The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives Read Online Free PDF Page B

union movement—a movement that in other countries was an integral part of Labor or Socialist parties, which sought to bind the interests of all parts of the working class—was more limited, both in its aspirations and its political achievements. Despite a militant history in the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, in the decades after the 1935 Wagner Act paved the way for the mass unionization of the industrial professions, unions increasingly came to lobby for skilled workers, forgoing the hard work of organizing the unorganized, and leaving the mass of day laborers and unskilled workers as badly off as ever. There were exceptions, of course—Cesar Chavez and California’s farm workers, and more recently the Justice for Janitors campaign. But, across the postwar decades, unions taken as a whole did a dismal job of moving beyond their traditional bases. As a result, many of the benefits accrued by labor in such industries as auto and mining never trickled downward. At the bottom of the economy, poverty remained pretty much untouched, its victims—living largely outside of trade union culture—voiceless and overwhelmingly without political muscle.
    From the late 1970s onward, as unions were dramatically weakened, that hardship and insecurity welled upward once again like a chronic infection never quite tamed. By the 2000s, workers even in top-tier professions such as auto manufacturing were seeing their wages pushed downward and their benefits packages eviscerated. An auto worker signing on in 2012 could expect to earn far less, in real terms, over the course of a lifetime of hard work than could his father or grandfather working in the same industry in bygone decades.
    As for the quality pensions fought for by previous generations of trade unionists, increasingly they were being relegated to the history books. In 2005, Hewlett-Packard began dismantling its pension plan for existing employees and announced that new hires would simply have no pensions. The intent? To save $300 million a year for the tech giant. Having narrowly avoided bankruptcy in 2009, in the years following the large automakers all began pushing their retirees to accept lump-sum buyouts in lieu of lifelong pensions. It might have been a good deal if you weren’t planning to live to a ripe old age; it was a far riskier proposition if you anticipated you still had several decades left in you. In 2012, the airplane manufacturer Boeing pushed its unions to accept 401(k)s in lieu of defined benefit pensions for newly hired engineers and technical professionals.
    And the list goes on.
    That the unions found it so difficult to fight back at least in part had to do with the past sixty-plus years of history. In the late 1940s and 1950s, when Western European nations were distributing a range of social benefits to their populaces, America’s progressives fell victim to a McCarthyite political culture that denounced comprehensive federal safety net systems as being somehow “Communist.” McCarthyism ended in the mid-1950s, but it left a toxic rhetoric in its wake, one that was particularly hostile to big-picture safety net reforms. From debates around full employment policies during the Truman years to debates over universal healthcare in the Obama years, large-scale attempts to smooth out the market’s rough edges have routinely been denounced as somehow anti-American.
    Hence the kluge-like, makeshift nature of the American safety net. It existed, but it was neither uniform nor elegant. Rather, it was something that had managed to eke out a survival against the odds, that had managed to weather McCarthyism and a series of successor movements, and that somehow continued to exist despite the vibrancy of the notion that a country of “free men” didn’t need or want large-scale government interventions in the economy. It was, wrote historian Michael Katz, a “rickety, uncoordinated welfare state.” 19

    That this welfare state was rickety didn’t,