Even before the current economic crisis took hold, workers were working harder for less and carrying big debts to compensate for falling income. Record numbers of workers endured long and fruitless searches for employment, while those who had jobs are plagued with insecurity over their employment, health care and retirement.
Employers routinely violate labor laws, combining 21st century surveillance technology that monitor workers' every movement with 19th century management practices like locking in workers on the night shift at Wal-Mart, and forcing them to work off the clock.
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Together, the books portray a society in which class lines are more rigid than the nations of Western Europe, once dominated by a wealthy aristocracy. Some 26.4 percent of U.S. workers receive poverty wages, and in the economic expansion just ended workers' productivity grew by 11 percent, while real wage gains (after inflation is taken into account) amounted to nothing.
At the other end of the spectrum, the richest 1 percent has seen its share of annual earnings almost double from 7.3 percent in 1979 to 13.6 percent in 2006, the most recent year for which figures are available. And the top 0.1 percent did far better -- its annual earnings increased 324 percent from 1979 to 2006, to more than $2.2 million.
The liberal writer Thomas Frank wrote about this trend earlier this year: "The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy."
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The lack of jobs -- particularly good-paying ones -- has contributed to a rise in poverty compared to the 1990s. According to U.S. government statistics, 12.3 percent of the population, or 36 million people, were under the poverty line in 2006. But the State of Working America, relying on a more realistic measure, says that the real poverty rate was actually 17.7 percent -- another 16 million persons.
Being poor doesn't necessarily mean being unemployed, as Greenhouse points out in The Big Squeeze, "The annual pay for Wal-Mart's full-time hourly employees averaged $19,100 in 2007 -- some $1,500 below the poverty line for a family of four."
