LAST YEAR Chrysler advertised for new workers in Detroit at $10 an hour, half the rate of its old production line staff, and a couple of dollars above a poverty line wage. The company froze the list after 10,000 applied. Now tens of thousands work alongside their better-paid workmates in Chrysler, GM, and Ford plants under agreements sanctioning two-tier workplaces signed between the Big Three and the once powerful United Automobile Workers (UAW).
The union controversially bought into the companies’ case that this was the only way in a global economy to remain competitive, and now counts 4,000 “yellow pack” workers among its 112,000 members.
Such desperate demand for low-paid jobs is eloquent testimony to the remorselessly impoverishing effect of growing levels of want in the US, not just on the country’s workless poor but among once-affluent industrial workers. With the decline in union power, it is also a taste of the future. And what happens in the US...
A Democrat may be in the White House, but last year the number of those living below the official poverty line in the US rose by 2.6 million to 46.2 million, the worst in 52 years, and the fourth consecutive year to see a rise. For middle-class families, Tuesday’s census report on poverty also reflected a grim reality: median household incomes, those of families located exactly half way up the income scale (on €36,000), fell last year to levels last seen in 1997, 7 per cent down on the peak of 1999. It was what the New York Times called a “lost decade”,
Fifteen per cent of the US population, and 22 per cent of its children, now live below the poverty line – for a family of four, a measly €16,300 – the highest level since 1993. Minorities have been hardest hit - black poverty rose from 25 to 27 per cent.
The figures reflect the continuing effects of the crisis in the financial system and weak recovery from recession that has left 14 million out of work. And they are unlikely to improve in 2011, not least because President Obama’s new limited jobs initiative has been given short shrift by Republicans. The Brookings Institution estimates that the current crisis will eventually push a further 10 million into the ranks of the poor.
The truth is that the poor tend not to vote, and the fear and reality of poverty often depress rather than stir to action. But as the spectre of want reaches up into the ranks of the once affluent, now precarious, the land of opportunity is likely to begin to lose its veneer and old political certainties and loyalties begin to lose their hold.