In this new reality, a smaller share of Americans enjoy the fruits of an expanding economy. This isn’t a fluke of the past few years — it’s woven into the very structure of the economy. And even though Republicans and Democrats keep promising to help the middle class reclaim the prosperity it grew accustomed to after World War II, their prescriptions aren’t working.
From the Great Depression through the 1980s, American recessions and recoveries followed a pattern: Employers shed jobs when the economy turned south but added them back quickly once it recovered. That changed in the early 1990s and worsened through the 2000s. Jobs came back more slowly, if at all. Even before the 2008 crisis, the 2000s were on track to be the weakest decade for job creation since the Labor Department started tracking the statistics. The great mystery is: What happened? Why did the economy stop boosting ordinary Americans in the way it once did?
The answer is complicated, and it’s the reason why tax cuts, stimulus spending and rock-bottom interest rates haven’t jolted the middle class back to its postwar prosperity.
Downey illustrates the nation’s struggle to resurrect that shared prosperity, and it reminds us what the economy has lost.
Today, Bob Thompson’s rise to the middle class sounds like something from an old movie.
He graduated from Downey High School, served a tour in the Army and returned to his home town to work odd jobs. The Rockwell plant loomed nearby, on a former orchard plot where town leaders once hoped to build Dodger Stadium. Thompson remembers the day the plant hired him — Aug. 4, 1965 — and his starting pay at his union job — $2.59 an hour — which was nearly double the minimum wage in California at the time. The week he got the job, Thompson drove down to Bill’s TV Shop and bought a new Quasar console, the first color set of his life, for $300. He was filling out the credit application when the salesclerk in the store asked where he worked. The plant, Thompson told him. The clerk waved away the paperwork. He knew he’d be good for the money. “I thought I was a king,” Thompson said.
He started off running blueprints from one end of the factory to the other. Then he worked his way up to plastics fabricator, foam sprayer, shipper of replacement parts between plants. Sometimes when the economy dipped or contracts dried up, he lost his job; the company always found him maintenance work or something else to help him get by until times improved and he got back to the plant. When he retired from the company in 2007, Thompson was making $24.95 an hour. He draws a sweeter pension than almost any worker starting out today could hope to receive.
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