Back in the 1940s, when the Iron Curtain descended and the Cold War broke out, one of the great concerns expressed by American capitalists was that the U.S. working class would find communism attractive and drift in that direction.But it didn’t happen.
Why not? Because government, business and labor cooperated to transform the working class into the middle class.
In one of history’s great social revolutions, industrial America created jobs with wages and benefits so attractive that workers had no reason to oppose the system. Indeed, they were part of it.
Now that appears to be coming to an end. A recent Associated Press headline told the story: “Workers face tough times as middle-class jobs vanish.”
Historically, “workers” were not part of the “middle class,” but in the United States they are — or were.
Today, the jobs that are going overseas are the jobs that created the American middle class. They are the jobs that paid for homes and cars and all the consumer items that made our economy the envy of the world. They are the jobs that sent kids to college. And they are the jobs that baby boomer parents expected to pass on to their children — along with a deep faith in our country and our way of life.
Only it isn’t working out that way.
Every day you pick up the newspaper and read about the exporting of U.S. jobs. And every day you see politicians and business leaders explaining how it is simply part of economic globalization.
What they don’t seem to understand is that without a serious effort on the part of business, labor and government, globalization will also undo what those three forces created to combat communism — a strong, prosperous middle class.
And if this is allowed to happen, the America of the future will have a working class in place of a middle class, and this nation will be very different from what citizens of today think America should be.
