I miss the America I grew up in. It was a place that embraced the hard work of my parents, who without any college education were rewarded for their labor enough to build a solid and comfortable middle-class life. Bob and Sally, my parents, struggled at times, especially with four children to raise on one salary. Until my mom went back to work when my youngest brother entered kindergarten, my clothes, if they weren’t hand-me-downs, came largely from our church’s rummage sales and thrift stores. With my mom’s paycheck, our quality of life increased pretty significantly. We began taking vacations in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the six of us packed into a burgundy Caprice Classic and later a minivan. For the first time I could go to the mall to buy clothes, and the teasing from other kids about my outdated wardrobe subsided. The extra money bought soccer uniforms, piano lessons, and Schwinn bikes. I remember feeling like my family had made it. We moved to a newer house, with wall-to-wall carpeting and a finished basement. Dad put up an aboveground pool and mowed the boundary lines for the backyard badminton court. As my sixteenth birthday approached, I got a job and bought a used car, with my dad cosigning the loan from the credit union. During high school I began setting my sights on an advertising career, aspiring to be like the upwardly mobile professionals in my favorite show, Thirty-something. When it was my turn to go to college, I applied to one university and, thankfully, was accepted. Four years later I left without any student loan debt and worked six months as a waitress to save up money to move to New York City. Twenty-one years later I’m a New Yorker, raising my daughter in a beautiful tree-lined neighborhood.
What a gift I was given by that America.
Sadly, for the past two decades I’ve also had a front-row seat to watch that America crumbling, as my once middle-class family, my siblings and my mom, were pulled down by the abandonment of our nation’s values and promises that set me on my way. After divorcing my dad while I was in college, my mom was able to purchase a small but comfortable home on her salary as an office manager in an orthodontist’s office. She worked there for twenty-four years before being summarily let go when the owners of the practice changed hands. She and the other highest-paid (and most tenured) employee were tossed aside, presumably because their pay was considered too high by the new owners. When she was let go, my mom was making $19 an hour plus benefits, including health insurance and a small retirement account. Unemployed at the age of sixty-one, she had a hard time finding work. For four and a half years she worked part-time, earning $12 an hour with no benefits. For the first time in her life she didn’t have health insurance, which was the case until Medicare kicked in when she turned sixty-five. During those years without a full-time job, she spent all her savings and racked up credit-card debt making ends meet and helping to support my siblings, all of whom have struggled to wring out a decent living in the bargain-basement economy. All told, my mom and siblings have experienced three bankruptcies, one foreclosure, and multiple spells of unemployment. My nieces and nephews know college is their pathway out, but they fear it isn’t financially feasible or practical. Their America has never provided for their family the way it did for mine. They have gotten a raw deal, and so have the millions of working-class people who wake up every day, try a little harder, and yet keep slipping behind.
My family is white, and the privilege afforded to our white skin has buoyed us in some difficult times. My dad’s parents left him and his siblings wealth in the form of stocks. When my dad passed away, that stock was passed down to another generation. That stock may very well put college within reach for my nieces and nephews and will definitely cushion us all from the harsh edges of today’s capitalism. This legacy of wealth, especially life-altering for working-class people, provides a generational cushion that remains overwhelmingly held by whites, due to decades of discriminatory wealth-building polices and stubbornly hardened segregation in housing and jobs.
The trajectory of downward mobility experienced by my immediate family is far from unique. Those of us who, through a combination of grit, resilience, and the once-affordable state college or university, made the great crossing from the working class to the middle class or beyond, are living reminders of what was possible when life in America was more fair.
Our nation’s long slide away from fairness and opportunity was in no way an accidental quirk of nature. It was created and sustained by an economic and political ideology that blesses the markets but forsakes the people—especially the people who fail to overcome the barriers deliberately constructed to make getting ahead a luxury increasingly determined by the random luck of birth.
Because America’s rising inequality was man-made (our political and economic elites are still overwhelmingly men), changing our destiny is possible. It’ll take a fight, but I’m pretty sure that’s an American value that hasn’t been eroded. Throughout history progressive transformation has occurred when the power of people and the power of ideas align. Put another way, transformative change happens when people hit the streets and ideas catch fire, making what was once thought impossible possible. The progressive uprisings in the Gilded Age and in the wake of the Great Depression ushered in the New Deal, a set of promises as much as a set of policies about what people in this country could expect from our government and our companies. These expectations weren’t delivered on a silver platter; they were fought for, often bitterly. Decades later African Americans challenged our nation to live up to its promise of equality, again with civil disobedience that cost lives and involved far too much bloodshed. And then the women’s movement and the gay rights movement did the same.
We are now seeing the beginnings of a new movement for justice, rooted in the intertwined struggle of race and class. As the Sleeping Giant stirs, challenging the status quo from the Central Valley of California to the streets of East New York, the new working class is beginning the tough work of changing the parameters of what’s possible, opening hearts and minds to a different vision of the future.
A future where we all get a Better Deal, in both our democracy and our economy.
It’s an America that most people would like to see. Where we all have a real say in the political decisions that affect our lives. Where we all have a real chance to meet our basic needs and fulfill our aspirations. Getting there will be nearly impossible without a major revival of working-class power, because the barriers standing in the way of transformative change are so formidable. The new working class is a Sleeping Giant, its latent power formidable because of its size, diversity, and a growing understanding that solidarity is the only weapon strong enough to challenge entrenched power. I realize that that might sound radical, but in an era when one-tenth of the richest 1 percent of Americans (160,000 households) owns the same share of wealth as the entire bottom 90 percent combined,1 we must confront the issue of who holds power and the ways in which that power now dictates the rules of both our economy and our democracy.
The calls for more investment in people—rebuilding our infrastructure, meeting the challenge of climate change, providing high-quality child care for every infant and toddler, paying workers a decent wage, and reinvesting in long-excluded and isolated communities—will be immediately dismissed by pundits and politicians as too expensive. For the past several decades we’ve been sold the idea that somehow our country is broke. That there is simply no way we can afford the investments that would improve the lives of millions of people, not to mention modernize our nation’s decayed infrastructure. Asking “How are you going to pay for it?” is an inside-the-Beltway paradigm that has seeped into our popular discourse. It’s a question lobbed by reporters and politicians, aimed at exposing the futility of dreaming of something better. And we all play along. When organizations like mine develop policy proposals, there is pressure to specify exactly where the revenue would come from to fund anything better than the status quo. This is a powerful red herring, designed to obscure the real challenge of creating something better: building the political will to make it happen.
But it’s not just the austerity politics of Capitol Hill that narrow our possibilities. There’s also often a knee-jerk fatalism that stifles our courage to dream big and fight hard. This fatalism is represented by four little words that have become the typical response to aspirational thinking: “That will never happen.” It’s a Beltway mentality shared by congressional staffers, political reporters, and far too many professional progressive advocates. Let me state the very obvious truth: Nothing will ever happen if we never try to make it happen.
Back in the early years of this century, I started producing research at Demos on the growth of credit-card debt, particularly among working-class households. Part of that research led me to investigate common practices by the credit-card companies, like jacking up interest rates for late payments. This was an industry that had the power to pretty much change the terms of its contracts at any time, for any reason. So Demos, along with organizations in the consumer movement, proposed new policies to regulate the card companies. My colleagues and I would make the rounds on Capitol Hill, and we were routinely met with laughter and a bunch of dismissals about how “that’ll never happen.” Well, after seven years of building the case for new credit-card regulations, the financial crash opened a political window. Suddenly lots of politicians wanted to take a vote against the big banks. And what was never supposed to happen did happen. The Credit Card Act of 2009, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, greatly curtailed fees and prohibited rate hikes on existing balances. I gleefully sat in the front row of the White House Rose Garden to watch President Obama sign the bill into law. And in the years since its passage, it has saved people over $60 billion, and that’s just in fees alone. The credit-card companies can no longer do what they want, when they want, to people in debt.
So I’m going to ignore the cynical and the elite thought leaders who try to shut down change by asking the “serious” question “How are we going to pay for it?” The stakes are simply too high to start a dialogue under this narrow definition of acceptable policy discourse.
The time has come for a Better Deal.
A Better Deal would reshape our politics by replacing a big-money-driven political system with public financing, so that candidates must reach deep into their communities to attract small donations, which would be matched by public dollars. A Better Deal would finally put an end to the attempts to stymie political participation, particularly of black and brown people, through voter suppression laws. A Better Deal would ensure that all Americans know we want them to participate in the selection of our leaders by making voter registration automatic and seamless, so even if you move or are in college, your registration will follow you.
A Better Deal would transform the bargain-basement economy into one where all jobs pay a decent minimum wage, our labor laws are actually enforced, and workers are protected on the job and paid exactly what they are owed. A Better Deal would mean that workers actually have a fair chance to unionize their workplace if that’s what the majority of them decide.
For our families, a Better Deal would finally give mothers and fathers the extra support they need to raise their children, by providing paid family leave and high-quality and affordable child care. The United States would no longer be the exception among democratic countries, which have provided these social benefits for their citizens for at least a generation, and most for much longer.
A Better Deal would mean our nation would finally address and repair the racial divides that still define our society. A Better Deal would invest in communities that have been isolated and excluded from society through a toxic combination of deindustrialization, discriminatory housing policies, and extensive incarceration.
Finally, a Better Deal would recommit to making America the land of opportunity, where the rungs of mobility are created through debt-free public college and a world-class system of apprenticeships and career education. A Better Deal would mean that all children would grow up in the United States with the knowledge that we want them to fulfill their dreams and have invested in a high-quality combination of higher education and training options for them to do just that.
A Better Deal would mean that Javier, whom we met in Chapter 3, who stocks shelves in the freezer department at Walmart, wouldn’t have to rely on payday loans to pay his bills, because his paycheck, and his wife’s paycheck from working in retail, would be enough to pay the rent and keep the fridge stocked and the lights on. It would mean that their children, unlike Javier, who dreamed of going to college but had neither the cultural nor the financial resources to do so, would grow up knowing that this country makes it possible for anyone, regardless of their background, to get the education or training they want to be their best. A Better Deal would mean that the next generation of largely Latino and black working-class children would no longer grow up in racially segregated, crime-driven projects where “getting out” is an against-the-odds tale available only to the most resilient, exceptionally bright and determined individuals.
At the conclusion of this book, I outline the key components critical to creating a Better Deal. We need a serious debate about what is really required to dismantle the hardened lines of privilege in this country. I hope we’ll have that debate, and that we can at least start with consensus that the scale of the challenge will require transformative change and not just tinkering around the edges with a new tax credit here and a tax cut there.
The new working class has lifted the curtain that for so long kept hidden the indignities, injustice, and hardscrabble reality of life in America. Their fight is our fight, calling on all of us to demand more from our country. We’ve stalled for too long, abandoning our nation’s long history of moving toward greater justice and progress. It’s time for a Better Deal.