A conversation with an ATT employee highlights the growing disparity between the wealthy and the working class. The author explores the decline of the American Dream, stagnant wages, rising healthcare costs, and the impact of job insecurity.
I just had a chat with an ATT office manager, a young Black man who is very attentive to his customers. After he learned that I worked with labor unions, he said, “I’ve always wanted to be in a union. My dad was a bus driver, and his earnings and benefits really took care of us. Our healthcare was amazing, $5 co-pay and that was it, no matter what the medical procedure.”His comments both made me sad and angry. He took me back a few decades, when working people still earned a decent living.
That’s the period before runaway inequality and job destruction basically wiped out the American Dream for the working class.It’s not like we can’t afford to pay people decently. The money is there and then some. In 1980, there were 13 billionaires in the U.S. In 2023 there were 801. The top one-tenth of 1% saw their collective wealth jump from $1.8 trillion in 1990, to $22.1 trillion in 2024. For some context, the U.S. federal budget in 2024 was $6.8 trillion. Or consider that there are 1975,00 bus drivers in the U.S. One trillion dollars could pay them $100,000 a year for 57 years.Have the Democrats learned anything from Trump’s ascendency? The jury is out. Will they actually take on the financial barons? Or will they continue to take in the money that flows so strongly from Wall Street and Silicon Valley?Meanwhile the average income after inflation of the average worker did not rise at all from 1980 to 2024. And as we all know, during that time healthcare costs have gone through the roof for nearly all of us.To add to working-class misery there is never ending job insecurity. One in four employed workers fear they will lose their jobs within the next year, according to polling done by Colorado State University.And there’s a very powerful connection between job loss and enriching the super-rich. In many, if not most, cases, mass layoffs are used to free up cash for companies to pour into stock buybacks—buying back the corporation’s own shares to artificially boost its pric
Inequality Working Class Wages Healthcare Job Security
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