Is There (Middle Class) Life After Maytag?

The consequences of outsourcing:

Ms. Newman calculates that 54 million adults and children occupy a “nether region” of family incomes well above the poverty line — but well short of the middle class. Either they fall out of the middle class, as the Winchells are in danger of doing, or they have never earned enough at one job to get a family of four into the middle class.

“We are caught in a never-ending cycle of de-industrialization in which the best jobs disappear,” Ms. Newman said. “It is amazing to me how much we have come to accept that there is nothing to be done about this loss of income.”

[...]Median family income has risen at an average annual rate of only six-tenths of a percent, adjusted for inflation, since the mid-1970s — in sharp contrast to the 2.8 percent growth rate in the preceding 26 years.

[...]As a freelancer, however, Mr. Schober’s annual income plunged in the first year from the low six figures he had earned at Maytag to $25,000.

Half now goes to pay for health insurance for himself and his children, Katie, 18, and Ben, 16. His wife, Sarah, 51, a special education teacher earning $30,000 a year, has coverage for herself from the public school system. Adding the family would cost $800 a month, slightly less than Mr. Schober now pays, so the couple will probably drop his coverage for hers.

“Health insurance was one of those invisible benefits of working for a corporation,” he said. “You didn’t have to think about it.”