White Males Without College Degree Don’t Earn Like Before
In 1980, white men in US who hadn’t been to college earned more than the average American worker. That has changed since. College-educated women earn more today with the US economy now focused less on manufacturing and more on services and knowledge work. Women without a college degree still round off the bottom of the payment pyramid, though.
No matter the racial group, men without a college degree “have fallen well below the average full-time worker (women without a degree have long been at the bottom in income, and college-educated men have consistently been at the top)”, says New York Times.
Jobs They’d Once Filled Have Mostly Gone Missing
Manufacturing jobs that needed workers to man the line on busy factory floors today make up a “shrinking share of what the average American worker does”, says NYT. Roles in financial analysis and software development have consistently paid more in the past few decades. For those without a college degree now, service-sector jobs like cook, maid, etc, offer more well-paying prospects than factories or clerical roles. “There was a clear division between winners and losers in the economy, and the losers were blue-collar white men largely,” Tom Kochan, who studied union work at MIT, was quoted as saying by NYT.
States That Once Were Factory Hubs Are Poll Battlegrounds
California and New York, both coastal states, represent geographies that have seen the highest growth in earnings. The biggest drops were suffered by those in the so-called ‘rust belt’ — once the beating heart of US manufacturing — comprising states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. These, along with a handful of other swing states, are expected to decide which way the poll goes as the contest is narrowest here. And it is the Republicans who have gained ground.
“We were the party of the middle class and working hard [people] and unions,” Lisa Boscola, a Democratic state senator in Pennsylvania, told NYT. “But something went wrong.” She noted that during her father’s time, it would have been unthinkable for a union worker to vote Republican in their part of Pennsylvania. NYT says that Democrats have lost support among white voters in “places most affected by job losses”. It says that “college-educated voters have increasingly moved towards the Democratic Party, as voters without a college degree have voted more Republican”.
Status Check?
NYT said that Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ pitch resonates with a certain section of voters for whom the issue is not so much a drop in earnings, but a decline in social standing and future prospects. “Many voters who turned to Trump were middle income, not poor. But that doesn’t mean economic factors didn’t matter… rightwing populism across Western democracies doesn’t necessarily appeal to those with the lowest incomes, but to those who are downwardly mobile,” it said.