Working class in the United States - Wikipedia
Since the 1970s, economic and occupational insecurity has become a major problem for American workers, their families, and their communities. While outsourcing, the busting and decline of unionization and welfare supports, the rise of immigration, the prison-industrial complex, and unemployment have brought increased competition and considerable economic insecurity to working-class employees in the "traditional" blue-collar fields, there is an increasing demand for service personnel, including clerical and retail occupations.[3] Sociologist Gosta Esping-Anderson describes these supervised service occupations as "junk jobs," as they fail to pay living wages in the face of asset and price inflation, fail to pay benefits, are often insecure, unstable, or temporary, and provide little work control and little opportunity for skill development or advancement. In contrast to other expensive countries with higher proportions of quality jobs, the U.S. has developed an economy where two-thirds of jobs do not require or reward higher education; the other one-third of jobs consist largely in managing the junk job workers.[7] Recalling this American labor market reality as well as the high cost of higher education in the US, lower educational attainment can be a rational calculation. The alternative is probably not a better job. It is the junk job, with educational debt added on top. In fact, even if more Americans were to become highly educated, there would be more competition for the relatively few high-quality jobs, and those wages would decline. This suggests that the middle and working classes in the US may not be distinct classes, but rather opposing subgroups of the same class.
