1. Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison coined this phrase in their book The Deindustrialization of America (New York: Basic Books, 1982). While I rely heavily on their perspective in this chapter, it is only fair to note that their thesis has its critics. For a review of the doubters see Katherine S. Newman, Falling from Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American Middle Class (New York: Free Press, 1988), 257-58.

2. Daniel Bell analyzed the importance of this transformation in his book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973). The term "postindustrial" generally connotes the industries outside of goods-manufacturing, in which an increasing proportion of the American work force is employed. The consequences of this change in employment distribution, particularly a skewing of the wage structure toward low-income service jobs, is discussed at a later point in this chapter.

3. See Katherine Gerson's chapter in this volume for a discussion of working mothers.

4. Osha G. Davidson, Broken Heartland: The Rise of America's Rural Ghetto (New York: Free Press, 1990).

5. Bluestone and Harrison, Deindustrialization , 6. Emphasis mine.

6. Bluestone and Harrison, Deindustrialization , 10. Of course, many new jobs were created during the same decade. Hence Bluestone and Harrison argue that the net loss was a bit over one million jobs. Nonetheless, the job losers were not necessarily the same people as the new-job gainers, as persistently high rates of unemployment throughout the 1980s suggests. The focus of deindustrialization, then, is on the displacement that individuals and communities endure as a result of plant closures or relocations, all the while acknowledging that employment booms (of questionable benefit in terms of income) are occurring in other places.

7. Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone, The Great U-Turn (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 114-15.

8. Harrison and Bluestone point out that much of this loss was due to the elimination of more than 1.2 million jobs in durable-goods manufacturing. But $3.1 million was "salvaged" by forcing average real wages down ( The Great U-Turn , 115-16). break

9. Bluestone and Harrison, Deindustrialization . See also Terry Buss and F. Stevens Redburn, Mass Unemployment: Plant Closings and Community Mental Health (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1983).

10. L. Mishel and Julian Simon, The State of Working America (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 1988).

11. Newman, Falling from Grace , 31; See also Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, "The Great American Job Machine: The Proliferation of Low-Wage Employment in the U.S. Economy" (study prepared for the Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Congress, December 1986).

12. Janet Norwood, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is one of many who have critiqued virtually all the conclusions reached by Bluestone and Harrison about the proliferation of low-wage jobs. Norwood believes that Bluestone and Harrison have chosen too short a measurement period following the steep recession of 1980-81. She argues that after enough years of sustained recovery, these problems will disappear, since they were artifacts of the measurement period. There is reason to doubt this argument, if only because measurements of income inequality, wage stagnation, and job displacement more than six or seven years into the recovery period seem to show patterns similar to those identified by Bluestone and Harrison. See Janet Norwood, "The Job Machine Has Not Broken Down," New York Times (February 22, 1987), D5.

13. Harrison and Bluestone, The Great U-Turn , 127.

14. Mishel and Simon, State of Working America , p. iii.

15. Ibid., 23.

16. Peter Kilborn, "For Many Women, One Job Just Isn't Enough," New York Times (February 15, 1990), 1.

17. William Julius Wilson argues that an even more serious source of "havenots" involves inner-city men who depended on the manufacturing industries to gain entry to the formal labor market. Deindustrialization has meant a closing off of those very opportunities and, in Wilson's view, the creation of a growing urban underclass. See William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

18. For a fascinating, if depressing, insight into the relationship between deindustrialization and homelessness, see Kim Hopper et al., "Economies of Makeshift: Deindustrialization and Homelessness in New York City," Urban Anthropology 14 (1985): 183-236.

19. Robert Jakall's insightful portrait of bureaucratic infighting in American corporations, Moral Mazes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), is a perfect manual for the rules of the game in the volatile financial service industries. For an analysis of what happens to white-collar management when the denouement finally arrives, see Newman, Falling from Grace .

20. CBS television news report, February 28, 1990.

21. In Falling from Grace , I discuss the meaning of plant shutdowns as moral commentaries on the state of American ideals of tradition and loyalty.

22. William Julius Wilson's much-discussed treatment of this issue appears in his book, The Truly Disadvantaged .

23. For the best discussion of the "mismatched" hypothesis, see John Kasarda, continue

"Jobs, Migration, and Emerging Urban Mismatches," in Urban Change and Poverty , ed. Michael McGeary and Laurence Lynn (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1988), 148-98.

24. This finding is reported in Frank Levy's important volume, Dollars and Dreams: The Changing American Income Distribution (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1987).

25. Susan Rose and David Fasenfest, Family Incomes in the 1980s: New Pressure on Wives, Husbands, and Young Adults (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 1988).

26. Harrison and Bluestone, The Great U-Turn , 130.

27. The declining-middle thesis as first offered by Robert Kuttner, "The Declining Middle," Atlantic (July 1983): 60. This thesis has many adherents, among them MIT economist Lester Thurow. But it also has its critics; among them is Frank Levy, who claims that, overall, the distribution has changed very little between 1947 and 1984 ( Dollars and Dreams , 295). Much of the time the disagreement between economists depends on the time period they are measuring. Looked at from the vantage point of the "egalitarian" sixties and seventies, when income equality declined, the disappearance of the middle class is striking in the 1980s data. Examined from the bad old days of the immediate postwar period, when inequality was high to begin with, the present era doesn't look so bad.

28. Cited in Harrison and Bluestone, The Great U-Turn , 132.

29. David Halle has shown that blue-collar workers who are home owners consider themselves to be middle class, even though on the job they think of themselves as "working men." Home ownership is a major cultural symbol of arrival in the middle class and, to a degree, transcends occupation as a source of identity. See David Halle, America's Working Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), and the chapter by Halle and Frank Romo in this volume.

30. See Frank Levy's Dollars and Dreams (especially chapter 1) for an extensive treatment of the uneven impact of the post-1973 slowdown in income growth.

31. Newman, Falling from Grace , 78.

32. Barbara Ehrenreich takes a closer look at the pressures on baby-boomers in her book Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon, 1989).

33. See Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Vintage, 1973), for an account of the idea of sacrifice among blue-collar workers. These authors show convincingly that low-level manual workers create an honorable identity out of an occupational category that is disrespected by "arguing" that they are sacrificing for their children.

34. This is, of course, a fictitious name for the community I studied. Since all the good fictitious names have already been used (Middletown, Plainville, etc.), I chose "Doeville" to signify the typical resident as John or Jane Doe.

35. "Average" is a tricky term here. It is no doubt the case that Doeville parents were on the high end of the middle-income spectrum, even in the 1950s. They were part of the new middle class. But they were not, and certainly did not think of themselves as, an elite. Only at the highest end of the community's scale would one have found the upper middle class. break