Raw Deal

Second Class:
How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women
by batya ungar-sargon
encounter, 264 pages, $32.99

Of the two million waiters and waitresses working in America,” Batya Ungar-Sargon writes, “just over half own their homes.” My wife, who worked as a waitress for fifteen years, was in the lucky half. But we have watched many of her friends and colleagues struggle. Whether they work in the front of the house (managers and waitstaff) or the back (cooks and cleaners), the story is the same. They struggle to get and keep healthcare; they can be crippled by seemingly minor financial setbacks like a sickness, a mugging, or a car accident; and their general trajectory involves moving from apartment to apartment until they have a kid or two, at which point they get priced out of the Bay Area and have to move away. We rarely hear what happens to them after that.

The decline in home ownership among service industry workers—from 58 percent in 2000 to 54 percent in 2020 nationwide—is one sign that the American dream is increasingly out of reach for working Americans. That is the story Ungar-Sargon tells in Second Class, which combines interviews with the author’s economic analysis. “It’s undeniable,” she writes, “that in the post-pandemic world, working-class wages are up, in some cases significantly. But for millions and millions of the hardest working Americans, even these better wages are vastly unequal to the cost of purchasing a middle-class life—a home, a vacation here and there, the ability to retire in dignity, adequate health care, and a better future for their kids.” Nor, I would add, are they guaranteed a day of Sabbath rest. 

The voices of the interviewees—American workers from a variety of backgrounds—come through vividly. Kevin, a cleaner, feels a real connection to his work:

Hard work—and prayer—are the keys to success, Kevin believes. And he finds deep peace in the work. When he gets cleaning, he zones out and finds an inner sense of calm. He loves the way he feels after a hard day’s work. He loves the feeling of accomplishment.

“For whatever reason,” Kevin says, “I just love getting my hands dirty. It gets my juices going. I just love the work part of it.” As no Protestant should need to be reminded, the job of truck driver, cleaner, or waitress is a potential vocation. 

Yet Kevin doesn’t own a home, has no savings, and describes himself as “a check away from being . . . certain things.” He is typical, but even the better-off interviewees find the economy is not working for them. Gord, a truck driver, and his wife earn about a hundred thousand dollars a year between them. But that is not enough to own a home in Upstate New York, where they live with their two kids. After taxes, food, gas, and rent, they make ends meet but have no savings. 

Gord, who has been working since he was thirteen and found his calling as a trucker at fifteen, is one of several interviewees who bluntly criticize free-market ideology.

Some people really honor a sense of place where your family is, where you grew up . . . When free-market types tell people to just move where the jobs are better, they are participating in the fracturing of American society. You make family formation more difficult. Your connection to your place is severed. And this is part of the reason why people are atomized and not going to church, because like our lives are being dictated by global capital and a lot of these National Review Cato Institute yahoos think that’s just fine.

Of course, the defenders of neoliberalism have an answer to this: Free trade and open borders create more efficient markets that are, in aggregate, better for everyone. Perhaps certain “low-skilled” laborers will lose their jobs when competing with foreign markets and imported labor; but this process generates savings for consumers due to cheaper goods—as well as massive profits for owners, which enable the government to tax the winners and so compensate the losers.

These arguments have greatly influenced both major political parties. But the political consensus has not given rise to mass prosperity, in part because not everything can be offshored, and what can’t be offshored becomes more expensive. As some Americans get wealthier, they increase the value of increasingly scarce domestic goods, by competing with one another to purchase them. 

Neoliberal economists urge us to embrace this change and pivot to being a service economy: If American workers cannot compete with textile workers in Bangladesh, they must either become higher-value cloth producers in the same industry, or remake themselves as workers in some industry that must remain domestic, such as medicine or management. The result is that housing, education, and healthcare—none of which can be offshored—become ever less affordable. The ability to buy ever more plastic toys or televisions is cold comfort when you cannot afford a place to keep them or are too sick to enjoy them. Everyone is a consumer, true, but most Americans are also workers, and most workers are waking up to realize they have been handed a raw deal. 

That raw deal is exacerbated by mass migration, which is often viewed as a solution to domestic-price inflation. Flooding the labor market with mass immigration has benefited elites. It keeps the costs of their Uber, their DoorDash, their organically harvested asparagus, and their neighborhood restaurant artificially low. But the deregulation of the labor supply also undercuts working-class wages and drives up the cost of housing, since new immigrants need to live somewhere.

The free marketeers have little answer to the evaporation of decent-paying jobs, except perhaps Joe Biden’s 2019 suggestion that “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well.” That was a few years before we were informed that AI can now do much of the programming for us. Regardless, we are assured there will be other higher-value activities for which these workers can retrain. Failing that, perhaps the government should provide UBI or free housing to that portion of the American population who cannot retrain. But these measures are not what Americans want; Americans want the American dream of ownership and opportunity. As Nicole, who works odd jobs—one of the poorest interviewees—puts it: “It’s not about giving me stuff for free. I don’t want that. I want better opportunities and more opportunities.” Like most workers in this book, she wants work that can provide her with healthcare and a home. A World Economic Forum video theorized in 2016 that in the future we might “own nothing” and “be happy.” Citizens and workers are right to reject this deal. Healthy economics are always tied to the home.

At times, Second Class is reminiscent of Chris Arnade’s 2019 book Dignity, though whereas Arnade would show the lives of his subjects in a shockingly clear warts-and-all style, Ungar-Sargon’s portrait occasionally tends towards romanticizing the poor. She contends, for instance, that “you can make all the right choices and work and work and work and still only have a fifty-fifty chance of making it into the middle class.” But she does not examine data on whether working-class people who are active members of religious congregations, abstain from illegal drug use, and get and remain married are more likely to achieve the American dream. Individuals are not statistics, and all individuals should look at their own choices and ask which led them to where they are. 

But Ungar-Sargon’s audience is not individuals who are struggling, but rather legislators—legislators who are always tempted to blame the poor for their misfortunes. As a brief for political reform, this book is admirable. Even the best intentioned and best behaved working-class person, Ungar-Sargon demonstrates, is swimming harder upstream than before NAFTA was signed.

Upper-class Americans, she writes, “will find any number of slurs to avoid acknowledging the truth: the American economy rewards them to a far greater degree than the people whose irreplaceable labor they rely on to survive.” In far too many cases, it has been long-standing government policy, through immigration, offshoring, and technology, to render those people, and their work, replaceable. If Washington took Ungar-Sargon’s analysis seriously, perhaps a new generation of policymakers would prioritize reshoring the supply chain, restricting immigration, and rethinking the way we structure access to benefits. Workers should never be in a situation where they have to decline work for fear that earning a bit more money will cut them off from accessing a needed government program.

We might also see a new attitude to college degrees, so that jobs that would not require a degree to accomplish the work likewise would not require a degree to get an interview. And we might witness a renewed labor movement, especially in the private sector, one that would return to advocating for actual working-class issues (as opposed to the identity preoccupations of the professional class). These are prescriptions that Ungar-Sargon floats and that many of those she interviews find compelling. It turns out that the average American worker believes in work and is aware of policy changes that can allow that work to be compensated more justly.

My wife often described her old job as a dance, requiring dexterity, speed, and attentiveness. It can be imbued with beauty and love—love for customers in need of a night off and some sustaining food. But as Ungar-Sargon writes, workers need our love, too.

Facing severe economic hardship can be deeply isolating. For many, it’s embarrassing, and the shame creates a taboo around talking about it. This silence is also convenient for the better-off, who would rather not contemplate the difficulty of the lives of those who provide services for them.

These workers can speak for themselves, as Ungar-Sargon shows, but we can also lend them our voices. We will need to show such solidarity if ordinary human goods are to survive the limitlessness of our current age. 

Colin Redemer is director of education at American Reformer.

Image by Alan Turkus, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.