The rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer, the politicians and pundits tell us every evening on the news.  Lost in the rhetoric is any concern for members of the middle class, who are in danger of becoming nothing more than a footnote in future histories of the United States.

If England was once a nation of shopkeepers, the United States, in the mid-20th century, was a nation of small businessmen and white-collar workers—all, in their own way, decidedly middle class.  Many in the working class, too, strove to afford the comforts of a middle-class lifestyle—and, even if they would never enter the middle class themselves, America’s prosperity and educational opportunities held out the promise that their children might leave the working class behind.

To that end, they provided a home and schooling for growing families and looked forward to the day when they would make the final payment on their mortgage, followed a few years later by retirement, a gold watch, pension payments, and days of traveling and doting on grandchildren.

The fact that we cannot read such a description today without thinking it a wild oversimplification, even a caricature, tells us more about the decline of the prospects of the working class than all of the facts and figures economists and politicians can muster.  Still, a few of those figures do fill out the picture.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average hourly wage (adjusted for inflation) of American workers has risen only 36 cents per hour in 33 years, from $16.39 per hour in 1973 to $16.75 in 2006.  By 2007, only 14 million Americans were still employed in manufacturing.

Today, of course, the average wage of those who hold the remaining jobs is declining, not rising (despite a near doubling of productivity since 1973).  Those who cry, “Good riddance!” when multinational corporations with no loyalty to the country in which they are based transfer production (read: “jobs”) overseas usually blame the decline of American manufacturing on unions that became so greedy they killed the golden goose.  “Of course companies are seeking cheaper labor markets; they’ve been bled dry.  Who could blame them?”

Who, indeed?  Well, perhaps the employees who never unionized, who worked hand-in-hand with the management of family-owned factories before a new generation of owners, less interested in the businesses their families had built than in what the profits from those businesses could buy, brought in outside managers who presided over the mergers and acquisitions of the late 20th century that made their companies just divisions of some faceless multinational.

When most Americans think of manufacturing, they think of the auto industry, and so they cannot be blamed for their obsession with unions.  But there’s more to manufacturing than Ford, Chrysler, and GM; and throughout the industrial Midwest, most small manufacturers were not unionized.  Yet somehow, they managed to pay their workers a living wage, and then some.

Today, after the loss of 20 percent of Rockford’s manufacturing jobs since the election of George W. Bush, Rockford’s median household income has slipped below the national median.  And President Bush’s generous offer of federal funds to retrain factory workers who lost an $18 per hour job to work in the “healthcare industry” (read: “empty bedpans at $9 per hour”) isn’t going to move that number in the right direction.

“The jobs are never coming back,” presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain has told workers in Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina.  Strangely, the countries to which multinationals are moving American jobs cannot absorb them quickly enough.  They want more, and they want them now; they’re not training (much less retraining) their workers for a “postindustrial economy.”

McCain’s platform promises funds to retrain “displaced” blue-collar workers for jobs in the “information economy”—good white-collar, middle-class jobs.  In an ideal world, that would be a step up; but for Americans, the information-economy bubble burst some time ago.  Former Fed Vice Chairman Alan S. Blinder, one of the chief supporters of NAFTA when he served on President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors and still a strong supporter of globalization, estimates that 29 to 38 million more American jobs are “offshorable” in the near future.  Most of those, he claims, are not in manufacturing but in the very “information economy” fields that McCain believes represent the future of American jobs.

The very fact that such jobs pay better than the national average makes them prime targets for “offshoring.”  In the March-April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, Blinder compares the disruptive effects of the coming exodus of jobs with those of the Industrial Revolution.  The Industrial Revolution, of course, made the rise of a broad middle class possible, but it also gave us the first urban underclass and the first nouveaux-riches.

This time around, we can see the ranks of the new underclass swelling, as the new-new rich drive the transformation.  If a new middle class is being created, however, it must be somewhere “offshore.”