A Cold Reception For America’s Working Middle Class

Photo via Unhindered by Talent.

As Blue Texan pointed out recently, middle class and poor folks are feeling more than a pinch in this economy. With more factories and businesses closing their doors every day, workers who have put a lifetime of sweat and toil into a job are finding themselves locked out with no job and no prospects for anything better than minimum wage on a part time basis. If that.

Welcome to George Bush’s America. Via the NYTimes:

Middle-aged men moving in with parents, wives taking two jobs, veteran workers taking overnight shifts at half their former pay, families moving West — these are signs of the turmoil and stresses emerging in the little towns and backwoods mobile homes of southeast Ohio, where dozens of factories and several coal mines have closed over the last decade, and small businesses are giving way to big-box retailers and fast-food outlets.

Here, where the northern swells of the Appalachians lap the southern fringe of the Rust Belt, thousands of people who long had tough but sustainable lives are being wrenched into the working poor….

“A lot of major employers have left, and the town is drying up,” Ms. Thiessen said of Jackson. “We’re starting to lose small shops, too — Hallmark, the jewelry and shoe stores, the movie theater and most of the grocery stores.”

Shari Joos, 45, a married mother of four boys in nearby Wellston, said, “If you don’t work at Wal-Mart, the only job you can get around here is in fast food.”

Between her husband’s factory job and her intermittent work, they made $30,000 a year in the best of times, Mrs. Joos said. Since last fall, when her husband was laid off by the Merillat cabinet factory, which downsized to one shift a day from three, keeping anywhere near that income required Mrs. Joos to take a second job. She works at a school cafeteria each weekday from 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m and then drives to Wal-Mart, where she relaxes in her car before starting her 2-to-10 p.m. shift at the deli counter….

In late December her husband landed a new job, driving a fork lift at a Wal-Mart distribution center, a shift that ends at 2:30 a.m. It pays a little less than he used to make and is an hour’s drive away, so gasoline soaks up a painful share of his wages.

“We never see each other,” Mrs. Joos, 45, said on a recent morning as she packed a roast beef and cheese sandwich for her evening meal. “We never even think of taking a vacation.”

Of course, if you are a wealthy blowhard, life is good — with the income gap between the haves and the have even mores getting larger and larger compared to everyone else. So why bother noticing the homeless vet under the bridge, hey, O’Reilly?

Good for John Edwards for letting him have it. More of this please. And, while I’m at it, how about asking questions at the Presidential debates on candidate plans for the economy and how to help America’s middle class instead of the dreck we’ve been getting?

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3. Less Robust Public Option a Double Slap in the Face to Working Class Americans
4. Obama Denies Insurance Mandate Taxes Middle Class, Diminishes Public Option
5. FDL Book Salon Welcomes Wade Rathke, Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families