Economy
The Future of the Middle Class Depends on Upgrading Service Jobs
More than 70 million Americans hold low-wage, precarious service jobs. We must make these jobs a pathway to the middle class.
The dramatic rise in inequality and the equally dramatic decline of the middle class are two of the most resonant themes in American political life. They reverberate through the competition for the Democratic presidential nomination and will directly affect the 2020 election.
American politicians typically offer two distinct strategies for creating good jobs and rebuilding the middle class. The first is to bring back once high-paying, family-supporting blue-collar jobs to the U.S. But the fact is that less than one-fifth of Americans do blue-collar work now, down from roughly 50 percent in the 1950s and 1960s. And just 6 percent of workers are employed in production occupations in actual factories.