It probably won't come as a surprise that less-educated American workers have been struggling to make a living in recent years, but
the numbers might still shock you: Working men aged 30 to 45 with no high school diploma saw their median earnings fall by 20 percent between 1990 and 2013. That means that this group saw a drop (measured in 2013 dollars) from $31,900 in 1990 to just $25,500 in 2013. Why would that be?
Well, globalization and technology—which are often cited to prove that such wage drops are inevitable—are part of it, but they're not the whole story. It's true that:
... there really is a shift away from the sectors where less-educated workers can earn a decent living. In 1990, 40 percent of the prime-age male workers without a high school degree worked as operators and laborers, a number that declined to 34 percent in 2013. Jobs in food service, cleaning and groundskeeping nearly doubled in the same span, to 21 percent from 11 percent. But it wasn’t an even trade: Pay for operators and labors was $25,500 in 2013, compared with $20,400 for the food, cleaning and groundskeeping category.
But that's just a small part of what's going on. The corporate race to the bottom is a much bigger reason for declining wages for workers with a high school diploma or less:
A bigger effect is downward pressure on pay in jobs held by low-education workers across the board.
So not only did people shift from higher-paying fields to lower-paying ones, but inflation-adjusted pay also fell in all of those jobs. For example, production work — manufacturing, largely — was the highest-paying category for men without a high school diploma in 2013, paying them $28,000. But that sector was both smaller (29 percent of such workers, down from 31 percent) and paid less (down from $33,600) than it did in 1990.
Numbers like these point to two big economic changes we need to win in the United States. First, workers need to join together and fight back. Part of the declining working- and middle-class share of income can be directly linked to
declining union density. Class war from above is working, and disarming is not the way to fix that. Second, this is another data point in the argument for free public higher education: a college degree is coming to be as much of a necessity to make a living as a high school diploma was a generation or two ago. Just as public high school became free and widely available when that level of education became necessary to employment, it's time for college to be free now, so that being able to afford college to begin with doesn't become even more of a driver of economic inequality than it already is.