Jobs that provide both a middle-class wage and benefits, even for workers without advanced degrees, still exist, often in union environments. But they're getting harder to find.
As technology has made global competition a reality, American workers -- particularly those who are lower-skilled -- have found themselves competing in a far broader marketplace. Their rivals overseas often don't receive benefits at all, or don't expect them from their employers. That puts American companies at a competitive disadvantage.
Bernie and Teresa Geerling of St. Charles, Mo., are feeling the pinch of today's changing job market.
(Mary Butkus For The Washington Post)
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$17 AN HOUR
About This Series
This is the sixth and last in a series of occasional articles about changes in the middle of the U.S. workforce -- the disappearance of many jobs that pay near the national average of $17 an hour, with such benefits as health care and pensions. Previous articles addressed topics such as the growth in itinerant workers, the tough decisions faced by businesses trying to preserve jobs and the effects on black workers. To read the other stories, go to www.washingtonpost.com/business
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"It's not helping employers to not be able to offer benefits," said Jennifer Schramm, manager of workplace trends and forecasting at the Society for Human Resource Management. But cutting back on benefits "is something they feel they have to do for economic reasons."
Shifts in the composition of the workforce have contributed as well. Jobs in manufacturing are more likely to come with benefits than are jobs in the service sector.
But in the 1980s, the number of manufacturing jobs began a decline that continues today, and factory workers were forced to look elsewhere for a middle-class living. Many retrained and traded their spot on the assembly line for a seat behind a desk, finding work in business services such as sales, information technology and accounting.
Within the past decade, however, most large service firms have decided that to succeed in a cutthroat, globalized market, they need to focus on their core functions and leave more peripheral tasks to others.
Recently, many such tasks have been shifted to workers abroad or have been picked up by smaller, more specialized outsourcing firms in the United States. For those firms, providing benefits such as health care can be difficult because they lack the necessary economies of scale, said Harvard public health professor Katherine Swartz. In firms with 1,000 or more employees, just 1 in 10 workers lacks insurance. In companies with fewer than 10 employees, nearly one-third lack coverage.
Even businesses that are expected to grow -- in industries such as health care and education -- have begun to pare back the pool of workers eligible for full benefits.
Hospitals, for instance, have responded to shifting staffing needs by hiring itinerant care workers who travel where they're needed but often don't have access to the same benefits as full-time nurses and therapists who stay in one place.
Reworking America
In the political world, debate over labor market restructuring has been dominated by finger-pointing about free trade or the ethics of offshoring, rather than by discussion of possible solutions. But as displaced workers fail to make the transition into new jobs that afford them the same kind of lifestyle as their old ones, economists say that politicians ignore the issue at their own peril.
