Being Middle Class: The American Dream

Being Middle Class: The American Dream Slipping Away The keystone to the American dream has always been the certainty that the next generation can do better economically than their parents. Americans pride themselves with the understanding that through hard work they can do better than those before them, but this may no longer be true. Climbing the economic and social ladder in the United States is becoming increasingly difficult and the middle class is shrinking. The decline of the middle class population in the United States can be attributed to an unfortunate cocktail of several factors. Among these factors are wage stagnation, tax policies more beneficial to the wealthy, the rise of the “gig economy,” the decline of unions, and globalization.
Many middle class level jobs have disappeared as the economy and the employee-employer relationship changes over time. The more traditional employer-employer model that contributed to the original rise of the middle class is being supplanted by the rise of the so-called “gig economy” (Perez). The idea behind the “gig economy” is that instead of having the same job for years and developing a relationship with a specific employer, many workers move from short-term job to short-term job, rather than having steady long-term employment. These temporary workers work “with the looseness of a musician's one-night engagement at a club” (Perez). Such “gig” jobs are taking away from the standard middle skill jobs typically held by the middle class. They also have fewer benefits and lower salaries than those of the long term employees they increasingly replace (Tucker
The power of unionization in many sectors was very beneficial to the middle class, and the decline of unions has hurt the middle class. The collective bargaining power of unions was able to secure higher wages and greater benefits for workers. Unions made originally lower class workers into middle class workers, and were largely responsible for the growth of the middle class. With decreasing unionization, the collective bargaining power of workers has decreased, and it is harder to prevent and change problems like wage stagnation (Perez). Without unions, it is harder for the middle class worker to stay in the middle class, and he/she can end up falling out of the middle class workforce and being replaced by a cheaper, temporary