Class dismissed: Why middle income jobs are not coming back

Here is an excerpt of an article written by Maureen Callahan that appeared in the New York Post on November 13, 2010. If you wish to read the complete article, please click here.

Anne, 45, has always considered herself middle-class: As a single mom earning $65,000 a year in ad sales, she was able to rent a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side for $1,000 a month and send her daughter, now 12, to private school. “I was able to make it,” she says. “Even go on vacation sometimes.”

In the span of 15 months, she has come to define herself as poor — even if the government won’t, denying her multiple applications for welfare and food stamps because, she says, she once made “too much money.”

Upon losing her job in June 2009 — her company was going under — “I was plunged into immediate poverty,” she says. “It was a surprise attack.”

Anne has borrowed money from her sister and her retired parents — who are struggling themselves — to pay the rent; she applied for a Section 8 and was able to slash it in half, to $500 a month. She depleted her 401(k). She had no savings, was living paycheck-to-paycheck. But she still felt economically safe, given her location and her tax bracket and her white-collar job.

“Now, when I go to the grocery store, I have to decide what is absolutely essential for my child,” Anne says.

“Sometimes, I’m eating whatever-in-a-can. A lot of the time, I’m literally walking around without a penny in my pocket.” She deliberates before taking her daughter on a day trip downtown, because a round-trip subway fare will cost $9. She negotiated a tuition break with her daughter’s school, and the ease of that leads her to believe she’s not the only parent who’s asked, which she does not find especially comforting.

She’s $16,000 in debt to credit card companies. One of her local grocers, who once let her buy food on a running tab, now has a bill collector after her. She has her résumé up online, but when headhunters call and ask her age, “suddenly they never call me back,” she says. “I’m depressed. None of my friends are able to find jobs. I am living day-to-day.”

Anne’s biggest fear is that her daughter finds out how dire the situation is.

“She’ll say to me, ‘Are we poor?’ And I keep lying,” Anne says. “I think it’s a very traumatic thing for a child. I don’t want her to feel like she’s the only one, or a victim.”

When the recession does ease up, Anne fears that she will emerge as a permanent member of the lower class.
“The world kind of betrayed us,” she says. “The salary I was making — I don’t think I’ll ever make it again.”

This is what President Obama spoke of last week on “60 Minutes”: the threat that America adapts to the point where this economy is considered “a new normal, where unemployment rates stay high, people who have jobs see their incomes go up, businesses make big profits, but they learn to do more with less and so they don’t hire.”