The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

Author:Nicole Aschoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

It’s a Cold World Out There

Oprah’s popularity stems in part from her message of empathy, support, and love in an increasingly stressful, alienating society. Three decades of companies restructuring their operations by eliminating jobs (through attrition, technology, and outsourcing) and dismantling both organized labor and the welfare state has left workers in an extremely precarious situation. Today, new working-class jobs are primarily low-wage service jobs, and the perks that once went along with middle-of-the-road white-collar jobs have disappeared. Flexible, project-oriented, contingent work has become the norm, enabling companies to ratchet up their requirements for all workers except those at the very top (jobs that in the past required only a high school education now require a college degree). Meanwhile, the costs of education, housing, childcare, and health care have skyrocketed, making it yet more difficult for individuals and households to get by, never mind prosper.

The situation is bleak: over 60 percent of the jobs lost during the Great Recession were good jobs, middle-income jobs. The average unemployed person spent forty weeks on the unemployment rolls in 2012, and today there are more than four people vying for every job opening. In the corporate world, job openings elicit hundreds of résumés, and when foreign automakers open plants in the US South tens of thousands apply. A third of households have negative wealth or no assets, and three-fourths have less than six months’ income in savings. One in three people say that if they lost their job they wouldn’t be able to make their mortgage or rent payment within one month.5

While the working poor grew used to crushed dreams a long time ago, the emotional toll of the recent crisis on the middle class is stark. The New York Times recently reported that the US middle class is no longer the most affluent in the world: even economic self-help guru Suze Orman tells older middle-class people that they’ll need to work until at least age seventy and “live below their means” if they’re going to make enough to support themselves through their retirement. But older workers, particularly those who lost their jobs in the recession, are finding it difficult to get, or stay, hired. Psychologists say that Millennials are the most stressed-out generation ever, set loose in a society that tells them the sky’s the limit, but that also sets requirements for, and expectations of, success sky-high. Meanwhile, 45 percent of the unemployed are young people. Suicide is now the second leading cause of death among college students, and the leading cause of death, after cancer and heart disease, among male baby boomers.

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