Working Families Strain to Live Middle-Class Life
By Louis Uchitelle
When Vice President Al Gore incorporated "working families" into his rhetoric last month and "hard-working middle-class families" this month as pivotal campaign phrases, he pointed a finger — unintentionally perhaps — at a central fact of American life: most of the nation's 72 million families feel they cannot make ends meet.
Three-quarters earn less than $75,000 a year and 45 percent of all families earn $30,000 to $75,000, the range of middle-class incomes in most of America. No one argues that middle-income families cannot put food on the table, pay the mortgage, own a car or two, take a modest vacation. What stresses them, sociologists and economist say, are the other outlays of middle-class life: new clothes, child care, lessons for the children, restaurants, movies, home decoration, computers, big-screen television sets, stereo systems, Christmas gifts, and saving for college and retirement.
"'Working families' is a code phrase with a variety of meanings, and one is middle-class people trying to live only on wages, not earnings from investments," said Barrie Thorne, a sociologist and the co-director of the Center for Working Families at the University of California at Berkeley. "They can't do it and they feel nonaffluent and not adequately compensated for the number of hours they must work to make ends meet."
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Carl
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