Middle-class life getting less secure

By Jonathan Krim and Griff Witte
Washington Post

ST. CHARLES, Mo. — Teresa Geerling is living the future of life in the middle of the American workforce.

After years of cleaning the insides of airplanes and polishing their outsides, Geerling was laid off from American Airlines last year. The job was physically taxing for Geerling, 50, but the nearly $32,000 annual pay and health-care coverage helped provide a typical middle-class life in this small Midwestern community.

Now, she works the overnight shift at a local hospital as a nurse's aide while completing course work to be certified as a medical assistant. That would seem to be a smart move, because unlike airlines, which are contracting, healthcare is one of the industries that many economists believe could generate millions more jobs in the decades to come.

Yet rarely has Geerling's work life been so precarious.

If she can't stay on her husband's health plan, her costs for health insurance offered by the hospital will be $200 a month, more than five times as much as at the airline. There are few job protections and no pension benefits beyond the option for a 401(k) savings plan. She makes $2 an hour less than before; to have a chance at higher pay, she must continually train herself in new areas.

Geerling is at the leading edge of changes that herald a new era for millions of people earning around the national average, $17 an hour.

This new era requires workers to shoulder more responsibility and risk on the way to financial security, economists say. It also demands that they be nimble in an increasingly fluid job market. Those who don't obtain some combination of specialized skills, higher education and professional status that can be constantly adapted will be in danger of sliding down the economic ladder to low-paying service jobs, usually without benefits.

Meanwhile, those who secure the middle-class jobs of the 21st century will have to make $17 an hour stretch further than ever as they pay more for healthcare or risk doing without insurance and assume much or all of the burden for their retirement.

Many economists and scholars acknowledge that the changes wrought by technology and global economic forces will be painful at first. But they say the new structure ultimately will create many kinds of jobs as yet unimagined, in fields such as education, healthcare and science.

"You have to take the leap of faith that the economy will evolve and there will be this innovation economy that comes," said John McCarthy, a Forrester Research analyst who wrote a report on U.S. jobs going overseas.

Yet many observers also say that the current economic restructuring may be more rocky than similar transitions in the past and that society should take additional measures to ease the struggles of those caught in the middle, especially the three-quarters of Americans who lack a college degree.

Analysts say retraining will be key because tomorrow's middle-class jobs likely will be enhanced variations of today's lower-wage jobs. Clerical positions keeping medical records, for instance, are being transformed into higher-paying technician jobs that involve both computer skills and the ability to talk to doctors and nurses.

"You can't be some kid who is good with a computer and get that job anymore," said Anthony Carnevale, senior fellow at the National Center on Education and the Economy. The successful candidate will be "someone who can do the computer stuff but also knows the business."

That combination of technology savvy, analytical thinking and interpersonal skills could be the magic formula for U.S. workers in many fields. Jobs that involve all three qualities, said Thomas Kochan, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology management professor, are hard to duplicate with machines or with low-wage workers from abroad, putting the Americans who fill them in a strong position to demand not just good wages, but benefits, too.

"For workers who are performing services for people that can't be made impersonal or sent offshore, those jobs could become much more attractive," he said.

• • •