White Working Class, With a New Foreword by Mark Cuban and a New Preface by the Author

by Mark Cuban

Even in a globalizing, automating world, that’s not nuts—and shouldn’t be impossible. But it will require new thinking by both conservatives and liberals. Liberals will have to move beyond their singular focus on the college degree as the avenue to economic achievement. Conservatives will have to recognize that providing jobs that yield a modest middle-class life for non-college grads will necessitate the kind of industrial policy that exists in Germany but has long been lacking in the United States.

  An important priority is addressing the severe shortage of Americans trained for middle-skill jobs. “Friends who work in the U.S. (in water infrastructure) always complain to me about the poor skills of the average American workers they get. Trump would best start there,” commented John Verhoeven.* Middle-skill jobs typically pay $40,000 and up and require some post-secondary education but not a college degree. One effect of the excessive focus on college degrees is that the United States lacks people with mid-level skills. One study found “a lack of adequate middle-skills talent directly or significantly affected the productivity of 47% of manufacturing companies, 35% of health care and social assistance companies, and 21% of retail companies.” A 2011 survey found 30% of all companies and 43% of manufacturing ones had positions that had been open for 6 months that they could not fill. A more recent survey confirmed large gaps, especially in health care, technical sales, sales management, and in jobs that require computer and mathematical skills.201

  The new manufacturing economy, concluded the MIT Task Force on Production in the Innovation Economy, requires “training for jobs that demand new combinations of book learning, hands-on experience, proficiency with digital technology, and ability to manage relationships face to face and with distant collaborators.”202 This is not what our educational system typically delivers.

  Vocational training was an integral part of the high school curriculum until the 1950s, and all students were routinely taught (on a gender-segregated basis) job-ready skills along with other subjects. In the 1950s, tracking emerged that, in theory, separated students according to ability; in fact, less affluent students and students of color were tracked into vocational programs that were seen as strictly second class.203 The response was to abolish vocational programs, on the theory that every child deserved the best—to go to college.

  This strategy was self-delusion. Not everyone wants to go to college, and even those who’d like to go can’t always garner the resources to accomplish this goal. Two-thirds of Americans don’t graduate from college, as we’ve seen. The decline of vocational education has meant that American employers can’t depend on a stream of employees with the specific skills they need. Employers have responded by “up-credentialing”—requiring college degrees for jobs that do not require college-delivered skills—as a way to weed out those who lacked the smarts or self-discipline to complete a college degree. This up-credentialing has two bad effects. Using college as a proxy for diligence and smarts, of course, disadvantages working-class kids who are smart and diligent but not college grads. It also means that a significant proportion of college grads do jobs that don’t really require college. As a result, a quarter of college grads and advanced degree holders will work for a lower median wage than associate degree holders.204

  Too often today, college education serves as a finishing school for elite kids, who go there at 18 and study full time until age 22, building the credentials and entrepreneurial networks that will see them through life. This works for elite kids but not for many working-class kids. For those who do attend college, significant changes are needed. Arizona State University President Michael Crow has led the way in making the resources of a major research university more user-friendly for children of the working class. ASU now provides online courses and scheduling options that fit better with working-class lives. Online students typically take only two or three classes per semester, and most courses cover a semester’s worth of material in just seven and a half weeks. ASU provides a mentor to help students plan and navigate their college careers, which levels the playing field by providing nonelite students with the kind of advice and savvy that elite kids get from their parents.205

  At a deeper level, what’s needed is a very different kind of education-to-employment system. Its key elements were outlined in 2015 by a task force convened by the Markle Foundation. Companies need to better define what skills they need, and develop private-public alliances to develop a local talent supply chain. High schools, community colleges, and universities should work with local businesses and with unions to develop educational and training programs that lead to industry-recognized certifications that provide employers the assurance that a worker has specific skills needed for specific jobs. Beyond high school, the programming should be relatively short; flexible and part-time programming works best for adults who are working and caring for families at the same time as they are continuing their educations.206 “And how do you propose they go back to school and pay for it if they don’t have a job? That is the Catch-22,” remarked Bill Parks.* The educational system that works well for the professional elites does not reflect the realities of working-class lives. What’s needed are targeted, fit-for-purpose credential programs. Participants trained for a job that then disappears could return to train for a job that’s just being created.

  Creating a smooth education-to-employment pipeline is not a new idea. Over 70 years ago, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the National Electrical Contractors Association worked in partnership to create a training program, delivered through local affiliates, combining apprenticeships, remote online education, and personal coaching. The program has enabled hundreds of thousands of workers to earn credentials as wiremen or installers.207 This is a key role unions could play if, alas, they were not so embattled they need to spend disproportionate resources on just trying to survive.

  Another example is the Automotive Technical Education Collaborative (AMTEC), a partnership between Toyota and a local community college that has grown into a network of 30 community colleges and 34 auto-related plants in 12 states. If someone has the AMTEC credential, “it’s a validation,” said a manager at a local Nissan plant; employers know what to expect. The credential does not require a college degree.208

  The Golden Triangle Link provides a third model. It’s a private economic development coalition in Mississippi led by an Arkansas developer and Brenda Lathan, a black woman he promoted from the reception desk to be his director for business research and development. The Link connects local, state, and country governments, utilities, engineering companies, and local educational institutions (Mississippi State and East Mississippi Community College). In conjunction with the Center for Manufacturing Technology Excellence, which trains local people for skilled jobs managing computerized robot-heavy modern factory jobs, the Link has brought more than $4.6 billion in investment and 5,600 jobs to impoverished northeastern Mississippi.209

  These are just illustrative examples of the ways in which educational opportunities can be restructured to provide the working class with meaningful skills. Doubtless there are others. My main point is that elites need to stop implying or stating that the working class should accept its diminished status, and start talking instead of steps toward jobs that provide a modest middle-class life.

  The truism that manufacturing has fled the United States for good can be exaggerated. There are strategic, bottom-line reasons to keep manufacturing local. Take Boeing. In the early 2000s, Boeing shifted massively to outsourcing production of its new 787 Dreamliner aircraft, replacing its traditional hub-and-spoke supply chain around Seattle with about 50 production hubs around the world responsible for wings, engine, and so forth.210 Only final assembly remained in Seattle.

  Global outsourcing resulted in quality breakdowns and cost overruns. In a product where millimeters matter, the components produced in other countries were not quite right, and quality control issues plagued the plane for years. The launch was delayed, and cost overruns were enormous. A strike adde
d to Boeing’s woes. Its stock price sank so low that it took 6 years for it to recover.

  In a 2011 speech, the CEO reflected, “We spent a lot more money in trying to recover than we ever would have spent if we’d tried to keep the key technologies closer to home.” In 2013, Boeing reversed course. It announced it was moving wing production back to Seattle and investing in a new factory and training there. It would continue to produce some parts abroad but “we need to bring it back to a more prudent level.”211

  Commerce is getting both more global and more local. 3-D printing and other technologies pave the way for a new generation of niche products tailored to individual consumers and delivered with high-quality customer service. Liam Casey is incubating hardware start-ups that provide high-value products for which low-cost labor is not a key factor. “It’s more important that producer and customer are close to each other,” he remarked.212 This adaptation of the German model—make the best products, not the cheapest—holds the potential for new industry in the heartland. So does the fact that major producers like IKEA and Emerson are moving to regional manufacturing to solve transportation problems.213

  These programs provide the model for the future of working-class jobs that yield a solid middle-class standard of living. But instead of nurturing a new industrial policy, too often what the white working class hears is the prescription that working-class men should take the kinds of low-wage jobs working-class women hold. That’s not the right message, as I explain in the next chapter.

  CHAPTER 11

  Why Don’t Working-Class Men Just Take “Pink-Collar” Jobs?

  MANLY DIGNITY is highly important to working-class men, and they’re not feeling it. Breadwinner status is a big part of this: Many men (of all classes) still measure masculinity by the size of a paycheck.214 Since 1970, professional-elite wages have increased dramatically, while the wages of high-school-educated men fell 47%.215 The percentage of men so discouraged they are not looking for work has tripled since the 1960s.216

  Look, I wish manliness worked differently. But most men, like most women, seek to fulfill the ideals they’ve grown up with. For many blue-collar men, all they’re asking for is basic human dignity (male varietal). When it comes to masculine dignity, men of all classes are united in their opinion: they’re all for it. But members of the PME have been remarkably tone deaf in their scorn for the dignity aspirations of working-class men.

  Instead, while elite men still enjoy a virtual stranglehold on highly paid high-status jobs themselves, some in the PME have recommended that blue-collar men take pink-collar jobs like genetic counselors, occupational assistants, or nurse practitioners. Highbrow discourse on Bloomberg.com and elsewhere identifies the key problem for working-class men as their outdated notions of masculinity.217

  “They are little man-boys who need ‘manly’ jobs and go crying to their mamas when they have to answer to a ‘woman in a pants suit’ or need to perform a task that doesn’t involve lifting 100 pounds or cutting through steel plates,” one man opined in an email. Said another, “Swallow your pride/dignity and go back to school, get a 21st century job. Economies change. Real men and women with integrity don’t expect to be handed a job or scapegoat others who get something they don’t,” commented Jerry Day.*

  I’m all for men of all classes developing new and healthier masculinities, but to have the elite telling working-class men to abandon the breadwinner masculinity privileged men still enjoy . . . that’s not going to persuade working-class men of anything except that they really, really, really hate feminism. When elite men start flooding into traditionally feminine jobs, elites will have the standing to tell working-class men to swallow their masculine pride and do so, too.

  And yet we do all need to recognize that twenty-first-century jobs will differ from twentieth-century ones. What’s a path forward? Let’s begin with a question: What’s a job that requires intensive scientific training and heavy lifting?

  Nursing. I’ll bet that’s not what came to mind. When we think of nursing, we think of the womanly art of caring, of holding the hand of the sick. Because it’s feminized, nursing is persistently undervalued and underpaid. Indeed, nursing shortages have continued because of hospitals’ refusal to do what’s typically done when there’s a shortage—pay more. That’s the kind of thing that happens in a pink-collar ghetto. The solution is not to consign working-class men to the underpaid, dead-end jobs traditionally provided to women. The solution is to create up-skilled jobs for both men and women.

  Here’s an example, again from the Markle report. The Tablet Pilot of the New York Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute equips home health care aides with tablets that enable them to assess client health risks and communicate with doctors and other members of a patient’s health care team. Armed with networked tablets, the home care workers answer 15 screening questions to monitor for documented health care risks. The pilot materially improved the quality of health care, because it addressed a key problem: often several days would pass before home aides’ observations were effectively communicated to the doctor or nurse in charge. This led to false alarms and unnecessary, and expensive, trips to the ER. The Tablet Pilot decreased unnecessary hospital visits.218

  The Tablet Pilot points the way for working-class jobs. What’s needed are networked service jobs that allow for up-skilling of workers who, because they will be adding more value, will be paid more.

  The technology exists to generalize this model. Today most services are seen as inherently local, but networks make that less true. Using Microsoft’s HoloLens, a reporter called an electrician who then talked him through how to install a light switch. A Los Angeles company called DAQRI has developed a “smart helmet” that can allow a soldier to see a schematic drawing of a machine he needs to fix along with a step-by-step description of how to fix it. The smart helmet and HoloLens open the way to next-gen “doctors’ visits” that occur in the patient’s home.219 Or to the practice of medicine in rural areas by doctors in large cities who practice in partnership with local physician assistants acting as the doctor’s eyes and ears.

  Some of the occupations expected to grow are ones that blue-collar guys (and gals) would likely be happy to do: wind turbine techs, cartographers, and ambulance drivers.220 This sort of thing has not been at the center of liberals’ social reform agenda, to say the least. Putting it there would require a cultural shift. Blue-collar jobs carry social prestige elsewhere, for example, in Germany, but not in the United States. “Nobody coming out of college these days is knowledgeable or excited about . . . [manufacturing],” said a Flextronics manager in Fort Worth. A community college student commented, if manufacturing “was a last resort I’d probably have to go in, but that’s definitely not what I want to be doing.”221

  These attitudes have consequences. For example, there’s a shortage of plumbers so acute that it’s threatening the building industry. Plumbers can make good money—the national median is $60,000 a year for a master plumber, but in a large city a plumber can make six figures.222 “My plumber drives a Porsche,” noted a friend. Are lame jokes about “plumber’s butt” worth the economic price our country pays for looking down on this kind of work?

  It’s time to reverse that attitude. “I haven’t heard either party talking about a ‘real’ jobs program or a ‘real’ training program. Most of the centers that are supposed to do this kind of work do very surface level training like how to write a resume, how to do an online job search, etc.,” wrote Elizabeth Ringler-Jayanthan. That’s a pressing social issue. Let’s treat it like one.

  CHAPTER 12

  Why Don’t the People Who Benefit Most from Government Help Seem to Appreciate It?

  BY 2008, my father-in-law was in bad shape. His dementia was so advanced that my mother-in-law sorely needed some respite. We found a day care program and suggested she inquire whether government subsidies were available to help cover the cost. A lifelong Democrat, she initially dismissed the suggestion out of hand. “It’s not wort
h it. The government doesn’t care about people like us, who have worked all their lives. They only care about the poor.”

  She asked, though, and—quickly and efficiently—Medicare covered the costs.

  Since then I’ve been on a quiet rampage. When she received a new energy-efficient refrigerator that, to her delight, cost her only $100, I pointed out that it was compliments of the Obama stimulus program.223 When fire fighters came to her house to check her smoke alarms and make sure the house was safe, I gently pointed out that that, too, was a government benefit. When she marveled one day that she had a full meal at the senior center for only $3, again I mentioned that the bounty she’s enjoying comes from her government.

  This should not be a one-woman campaign.

  In Suzanne Mettler’s must-read book The Submerged State, she points out that most Americans don’t know about the subsidies and benefits they receive from their government. In 2008, a survey asked Americans whether they had “ever used a government social program, or not.” Of those surveyed, 56.5% said they never had. In fact, 91.6% had.224

  For the working class, the most valuable and least discussed social program is the system of disability payments to those deemed unable to work (formally known as Social Security Disability Insurance). Chana Joffe-Walt’s reporting, which has received shockingly little attention, documented that the federal government spends more on cash payments for disability than on food stamps and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (aka “welfare”) combined.225 Nearly 40% of men aged 21–64 were on disability in the rural California community Sherman studied.226

  Joffe-Walt documents the steep increase in the costs of the disability program and its link to the disappearance of blue-collar jobs. She spoke with a doctor who, when deciding whether to certify disability, always asks patients what grade they finished in school, which “is not really a medical question. But Dr. Timberlake believes he needs this information in disability cases because people who have only a high school education aren’t going to be able to get a sit-down job.”227 Dr. Timberlake was hesitant to deny disability to someone who was unlikely to be able to find work.