What Happened to America's Working Class?

What Happened to America's Working Class?: In the 1930s and 1940s, around 60 million Americans considered themselves "working-class." But in each decade since World War II, the number of Americans identifying as "working-class" has declined dramatically. At present, it's fair to claim that America's working class has been mostly subsumed by the middle class. Yet what precipitated such a major change in American social class structure? Many sociologists point to deindustrialization as the primary catalyst for eviscerating the working class. Although the causes of deindustrialization are multifaceted, enviro-labor economics is one key culprit. For instance, the costs of manufacturing in the U.S. simply became too high in the postwar era. Whether it was the 1947 Labor Management Relations Act or the birth of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970, the costs of producing consumer and industrial goods were cheaper abroad (outsourcing). Aside from deindustrialization, there was also a general shift in American society away from issues of "class" and toward problems of "race" and "gender" in the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps the clearest examples of this shift were embodied in the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation movements, which succeeded in obtaining constitutional protections for historically underrepresented social groups in America.