Have you ever had the sneaking suspicion that as a member of the middle class, you have been duped? I have and more and more so as I get older. Being middle classed no longer denotes a comfortable standard of living, unless of course you are in the upper quarter. The bottom three quarters is struggling to get by. About three months ago I quit my full time job because I decided that the pay I received was not sufficient to give up time to myself and time with my daughter. The mere fact that I can opt out of a full time job must seem ridiculously opulent in this financial climate to the majority of my cohorts but to me a living wage doesn't include a mortgage or retirement. It doesn't even include eating dinner out a couple of times a month. I am just talking about getting by without worrying about my bills.
Though I don’t have a mortgage I live in the San Francisco Bay Area where rent and the difference in other living expenses is equivalent to the mortgages of those who live in less metropolitan areas. The reason I quit my full time job and the premise for everything I am about to write in this blog rests on the fact that earning an annual income of $48,000 as a single mother with one child is equivalent to earning less than $28,000. I think many people know where I am going with this.
I have experienced parenting making under $28,000 a year as well as parenting above $48,000 a year and I can tell you from first hand experience that in a major metropolitan area, living on $48,000 is not any better and possibly worse. When I was living on less that $28,000 a year, I was a student and the grants and loans allotted to me didn't even come close to $20,000. However I lived in campus housing designated for students with families and the rent, which included utilities and basic cable was less than half of what the equivalent would have cost in the real world. I made due and accrued debt but only at a rate of about $3,000 per year. Now, that I have to pay full price for housing, daycare, and health care, after taxes, $48,000 just doesn't come close to covering mine and my daughter's basic needs.
So I quit my job. Why? It looked to me that, though I am living more frugally than I have ever lived in my life, at $48,000, I would most likely be in debt close to $8,000 a year. In other words, I could not afford to work full time because it was too expensive. I know this sounds unbelievable and some might judge me for opting to work less and be in a position to get subsidized health care but honestly, if I accrue debt at $8,000 a year for any number of years, I will be in serious trouble; and I'm the kind of person who figures, and rationally so, that if I am going to be in financial trouble, there is no way I am going to bust my hump 40 hours a week and be estranged from my offspring when I am less likely to go in debt making half as much.
The moral of this story is that we as a people, and I mean we middle class people who are in the strange position of having a generous pool of resources, some of them being as simple as literacy, food, and a computer, but having a historically diminished capacity to earn wages, we need to make some serious decisions. I believe that there are many of you out there who are in the same perplexing situation as I am and choose to continue to march on like a good little worker bee, accruing more debt each year. I urge you to stop and reassess why you are doing this. Is it possible that you could work less and live as well or better? The answer for me was yes.
I believe that we can put into practice methods that will take back some of the power that we have so easily given to employers. In Middle-class income doesn't buy middle-class lifestyle, Warren and Tiagi suggest that relying on a dual income allows no back up plan for families, causing high levels of stress and a propensity for bankruptcy when emergencies occur. I would like to add that when everyone works, we flood the market with an abundant supply of labor, thus making it difficult for us to negotiate for higher earnings. I am arguing that as a people we are giving away our resources too cheaply. I urge everyone to work less. Don’t take that second job that pays less than your first job. If you are a single parent, figure out how you can live on less than a full time wage and do that. As people work fewer hours and as more dual income families try to make it on a single income or two half time incomes, the supply of workers will shrink, necessitating higher wages.
I start this blog today to document two things. First, I would like to hear from anyone who has found that working less has worked for them so that I can compile a body of literature to document the unfathomable, that it is possible that working less and making less may actually result in a better standard of living, at least until you get the salary that is well above a living wage for your area so that you can actually afford old age and your children's tuition. Second, I would like to document my research to support the premise that if a considerable percentage of the middle class drop out of the work force, wages and living standards will improve for everyone. I hope to find economists, perhaps among those currently arguing for policies that will alleviate the inequality of income, to come forward in support of this premise. If my theory is correct, then it might also be true that our acting in unison may actually result in the policy changes, such as tax cuts and childcare subsidies, that persuasive arguments alone could not motivate.
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