Separate Realities: The Dream and the Iceberg - Scarecrow Press

66 Chapter 2
by comparisons of “entry-level” wages for high school–educated workers,
which indicate sharp income drops have occurred across generational lines.
For example, the real entry-level hourly wage received by male high school
graduates (ages nineteen to twenty-five) declined from $13.39 in 1973 to
$10.93 in 2005 (wages for both years computed in 2005 dollars); female high
school graduates’ entry-level hourly wage fell from $9.81 in 1973 to $9.08 in
2005. 112 While some young workers (e.g., college educated) experienced
modest wage gains in the 1973–2005 period, the fact remains “that entry
level wages for men and women high school graduates in 2005 were still below
their levels of 1979 or 1973.” 113
Research findings showing lower wages for young U.S. workers today than
was the case a generation ago should not be surprising given the massive
shifts that have occurred in the U.S. occupational and wage structures over
the past thirty years. For young workers, finding a “good job” is increasingly
problematic, as illustrated by a recent study which found only 50 percent of
young workers (ages eighteen to thirty-four) without college degrees (73 percent
of all young workers) held full-time, permanent jobs. 114 Given the kinds
of jobs young workers hold, wage trends among young workers, and the fact
that most U.S. job growth through 2014 is projected to occur in low-wage
occupations, it appears that downward intergenerational mobility is, and
will continue to be, a relatively common experience among young adults today
and in the future. 115
Class Secession
America’s top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the
past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different
country. Few among them send their children to our public schools.
—Senator James Webb (D-VA), Wall Street Journal, November 14, 2006
As class polarization and downward mobility intensify and contribute to
growing community tensions and social problems, the privileged class is increasingly
distancing itself from public institutions in ways that suggest not
simply more suburbanization but a kind of class secession. Of course, the very
wealthy have always separated themselves from the nonwealthy through exclusive
neighborhoods, clubs, and schools. However, what Robert Reich once
termed the “secession of the successful” now combines traditional forms of
physical and social separation and increasing numbers of privately provided
services with the ideology of neoliberalism, an idea system of free market fundamentalism
that encourages and legitimates hostility to public institutions.
116 In short, class secession today involves both a separatist social identity
and a conscious secessionistic mentality.
One measure of the increasing physical separation of the privileged class
from the working class is the growing number of home-owner associations,