Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America, by Alissa Quart. HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN: 978-0062412263, New York, NY, 2018, 320 pages, $16.99 softcover.
Quart, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, provides a woman’s perspective on the economic state of working America. New social workers and other women soon to join the labor force need to read this book. Within they will find extremely personal and poignant stories about the challenges of parenthood in the marketplace, the high costs of childcare, and the devaluing of all kinds of care work. Reflecting on Quart’s personal story and those she interviews may provide some insight into how to prepare and plan for escaping the middle-class squeeze described so well.
The subjects of Quart’s account are not the poor, but the middle class threatened by contemporary trends. High education levels no longer insure a stable middle-class status, as evidenced by the 40% of college instructors teaching as adjuncts without job security or benefits. Tenured professors are just one-sixth of the higher education workforce. Public school teachers are reliant on the gig economy (e.g., Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb) to supplement their stagnant wages. Middle-aged workers are more likely today to need a second career than ever before—a second career that requires new skills that many will be unable to obtain without incurring educational debt they may never be able to repay. Not only truck drivers, but also highly skilled professionals like nurses, lawyers, accountants, and pharmacists, face elimination by the robotic revolution and artificial intelligence on the near horizon.
Coastal elites in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street have priced housing beyond the budget of any single middle-class family, but their lifestyles of opulence and excess receive nothing but adulation in television series Quart refers to as 1% television. The desperation and precarious situation of the middle class is a forgotten media subject. Readers might be surprised at the great sympathy Quart shows toward those living in close proximity to the wealthiest. Their first world struggles to find nannies or extreme childcare (i.e., 24-hour care) are laced with at least some awareness of the moral complexity of importing care workers who have virtually no opportunity to climb the ladder to economic prosperity.
After the 2008 Great Recession, less than half of Americans reported being in the middle class for the first time ever. The squeeze is on, and middle-class stability is precarious at best. Quart is at her best when describing a few of the cracks in the system that some have used to cope with the squeeze: co-parenting arrangements, extended families-by-choice, and co-housing. Her policy solutions in comparison are a bit quixotic: universal child allowances, a national day care system, and a universal basic income. Until then, we may all gain by changing a few attitudes. We can stop blaming the squeezed victim for her condition, we can instill unpaid care work with the value it deserves, and we can talk openly about social class.
Middle-class Americans tend to base their worth on their work, but work is becoming increasingly elusive. Perhaps things will change when we learn to value our humanity instead.
Reviewed by Peter A. Kindle, Ph.D., CPA. LMSW, associate professor, The University of South Dakota.