31 Aug Roxanne D. Brown – This Dead-End Economy Drags All of Us Down.
It’s common to see members of the United Steelworkers (USW) retire after dedicating their entire working lives to a single mill or plant.
They deliver decades of skill and experience to an employer. In return, they receive the security of a USW contract, including steady pay, quality health care, fair treatment and strong retirement plans that carry them through their golden years.
This is how a healthy system functions—one generation driving prosperity and empowering the next to continue the fight. It’s the American dream.
But today, the notion of the American dream is coming apart at the seams. Tens of millions of workers find only a dead-end economy that sells them short and leaves them grasping.
These workers—from all ages, backgrounds and parts of the country—simply cannot find career-long, family- and community-sustaining jobs amid Trump Administration policies that choke investment and kill growth.
Instead, their backs are against the wall, and these workers have little choice but to juggle multiple part-time jobs that provide neither the opportunities they crave nor the wages, benefits and security their families require. Unable to get the jobs they want, they take whatever they can get and try to make do.
About 54 million Americans now draw incomes from multiple sources, up from 41 million in 2024, according to a Cash App study. Researchers found the U.S. worker’s gold standard—a “steady, predictable paycheck”—increasingly giving way to income arriving in dribs and drabs at “variable times.”
This isn’t living. It’s no longer the dream. It’s hanging on—and a world away from the stability that hundreds of thousands of USW members still get in the contracts they negotiate.
One woman threw the scope of the crisis into sharp relief when she went public with her story earlier this year, writing that she and her husband have 10 jobs between the two of them but still struggle to raise five kids and pay the bills.
“The sobering realization that even 10 jobs isn’t enough is very defeating,” she wrote. “I’m still working on a solution.”
How much more can she and her husband do?
They’re holding up their end. But instead of supporting them, the government all but ignores so-called “income stackers” like these.
The nation’s official unemployment rate—4.1 percent in July—measures only the number of Americans 16 and older who are unemployed and looking for work.
It fails to count the skyrocketing number of people who work part-time against their will and barely scrape by. As a result, the unemployment rate offers a gerrymandered view of the economy, making conditions look healthier than people know them to be.
After adding up all of those out of work and all of those working less than they want, analyst Gene Ludwig concluded that nearly 25 percent of Americans are “functionally unemployed.”
In other words, we sidelined a huge swath of the work force, leaving no suitable outlet for their skills, no way to parlay those skills into adequate income, and no path forward.
Little wonder that members of this burgeoning underclass describe themselves as feeling “defeated,” “stuck” and “sick of trying.” They characterize the job market as “truly abysmal,” “very bleak” and a “mental war.”
The current Administration owns this mess.
The on-again, off-again trade policies inject uncertainty into the economy, killing investment and jobs. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers, many with unique skill sets, were fired and forced into lengthy searches for new careers. Next-generation manufacturing grants that promised to create a new era of prosperity for workers, key industries and communities were stripped away or rolled back.
All of this was compounded by attacks on labor rights, aimed at preventing workers from joining unions and fighting for the pay, benefits and working conditions that collective bargaining provides.
A dead-end economy drags all of us down.
Employers skimp on benefits for part-time workers, often denying them health care, paid leave and retirement plans. Without these staples, workers often fall into poverty, furthering the nation’s division into haves and have-nots.
By shoehorning people into any available jobs, instead of the ones they want, the nation also squanders the work ethic, ambition and expertise needed to move the country forward.
That’s a sure recipe for stagnation. And it’s an insult to the working people who want nothing more than to help build a better tomorrow. Not just for themselves but for their kids and their grandkids.