The middle class is facing serious economic hardship with little of the workplace flexibility now afforded to the well-off. Here’s how employers — and government — can help.
at the University of California-Hastings’ Center for WorkLife Law . Their experiences highlight an important but overlooked subset of Americans whose lives and livelihoods have been upended by the pandemic.
Since Covid hit, there has been much discussion of the profound health risks low-income essential workers took on to keep the economy running, and of the privileged white-collar workers who are now demanding “anywhere jobs.” Yet we’ve heard far less about the economic impacts of the pandemic on America’s fragile middle class, which makes up roughly 50 percent
of the population. As Frazer’s story shows, the pandemic is squeezing these already struggling workers in new and worrisome ways, leaving them to cope with economic hardship, while affording them little of flexibility available to the well-off.is emerging in which highly paid professionals have more options than ever, while middle-income workers often are ordered back to full-time on-site work and might have little choice but to quit.
What does the pandemic-era economic picture look like for the middle class? Harvard, NPR and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation conductedin August and September and found that middle-income households were almost 3.5 times more likely than high-income ones to be facing serious financial problems. Specifically, 34 percent of households earning between $30,000 and $99,999 reported financial hardship, while only 10 percent of households earning $100,000 or more did.