Third World America - Arianna Huffington [7]
Enter Undercover Boss, the CBS reality show in which corporate CEOs don disguises and spend a few days experiencing what it’s like to be a low-level worker at their companies. It’s the kind of popular entertainment that can start out as one thing—a fun, high-concept reality show—but morph into something that affects the zeitgeist by shining a spotlight on just how out of touch America’s corporate chiefs are. And their cluelessness is not just about the jobs their workers do—it’s about the lives their workers lead.
Ever since Roseanne went off the air, the stories of working-class Americans have been all but invisible on network TV. But now, week in and week out, millions can see what downsizing and Wall Street’s demands for ever-greater productivity and earnings margins did to the lives of so many Americans, even before the economic crisis.
The chasm between America’s classes has reached Grand Canyon–esque proportions. Forty years ago, top executives at S&P 500 companies made an average of thirty times what their workers did—now they make three hundred times what their workers make.23 That’s the kind of statistic a show like Undercover Boss can bring to life. Here are a few others:
Between 2007 and 2008, more than 800,000 additional American households found themselves trying to make do on under $25,000 a year, bringing the total to nearly 29 million.24
In 2005, households in the bottom 20 percent had an average income of $10,655, while the top 20 percent made $159,583—a disparity of 1,500 percent, the highest gap ever recorded.25
In 2007, the top 10 percent pocketed almost half of all the money earned in America—the highest percentage recorded since 1917 (including, as Business Insider editor Henry Blodget noted, in 1928, the peak of the stock market bubble in the “roaring 1920s”).26
Between 2000 and 2008, the poverty rate in the suburbs of the largest metro areas in the United States grew by 25 percent—making the suburbs home to the country’s biggest and most rapidly expanding segment of the poor.27
Making matters even worse is the fact that while the classes are moving farther apart—with the middle class in real danger of disappearing entirely—mobility across the classes has declined. The American Dream is defined by the promise of economic and social mobility—but the American Reality proves just how elusive that dream has become. Indeed, Canada, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and even the often-reviled France have greater upward mobility than we do.
Here are the numbers:
Almost one hundred million Americans are in families that make less in real income than their parents did at the same age.28
The percentage of Americans born to parents in the bottom fifth of income who will climb to the top fifth as adults is now only 7 percent.29
If you were born to wealthy parents but didn’t go to college, you’re more likely to be wealthy than if you did go to college but had poor parents.30
In other words, as the middle class is squeezed and more and more people are being pushed down, it’s becoming harder than ever to move up. In a study of economic mobility, Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution and John E. Morton of the Pew Charitable Trusts wrote, “The inherent promise of America is undermined if economic status is—or is seen as—merely a game of chance, with some having the good fortune to live in the best of times and some the bad luck to live in the worst of times.31 That is not the America heralded in lore and experienced in reality by millions of our predecessors.”
And yet it’s certainly the reality being experienced now, and, at least in part, the reality being shown on Undercover Boss. Now, I’m not suggesting that the show is going to foment a working-class rebellion or directly lead to a raft of social reforms. But it might lead to a conversation we, as a nation, desperately need to have—especially in Washington.
Maybe if our elected representatives went undercover