Talkin' Bout My Generation: Economic Security, the Challenge for California Progressives in 2007

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Robert Cruickshank

The California Budget Project's report, A Generation of Inequality: The State of Working California, 1979-2006, has already started to grab public attention, such as a front-page article in the SF Chronicle.

It's about time. Although neoliberalism has been hurting working Californians since 1979, it's been in the last few years that the situation has become dramatically worse. Low wages, poor job growth prospects, and soaring costs of living are killing the California Dream for millions of residents of this state.

Below I offer an overview of the report, and some suggestions on what we can - and should - do about the growing crisis.

The CBP has identified several major factors that illustrate the widening inequality in California:

• 70% of job creation in California since 1979 has been in high-wage or low-wage jobs. The middle-income folks have faced stagnation or declining incomes.

• Wage gains are not only unevenly shared, but inflation and the soaring cost of living has hit low- and middle-income workers harder than their counterparts in other states.

• Workers are getting fewer benefits - health care has been slashed, as have pensions.

• Young Californians - those born since 1979 - have fared poorly in the state's job market, and since 2000 those with college degrees have had *fewer* job prospects than those with only a high school diploma, though the latter group is still facing poor prospects of their own.

California is becoming a place where only the rich can afford to enjoy basic economic security - whereas everyone else must face high housing costs, rising energy, food, and health care costs with shrinking wages and poor job prospects.

It's apt that this report focuses on 1979 to the present, as that corresponds to my own lifespan. Parts of this report ring all to true to my own cohort. Take my high school class, which graduated from an Orange County school in 1997. Today most of us work either in financial services, high-tech, or education, with many of the grads who did not attend college working in the service sector.