Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
An intimate look at a squeezed middle class
In the wealthiest U.S. cities, public schoolteachers are moonlighting as Uber drivers to make ends meet.
Adjunct professors are drowning in so much student debt that they rely on food stamps.
And across the U.S., children are spending their days, and nights, in 24-hour child care centers designed to accommodate the erratic schedules of their overworked parents.
In “Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America,” Alissa Quart lucidly recounts these and other wrenching stories of economic hardship, while meticulously deconstructing some of the prevailing myths about middle-class life in the United States.
Quart takes readers on an intimate journey, inside living rooms and workplaces across the nation, and shows how even highly educated workers — including lawyers, academics, journalists and nurses — have become trapped within a system that reinforces economic injustices and inequality.
They are members of what she calls the “middle precariat”: people who thought that years of work and an advanced degree would lead to status and success, but who instead find themselves barely able to scrape by amid stagnant wages and rising costs for child care, housing and education.
Writing in a sharp-edged tone, Quart introduces us to Dee’s Tots Child Care in New Rochelle, New York, one of a growing number of round-the-clock day care centers filling the “parenting vacuum” created by unconventional work schedules.
The rise of such centers — what Quart calls “extreme day care” — reflects deeper changes coursing through the American workforce, resulting from the disempowerment of labor unions and the expansion of “just-in-time” scheduling by companies. Only a minority of Americans now have a normal five-day, 40-hour workweek. At least 17 percent have unstable work schedules, meaning they are assigned to work oncall or rotating work shifts, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
At times, “Squeezed” can feel like an anxietyinducing plane trip marked by nonstop turbulence. The stories of injustice build, one on top of another, until the reader feels claustrophobic — walled in by the anxiety, debt, overwork and isolation so vividly described.
Quart offers heartbreaking portraits of women who conceal their pregnancy bumps, or who do not get pregnant at all, to avoid being penalized in the workplace. In high-priced cities, a growing number of people are coparenting by living with others and sharing duties because they no longer can afford to raise their children themselves, Quart reports.
Quart, a columnist for the Guardian newspaper and executive editor of the nonprofit Economic Hardship Reporting Project, does not produce a grand theory explaining the growing precarity of middleclass life. Nor does she offer an emancipatory alternative to the economic prison she describes.
Yet “Squeezed” stands out for its insightful analysis of class dynamics in the United States. Drawing from social science research, Quart points out that people’s perception of wealth, poverty and status is shaped by the environment they are in and those around them. There is a class-based alienation that comes with living in overpriced cities, where even people with upper-middle-class incomes can feel priced out of their own communities.
The Uber-driving professionals who believed that a degree plus years of work would result in success are suffering from a sense of profound disillusionment. They are likely to blame themselves (and not global market forces or the fastchanging labor market) for the fact that they will not be able to pass on their social status to their children.