Hard Times for Working America

In the last half of the 1980s questions began to be raised about income and wages in the U.S. economy. Who was benefiting from Reaganomics? Was the economy producing a disproportionate number of low-wage jobs? Was the middle class shrinking? This is an appropriate time to reexamine these issues.(See our The State of Working America, M. E. Sharpe, 1991, from which this article is taken.) The rise in unemployment in 1990 marks the end of the 1980s recovery, allowing us to compare trends ...