What Becomes of the Middle-Class post-COVID?
It’s important to recall that prior to our present pandemic, a stream of commentators were proclaiming that the middle-class was receding back into history. There’s truth to it, just as there has been for the last 30 years.
But what about now? If average families were struggling prior to COVID-19, what are their challenges in the coming months and years? While everything is held in suspension as COVID relief rolls out from governments at all levels, at some point these will end and reality will set in – the middle-class will remain in a struggle to protect whatever it has left.
Across numerous fronts, families in this economic sector will have to work through a string of challenges that individually might be manageable but collectively could prove overwhelming. Secure employment, sufficient wages, affordable or available childcare, mortgage payments, accumulated loans and credit, benefits, education responsibilities – these will be the challenges of the age for millions of families, from Canada to China, Britain to Brazil, and America to Australia. The same global economy that provided quick wealth could just as easily take it away in a post-COVID fallout of trade, climate change and political disputes.
For women, the coming years will prove disproportionally challenging compared to men, since they make up the majority of workers in those service sectors that might be the first to close in the ensuring economic downsizing.
Things were made worse by the U.S. decision to steer most of its pandemic stimulus money to the wealthy, huge monopolies and executive bonuses instead of small business protection, unemployment assistance or basic family relief. It took America out of the lead for economic protection of middle-class families.
There are personal stories galore of people that all of us know who fear for their economic livelihood and stable future. Everything seems unknown and we are being forced into the regrettable choice of saving economies over the health of people.
The burgeoning middle-class component of populations, which was rising significantly in the developing regions of the world on a half-year ago, are now facing a similar unknown fate, as the global economy contorts and writhes in response to the pandemic. It all points to an immediate future where COVID will play havoc with those in the global middle-class and their security could be put at great risk.
We make a fundamental error by presuming that being in the middle-class is just about money and holdings. It used to be that families at this economic level enjoyed security, stability, meaningful employment, the ability to pay the bills, funds or health plans for medical emergencies, benefits for dental work, pensions or work-related disabilities. And, above all, they could plan and dream. Where to vacation, what university will the kids attend, where to dip into the stock market a little, where to live in retirement – these and much more were once the great privileges of entering the middle-class.
And it meant positive vibes about the future, an assurance that our economic promise was growing, as were our possibilities for enjoyment.
But at some point, employment became more menial and ironically more robotic in feel and custom. The growing distrust between workers, management and owners became poisoned with suspicion. Ownership got bigger and more distant, until it finally became global in nature. Trade agreements frequently benefitted the ownership class over the working class. The middle-class, in the process, was getting squeezed and increasingly losing the political influence to protect its lifestyles.
And just as the work life is becoming more insecure in the post-COVID world, so have our domestic lives. We have read of the significant rise in depression, drug use, addictions, relationships on permanent edge, ability to pay the family mortgage at risk, university education in doubt, and children with more limited choices for their futures.
Ultimately, being middle-class isn’t about money but our psychological and mental state of mind. It’s true that if we don’t have money then we don’t have much. But if we don’t have a positive sense of our future, the belief that our children will have more opportunity than we did, that our work is meaningful and that our home life is a garden for personal and collective growth, then that is even worse.
The global forces that were in the process of making middle-class lives increasingly perilous in the pre-COVID years will now have even greater advantage over the economic fate of our world. It doesn’t work to just fight them individually, with the little that we possess. We must collectively stake a claim so that future generations will be more secure and sustainable. If we don’t possess the collective will to fight for that, then the post-COVID era will prove gut-wrenching.
Our pre-COVID economic policies were already undermining the economic future of the middle-class. If we can’t change them now, when everything is in a state of flu and vulnerable, then the years following the pandemic will be difficult. We must begin the process of fighting for our economic future before there’s no fight left in us at all.