The Time of Our Lives

by Tom Brokaw

  From 2007 to 2008 enrollment at community colleges promising job training jumped 10 percent in the eighteen- to twenty-five-year-old demographic. And they’re a bargain at under three thousand dollars a year on average.

  More important, community colleges are rapidly expanding their capacity to train workers for the demands of the modern world. Gateway Community and Technical College just south of Cincinnati in Covington, Kentucky, is a model. The president of Gateway told me, “Twenty-five years ago eighty percent of the factory work was brawn, twenty percent brain. Today it is ten percent brawn, ninety percent brain.”

  Gateway Community was opened in September 2010 with the help of local manufacturers who desperately needed skilled younger workers to fill in behind a generation of workers trained on the job and now approaching retirement. It is a gleaming twenty-eight-million-dollar college with classrooms and a gymnasium-sized space filled with workstations to train students in electronic power systems, hydraulics, and pneumatics. A major part of the curriculum is problem solving, so the graduates emerge with much more than just a rote set of skills. They must have brains to match their manual dexterity to land jobs in local plants, such as MAG Industrial Automation Systems, once an old-fashioned tool and die company.

  MAG is now part of a privately owned conglomerate turning out sophisticated elements for aerospace, automotive, mining, rail, wind, solar, oil, and gas industries around the world. Its local factory, about fifteen minutes from Gateway Community College, is a showcase for the modern age of manufacturing: precision mining tools, airplane fuselages, solar panels, fighter jet wings, and automotive gear boxes.

  The brightly lit, quiet workspace shows off space-age, highly computerized machines as complex as the human nervous system. At each station workers in company-issued polo shirts manipulate them with their laptops open in a temperature-controlled, filtered air environment.

  This is the leading edge of the evolution of American manufacturing, the high-tech business that can help redefine the new industrial age. It is a long way from the grimy, steel-on-steel tool and die origins of the factory when manual laborers were required to have only a strong back, good hands, and a tolerance for earsplitting noise, low light, and high temperatures.

  MAG is on a desperate hunt for younger workers with the brains and skills to replace its graying employees headed for retirement, a generational shift so widespread it is called the “silver tsunami.” In the middle of a long run of high unemployment, you’d think that would not be a problem. But it is.

  Bill Horwarth, the athletically trim president of MAG, told me that too many of today’s high school graduates are simply not prepared. “It’s been a real struggle,” he said, “to get the mechanical and electrical discipline we require to build the products we do.”

  As MAG’s human resources officer Bill Weir puts it, “You can’t find ’em. You can’t steal ’em. You have to grow ’em.” Gateway Community College is the nursery, and thirty-three-year-old Joe Snyder is one of the workers under the grow lights.

  Snyder was an enterprising electrician who had a small residential contracting company, the kind of work that has long been a fixture on the American landscape of housing developments and strip malls. Then came the Great Recession.

  Joe’s business dried up, but his skill set was a strong foundation to take him to the next level of worker competency. Besides, Joe had an uncle who was preparing to retire at the MAG plant.

  Joe caught on as an apprentice at MAG with the proviso that he’d simultaneously enroll at Gateway Community College in their mechatronics program. As he told me on the MAG factory floor, “When I got here I thought I knew it all; three and a half years into it, I still don’t know enough.”

  So after a full workday at MAG he shows up at Gateway for classes in hands-on electronics and problem solving. Gateway knows what he needs because as Dr. G. Edward Hughes, the school’s president told me, “We’re constantly checking with the employers so we can customize our training. We also get requests from them on how to adjust to what we’re doing.”

  Joe is a perfect match for the Gateway program. The school has been able to place 80 percent of its graduates in good jobs, but I wonder about the future of two other men I saw laboring over an electronic circuit board at Gateway.

  They were probably ten years older than Joe, and they seemed to be struggling with the task at hand. One was an out-of-work truck driver and the other was a laid-off warehouse employee. They had been enrolled at Gateway for more than a year and still had no job prospects.

  The figures are stark. The unemployment rate at the beginning of 2011 for those without a high school diploma was more than 15 percent. Workers with just a high school diploma represented the mean, at 9.8 percent. The unemployment rate for college degree workers was half that.

  Age is a complicated issue in the national workforce. Forty percent of the members of the national workforce in 2009 were forty-five and older; that’s almost a 100 percent increase in the share of older workers in the last quarter century.

  Paradoxically, while older workers have a lower unemployment rate than their younger counterparts as a result of seniority on the job and the experience they bring to their positions, in the universe of the long-term unemployed, older workers represent the largest single group. Why? Seniority does you little good if your plant closes or your company goes out of business. Unemployed older workers have higher wage expectations, and hiring companies often want to start fresh at a lower salary.

  As a result, long-term unemployment, twenty-seven weeks and more, hits the older worker the hardest. That rate is 37 to 40 percent among older workers, a further complication for a society already struggling with the prospects of elderly health care and entitlements.

  Two Rutgers University professors in the fall of 2010 released a survey of workers not unlike those two Gateway students. The poll of eight hundred workers nationwide showed 14 percent of them had lost a full- or part-time job, and 73 percent of those questioned said either they or a family member or a friend had also lost a job.

  Professor Carl Van Horn said the workers have “diminished expectations about America’s economic future,” a troubling reversal of the long-standing optimism of Americans who have always thought that things will get better. A majority of the workers in the Rutgers study believed the economy has undergone a fundamental change and will get worse.

  Who can blame them? During the Great Recession companies learned they could get along with fewer employees. Those firms that did begin to hire again were able to get new workers at a lower starting wage than those they replaced. Pensions and other company-provided retirement benefits are under assault. Families, companies, and the government should start addressing these issues now in a realistic fashion so we don’t end up midcentury with class warfare based on age.

  Joe and his classmates represent an important change in attitude among male workers. They now know they can’t take a job for granted and that their future depends much more on their reasoning skills than on their strong backs and a good pair of work boots. Still, nationally men make up less than 40 percent of community college enrollments. Women—both those in search of additional skills or career changes and mothers returning to the workplace—are now the dominant sex in the classroom, representing more than 60 percent of the community college enrollment nationwide.

  Those women and their college-educated sisters are making a rapid ascent through the layers of America’s workaday world. Women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four with a college degree can expect to earn a whopping 79 percent more annually than their generational sisters who finished high school only. Women with some post–high school education make 25 to 30 percent more than those with only a high school diploma.

  Disparities in earnings between college- and high-school-educated people go well beyond purchasing power; these disparities affect their confidence and self-esteem as well.

  In the 2010 midterm elections a representative cross
section of voters were asked if they still believed in the American Dream, that fixed part of the American experience.

  A stunning 40 percent said they had given up on what we’ve always assumed was a common goal. The one factor that separated the dreamers from the disenfranchised?

  Money.

  Those who had surrendered the dream, however they defined it, were earning as much as fifty-five thousand dollars a year, while those who still believed in the dream were making seventy-five thousand dollars and up annually.

  The income and cultural gap between those with at least some higher education after high school and those without has been widening for the past three decades. As New York Times columnist David Brooks has commented, “In 1964 the educated and the less educated lived similar lives. Same divorce rates, same smoking rates. But since the rise of the Baby Boomers coincided with the importance of education, that has changed.”

  College-educated couples have half the divorce rate, half the obesity rate, and half the smoking rate, and they vote twice as often. When it comes to income, the differences are just as striking and perhaps more ominous, for if the money gap between the working class and the college educated continues to widen as dramatically as it has in recent years, how long can it be before there is measureable class warfare, especially with the old safeguards of pensions and other social contracts starting to fray? At a time when we need to be strong at our weakest points to deal with global competition, an economic civil war would be fratricidal.

  CHAPTER 6

  Church of Thrift

  FACT: In August 2010, total household debt in America equaled 121.7 percent of after-tax income. When the U.S. economy stagnated at the turn of the twenty-first century and job growth slowed, too many families who had gotten used to buying whatever they wanted whenever they wanted began to borrow in record proportions. We had gotten hooked on expensive cars, rooms full of new electronic toys, Las Vegas vacations, cruise lines, dining out, and the biggest buy of all, a house.

  Add on the higher cost of health care and the cost of raising a child, not to mention exorbitant credit-card late fees, and it was a formula for washing the middle class in red ink.

  QUESTION: When was the last time you had a family conversation about your short- and long-term financial goals? How much did you save last week? Do you know how much you put on your credit card before you receive the monthly bill?

  Deep in my parents’ closet, tucked away behind their modest wardrobes, was a small locked box with the family birth certificates, their marriage license, insurance policies, the passbooks for their savings account, and a stack of twenty-five-dollar war bonds.

  The bonds, which paid a paltry 2.9 percent when cashed at maturity after ten years, helped finance America’s astronomical costs for fighting in World War II. Yet they were phenomenally popular, largely as a result of a mass marketing campaign that featured Hollywood’s biggest stars, including the GIs’ favorite pinup, Rita Hayworth. War heroes were flown home to help with the effort. Three of the Marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima were ordered by FDR to appear in Washington, D.C., at Major League Baseball games, and at a war bonds rally in Chicago that drew forty-five thousand people to Soldier Field.

  By war’s end, more than half the population had bought a war bond and raised almost $186 billion. Remember, the average annual family income at the time was two thousand dollars.

  The bonds in my parents’ closet had a kind of sacred quality in our family. They were one of the unspoken lessons of my youth: Save your money and help your country. When the United States went to war in Vietnam and later in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was no unifying financial sacrifice. They were wars financed on a credit card that had a big penalty for a late payment.

  I thought about the small stash of Brokaw war bonds when in a White House briefing in early 2011 I heard the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers say, “We have a national savings rate of less than zero.”

  THE PAST

  There are so many stories about the calamitous collapse of the American economy in the Great Depression that it would be hard to settle on just one. I’ve heard my family’s accounts of lost farms, dust storms, dime-an-hour jobs, and skimping on everything, always told as a matter-of-fact recitation of the realities. I grew up with those stories, but I cannot remember any anger or whining in their retelling.

  A few years ago I was deeply impressed by the details in a book called The Great Depression: A Diary, published by the son of a Youngstown, Ohio, lawyer. The lawyer, Benjamin Roth, kept a meticulous journal of the day-to-day developments he witnessed and experienced.

  His notes from several days in the fall and early winter of 1932 provide a stark accounting of the desperate times for ordinary Americans.

  November 19, 1932

  It seems unbelievable but conditions seem to be even worse. The month of October was the worst in my law practice but November is on the way to beat that low record. So far this month I have taken in $19 in cash. In the meanwhile the steel industry operates at 15 percent—bank failures start again last week with four in closing in Pittsburgh and five in Oklahoma.

  December 1, 1932

  Nothing new to report. Several hundred “hunger” marchers passed through Youngstown on their way to Washington where they will demand food instead of bullets when it [Congress] convenes Monday. I passed about two hundred of them … and they were singing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

  December 5, 1932

  A salesman just tried to sell me a small pass-book on the Dollar Bank at 72 cents on the dollar. He states the tenants of the bank are using this means to pay their office rents, notes, mortgages, etc.

  December 10, 1932

  Business is at an absolute standstill. Merchants are fighting hard for Christmas business but report none is in sight. Last night’s paper states that in Youngstown one out of every four families is being supported by charity.

  By the end of the year, Roth noted that steel mills, the great engines of Youngstown’s economy, were operating at just 13 percent of capacity; begging, holdups, and murders were frequent; and bankruptcies and foreclosures were no longer disgraces. The price of corn and wheat was so low—four and five cents a bushel—that farmers were burning their crops for heat rather than selling them for a loss.

  Those conditions lasted across the country for most of the decade, imprinting a thrift gene on the people who lived through them. There was a common belief that it could happen again, a conditioning that stayed with this generation, and largely with their children, for the rest of their lives.

  That thrift gene from the Depression was built into the bloodlines on all sides of our extended family. It had to be, for survival. The cost of living was not a statistic issued by a government economist. It was a daily reality.

  Today, through marriage, we’re the Brokaws, Conleys, Aulds, Harveys, Frys, and Bartfields and Simons. We have in our family albums cooks and butchers, farmers and city girls, garment workers and department store clerks, physicians and ranchers, football coaches and teachers, lawyers and community activists, journalists and businesswomen.

  We’re Huguenots, Irish, English, Scottish, Native Americans, and Russian Jews. All but the Simons and the Bartfields are rooted in the broad middle of the country, that swath of prairie and plains unfolding from the old Dakota Territory to the old Oklahoma Territory. The Simons and Bartfields are city folk; they got off the boat at Ellis Island in New York and never left.

  We’re a mix of high school graduates, college graduates, and elementary school dropouts. We are both working class and professionals. We’re Republicans, Democrats, and independents, moderate to liberal, but none would be called radical or extreme. Some struck it rich while most stayed in the middle or working class.

  The older ones were shaped but not broken by the Great Depression. The enforced economies of that long downturn stayed with them to the end of their days and gave them perspective when trouble emerged again from
time to time.

  My mother spent the first six years of her life living with her parents on a 160-acre farm in a one-room tar-papered “house.” There was a loft where the hired hand slept surrounded by hams being cured, canned vegetables from the garden, and household tools.

  The farm earned enough in the early twenties that the Conleys were able to build a small home with oak floors and two bedrooms but no indoor plumbing. Money ran out before they could paint the exterior.

  Mother has only good memories of farm life despite the rustic conditions and absence of even the smallest luxuries. One year her favorite toy was a piece of a fence post she christened Maude and carried around as a make-believe friend.

  Her education until the ninth grade took place in a one-room school. A precocious student, she listened in as the teacher worked with the older students and eventually skipped a grade.

  A few years ago Mother was seated with Caltech president David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate, at a postgraduation luncheon in a campus garden. At one point I saw Dr. Baltimore listening intently to Mother explaining something. When I asked later what they were talking about, she said, “Well, I noticed in the tree nearby a Baltimore oriole and I pointed it out to him. I said, ‘Look, there’s the bird named after you.’ He didn’t seem to know much about them so I explained how they built a hanging nest.”

  In turn, I asked Mother how she knew enough about the Baltimore oriole to be teaching a Nobel laureate. She said, “Oh, we learned all about birds and nature in that one-room school.”

  Life on the farm was instructive and rewarding in many ways, but when the boom years of the twenties ended and the twin evils of a great drought and a worldwide financial collapse ushered in the thirties, a hard life became even harder.