MONDAY 22 DECEMBER 2014 • [email protected] • www.thepeninsulaqatar.com • 4455 7741 Dengue fever vaccine inside on the cards after CAMPUS novel antibody • Doha College hosts discovery motivational talk P | 4 P | 11 MARKET PLACE • Cake festival opens at Safari Mall P | 6 WHEELS • Too fast for this world, not fast enough fort that one P | 7 ENTERTAINMENT • Selma, a handsome civil rights drama P | 8,9 MIDDLE CLASS TECHNOLOGY • Auxi, aiming for WOES a hit from iPad P | 12 Make no mistake: The American middle class is LEARN ARABIC in trouble. That trouble started decades ago, well before the 2008 financial crisis, and it is rooted • Learn commonly used Arabic words in shifts far more complicated than the simple and their meanings tax-and-spend debates that dominate economic policymaking in Washington. P | 13 2 PLUS | MONDAY 22 DECEMBER 2014 COVER STORY US middle class is adrift, and it has been for decade A museum, a ballpark and a hospital occupy a landscape that was once part of the Rockwell International Nasa Industrial Facility in Downey, California. A shopping center is likely to be built on other portions of the property. By Jim Tankersley Not at the old North American and services per hour on the job as it’s the reason why tax cuts, stimulus ne day in 1967, Bob Thompson Rockwell plant, and not in thou- they did in 1989, but as a group, they spending and rock-bottom interest sprayed foam on a hunk of sands of similarly socked towns. get less of the nation’s economic pie. rates haven’t jolted the middle class Ometal in a cavernous factory Yes, the stock market is soaring, In 81 percent of America’s counties, back to its postwar prosperity. south of Los Angeles. And then the unemployment rate is finally the median income is lower today Downey illustrates the nation’s another day, not too long after, he retreating after the Great Recession than it was 15 years ago. struggle to resurrect that shared sat at a long wood bar with a black- and the economy added 321,000 jobs In this new reality, a smaller prosperity, and it reminds us what and-white television hanging over it, last month. But all that growth has share of Americans enjoy the fruits the economy has lost. and he watched that hunk of metal done nothing to boost pay for the of an expanding economy. This Today, Bob Thompson’s rise to the land a man on the moon. On July typical American worker. Average isn’t a fluke of the past few years — middle class sounds like something 20, 1969 — the day of the landing — wages haven’t risen over the last it’s woven into the very structure from an old movie. Thompson sipped his Budweiser and year, after adjusting for inflation. of the economy. And even though He graduated from Downey High thought about all the people who had Real household median income is Republicans and Democrats keep School, served a tour in the Army ever stared at that moon. Kings and still lower than it was when the promising to help the middle class and returned to his home town to queens and Jesus Christ himself. recession ended. reclaim the prosperity it grew work odd jobs. The Rockwell plant He marvelled at how when it came Make no mistake: The American accustomed to after World War II, loomed nearby, on a former orchard time to reach it, the job started in middle class is in trouble. their prescriptions aren’t working. plot where town leaders once hoped Downey. The bartender wept. On That trouble started decades From the Great Depression to build Dodger Stadium. Thompson a warm day, almost a half-century ago, well before the 2008 financial through the 1980s, American reces- remembers the day the plant hired later, Thompson curled his mouth crisis, and it is rooted in shifts far sions and recoveries followed a pat- him — Aug. 4, 1965 — and his start- beneath a white beard and talked more complicated than the simple tern: Employers shed jobs when the ing pay at his union job — $2.59 an about the bar that fell to make way tax-and-spend debates that domi- economy turned south but added hour — which was nearly double for a freeway, the space-age factory nate economic policymaking in them back quickly once it recov- the minimum wage in California at that closed down and the town that Washington. ered. That changed in the early the time. The week he got the job, is still waiting for its next great It used to be that when the US 1990s and worsened through the Thompson drove down to Bill’s TV economic rocket, its new starship economy grew, workers up and 2000s. Jobs came back more slowly, Shop and bought a new Quasar con- to the middle class. They’ve waited down the economic ladder saw their if at all. Even before the 2008 cri- sole, the first color set of his life, for more than a decade in Downey. incomes increase, too. But over the sis, the 2000s were on track to be $300. He was filling out the credit They’ve tried all the usual tricks to past 25 years, the economy has the weakest decade for job creation application when the salesclerk in bring good-paying jobs back to the grown 83 percent, after adjusting since the Labor Department started the store asked where he worked. 77-acre plot of dirt where once stood for inflation — and the typical fam- tracking the statistics. The great The plant, Thompson told him. The a factory that made moon landers ily’s income hasn’t budged. In that mystery: What happened? Why did clerk waved away the paperwork. He and, later, space shuttles. Nothing time, corporate profits doubled as a the economy stop boosting ordinary knew he’d be good for the money. “I brought back the good jobs. share of the economy. Workers today Americans in the way it once did? thought I was a king,” Thompson Those jobs aren’t coming back. produce nearly twice as many goods The answer is complicated, and said. PLUS | MONDAY 22 DECEMBER 2014 3 The vacated interior of the former Rockwell International Nasa Industrial Facility in He started off running blueprints bought houses in Downey, big adobe Downey, California. from one end of the factory to the split-levels with lush green lawns. The other. Then he worked his way up easiest way to tell an assembly work- to plastics fabricator, foam sprayer, er’s house from the top manager’s was shipper of replacement parts between to watch how often the Cadillac in plants. Sometimes when the economy the driveway gave way to a new one. dipped or contracts dried up, he lost When Rockwell won another huge his job; the company always found contract, for the space shuttle in 1972, him maintenance work or something one of the top engineers handed the else to help him get by until times keys to his pickup truck to a younger improved and he got back to the plant. worker. He told him to fill the bed When he retired from the company with ice and champagne. Then he told in 2007, Thompson was making $24.95 another man to call a local restaurant an hour. He draws a sweeter pension and inform them that Rockwell would than almost any worker starting out be taking the place over for at least today could hope to receive. the next 24 hours. Thompson’s rise mirrored the By 1990, there were nearly 200,000 plant’s, which mirrored Downey’s, aerospace workers in Los Angeles which mirrored Southern California’s, County alone, and the local median which mirrored America’s. North income had risen almost 20 percent were slow to appear after the 1990 the pioneering electric car company, American won the Apollo contract in since 1970, after adjusting for infla- recession ended, even when growth to manufacture its roadsters in the 1961 and ramped up to 25,000 workers, tion. Then things cratered. The Cold sped up. The late-‘90s tech bubble old Rockwell plant. They’d secured including production grunts, account- War ended, and defense cuts starved brought a shower of jobs and wealth, a multimillion-dollar federal loan to ants and engineers. A lot of them the industry. More than half the but when the bubble burst, all the overhaul the equipment and become county’s aerospace workers lost their gains were wiped out — except the the lowest-emission car factory in the jobs over the next decade, and when ones for the wealthiest people in the world. They’d drafted a lease. They’d they found new ones, they weren’t country. The same was true for the reached what they believed was an nearly as good. The county’s median housing bubble of the 2000s. oral agreement with Tesla Chairman income fell more than 10 percent — The first decade of the 21st century Elon Musk. They would announce the and stayed there. The Rockwell plant produced two recessions and two “job- deal in a news conference the next day. By 1990, there were nearly shed workers steadily, was bought by less recoveries,” and when it was over, The new plant would move in next to Boeing and eventually closed in 1999. the vast majority of Americans found a shopping center with a Best Buy, 200,000 aerospace workers Thompson was lucky to find work at themselves no better off than they a space museum and a new state-of- in Los Angeles County a different Rockwell site in Southern were a quarter-century ago.