Labor and Economic Issues in America

Before the late 1970s and even earlier in the mid 1960s, a mass amount of working class laborers were working in technical or trade industries. With most placing their bets on a stable livable wage, what soon occurred to one specific industry decimated those plans. A main part of the plight that working-class citizens, specifically in Pennsylvania, faced was the decline and closure of the US Steel industry (Winant). Many towns and cities within Pennsylvania relied heavily on the steel industry for both their job and living security, as in the past there had been no major threats to the industry. When the steel industry started to decline, many thought that nothing major was happening as it could just be the start of a natural downturn that had happened previously many times before re-correcting itself (Winant). Thus, it was surprising to most that the industry didn’t revive as time went on. Rather, it declined with them laying off, leading to a leap in unemployment with 9.7% for the region and 7.8% for the U.S. in 1981, which only increased by 1983 to 17.1% regionally compared to the national 10.8% (Winant). This statistic of the increased poverty rates helps show some of the economic issues of the time between the 1970s and 1980s with the decline of the labor workforce, but this is only one part of the puzzle. The other main contributing factor was the recessions that happened, with the first one happening in 1971 but the major ones happening between 1979 and 1983 (Winant). Recessions only hindered the already fragile labor market in Pennsylvania after the decline of the U.S. Steel industry presence, causing many now-unemployed labor workers to look for other means of employment (Winant). Along with the economic issues, political ones also affected what options labor workers had available going forward. Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party of the time made it gradually harder for unemployed workers to get welfare money to pay for their living expenses. That was also happening at state and local levels as well, with many having to try and help those workers while working with smaller and smaller budgets due to the fiscal year stiffening areas concerning welfare (Winant).  

Besides the obvious economic and political forces that affected the working-class laborers in Pennsylvania, there were also social forces and consequences as well. To begin with, the major social force was that, with the steel industry no longer an available or stable job career, many workers had to look for other jobs, but many weren’t catered to the skills that workers employed previously. Men were typically able to stay in related job fields that utilized hard labor as a means of gaining money, but compared to women, they had fewer doors open for jobs (Winant). Women in this period of uncertainty and unemployment had the option to go into healthcare as that was already an established career that they could go into and during that time, the healthcare system wasn’t declining but increasing (Winant). This allowed women to have more stable jobs than men in this time period because their chosen field just happened not to decline as the labor market typically did for blue-collar work.

I think that there are many reasons why the social welfare system failed. First, I would say the American philosophy is that everyone should be able to care for themselves rather than have the government or an outside source step in. Secondly, with the decline in labor work for blue-collared workers in major companies, there became a big population that had almost nowhere to go with their skills in the crashing economy. When you put those two together, you get an image of a government and society that wanted the individual to deal with the economic stress rather than have to meditate and step in. Along with that, the recession and loss of economic monetary power led to the government also not wanting to step in as they saw defense spending as more important than the declining economy and increased poverty.