For the past 32 years, Gary Bragnalo has worked at the Abitibi-Bowater paper mill in Thunder Bay, Ont. As a day crew leader, he earns $31 an hour, just enough to enjoy the middle-class dream: a house, a car, and a trailer on Crystal Lake about an hour outside the city, where his family takes summer vacations. Bragnalo, who’s 50, has put one daughter through university and is helping his second do the same. “It’s a good living,” he says. “It’s not the best living, but it’s a good living.”
But next month, along with hundreds of other workers, he’ll be temporarily laid off when the mill shuts down for three or four weeks. Bragnalo is thinking of using up some vacation time and then going on employment insurance to get through the down time, but he sees more trouble ahead. For years, jobs have been disappearing. The mill, facing fewer customers for its newsprint, has already cut 900 positions in the last decade, and if the plant shuts down for good, he’s too young to retire. If things get worse, he’ll head west in search of work, he says. He’s already brushing up his resumé. After decades living a solid, middle-class existence, Bragnalo is at risk of watching it all slip away. “You can start seeing it eat away a bit,” he says. “It’s getting less comfortable, you’re worrying more, starting to think about retirement. It’s the uncertainty.”
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There was a time when the middle class—really, anyone who falls in between the rich and the working poor—occupied a wide and comfortable place in society. Until recently, it was a position that could be reached without grasping (often, without a university degree) and enjoyed without too much worry. It meant a stable job, a house with a yard, a two-car garage and perhaps a nice pension. But it’s getting to the point where having all of that could make you the envy of your neighbourhood.
Economists have been anxiously watching the middle class lose ground for years, and now its members are in free fall. As the Canadian economy unravels, jobs like Bragnalo’s are being lost by the thousands every month. More than 70,600 jobs vanished in November, and 34,400 followed in December—the majority of them the kind of solid manufacturing and resource sector jobs that were once the backbone of the Canadian economy. And there are many more losses to go. Tens of thousands of Canadians are now left wondering: where did the simple life go? And is the middle-class dream dead?
There are various definitions of precisely who is middle class. The simplest is those who fall in the middle third of the income distribution. In Canada, that’s a broad category, with incomes ranging from as low as $35,000 (which is above the cut-off for a low-income family of four living in a large city) to as high as $90,000. During the early post-war decades, this was a group that, generally speaking, was brimming with optimism. Incomes were rising, and there was no reason to think they’d stop. But when sociologists and economists talk about this group today, they inevitably point to one very troubling trend: over the past 25 years, middle-class incomes have not grown at all. In 1980, the median family income was $58,000. In 2006, over a quarter of a century later, that number had actually dropped to $57,700. (Both figures are expressed in 2005 dollars to remove the effects of inflation.)
That doesn’t mean everyone has been treading water, though. As if to add insult to injury, while median incomes have stagnated, those of the wealthy have been shooting up. “If you look at the income distribution of the whole, the winners over the past 25 years have been the people at the very top,” says Charles Beach, an economist at Queen’s University. “In the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, the view was that rising tides raise all boats.” But lately, “the only boats that have gone up much are the ones at the very top end of the income distribution.” Between 1992 and 2004, for instance, the average income of the top 10 per cent of families has jumped by 34 per cent, or by $55,000. For the top five per cent, according to a report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the average income has jumped by almost 44 per cent.
Not surprisingly, as the incomes of the wealthy have been rocketing up, middle- class families have been earning a smaller and smaller piece of the pie. In 1972, the middle 60 per cent of families accounted for about 57 per cent of all income earned in Canada. By 2006 that number had dropped to 53 per cent, says Roger Sauvé, president of People Patterns Consulting.
It gets worse. Not only is the middle class earning less compared to those higher up on the wealth scale, but they’re working harder for what they get. For proof, look no further than the long hours families now work to maintain their middle-class existence. The number of two-income families has soared to well over 70 per cent, from just 30 per cent in the 1970s. That means in most households, both parents need a job to pay the mortgage—so they are logging twice the work hours to maintain a standard of living that was easily affordable on a single income a few decades ago. Plus, having two working parents often necessitates extra costs like child care, which can run upwards of $10,000 a year per child, and a second car to commute to two jobs. At the end of the day, even double incomes aren’t the panacea they once were.
