In the wake of the 2024 election, pundits and politicos have had much to say about the battle for the American “working class,” with their commentary—whether from the left, the right, or the middle—invariably accompanied by the same image: guys wearing hard hats, toiling away at a construction site or on an assembly line.
Such iconography isn’t surprising. Both political parties have stressed their commitment to reviving U.S. Manufacturing and resuscitating parts of the country that were once defined by good factory jobs but have come over many years to feel hopelessly left behind.
But this picture is, in fact, misleading. Two-thirds of those without a four-year college degree—the criterion that many demographers use to define the “working class”—are employed in services (including health care, retail, and hospitality), compared with one-third in manufacturing, construction, and related industries. Their needs are distinct, and they remain largely unmet.
We know this because one of us has been researching and writing about this topic for many years. The other helped to shape labor policy in the Obama and Biden administrations—and, perhaps more to the point, has a mom who has worked as an hourly employee at Walmart since the late 1990s. (She currently makes $17.78 an hour as a floor associate.)
She and her frontline colleagues at the Walmart in Stone Mountain, Ga., express concerns that are common to many Americans—no matter what sector they’re working in. Among them: the high cost of housing and the difficulty in accessing high-quality medical care.
But tens of millions of those working in services face particular challenges.
At the top of the list is pay. At the Walmart in Georgia, workers jump to the Amazon warehouse across the street, and then back again to Walmart, for even the slightest raise.
Across the U.S., median annual pay for service workers without a four-year degree is $33,330—well below what it takes to make ends meet, given that more than 98% of Americans reside in a location where the living wage is at least $20 an hour, or $41,600 a year for a full-time employee. (In many urban centers, the living wage is much higher.)
By contrast, their peers engaged in production, transportation, and material moving have a median annual wage of $44,960, while those in construction have a median wage of $52,630.
Some places have made significant progress. California last year raised the minimum pay of fast-food workers to $20 an hour, with no discernable job loss despite howls of protest from the business community.
But much more needs to be done across the country. Indeed, it’s long past time for the Fight for $15 to morph into the Tussle for $20.
Beyond a lack of pay, many feel aggrieved by a lack of say. Studies show that a majority of workers don’t believe they have the right amount of input into how they’re compensated or promoted–what scholars call a “voice gap.”
This frustration cuts across sectors. But “low-wage service workers have a bigger voice gap than others,” says Tom Kochan, a labor expert at the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research.
One way that workers can strengthen their voice is collectively, by unionizing. But here, as well, many service workers are at a disadvantage. Fast-food chains and big-box operators have proven tougher to organize than, say, an auto factory, because they’re spread out and there tends to be high turnover among the staff. As a result, fewer than 4% of those in retail and only 1.4% in food services carry a union card, versus about 8% in manufacturing and nearly 11% in construction.
Another burden for those in hospitality and retail is unstable and unpredictable job schedules. (This is far less of an issue in manufacturing.) Those who find themselves jerked around in this way are apt to suffer from income volatility, poor sleep quality, psychological distress, and an inability to make satisfactory childcare arrangements.
The State of Oregon and a handful of large cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle—have passed predictive-scheduling laws to ensure that workers are given adequate notice of their shifts.
But 11 other states have gone in the opposite direction, passing laws that prevent such ordinances from being implemented at the local level. This is no way to help “the working class.”
For many low-wage service workers, another hurdle is finding effective ways to advance in their careers. A 2023 report by the Burning Glass Institute and Multiverse identified one potentially promising route for those in “low-wage, high-churn jobs”: apprenticeships, which combine real-world training with paid employment opportunities.
But the creation of such pathways has been slow. “Part of what holds employers, educators, and others back is an outdated understanding of apprenticeship and the fields in which this model could be applied,” the report noted. “In the U.S., apprenticeship has historically been limited to traditional skilled trades, like welding or carpentry. Today, the greatest potential for apprenticeship is no longer in the trades, but in a wide array of jobs that are emergent and growing in the knowledge economy.”
None of this is to suggest that making things isn’t critically important. We are sympathetic to the view that, as an essay in American Affairs puts it, “no nation can maintain a world-power position while walking away from manufacturing.” Generating a lot more factory jobs is a worthy aim.
Yet even if America does manage a real manufacturing renaissance, it isn’t going to materialize overnight. In the meantime, policymakers need to remember that most of those in the “working class” don’t wear hard hats—but they’ve got it especially hard.
Rick Wartzman is co-president of the consulting firm Bendable Labs, a senior fellow at the Burning Glass Institute, and the author of five books, including Still Broke: Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism . Harin Contractor is director of Workforce Innovation at the Burning Glass Institute and served previously as Director of Labor Policy for the White House National Economic Council and as an economic policy advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Labor.
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