Life is a jumbo jet, old chum, and most of us are stuck in the middle seat in coach.
By all statistics and anecdotes, the global economy is creating a stratified way of life that is coming to look like the huge airports and airliners that are the hubs and vehicles of this new society. Chicago and the other great cities are becoming as fragmented and segregated economically as so many O’Hares and jetliners.
Up in the air, the average passenger squeezes into an economy-class seat designed for a jockey and gets a tiny free sack of pretzels and a coke: “beverages” are $4 extra. Meanwhile, on the other side of an impassable curtain, a better life is being lived by first-class passengers who never stand in lines and for whom the beverages, and much else, are free.
On the ground, the same privileged elite lives in society’s perpetual connoisseur class, while the rest of humanity labors for rewards that, like airplane seats, seem to shrink every year.
What does globalization have to do with this new class system?
In their unceasing and unsentimental search for maximum return and lowest costs, global money markets have wiped out millions of well-paying manufacturing and service jobs and eroded the wages paid for the jobs that are left.
At the same time, these markets have brought unprecedented riches to the global elite–the chief executive officers, traders, lawyers and others–who command the global economy.
Albert “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap wiped out thousands of good jobs during his tenures as CEO at Scott Paper and Sunbeam Corp., all to appease the stock market. When he was fired last week (not because of any moral outrage over the lives he destroyed but because the price of Sunbeam stock was lagging), he could claim a payoff of $2 million per year.
The result of this turmoil is more rich people, more poor people, and fewer people in between, where the middle class used to be.
In the 1950s, the United States was the most egalitarian of the major industrial nations. Gaps between rich and poor were smaller than in other nations and much smaller than in places such as Britain, with its class system and upstairs-downstairs inequalities.
That situation is reversed now. The U.S. is the most unequal, with greater gaps between rich and poor than any other nation, including Britain. Not only are the rich richer–the top 1 percent here control 35 percent of all wealth, compared with 20 percent in England–but the poor are poorer: The average U.S. standard of living is the world’s highest, but the poorest Americans live worse than the poorest Finn, Dutchman or Italian. For evidence, look no further than downtown Chicago.
Saskia Sassen, a Columbia University sociologist who is joining the University of Chicago in the fall, has written that the global economy is revitalizing and reshaping major cities and creating a whole new class structure.
The big corporations and banks, as everybody knows, are spreading their operations around the earth. Manufacturing and much of commerce is farther flung than ever before.
But when a company scatters its parts across the globe, those parts must be controlled and coordinated tightly from a central headquarters.
Given the speed and scope of space-age communications, this coordination theoretically could be done from the Unabomber’s hut. In fact, Sassen said, it’s happening in the centers of the major cities, which have become the focus of “global control.”
A major reason, she says, is that it takes more than just a slimmed-down headquarters staff. It takes lots of outside lawyers, accountants, advertising agencies, public relations people, bond traders and investment bankers who make the global economy go.
This concentration of high-powered talent–plus the powerful telematic infrastructure that these people need–is found today only in the centers of major cities, in Manhattan and the Loop, in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo or London’s traditional business hub, the City.
And so a growing population of very smart, very well-paid, very fast-moving professionals cluster in these tight, high-density areas–and not only to work.
Many are single or childless, and even those with kids earn enough to afford private schools. Increasingly, this global tribe–scornful of commutes and too busy to mow the grass on some suburban lot–chooses to live where it works. This is what the housing boom on the fringes of the Loop, and the conversion of Loop buildings themselves into lofts, is all about.
This globalization of the downtowns is creating not only high-paying jobs for traders and lawyers, but thousands of other, not-so-well-paying jobs. The global tribe also has brought into being whole new categories of jobs, most of them demanding few skills and paying low salaries, to serve their more casual needs.
The globalites prefer specialty grocers to supermarkets, small restaurants to cafeterias, boutiques to Kmarts. To meet this demand, central cities have become a maze of small shops, cafes and service businesses, employing legions of dogwalkers, limo drivers, restaurant waiters, boutique clerks, caterers, coffeemakers, salad tossers, word processors and personal trainers.
Some of this job growth, in restaurant employment or in photocopying shops, is well-documented. Much of the growth, in personal trainers and valet parkers for example, comes from jobs that didn’t even exist five or 10 years ago in sufficient quantities to be counted.
Most of these small businesses go in and out of business quickly, and the jobs they offer are temporary and unstable. (So, come to think of it, are the better-paid jobs of the global elite themselves).
In an earlier, industrial era, big industries created millions of solid steady jobs that paid a living wage, if only because these industries needed well-paid workers to buy their goods. In a global economy, the headquarters people have no interest in paying lowlier workers more than a minimum wage, because their customers are more often thousands of miles away, not next door.
Within the global industries themselves, the average worker earns more than a valet parker but less than a steelworker. The big growth industries–finance, trade, business services–“show significant shares of low-wage jobs, weak, if any, unions, and higher percentages of part-time and of female workers,” Sassen writes.
One result is that Chicago has lost hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs paying an average of $37,000 per year and has gained hundreds of thousands of service jobs paying an average of $26,000 per year. All of this at a time when skilled players of the global game command salaries in six or seven figures, and CEOs of major corporations–even a money-losing one like Occidental Petroleum–can earn $100 million or more in a year.
So, we have devised a social structure that looks more like the class-conscious ordering of airline passengers than the ideal of American equality.
Not only are airports and cities beginning to look like each other. As writer Pico Iyer has noted, airports have chapels, wine shops and dental clinics, while the cities downtown are filled with interchangeable theme restaurants and chain stores, perfect for busy people who are just passing through. Hotels, even hospitals, have executive suites for those who can pay for them, just like airports have executive lounges with secretaries and the latest in cybergadgetry.
At the top of this global order are the rich, the top 1 to 10 percent of society, swaddled in the air in first or business class, housed on the ground in gated communities and secure apartments as private as any first-class lounge, sealed off from the rest of the world, plied with services and food beyond the reach of their fellow citizens in economy class, blessed with unneeded perks and gifts, their suitcases full of eye masks and toiletry kits, their weeks full of client-sponsored golf outings and skybox tickets.
Meanwhile, the remnants of the middle class sit cramped in life’s economy class, unsatisfied and vaguely aware that, somewhere beyond that impassable curtain lies a whole new world that, no matter how hard they work, they most likely never will see or know.
Connecting the strata of this new class system is the support staff. At O’Hare, these are the ticket agents and baggage handlers and bagel sellers. In the city outside, they are the security guards and valet parkers and Starbucks clerks who do most of the work in the Global City.
These people make the system go. But they live far removed from the global elite, as removed as the pampered passengers in the upstairs deck of a 747 are from the drivers of the airport shuttle buses, who ply their rounds between terminal and remote lot, traveling in unending circles, without advancement, variety or joy.
