Earlier this winter in a thoughtful piece about a middle-class family in Bangor (BDN, Feb 3), columnist Renee Ordway asked an important question. Amidst all that talk about the rich getting richer and the poor poorer, what is happening to the families in the middle? Ordway reports that the family whom she interviewed in some detail reports feeling squeezed. There is good reason to suspect that many middle like the one Ordway interviewed are experiencing the pressures of corporate globalization in new and unexpected ways.

Ordway described a two-parent family where the father worked as an office manager and the mother as a nighttime office cleaner for a cleaning service. They have four children, ranging in age from 19 months to 17 years. Their annual family income of about $40,000 places them just slightly short of the average income for a family in the middle fifth of Maine’s income distribution pyramid. They spend $1,900 a month for a heated apartment and food, leaving only $1,400 a month for all the other household and transportation costs.

A skeptic might point out that over the last 20 years, the average Maine family in similar circumstances has seen its income grow by more than $10,000. Even if the average income of the wealthiest quintile of Maine citizens has grown by about $40,000 in this period, shouldn’t most middle class families in Maine, be pleased? The couple’s two teenage daughters do enjoy internet access and cable tv, cultural amenities unimaginable to an earlier generation.

Yet this prosperity is elusive and insecure. Moreover, comparisons of family income over long intervals can be misleading. Twenty years ago, it was less common for both parents to work full time. Some of the increases in family income over these years have been the result of families’ working more hours. Longer hours or more days of work often increase travel, clothing, and day care costs.

That the family’s young children can enjoy Internet access may be viewed by some as a luxury. Nonetheless, with ever more school assignments dependent on Internet access, children with computers and the Internet at home are clearly at an advantage.

Ordway did not mention whether the family had a cell phone, though many middle class families do. Here again, our pattern of economic growth has a way of turning the luxuries of one era into the necessities of a subsequent era. Once a significant number of wealthy Americans buy and use cell phones, these become more than merely status symbols. The average middle-class professional who might have been content to arrive at an airport and call his or her spouse from a pay phone finds such relatively public goods increasingly scarce. Middle-class life today may include more technological wizardry, but many of these gadgets are now required for admission to the club.

How secure can such families be in their struggle to keep their feet on the middle rungs of the ladder? An office manager may enjoy health coverage for at least himself and his spouse, but such policies are increasingly parsimonious. And the temporary loss of one spouse’s income, from illness or unemployment, would likely put the family close to bankruptcy.

Ordway’s young manager is clearly aware of these threats and is planning to pursue a master’s degree to upgrade his employability. Here, however, is where the some discomforting dilemmas present themselves. The best professional positions go only to those with the right educational credentials, but the number of qualified candidates continues to increase and the demand diminishes. A recent study of starting salaries for newly minted computer engineers, computer scientists, and electrical engineers, shows a decline of about 10 percent in just the last four years.

Incomes in good manufacturing jobs have been eroded by new technologies, business flight to low wage havens, and declining union power. Traditionally low-wage jobs in the service sector are generally non-union, and the real value of the federal minimum wage is at its lowest point in a generation. More immigrants are now willing to perform these jobs, often for under the table wages below state and federal minimums.

Professional jobs are becoming increasingly insecure. Modern corporations are ever less reluctant to send not only call center but engineering, accounting, and computer science jobs to educated foreign workers. Even just the possibility of outsourcing may depress wages in these occupations.

Keeping immigrant labor away has become the cause de jour for many on the political right and even some progressives. But even were this possible, it would only maintain an even larger pool of cheap and highly exploitable labor south of our border.

Outsourcing and importation of high tech and low-skilled workers has been a symptom and consequence of labor’s lack of power in the workplace more than a cause of powerlessness. In an increasingly global economy, workers up and down the skill ladder and across ethnic and national lines need more tools to defend themselves.

I will address this theme in subsequent columns.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers

wishing to contact him may e-mail

messages to jbuell@acadia.net.