After Gabriel Cardenas graduated from high school, he seemed on track to join America’s middle class. He worked at Google in Silicon Valley, enrolled in classes at San Jose’s Evergreen Valley College and took a second job.
But seven years after graduation, Cardenas is no closer to a middle class that has been shrinking for decades. Instead, his career reflects a common storyline in the modern economy. Cardenas was not an employee at the high-tech firm. Instead, he worked there as a contractor, spending his days unloading crates of bottled water, pet food and other goods for the company’s new delivery service, Google Express.
He has not earned a college degree either, since he could only afford to take a few community college courses on the $17 an hour he earned as a contractor at Google. When Cardenas turned 25, he moved back home.
Cardenas isn’t alone. Last year, the middle class shrunk to its lowest share of the U.S. population in four decades, with only 50 percent of Americans living in middle-income homes, down from 61 percent in 1971, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center, “The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground.”
While the middle class was shrinking, two other segments of the American population were growing: the poorest and the wealthiest. Last year, 20 percent of U.S. adults were on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, earning less than half of the national median income or roughly $31,000 or less in 2014, an increase from 16 percent in 1971, Pew researchers reported. In 2015, 9 percent of Americans were at the top, they earned three times the median or more than $188,000 for a family of three, up from 4 percent in 1971.