Among American workers, poll finds unprecedented anxiety about jobs, economy

By Jim Tankersley and Scott Clement,

Tuesday, November 26, 2:03 AM E-mail the writers

The Washington Post

CHESTER, Pa. — The alarm rang on John Stewart’s phone at 1:10 a.m. Up at 1:30, he caught one bus north into Philadelphia a little after 2 and another bus, south toward the airport, half an hour after that. He made it into work around 3:25 for a shift that started at 4, for a job that pays $5.25 an hour, which he cannot afford to lose.

Stewart is 55, tall and thin and animated. At work he wears a clip-on tie, a white cotton shirt with a fraying collar and a pair of black sneakers he nabbed on sale for $12.99 a few days ago. He wheels elderly air passengers from the ticket counters through security and to their gates, and back again, and every once in a while they tip him. Usually for lunch he buys a candy bar. His skin flakes from psoriasis, which gets worse when he worries, which, these days, is all the time. He can’t pay for treatments to soothe the itching or for a car to shorten his pre-dawn commute.

“I can’t save money,” he said recently, “to buy the things I need to live as a human being.”

American workers are living with unprecedented economic anxiety, four years into a recovery that has left so many of them stuck in place. That anxiety is concentrated heavily among low-income workers such as Stewart.

More than six in 10 workers in a recent Washington Post-Miller Center poll worry that they will lose their jobs to the economy, surpassing concerns in more than a dozen surveys dating to the 1970s. Nearly one in three, 32 percent, say they worry “a lot” about losing their jobs, also a record high, according to the joint survey, which explores Americans’ changing definition of success and their confidence in the country’s future. The Miller Center is a nonpartisan affiliate of the University of Virginia specializing in public policy, presidential scholarship and political history.

Job insecurities have always been higher among low-income Americans, but they typically rose and fell across all levels of the income ladder. Today, workers at the bottom have drifted away, occupying their own island of in­security.

Fifty-four percent of workers making $35,000 or less now worry “a lot” about losing their jobs, compared with 37 percent of ­lower-income workers in 1992 and an identical number in 1975, according to surveys by Time magazine, CNN and Yankelovich, a market research firm. Intense worry is far lower, 29 percent, among workers with incomes between $35,000 and $75,000, and it drops to 17 percent among those with incomes above that level.

Lower-paid workers also worry far more about making ends meet. Fully 85 percent of them fear that their families’ income will not be enough to meet expenses, up 25 points from a 1971 survey asking an identical question. Thirty-two percent say they worry all the time about meeting expenses, a number that has almost tripled since the 1970s.

Americans’ economic perceptions often divide along political lines; supporters of the incumbent president are usually more optimistic about the job market and the health of the economy. But that’s not the case with this new anxiety. Once you control for economic and demographic factors, there is no partisan divide. There’s no racial divide, either, and no gender gap. It also doesn’t matter where you live.

What matters in this new anxiety, what unites the people who worry more now than ever, are income and education. Workers who earn less, and workers who didn’t graduate from college, fear losing their already weaker livelihoods more than anyone else.

Spend a day with John Stewart — a man who has worked low-wage jobs since the late ’70s — and you start to understand why.

Back then, fewer worries

His first job — he doesn’t remember if it was in 1978 or ’79 — was cooking eggs and pancakes at a five-and-dime in New York City. He made $2.35 an hour, which would be a little less than $8 an hour today. He was 19 years old, a high school graduate who had grown up in Brooklyn and North Carolina. He hadn’t gone to college. He was sending chunks of his paycheck south to his parents, who were battling health issues. It was an anxious time in the national economy, with inflation running high.

He worried hardly at all, about any of it.

“In the years back then,’’ Stewart explained recently, “if you left a job, you were able to find another job, within the next day or the same week.”

He did leave that cooking job, fairly quickly. He found work right away as a messenger, running documents all over the city. In later years he would work in offices and at a trash dump infested with rats. He tried college for six months but left when his mother died. He has never gone back, though he would like to; he says he has never had the time or money for school. Eventually he landed in New Jersey at a Wal-Mart, poised, he thought, for a manager’s job. But he lost the promotion chance and the job — he was late to work too often, because of unreliable public transportation, he says — and in the fall of 2010 he retreated to Philadelphia to live with a cousin and look for a new gig.

This time, finding a job took him five months. It’s sadly typical for this recovery: In October, more than 4 million Americans had been looking for work longer than six months. That was down from nearly 7 million people at the start of 2010, but still 1 million more than at any point in U.S. history before the Great Recession.

When Stewart finally got the job at the airport, through a man at his church, he thought he was signing on for $7.25 an hour. On the first day they told him no, it’s $5.25 plus whatever tips come your way. That’s not usually very much. He brings home about $600 most months after taxes and accounting for unpaid sick days, he says. He pays a family friend $400 a month to live in her basement.

It makes him grateful to be a bachelor: “I’m glad I don’t have a family,” Stewart said. “Because if I had a family, man, we’d be hit.”

He has held the job for two years, arriving hours before sunrise on the circuitous bus route that takes more than an hour to cover what would be a quick ­seven-mile drive.

Before the shift begins at 4 a.m. he sits with colleagues, usually chatting about family and friends and complaining about work. On a recent Thursday, his first assignment came at 4:05. He picked up a 91-year-old woman at the counter and wheeled her through security, helping her shed her coat and walk through the checkpoint. It was a cold morning in the terminal, as usual, and he wore a blue jacket over a navy windbreaker over a navy sweater over his usual shirt and tie. At the gate she tipped him. He wouldn’t say how much.

Tips vary from day to day — sometimes he leaves work with enough cash in his pocket for a takeout dinner. Sometimes hardly any at all. Some folks bark directions sternly at the man pushing them around. Some passengers in the terminal curse him when they need to move as he rolls the chairs through. One man tried to fight him after Stewart asked him several times to make way.

The job is hardest before the sun comes up, Stewart said, but he tries to treat every day like he’s “going to a party” when morning comes.

“I believe in God,” he said, “and I try to keep that smile on my face, even though I may be struggling.”

He is usually tired by 6 a.m.

“My feet hurt now,” he said, boarding the bus, shortly after his shift ended at noon. “I’m tired. I always get tired.”

A stagnant labor market

There is a reason workers like Stewart are so nervous in today’s economy. That reason is the economy itself. There are still 11 million Americans looking for work who can’t find a job. The unemployment rate is 7.3 percent, higher than it has been since 1980, except during recessions and their immediate aftermaths. Adjusting for inflation, average household incomes for the poorest 40 percent of workers have fallen steadily — by more than 10 percent, total — since 2000.

Lower-income workers get most of their money from wages, as opposed to investments or other capital gains, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute, who writes extensively about unemployment and income.

“It’s no surprise that security concerns are off the map now [among those workers] because the labor market is so bad,” Shierholz said. “High unemployment hurts workers across the board, but it hurts workers with low and moderate incomes more.”

Even worse, there aren’t many signs that job and wage growth will rocket upward anytime soon — especially for workers like Stewart without college degrees.

“High-paying jobs for people who didn’t go to college just aren’t there anymore” in large numbers, said Melissa Kearney, an economist who directs the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.

As low-income workers tightly grip their current jobs, few are seeking the skills and education often required to land better-paying ones, the Post-Miller Center poll suggests. Fewer than four in 10 of those earning less than $35,000 annually said they’ve taken training programs in the past year to update their knowledge or skills, compared with about half of middle-income workers and nearly two-thirds of those whose household income tops $75,000.

Several economists say there’s a simple explanation for that gap: Poorer people can’t spare the time or money to go to school. Stewart, for example, would love to ditch his airport job to work as a hospital aide, hopefully for higher pay and at least some health benefits. (His job now offers none.) He’d need to take classes to earn a certification to qualify for that work. He has no idea how he’d swing that, financially. But he has hope that he will — and that, too, is typical of low-earning, anxious workers today.

Nearly six in 10 of those workers think it’s likely they’ll find a new job that pays better in the next five years, compared with fewer than four in 10 middle- and upper-income workers. Almost half expect a significant raise at their current job in the next half-decade, again outpacing the optimism of those who currently take home more.

Day to day, though, Stewart battles fatigue and depression. He rode two buses home from work when his Thursday shift ended, then hopped off and walked a few blocks toward his basement apartment. He had visitors, so he sat in the upstairs living room, near a computer table with pictures of the smiling Obama family, and talked for almost an hour.

But if it were a normal day, he said, if he were alone, he’d have walked off the bus and into the house and straight downstairs. He’d strip off his shirt and light a cigarette and lie down. Just to take it easy, for a bit.

Peyton M. Craighill contributed to this report.