After the great depression and WW2, the United States economy was structured to benefit working families. A single income household could prosper and thrive. The game changed by the 70's and changed to favor corporations. Through the 80's and 90's financialization was in full swing, and by the 2000's households in the United States were strapped for cash, heavily in debt and shopping at Wal-Mart to buy Chinese consumer crap.
Today's tech workers and white collar office workers are like the Teamsters of the 60s. Their salaries have the most zeroes. Plus they've got decent benefits. Corporations have tried to outsource those jobs too, but with limited success. They're riding high but there's dark clouds on the horizon.
The white collar workers rely on the shitty financial system for their future prosperity. They've got money in the stock market and in 401(k) plans, but don't have any real productive assets. The game can change on them very easily.
The regulatory and legal framework of the "economy game" changed on the working class people in the US in a couple of decades. Arguably, it's a lot more difficult for a corporation to ship working class jobs overseas than it is to automate away white collar office jobs. They needed to build facilities abroad, ship equipment abroad, train up a labor force in a foreign language, etc... Also, they start to accrue a bunch of additional expenses and friction and risk by operating in foreign countries. My guess is the ROI of much of that outsourcing was a lot lower than initially imagined by executives.
What will the white collar workforce do to protect itself? They will probably have a much harder time if the economy game changes on them in the coming years than the teamsters and working class people transitioning from a high-income + leverage lifestyle to a lower status.
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