What will the simple folk do?

          The Service Employees International Union is engaged in a major organizing campaign against the likes of McDonald's and Walmart, which was launched about a year ago.
http://www.labornotes.org/2013/01/walmart-and-fast-food-unions-scaling-strike-first-strategy
The goal is to raise wages from &7.50 per hour to twice that.  These retail giants can afford to pay.Robert Reich: McDonald's And Walmart Can Afford $15 An Hour Wages (huffingtonpost.com)
And people need to be paid that amount, if they are to have any chance of a decent lifestyle.

        Who are these retail clerks and fast food workers?  Some are just kids, sure.  But many are the folks whose fathers and grandfathers were able to get good union jobs in auto, steel, rubber, glass and other manufacturing plants, as well as in mines and mills.  As a consequence, they entered the middle class with high wages, good benefits and defined-benefit retirement plans.  Some were smart enough to have gone to college.  Many were not.  Still, they could live a middle class life.

      The retail giants threaten to automate those jobs if they have to pay higher wages.  I have no doubt that technology is taking away many more jobs than it is creating.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics confirmed this recently.  Specifically, clerical jobs that were eliminated during the Great Recession have disappeared forever. Here's where middle-class jobs are vanishing the fastest (washingtonpost.com)

       Concurrently, union ranks are at a 97-year low.  
 Union membership in the United States has dipped to its lowest level in 97 years, according to a report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics last week.

In 2012, the union membership rate—the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of a union—was 11.3 percent, down from 11.8 percent in 2011, BLS said.

The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.4 million, also declined over the year. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 million union workers.

http://www.examiner.com/article/unions-at-97-year-low-bls-report-says-as-precarious-worker-class-forms

        This means the U.S. has regressed to pre-WWI rates of unionization... Pre-New Deal ... Pre-National Labor Relations Act... Pre-Railway Labor Act... Pre- just about everything progressive that happened to American workers in the prior century.

        Perhaps worse still, in the 21st century, we are not on the brink of a new era of industrialization which will create millions of jobs that are ideal for energetic hands that don't require sharp wits above them.   

       So what will America do with its simple folk --- the ones who are not even community college material --- when their service jobs are automated?  

Kurt Vonnegut speaking at Case Western Reserve University (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

       Kurt Vonnegut raised this question with astonishing foresight way back in the 1950s at the very height of America's manufacturing/union supremacy.  "Player Piano" was, remarkably, Vonnegut's first novel.  In it he postulated a nation in which a small minority at the top, all holding PhDs, ran everything, and everyone else did make-work jobs on road crews and the like, lived in modest housing, and in essence were subsidized.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel)

Aren't we witnessing the beginning of the shift to Vonnegut's Player Piano society, as the gap between the one-percent and the 99 percent widens?

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• No Recovery for the Black Worker (theroot.com)
• In the Land of Opportunity (endtimebibleprophecy.wordpress.com)
• Robert Reich: No quick fix for the widening gap of inequality (tv.msnbc.com)
• Changes in the Distribution of Workers' Hourly Wages Between 1979 and 2009 (economistsview.typepad.com)
• Developments in Detroit and Beyond (gaunited.org)
• The Rich Get Richer (justamannameddan.wordpress.com)
• Liberal's Class Problem (counterpunch.org)
• Bob King: A Call for America (huffingtonpost.com)
• Rich and poor divide widens (smh.com.au)
• Miles Rapoport: Not Only the Absence of Oppression, But the Presence of Opportunity (huffingtonpost.com)

       A related question in my mind is, "Why do we want more immigrants?"  Yes, I know this isn't a PC question.  One reason I often hear is "economic growth."  Grow the population and the economy will grow.  Another is, the immigrants take the jobs Americans don't want to do. 

      Does anyone very ask what is the optimum population for North America in terms of not only the economy, but also the environment and human livability? 

      Have we considered that many poor Americans would gladly take these supposedly undesirable jobs, if they paid fairly?

      And if Vonnegut's Player Piano society is in the offing and a large lower class must be subsidized, don't we want to limit the size of that lower class, not increase it?

      These are only a few of the fundamental questions that I don't hear being asked.

      And what of the current middle class?  There are the families and students struggling to get college educations.  The results?  A one-trillion-dollare student-loan debt.  A prediction by Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School that in 15 years half of all American universities will be bankrupt.

http://www.businessinsider.com/clay-christensen-higher-education-on-the-edge-2013-2