Mary Beth Meehan and Mary Beth Meehan is an independent photographer and writer. Fred Turner is a professor of communication at Stanford University.The workers of Silicon Valley rarely look like the men idealized in its lore. They are sometimes heavier, sometimes older, often female, often darker skinned. Many migrated from elsewhere. And most earn far less than Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Cook. More
U.S. employers added 266,000 jobs in April, the government reported Friday, far below what economists had expected and a dramatic slowdown from March’s rapid hiring pace.The jobless rate rose slightly to 6.1 percent.Economists had forecast an addition of about a million jobs.The increase for March was revised down to 770,000 from 916,000.Still, more opportunities are bubbling up as coronavirus infections ebb, vaccinations spread, restrictions lift and businesses reopen. Job postings on the online job site Indeed are 24 percent higher than they were in February last year.“There’s been a broad-base pickup in demand,” said Nick Bunker, who leads North American economic research at the Indeed Hiring Lab. The supercharged housing market is driving demand for construction workers. There is also an abundance of loading, stocking and other warehousing jobs — a side-effect of the boom in e-commerce.The economy still has a lot of ground to regain before returning to prepandemic levels. Millions of jobs have vanished since February 2020, and the labor force has shrunk.As the economy fitfully recovers, there are divergent accounts of what’s going on in the labor market. Employers, particularly in the restaurant and hospitality industry, have reported scant response to help-wanted ads. Several have blamed what they call overly generous government jobless benefits, including a temporary $300-a-week federal stipend that was part of an emergency pandemic relief program.But the most solid evidence of a real shortage of workers, economists say, is rising wages. And that is not happening in a sustained way.As Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said at a news conference last week: “We don’t see wages moving up yet. And presumably we would see that in a really tight labor market.”Millions of Americans have said that health concerns and child care responsibilities — with many schools and day care centers not back to normal operations — have prevented them from returning to work. Millions of others who are not actively job hunting are considered on temporary layoff and expect to be hired back by their previous employers once more businesses reopen fully. At the same time, some baby boomers have retired or switched to working part time. More
Perhaps the most striking difference between the middle class of 50 years ago and the middle class today is a loss of confidence — the confidence that you were doing better than your parents and that your children would do better than you.President Biden’s multitrillion-dollar suite of economic proposals is aiming to both reinforce and rebuild an American middle class that feels it has been standing on shifting ground. And it comes with an explicit message that the private sector alone cannot deliver on that dream and that the government has a central part to play.“When you look at periods of shared growth,” said Brian Deese, director of Mr. Biden’s National Economic Council, “what you see is that public investment has played an absolutely critical role, not to the exclusion of private investment and innovation, but in laying the foundation.”If the Biden administration gets its way, the reconstructed middle class would be built on a sturdier and much broader plank of government support rather than the vagaries of the market.Some proposals are meant to support parents who work: federal paid family and medical leave, more affordable child care, free prekindergarten classes. Others would use public investment to create jobs, in areas like clean energy, transportation and high-speed broadband. And a higher minimum wage would aim to buoy those in low-paid work, while free community college would improve skills.That presidents pitch their agendas to the middle class is not surprising given that nearly nine out of 10 Americans consider themselves members. The definition, of course, has always been a nebulous stew of cash, credentials and culture, relying on lifestyles and aspirations as much as on assets.But what cuts across an avalanche of studies, surveys and statistics over the last half century is that life in the middle class, once considered a guarantee of security and comfort, now often comes with a nagging sense of vulnerability.Salaries for teachers, hospital workers and child care providers are determined largely by the government, and do not necessarily reflect their value in an open market.Philip Keith for The New York TimesBefore the pandemic, unemployment was low and stocks soared. But for decades, workers have increasingly had to contend with low pay and sluggish wage growth, more erratic schedules, as well as a lack of sick days, parental leave and any kind of long-term security. At the same time, the cost of essentials like housing, health care and education have been gulping up a much larger portion of their incomes.The trend can be found in rich countries all over the world. “Every generation since the baby boom, has seen the middle-income group shrink and its economic influence weaken,” a 2019 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded.In the United States, the proportion of adults in the middle bands of the income spectrum — which the Pew Research Center defines as roughly between $50,000 and $150,000 — declined to 51 percent in 2019 from 61 percent 50 years ago. Their share of the nation’s income shrank even more over the same period, to 42 percent from 62 percent.Their outlook dimmed, too. During the 1990s, Pew found rising optimism that the next generation would be better off financially than the current one, reaching a high of 55 percent in 1999. That figure dropped to 42 percent in 2019.The economy has produced enormous wealth over the last few decades, but much of it was channeled to a tiny cadre at the top. Two wage earners were needed to generate the kind of income that used to come in a single paycheck.“Upper-income households pulled away,” said Richard Fry, a senior economist at Pew.Corrosive inequality was just the beginning of what appeared to be a litany of glaring market failures like the inability to head off ruinous climate change or meet the enormous demand for affordable housing and health care. Companies often channeled profits to buy back stock instead of using them to invest or raise wages.The evidence was growing, liberal economists argued, that the reigning hands-off economic approach — low taxes on the wealthy, minimal government — was not producing the broad-based economic gains that sustained and grew the middle class.“The unregulated economy is not working for most Americans,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics. “The government has an important role,” he emphasized, in regulating the private sector’s excesses, redistributing income and making substantial public investments.Skeptics have warned of government overreach and the risk that deficit spending could ignite inflation, but Mr. Biden and his team of economic advisers have, nonetheless, embraced the approach.“It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom and middle out,” Mr. Biden said in his speech to a joint session of Congress last week, a reference to the idea that prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the wealthy, but flows out of a well-educated and well-paid middle class.He underscored the point by singling out workers as the dynamo powering the middle class.“Wall Street didn’t build this country,” he said. “The middle class built the country. And unions built the middle class.”Of course, the economy that lifted millions of postwar families into the middle class differed sharply from the current one. Manufacturing, construction and mining jobs, previously viewed as the backbone of the labor force, dwindled — as did the labor unions that aggressively fought for better wages and benefits. Now, only one out of every 10 workers is a union member, while roughly 80 percent of jobs in the United States are in the service sector.And it is these types of jobs, in health care, education, child care, disabled and senior care, that are expected to continue expanding at the quickest pace.Most of them, though, fall short of paying middle-income wages. That does not necessarily reflect their value in an open market. Salaries for teachers, hospital workers, lab technicians, child care providers and nursing home attendants are determined largely by the government, which collects tax dollars to pay their salaries and sets reimbursements rates for Medicare and other programs.They are also jobs that are filled by significant numbers of women, African-Americans, Latinos and Asians.“When we think about what is the right wage,” Mr. Stiglitz asked, “should we take advantage of discrimination against women and people of color, which is what we’ve done, or can we use this as the basis of building a middle class?”Mr. Biden’s spending plans — a $2.3 trillion infrastructure package called the American Jobs Plan, and a $1.8 trillion American Families Plan that concentrates on social spending — aim to take account of just how much the work force and the economy have transformed over the past half-century and where they may be headed in the next.The president’s economic team took inspiration from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the public programs that followed it.After World War II, for instance, the government helped millions of veterans get college educations and buy homes by offering tuition assistance and subsidized mortgages. It created a mammoth highway system to undergird commercial activity and funneled billions of dollars into research and development that was used later to develop smartphone technology, search engines, the human genome project, magnetic resonance imaging, hybrid corn and supercomputers.Mr. Biden, too, wants to fix roads and bridges, upgrade electric grids and invest in research. But his administration has also concluded that a 21st-century economy requires much more, from expanded access to high-speed broadband, which more than a third of rural inhabitants lack, to parental leave and higher wages for child care workers.The basic necessities that make it possible for parents to fully participate in the work force, like child care and parental leave, are still missing, said Betsey Stevenson, an economics professor.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times“We’ve now had 50 years of the revolution of women entering the labor force,” and the most basic necessities that make it possible for parents to fully participate in the work force are still missing, said Betsey Stevenson, a professor at the University of Michigan and a former member of the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers. She paused a few moments to take it in: “It’s absolutely stunning.”Right before the pandemic, more women than men could be found in paying jobs.Ensuring equal opportunity, Ms. Stevenson noted, includes “the opportunity to get high-quality early-childhood education, the opportunity to have a parent stay home with you when you’re sick, the opportunity for a parent to bond with you when born.”When it comes to offering this type of support, she added, “the United States is an outlier compared to almost every industrialized country.”The administration also has an eye on how federal education, housing and business programs of earlier eras largely excluded women, African-Americans, Asians and others.In the Biden plan are aid for colleges that primarily serve nonwhite students, free community college for all, universal prekindergarten and monthly child payments.“This is not a 1930s model any more,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a political science professor at Princeton University.And it’s all to be paid for by higher taxes on corporations and the top 1 percent.Passage in a sharply polarized Congress is anything but assured. The multitrillion-dollar price tag and the prospect of an activist government have ensured the opposition of Republicans in a Senate where Democrats have the slimmest possible majority.But public polling from last year showed widening support for the government to take a larger role.“What is so remarkable about this moment is this notion that public investment can transform America, that these are things government can do,” said Felicia Wong, president of the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute. “This is fundamentally restructuring how the economy works.”The middle class today differs in significant ways from the middle class of 50 years ago and perhaps the most striking is a loss of confidence.Evan Jenkins for The New York Times More
President Biden plans to sign an executive order on Tuesday raising the minimum wage paid by federal contractors to $15 an hour, the latest in a set of ambitious pro-labor moves at the outset of his administration.The new minimum is expected to take effect next year and is likely to affect hundreds of thousands of workers, according to a White House document. The current minimum is $10.95 under an order that President Barack Obama signed in 2014. Like that order, the new one will require that the new minimum wage rise with inflation.White House economists believed the increase would not lead to significant job losses, a finding in line with recent research on the minimum wage, and that it was unlikely to cost taxpayers more money, two administration officials said in a call with reporters. They argued that the higher wage would lead to greater productivity and lower turnover.The White House also contends that although the number of workers directly affected by the increase is relatively small as a share of the economy, the executive order will indirectly raise wages beyond federal contractors by forcing other employers to bid up pay as they compete for workers.Several cities have a minimum wage of at least $15 an hour, and several states have laws that will raise their minimum wage to at least that level in the coming years. There is so far little evidence on how a $15 minimum wage affects employment in lower-cost areas of such states.Two years ago, the House of Representatives passed a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025, but the legislation has faced long odds in the Senate. Mr. Biden sought to incorporate such a measure in his $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package so that it could pass on a simple majority vote, but the Senate parliamentarian ruled that it could not be included.Mr. Biden’s executive order will also eliminate the so-called tipped minimum wage for federal contractors, which currently allows employers to pay tipped workers $7.65 an hour as long as their tips put them over the regular minimum wage. Under the new minimum, all workers must be paid at least $15 an hour.The order will technically begin a rule-making process that is expected to conclude by early next year. The wage will be incorporated into new contracts and existing contracts as they are extended. More
While millions of people struggled to make ends meet, many of the companies hit hardest in 2020 showered their executives with riches. More
Something strange is happening to the exhausted, type-A millennial workers of America. After a year spent hunched over their MacBooks, enduring back-to-back Zooms in between sourdough loaves and Peloton rides, they are flipping the carefully arranged chessboards of their lives and deciding to risk it all.Some are abandoning cushy and stable jobs to start a new business, turn a side hustle into a full-time gig or finally work on that screenplay. Others are scoffing at their bosses’ return-to-office mandates and threatening to quit unless they’re allowed to work wherever and whenever they want.They are emboldened by rising vaccination rates and a recovering job market. Their bank accounts, fattened by a year of stay-at-home savings and soaring asset prices, have increased their risk appetites. And while some of them are just changing jobs, others are stepping off the career treadmill altogether.If this movement has a rallying cry, it’s “YOLO” — “you only live once,” an acronym popularized by the rapper Drake a decade ago and deployed by cheerful risk-takers ever since. The term is a meme among stock traders on Reddit, who use it when making irresponsible bets that sometimes pay off anyway. (This year’s GameStop trade was the archetypal YOLO.) More broadly, it has come to characterize the attitude that has captured a certain type of bored office worker in recent months.To be clear: The pandemic is not over, and millions of Americans are still grieving the loss of jobs and loved ones. Not everyone can afford to throw caution to the wind. But for a growing number of people with financial cushions and in-demand skills, the dread and anxiety of the past year are giving way to a new kind of professional fearlessness.I started hearing these stories this year when several acquaintances announced that they were quitting prestigious and high-paying jobs to pursue risky passion projects. Since then, a trickle of LinkedIn updates has turned into a torrent. I tweeted about it, and dozens of stories poured into my inboxes, all variations on the same basic theme: The pandemic changed my priorities, and I realized I didn’t have to live like this.Brett Williams, 33, a lawyer in Orlando, Fla., had his YOLO epiphany during a Zoom mediation in February.“I realized I was sitting at my kitchen counter 10 hours a day feeling miserable,” he said. “I just thought: ‘What do I have to lose? We could all die tomorrow.’”So he quit, leaving behind a partner position and a big-firm salary to take a job at a small firm run by his next-door neighbor, and to spend more time with his wife and dog.“I’m still a lawyer,” he said. “But I haven’t been this excited to go to work in a long time.”Olivia Messer, a former reporter for The Daily Beast, also quit in February, after realizing that a year of covering the pandemic had left her exhausted and traumatized.“I was so drained and depleted that I didn’t feel like I knew how to do my job anymore,” she said. So Ms. Messer, 29, announced her departure and moved from Brooklyn to Sarasota, Fla., near her parents. Since then, she has been doing freelance writing as well as pursuing hobbies like painting and kayaking.She acknowledged that not all people could uproot themselves so easily. But she said the change had been restorative. “I have this renewed creative sense about what my life could look like, and how fulfilling it can be,” she said.If “languishing” is 2021’s dominant emotion, YOLOing may be the year’s defining work force trend. A recent Microsoft survey found that more than 40 percent of workers globally were considering leaving their jobs this year. Blind, an anonymous social network that is popular with tech workers, recently found that 49 percent of its users planned to get a new job this year.“We’ve all had a year to evaluate if the life we’re living is the one we want to be living,” said Christina Wallace, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. “Especially for younger people who have been told to work hard, pay off your loans and someday you’ll get to enjoy your life, a lot of them are questioning that equation. What if they want to be happy right now?”Fearful of an exodus, employers are trying to boost morale and prevent burnout. LinkedIn recently gave the majority of its employees a paid week off, while Twitter employees have been given an extra day off per month to recharge under a program called #DayofRest. Credit Suisse gave its junior bankers $20,000 “lifestyle allowances,” while Houlihan Lokey, another Wall Street firm, gave many of its employees all-expenses-paid vacations. Raises and time off may persuade some employees to stay put. But for others, stasis is the problem, and the only solution is radical change.“It feels like we’ve been so locked into careers for the past decade, and this is our opportunity to switch it up,” said Nate Moseley, 29, a buyer at a major clothing retailer.Mr. Moseley recently decided to leave his $130,000-a-year job before June 1 — the date his company is requiring workers to return to the office.He created an Excel spreadsheet called “Late 20s Crisis,” which he filled with potential options for his next move: Take a coding class, start mining Ethereum, join a 2022 political campaign, move to the Caribbean and open a tourism business. He looks at it regularly, he said, adding new pros and cons for each option.“The idea of going right back to the pre-Covid setup sounds so unappealing after this past year,” he said. “If not now, when will I ever do this?”Disillusioned workers with money to spare have always gone soul-searching. And it’s possible that some of these YOLOers will end up back in stable jobs if they spend through their savings, or their new ventures fizzle. But a daredevil spirit seems to be infecting even the kinds of risk-averse overachievers who typically cling to the career ladder.In part, that’s because more people than ever can afford to take a risk these days. Stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits and a stock market boom have given many workers bigger safety nets. Many sectors now face severe labor shortages, meaning that workers in those fields can easily find new jobs if they need them. (Not all of these are high tech; many restaurants and trucking companies, for example, are struggling to fill open jobs.) U.S. job openings rose to a two-year high in February, and economists and business owners expect more turnover in the months ahead, as workers who stayed put during the pandemic start emerging from their bunkers.“Lots of things were on hold during the pandemic,” said Jed Kolko, the chief economist at Indeed.com. “To some extent, we’re seeing a year’s worth of big life changes starting to accelerate now.”In addition to the job-hopping you’d expect during boom times, the pandemic has created many more remote jobs, and expanded the number of companies willing to hire outside of big, coastal cities. That has given workers in remote-friendly industries, such as tech and finance, more leverage to ask for what they want.“Employees have a totally unprecedented ability to negotiate in the next 18 to 48 months,” said Johnathan Nightingale, an author and a co-founder of Raw Signal Group, a management training firm. “If I, as an individual, am dissatisfied with the current state of my employment, I have so many more options than I used to have.”Individual YOLO decisions can be chalked up to many factors: cabin fever, low interest rates, the emergence of new get-rich-quick schemes like NFTs and meme stocks. But many seem related to a deeper, generational disillusionment, and a feeling that the economy is changing in ways that reward the crazy and punish the cautious.Several people in their late 20s and early 30s — mostly those who went to good schools, work in high-prestige industries and would never be classified as “essential workers” — told me that the pandemic had destroyed their faith in the traditional white-collar career path. They had watched their independent-minded peers getting rich by joining start-ups or gambling on cryptocurrencies. Meanwhile, their bosses were drowning them in mundane work, or trying to automate their jobs, and were generally failing to support them during one of the hardest years of their lives.“The past year has been telling for how companies really value their work forces,” said Latesha Byrd, a career coach in Charlotte, N.C. “It has become challenging to continue to work for companies who operate business as usual, without taking into account how our lives have changed overnight.”Ms. Byrd, who primarily coaches women of color in fields like tech, finance and media, said that in addition to suffering from pandemic-related burnout, many minority employees felt disillusioned with their employers’ shallow commitments to racial justice.“Diversity, equity and inclusion are extremely important now,” she said. “Employees want to know, ‘Is this company going to support me?’”Not every burned-out worker will quit, of course. For some, an extended vacation or a more flexible workweek might quell their wanderlust. And some workers might find that returning to an office helps restore balance in their lives.But for many of those who can afford it, adventure is in the air.One executive at a major tech company, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to talk to the media, said she and her husband had both been discussing quitting their jobs in recent weeks. The pandemic, she said, had taught them that they’d been playing it too safe with their life choices, and missing out on valuable family time.The executive then sent me a quote from the Buddha about impermanence, and the value of realizing that nothing lasts forever. Or, to put it in slightly earthier terms: YOLO. More
Pay, benefits and an aggressive anti-union campaign by the company helped generate votes at a warehouse in Alabama.When Graham Brooks received his ballot in early February, asking whether he wanted to form a union at the Amazon warehouse in Alabama where he works, he did not hesitate. He marked the NO box, and mailed the ballot in.After almost six years of working as a reporter at nearby newspapers, Mr. Brooks, 29, makes about $1.55 more an hour at Amazon, and is optimistic he can move up.“I personally didn’t see the need for a union,” he said. “If I was being treated differently, I may have voted differently.”Mr. Brooks is one of almost 1,800 employees who handed Amazon a runaway victory in the company’s hardest-fought battle to keep unions out of its warehouses. The result — announced last week, with 738 workers voting to form a union — dealt a crushing blow to labor and Democrats when conditions appeared ripe for them to make advances.For some workers at the warehouse, like Mr. Brooks, the minimum wage of $15 an hour is more than they made in previous jobs and provided a powerful incentive to side with the company. Amazon’s health insurance, which kicks in on the first day of employment, also encouraged loyalty, workers said.Carla Johnson, 44, said she had learned she had brain cancer just a few months after starting work last year at the warehouse, which is in Bessemer, Ala. Amazon’s health care covered her treatment.“I was able to come in Day 1 with benefits, and that could have possibly made the difference in life or death,” Ms. Johnson said at a press event that Amazon organized after the vote.Patricia Rivera, who worked at the Bessemer warehouse from September until January, said many of her co-workers in their 20s or younger had opposed the union because they felt pressured by Amazon’s anti-union campaign and felt that the wages and benefits were solid.“For a younger person, it’s the most money they ever made,” said Ms. Rivera, who would have voted in favor of the union had she stayed. “I give them credit. They start you out and you get insurance right away.”Ms. Rivera left Amazon because she felt she wasn’t adequately compensated for time she had to take off while quarantining after exposure to Covid-19 at work, she said.Amazon, in a statement after the election, said, “We’re not perfect, but we’re proud of our team and what we offer, and will keep working to get better every day.”Carla Johnson, second from left, said Amazon had covered her cancer treatment just a few months after she started at the warehouse. J.C. Thompson, far left, said he had faith in Amazon’s promises.via AmazonOther workers said in interviews that they or their co-workers did not trust unions or had confidence in Amazon’s anti-union message that the workers could change the company from within. Often, in explaining their position, they echoed the arguments that Amazon had made in mandatory meetings, where it stressed its pay, raised doubts about what a union could guarantee and said benefits could be reduced if workers unionized.When a union representative called her about the vote, Ms. Johnson said, he couldn’t answer a pointed question about what the union could promise to deliver.“He hung up on me,” she said. “If you try to sell me something, I need you to be able to sell that product.”Danny Eafford, 59, said he had taken every opportunity to tell co-workers at the warehouse that he strongly opposed the union, arguing that it wouldn’t improve their situation. He said he had told colleagues about how a union let him down when he lost a job years ago at the Postal Service.His job, which involves ordering cardboard, tape and other supplies, did not make him eligible to cast a ballot. But when the company offered “VOTE NO” pins, he gladly put one on his safety vest.“The union’s job is not to keep you — it is to keep everybody,” he said he had told colleagues. “If you are looking for the individual help, it will not be there.”J.C. Thompson, 43, said he believed a commitment by management to improve the workplace over the next 100 days, a promise made during the company’s campaign. He had joined other anti-union workers in pushing Amazon to better train employees and to educate managers on anti-bias techniques.“We’re going to do everything that we can to address those issues,” Mr. Thompson said. He appeared with Ms. Johnson at the Amazon event.Pastor George Matthews of New Life Interfaith Ministries said numerous members of his congregation worked at the warehouse, just a few miles away, and had expressed gratitude for the job. But he was still surprised and disappointed that more did not vote to unionize, even in the traditionally anti-union South, given how hard they described the work.In talking with congregants, Mr. Matthews said, he has come to believe that workers were too scared to push for more and risk what they have.“You don’t want to turn over the proverbial apple cart because those apples are sweet — larger than the apples I had before — so you don’t mess with it,” he said.With its mandatory meetings and constant messaging, Amazon used its advantages to run a more successful campaign than the union, said Alex Colvin, dean of Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.“We know campaigns change positions,” he said.Amazon used mandatory meetings and constant messaging to its advantage at the warehouse, said Alex Colvin, dean of Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesStuart Appelbaum, the president of the retail workers union that led the organizing effort, cited several factors to explain the loss beyond Amazon’s anti-union efforts.He pointed to the high rate of turnover among employees, estimating that up to 25 percent of Amazon workers who would have been eligible to vote in early January had left by the end of voting in late March — potentially more than the company’s entire margin of victory. Mr. Appelbaum surmised that people who had left would have been more likely to support the union because they were typically less satisfied with their jobs.Mr. Brooks said that on the previous Friday, he saw eight or 10 new faces in the area where he worked.“I was told they were Day 3 employees,” he said, “and I noticed a few more today.”Many of the workers at the warehouse have complaints about Amazon, wanting shorter hours or less obtrusive monitoring of their production. Mr. Brooks and others said they wished their 10-hour shift had a break period longer than 30 minutes because in the vast warehouse, they can spend almost half their break just walking to and from the lunchroom.Turnout for the vote was low, at only about half of all eligible workers, suggesting that neither Amazon nor the union had overwhelming support.Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, said Thursday in his annual letter to investors that the outcome in Bessemer did not bring him “comfort.”“It’s clear to me that we need a better vision for how we create value for employees — a vision for their success,” he wrote.Michael Corkery More
The pandemic sent 32 million people in India from the middle class last year. Now a second wave is threatening the dreams of millions more looking for a better life.NOIDA, India — Ashish Anand had dreams of becoming a fashion designer. A former flight attendant, he borrowed from relatives and poured his $5,000 life savings into opening a clothing shop on the outskirts of Delhi selling custom-designed suits, shirts and pants.The shop, called the Right Fit, opened in February 2020, just weeks before the coronavirus struck India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi abruptly enacted one of the world’s toughest nationwide lockdowns to stop it. Unable to pay the rent, Mr. Anand closed the Right Fit two months later.Now Mr. Anand, his wife and his two children are among millions of people in India in danger of sliding out of the middle class and into poverty. They depend on handouts from his aging in-laws. Khichdi, or watery lentils cooked with rice, has replaced eggs and chicken at the dinner table. Sometimes, he said, the children go to bed hungry.“I have nothing left in my pocket,” said Mr. Anand, 38. “How can I not give food to my children?”Now a second wave of Covid-19 has struck India, and the middle class dreams of tens of millions of people face even greater peril. Already, about 32 million people in India were driven into poverty by the pandemic last year, according to the Pew Research Center, accounting for a majority of the 54 million who slipped out of the middle class worldwide.The pandemic is undoing decades of progress for a country that in fits and starts has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Already, deep structural problems and the sometimes impetuous nature of many of Mr. Modi’s policies had been hindering growth. A shrinking middle class would deal lasting damage.“It’s very bad news in every possible way,” said Jayati Ghosh, a development economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It has set back our growth trajectory hugely and created much greater inequality.”The second wave presents difficult choices for India and Mr. Modi. India on Friday reported more than 216,000 new infections, another record. Lockdowns are back in some states. With work scarce, migrant workers are packing into trains and buses home as they did last year. The country’s vaccination campaign has been slow, though the government has picked up the pace.Yet Mr. Modi appears unwilling to repeat last year’s draconian lockdown, which left more than 100 million Indians jobless and which many economists blame for worsening the pandemic’s problems. His government has also been reluctant to increase spending substantially like the United States and some other places, instead releasing a budget that would raise spending on infrastructure and in other areas but that also emphasizes cutting debt.Anil G. Kumar lives in Palam, one of the many neighborhoods in Delhi that have been hurt by the pandemic.Smita Sharma for The New York TimesThe Modi government has defended its handling of the pandemic, saying vaccinations are making progress and that signs point to an economic resurgence. Economists are forecasting a rebound in the coming year, though the sudden rise in infections and India’s slow vaccination rate — less than 9 percent of the population has been inoculated — could undermine those predictions.The heady growth forecasts feel far away for Nikita Jagad, who was out of work for over eight months. Ms. Jagad, a 49-year-old resident of Mumbai, stopped going out with her friends, eating at restaurants and even taking bus rides, unless the trip was for a job interview. Sometimes, she said, she shut herself inside her bathroom so her 71-year-old mother wouldn’t hear her crying.Last week, Ms. Jagad got a new job as a manager at a company that provides housekeeping services for airlines. It pays less than $400 a month, roughly half her previous salary. It could also be short-lived: the state of Maharashtra, home to Mumbai, announced lockdown-like measures this week to stop the spreading second wave.If she loses her new job, Ms. Jagad is still the only support for her mother. “If something happens to her,” she said, “I don’t have the money to even admit her in the hospital.”India’s middle class may not be as wealthy as its peers in the United States and elsewhere, but it makes up an increasingly potent economic force. While definitions vary, Pew Research defines middle-class and upper-middle-class households as living on about $10 to $50 a day. The kind of income could give an Indian family an apartment in a nice neighborhood, a car or a scooter, and the opportunities to send their children to a private school.Roughly 66 million people in India meet that definition, compared with about 99 million just before the pandemic last year, according to Pew research estimates. These increasingly affluent Indian families have drawn foreign companies like Walmart, Amazon, Facebook, Nissan and others to invest heavily in a country of aspirational consumers.A collage of vacation photographs in Ashish Anand’s apartment in Noida, a reminder of the good times the family once had.Smita Sharma for The New York TimesAnil G. Kumar, a civil engineer, was one of them. Around this time last year, he and his family were about to buy a two-bedroom apartment. But when last year’s lockdown hit, Mr. Kumar’s employer, a construction chemicals manufacturer, slashed his salary by half.“Everything turned turtle within a few hours,” he said. Three months later, his job had been eliminated.Now Mr. Kumar spends his days in his home in a working-class neighborhood in the western part of Delhi, searching for jobs on LinkedIn and taking care of his son.The family’s middle-class life is now under threat. They survive on the $470-a-month salary Mr. Kumar’s wife draws from a private university. Instead of holding a big celebration for their son’s 10th birthday at a restaurant, which would have cost nearly $70, they ordered a cake and a new outfit for about one-fifth the cost. Mr. Kumar also canceled his Amazon Prime subscription, which he hadn’t used in a while.“Every day you can’t sit on the laptop,” he said. “At times, you feel depressed.”India’s middle class is central to more than the economy. It fits into India’s broader ambitions to rival China, which has grown faster and more consistently, as a regional superpower.To get there, the Indian government may need to address the people the coronavirus has left behind. Household incomes and overall consumption have weakened, even though the sales of some goods have increased recently because of pent-up demand. Many of the hardest hit come from India’s merchant class, the shopkeepers, stall operators or other small entrepreneurs who often live off the books of a major company.“India is not even discussing poverty or inequality or lack of employment or fall in incomes and consumption,” said Mahesh Vyas, the chief executive of the Center for Monitoring of the Indian Economy. “This needs to change first and foremost,” he said.Mr. Kumar with his 10-year-old son, Akshay, in the Palam neighborhood in Delhi, India. Mr. Kumar lost his job as a civil engineer during last year’s lockdown.Smita Sharma for The New York TimesMost Indians are “tired” and “discouraged” by the lack of jobs, said Mr. Vyas, especially low-skilled workers.“Unless this problem is addressed,” he said, “this will be a millstone that will hold back India’s sustained growth.”Mr. Anand, the prospective fashion designer, who lives in the industrial hub of Noida in the southeastern Delhi area, found himself at wit’s end during last year’s lockdown. The family fell behind on the rent. Two months into the lockdown, he collapsed in what he described as a panic attack.“We did not want to live,” said his wife, Akanksha Chadda, 33, a former operations manager at a luxury retail store who also hasn’t been able to find a job. She sat facing a photograph taken three years ago of her son and daughter sitting on a giant turtle at an amusement park. “I didn’t know if I would wake up the next morning or not.”The days when they could afford muesli for breakfast and pizza for dinner are gone, said Mr. Anand. On good days, they get some vegetables and banana for the kids.In January, Ms. Chadda sold their 8-year-old son’s bicycle to buy milk, lentils and vegetables. He cried for a solid evening. But she felt she had little choice. She had already sold her jewelry the month before.“When you don’t see a ray of hope,” she said, “you lose it.” More
Notifications