The Jobs That Built America’s Middle Class Are Disappearing, Intensifying Its Downfall
10th November 2022
Companies, emboldened by an economic rebound after the nadir of the pandemic, rushed to acquire talent and fill their ranks with skilled middle managers. The Harvard Business Review even wrote that middle managers are more important now than ever (Fortunewrote that story six ways to Sunday as well). But a lurking recession is now threatening the livelihoods of white-collar workers: Those higher-salaried management roles—the jobs once heralded in American society as the key to obtaining the middle-class American Dream—may be axed in waves.
As these jobs vanish in favor of blue-collar workers at more manageable costs, that pipeline to the middle class could be chopped at the knees, reports The Financial Times.
Middle-management jobs typically deal with information flows–gathering and consolidating data for upper management, supervising production processes, performing interim analytics, identifying (and hopefully resolving) production problems, and monitoring employee performance. That sort of thing is more and more being automated, significantly flattening management hierarchies.