The Floor We Forgot We Were Standing On

I entered the workforce in the early 1980s—right about the time a lot of bigger economic ideas were starting to take hold.

And like a lot of folks, I had my moments where I’d look around at a job and think, We’re getting screwed here.

Different job, same feeling.

But here’s the part that doesn’t get said out loud enough: I was part of the problem too. Not in some grand, villainous way. Just in the ordinary, everyday, short-sighted way a lot of us were.

My logic was simple: why would I join a union and pay dues every week or every month, especially when I thought I could get the same base pay without paying into it?

From where I was standing, it looked like this: union wages set the floor, companies still had to stay competitive for non-union workers, and my pay was “negotiable.”

In my mind, that meant upside.

Why cap myself under a contract when I could go out and get more on my own?

It sounded smart at the time.

What I—and a lot of others—missed was that the “floor” we were benefiting from didn’t exist on its own. It existed because unions had the strength to set it.

Starting in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, that strength began to fade. Fewer people joined. Companies pushed back harder. And moments like the PATCO strike were widely understood as signals about which way things were heading.

Once fewer people bought in, the leverage behind those wages started to slip.

And when that leverage slipped, something else happened quietly:

The floor did not hold.

It softened.

Companies didn’t need to match union-level wages or benefits the same way anymore, because the force that once demanded them wasn’t as strong. And that idea of “negotiable pay”? It cuts both ways.

In a strong market, maybe you can negotiate up.

But when the balance of power shifts—and it did—that same flexibility becomes:

• “That’s the offer, take it or leave it.”
• Fewer benefits.
• Less security.
• More exposure to restructurings, redundancies, and layoffs.

And those layoffs weren’t rare footnotes in the 1980s. They became part of the working landscape. Plants closed. Departments got trimmed. Middle managers got “reorganized.” People who thought they were building careers suddenly found out they were line items.

That is one reason many Boomers and Gen Jones workers reached retirement age with less security than the old bargain had promised.

The promise was steady work, rising wages, pensions, and security.

The reality for many was interrupted careers, lost benefits, cashed-out retirement accounts, and starting over more times than they ever expected.

What I thought was independence was, in a lot of ways, giving up collective leverage without realizing it.

And I wasn’t alone.

A lot of us made that same calculation:

Why pay into something when I can ride along for free?

The problem is, when enough people think that way, there’s nothing left to ride on.

And that’s where this ties into the bigger picture.

About the same time Americans were being told that prosperity would “trickle down,” something else was quietly happening that didn’t make the slogan. The people who used to negotiate for that prosperity were losing their seat at the table.

For a long stretch of American history, unions weren’t some fringe idea. They were one of the main ways growth actually showed up in a paycheck.

When a company did better, workers had a way to say:

Good. Now let’s talk about our share.

Then the ground shifted.

Starting in the late 1970s and accelerating through the 1980s, union membership began a steady decline. Total union membership was around 20 percent in 1983, but in the private sector the number was about 16.5 percent. Today, private-sector union membership is under 6 percent.

That’s not a small change.

That’s a different system.

Researchers have pointed to the PATCO strike as one of the moments that signaled a shift in the balance of power, and companies adjusted accordingly. Peer-reviewed work by economists such as David Card, Thomas Lemieux, and W. Craig Riddell has linked declining unionization to rising wage inequality. Another widely cited study by Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld found that the erosion of unions played a major role in widening the pay gap, especially for middle- and working-class men.

Meanwhile, productivity kept climbing.

The country was producing more per worker than ever. But pay for typical workers did not keep up with that growth. So you ended up with two things happening at once:

Growth at the top.

Less leverage at the bottom.

And that combination matters.

Because if gains do not naturally flow down, and workers do not have the leverage to ask for them, there is not much left to close the gap.

You don’t need an economics degree to see how that plays out.

It shows up in raises that don’t keep up with rent.

Health insurance that eats more of your paycheck each year.

Retirement shifting from “guaranteed” to “good luck.”

None of this means unions were perfect.

They weren’t.

There were inefficiencies, politics, and real problems. But taking them mostly out of the equation did not create balance.

It removed one of the main counterweights.

And without a counterweight, the scale does not stay level for long.

That’s the part that often gets missed.

The conversation was framed as:

Growth will take care of everything.

But at the exact same time, we weakened one of the main ways ordinary workers made sure growth included them.

So when people today say, “It doesn’t feel like the economy is working for me,” they’re not imagining it.

They’re describing what it looks like when the system changes—and nobody updates the promise.

Some people wait to be told what to believe.

I tend to start with a simpler question:

Who benefits if I believe this?

That question works surprisingly well. It does not solve everything, but it clears a lot of fog. Whenever a policy, slogan, or economic theory gets wrapped in polished language, I like to take it out to the porch, set it in plain daylight, and ask what it actually does.

Trickle-down economics is one of those ideas that sounds reasonable if you say it fast enough.

The theory goes something like this: if you give enough benefits to the people and companies at the top, they will invest more, build more, hire more, and eventually the prosperity will work its way down to everyone else.

In theory, that sounds almost neighborly.

In practice, it often looks more like pouring a beer, ending up with a glass full of foam, and telling everyone at the table to be patient because the good stuff is technically underneath.

The problem is not that investment is bad. Businesses do need capital. Expansion can create jobs. Healthy companies do matter to a healthy economy. Nobody with sense should pretend otherwise.

The problem is the assumption that money given to the top naturally becomes shared prosperity.

It does not have to.

A corporation can use tax savings to raise wages. It can also use them for stock buybacks, executive bonuses, automation, acquisitions, or simply holding more cash. A wealthy investor can put money into a business that creates local jobs. They can also park it in assets that inflate wealth without doing much for the working person trying to pay rent, buy groceries, or take a kid to the doctor.

Money does not trickle down by magic.

It goes where incentives send it.

And for the last several decades, too many incentives have rewarded accumulation more than circulation.

That is where the theory starts to fail the smell test.

If working people are told to wait patiently because prosperity will eventually reach them, but the cost of housing, food, healthcare, insurance, transportation, and education keeps rising faster than wages, then the promise is not functioning as advertised.

At some point, “just wait” stops being economic theory and starts sounding like a customer service recording.

Your prosperity is very important to us. Please remain on the line.

Meanwhile, the people at the top are not waiting. They are optimizing.

They have accountants, lobbyists, tax strategies, market leverage, and pricing power. They have access to tools ordinary households do not. When costs rise, they often pass them along. When profits rise, they are under no natural obligation to pass those along with equal enthusiasm.

That is not a moral accusation against every wealthy person or every business owner. It is just how systems behave when they are designed to protect returns at the top first.

The part that bothers me most is how often the burden of patience is assigned downward.

Workers are told higher wages will hurt the economy.

Families are told affordable healthcare is too expensive.

Students are told education is an investment, even if it starts them in debt.

Retirees are told benefits are unsustainable.

Small businesses are told to compete in a market where the giants get the better tax treatment, better financing, better pricing power, and better political access.

And then, after all that, the people struggling at the bottom are told the real problem is that they lack discipline.

That is convenient.

Pain at the bottom becomes a character flaw. Hoarding at the top becomes strategy.

I am not against wealth. I am not against business. I run a small business. I understand risk, cost, inventory, cash flow, and the joy of wondering why the thing you thought would sell like hotcakes is sitting there like a decorative brick.

But that is exactly why I do not buy the fairy tale version of economics.

At the small-business level, money has to move. If someone buys a cutting board, that money may help pay booth fees, materials, gas, packaging, website costs, or the next batch of product. It may go to another local vendor, a print shop, a lumber supplier, or groceries. That dollar keeps changing hands.

That is circulation.

Circulation is what keeps communities alive.

When ordinary people have money, they spend much of it close to home. They buy groceries. They fix cars. They pay rent. They take the family out for dinner once in a while. They buy school shoes, birthday gifts, prescriptions, gas, lumber, coffee, haircuts, and maybe something handmade at a vendor show because it made them smile.

That money does not sit still for long.

It moves through neighborhoods, stores, tradespeople, service workers, suppliers, and local tax bases. It creates demand. Demand supports jobs. Jobs support families. Families support communities.

That is not complicated.

It is just less flattering to the people who prefer to believe the economy begins and ends with them.

When money concentrates too heavily at the top, it does not automatically circulate with the same force. It can sit. It can be shielded. It can be converted into ownership of more assets, which then generate more wealth for the people who already had enough money to buy them.

That is not rain.

That is a reservoir with a very expensive fence.

And that is where the beer foam comes in.

Foam looks impressive. It fills the glass. It rises above the rim. It gives the appearance of abundance.

But nobody orders a beer for the foam.

The foam is what you wait through to get to the part you actually came for. And if the bartender keeps handing you glass after glass of foam while insisting there is plenty of beer in there somewhere, eventually you stop calling it service.

You call it a con.

Trickle-down economics has always had a beer-foam problem. The people at the top point to a full glass and say, “Look how much prosperity there is.” The people lower down are still waiting for something they can actually drink.

Plenty at the top.

Very little reaching the table.

And somehow, the people still thirsty are accused of not appreciating the foam.

The old argument was that helping the top would eventually help everyone else. But after decades of watching wages stagnate, pensions disappear, healthcare become a maze, housing become a crisis, and retirement savings become a luxury for many working people, it seems fair to ask:

How long exactly is “eventually”?

Because eventually does not pay the light bill.

Eventually does not refill a prescription.

Eventually does not fix the transmission.

Eventually does not help a sixty-year-old worker who did everything mostly right and still has little to show for it because the rules kept changing while the people writing them kept cashing checks.

A healthy economy should not depend on waiting for generosity from the top. It should be built so prosperity circulates through the middle and bottom as part of the design.

Good wages circulate.

Affordable healthcare circulates.

Stable housing circulates.

Local jobs circulate.

Small-business spending circulates.

Retirement security circulates.

When ordinary people are financially stable, they do not bury that stability in a vault. They use it. They repair things. They replace things. They support local businesses. They participate in their communities. They take modest risks because disaster is not always one bad month away.

That is not laziness.

That is the foundation of a functioning country.

The mistake of trickle-down thinking is that it treats working people as the final recipients of prosperity instead of the engine that keeps prosperity alive.

It imagines the economy as something that begins in boardrooms and descends, eventually and reluctantly, to everyone else.

But most of real life does not work from the penthouse down.

It works from the grocery cart up.

It works from the rent check up.

It works from the lunch counter, the daycare bill, the tire shop, the school fundraiser, the farmer’s market, the utility payment, and the person deciding whether they can afford both medicine and meat this week.

That is where the economy is felt.

That is where theory either becomes real or exposes itself as foam.

So when someone tells me that more benefits for the top will eventually help everyone, I still ask the same porch question:

Who benefits if I believe this?

Because if the same people keep benefiting first, most, and always, maybe the theory is not broken.

Maybe it is doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Maybe the foam was never a mistake.

Maybe it was the sales pitch.

There is a whole category of makers now who claim “handcrafted” because they stood near the machine while it ran.

Originally posted at https://www.jamesallenwrites.com/blogs/post/book-clubs-booktok-policy on 03.11.26 10:29 AM

From time to time I receive messages from well-meaning readers, organizers, and online groups asking if I would like to participate in a book club discussion, appear in a virtual event, join a BookTok promotion, or otherwise take part in organized reader activities.

I do not participate in book clubs, discussion groups, BookTok promotions, organized reader events, or similar activities.

The books are the conversation.

Readers are free to have whatever discussion they like.

I just won’t be in the room for it.