Liberals and conservatives alike have assumed that the middle class is growing and that its standard of living is steadily rising. In fact it is shrinking, and its standard of living is deteriorating. The impression that the United States has become an overwhelmingly middle-class society rests largely on the expansion of the service sector of the economy and on the growth of white-collar jobs in relation to blue-collar jobs. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, the expansion of the white‐ collar work force has derived for the most part from increases in the number of clerical, sales, and service workers, who usually receive even lower pay than most blue-collar workers. The clerical category consists largely of working-class women, and "the existence of two giant categories of labor—operatives and clerical workers—as the two largest major occupational classifications and the composition by sex of each of these categories leads to the supposition," as Harry Braverman noted in 1974, "that the most common occupational combination within the family is one in which the husband is an operative and the wife a clerk." This supposition in turn suggests not only that blue-collar and white-collar jobs have become for many purposes indistinguishable but also that working-class families, like the rest of the population, find it more and more difficult to get along on one income alone. "More than anything else, it is working wives," writes Andrew Levison, "who have made possible even the modest standard of living workers enjoy."

Levison points out that the Census Bureau omits clerical, sales, and service workers from the category of blue-collar occupations. Most of the jobs thus excluded are repetitive and poorly paid. The service category, for example, includes janitors, watchmen, policemen, firemen, waiters, waitresses, cooks, busboys, dishwashers, maids, and porters. If these three categories—clerical, sales, and service—are reclassified as manual labor, the percentage of workers in the population rises dramatically. It has risen over time as well, from 50 percent in 1900 to 70 percent in 1970. This evidence indicates that workers can be considered a middle class only in the sense that they occupy an intermediate position between the professional and business classes on the one hand and the "underclass,"

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