High school-educated young Americans – what scholar Andrew Cherlin defines as the working class – are now pursuing their ‘expressive selves’ in much the same way as the middle class. Cherlin worries the trend could prove damaging

The working-class American family – the stuff of political speeches and Bruce Springsteen ballads – is on “life support”, according to Andrew Cherlin.

Cherlin is a sociologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University and his latest book, Love’s Labor Lost, examines the decline of marriage among the US working class.



The Guggenheim fellow defines the working class as the working population with a high school degree but not a college degree. That accounts for about half of the working population of young adults in America.



In the past few decades, as factory work has moved overseas or become automated, the jobs that sustain these families have dried up for men. At the same time, changing economic and cultural currents have also strengthened the position of women.

The combination of these economic and cultural shifts have led to “the fall of the working-class family”, Cherlin said.

Many researchers have argued that the American nuclear family has passed into obsolescence. But Cherlin goes a step further and calls it “troublesome” that more and more high school-educated young adults are having kids while still in live-in relationships, following a pattern of individualism pioneered by the American middle class decades ago. The instability of these working-class living arrangements will have ripple effects in society, he predicts.

The only way to stop the trend, Cherlin says, is to strengthen the economic standing of working-class families with better jobs and wages, ensuring class mobility. But some days, he said, “I wonder if we just no longer have enough work for everyone to do”.

Cherlin spoke to the Guardian about his new book and explained the surprising cultural shift matching America’s increasing inequality and how he believes that the solution lies in education and policies that strengthen unions.



Our interview, below, has been edited for clarity and space.

“Some days I wonder if we just no longer have enough work for everyone to do.” Photograph: Johns Hopkins University

Why is it important to examine the working-class marriage now?

I wrote Love’s Labor Lost because I realized that I had been watching the slow disintegration of the American working class over the past few decades. A large group of young adults was struggling in their family lives, not just in their economic lives.



This population of young adults has a high school degree but no college degree. That’s a huge group, and their prospects in the labor market have declined substantially and their family lives have changed too. It’s more than half the young adult working population.

The current gap began sometime in the 1970s, which is when the American economy began to de-industrialize. So I think the phenomenon is three to four decades old but we only realized what was going on a decade or two ago.

The traditional working-class family was based on marriage. What we have seen over recent years is a movement away from the marriage-based family life. It has long been the case that the least-educated Americans had children outside of marriage. Over the past few decades, young Americans with a moderate amount of education have joined them.

Essentially, what we have learned is that the marriage gap is widest when economic inequality is greatest.

This is not the first time we have seen a large marriage gap – the first occurred after the late 19th century. What have we learned about the second gap from this first one?

What these two gaps have in common is that economic inequality was high and rising in both cases. The first period was when factories replaced small shops. The second period was when computers replaced factories.

The pattern peaked in the 1950s when factory jobs paid the most and were the most stable. That’s when working-class Americans tended to marry in large numbers and to remain married. Men were expected to take factory jobs; women were expected to not work outside the home.



It was the only time in the country’s history when a young adult without an advanced education could count on getting ahead.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The role of women in working-class families was traditionally to support the male breadwinner or to take up part-time work, but recent times have seen the rise of the full-time female worker. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

In the 1930s, the economy was very weak, as it is today. But we saw very few children born outside of marriage because it was culturally unacceptable to do that.



Today, when people face economic difficulties, they may choose to cohabit rather than stay in a marriage they think will fail.

Would you say that in some ways the decline of marriage in this class also tells the story of the rise of the female worker?



Clearly. Changes in women’s work lives have a lot to do with the decline of the working-class family – but I would point out that college-educated women work outside the home too and they are still marrying in large numbers.



What’s happening is that high school-educated women don’t see good marriage prospects in the future and so they are using their economic independence to start their own families. So, yes, women’s independence is part of this story, but this [alone] doesn’t necessarily lead to lower rates of marriage. It only does so when the possibility of finding a good marriage partner isn’t encouraging.



Is long-term stability possible without marriage? Why is marriage so important?



If I were writing about the UK or France or Scandinavia, I would be much less concerned about the decline of stable marriages. Because in many European countries, long-term cohabitations are common and can provide a stable environment for children. But in the US, cohabitation is still a short-term phenomenon. In the US, cohabiting relationships often end quickly, leading to a great deal of churning and instability in children’s lives. It’s the instability that I think hurts children.



A friend of mine is the demographer at the University of York and said that on the whole cohabitation in Britain is more like marriage, whereas cohabitation in the US is closer to single-parent or lone-parent families. The meaning of cohabitation varies from country to country.



How can the movement from the “utilitarian self” to the “expressive self” explain the marriage gap?



People talk a lot about American individualism. In the old days it meant working hard, striking out on one’s own, succeeding in your career. Today it often means striving for personal growth, individual development, a happier sense of self. That change occurred among the middle class a few decades ago. It’s now occurring among the working class. We’re now seeing young working-class men and women talk about their lives in the same kind of therapeutic personal-satisfaction sense that the middle class has been showing for decades.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The decline in working-class marriages began around the 1970s, says Cherlin. Photograph: H Armstrong Roberts/Retrofile/Getty Images

One can say that thinking about one’s personal development is a luxury that could only happen when one’s economic life is in good shape. That’s what happened with the middle class. What’s surprising is that we see the shift to the ‘expressive self’ among the working class even though their economic lives are highly unstable and unsatisfactory.



If I’m concerned about my own personal satisfaction and my wife is not allowing me the personal growth I need, I may be justified in leaving. So the shift to expressive self has some positives and negatives.

What can be done to fix the marriage gap in the American working class?



It starts with education. Everyone who looks at this issue agrees we need to do a better job in educating American children and young adults. That doesn’t necessarily mean a four-year college degree for everyone. It may mean that we support community colleges and alternative high schools that [point] people toward some of the mid-level jobs that still exist.

We should try to connect our high school graduates with good mid-level jobs that require some training after high school, like operating a computer, controlling machinery. But if we could magically give everyone a college degree by tomorrow, it wouldn’t solve any of our labor market problems. Instead we also need to intervene directly in the labor market: by supporting low-wage work, by raising the minimum wage and by strengthening unions.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Factory jobs offering stable, long-term employment may be gone, but nothing has replaced them. Large-scale retail employers such as Amazon pay low wages and rely on temporary workers. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

Why education? Why not an aggressive push toward a production-oriented economy?



I don’t think we can get there. Manufacturing jobs are gone and they won’t come back in large numbers. That’s why we need to get more people college degrees so that they can move into the growing part of our economy – that is information and communication, the professional sectors.



So, a two-pronged attack – in which we give more people a bachelor’s degree which gets them into the privileged sector of our economy, and more training that lets other people enter the mid-level jobs that were made – is the best way to go.



But on some days I wonder if we just no longer have enough work for everyone to do.



Do you really think that’s true?



Sometimes I think that is true, but I know that everyone who has predicted it in the past has been wrong. I know that a group called the Luddites smashed the machines of the early weaving looms in England because they thought the machines would end work. They were wrong. And so I’m reluctant to make that prediction today.



Have we run out of work? Probably not. It’s a frightening prospect to consider. And given the past track records of people who predicted that and were incorrect, I’m reluctant to go there.