There's been a lot of talk about whether high unemployment is the "new normal." That would be disastrous for America's economy and workers and families, though even our Democratic leaders aren't necessarily or consistently acting like they realize that. But while we wait for the verdict on whether it's true that high unemployment is just something we need to get used to and maybe embrace, there's something related that has become normal.

Even as executive pay has shot up into the stratosphere, the idea that we as a nation should be proud to have people who can make a middle-class life for their families through manual labor has been progressively broken down. This isn't just about the reality of wages for high school-educated people having gone down. It's about how we understand and talk about those declining wages and the relatively few remaining people who do make a middle-class living from blue-collar work.

It's the outrage we hear about public worker pay that gets pinned on the bus driver or janitor who has benefits and can afford to own a home. It's the incredulity that we might be offended when corporations send jobs overseas, because of course they do when workers here are so greedy and won't work for $12 a day like they do in China. And it's auto workers.

As Jake McIntyre wrote in late 2008, it's not a stretch to say that as much as anyone, the UAW made the middle class. Hundreds of thousands of people were able to buy homes and go on vacations and send their kids to college based on the physical work of making the cars, and that was something we used to be proud of, that you didn't have to be an engineer or an executive to earn that. Not anymore.

Detroit:

Over the past two years, Ford Motor Co has roared back from the brink of failure, won accolades for its gains in quality, posted its highest profits in a decade and rewarded patient investors with a 14-fold increase in its share price. But Mike LeBeau, 23, who works at a Ford assembly plant in Chicago making around $15 per hour and lives at a bedroom in his parent's house, is not feeling the good times yet. Like thousands of newly hired unionized auto workers brought in at half the wages of existing hires, he and others like him are looking for new contracts between the United Auto Workers and the Detroit automakers to share the wealth.

At a California BMW distribution center represented by the Teamsters:

Times being what they are, when a Teamsters committee came to the plant in early June to open negotiations over a new contract to start Sept. 1, they thought they might be asked to accept minuscule wage increases and maybe some givebacks on health coverage. They were stunned by what they heard instead: As of Aug. 31, the plant would be outsourced to an unidentified third-party logistics company and all but three of its 71 employees laid off. The union contract will be terminated. Some of the employees might be offered jobs with the new operator, but there are no guarantees. And no one expects the new bosses will match the existing $25 hourly scale or the health benefits provided now.

Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times continues:

It's fashionable to observe today that the loyalty the BMW workers gave their employer was naive; complain to manufacturing CEOs about their remorseless hollowing out of middle-class livelihoods to maintain payouts to shareholders, and the answer you get is that this is merely the way of our hyper-competitive modern world. Nothing personal; it's the tyranny of the marketplace. Yet what gives BMW the freedom to convert good American middle-class jobs into low-wage piecework is the evaporation of American workers' power of collective action. The labor lawyer and writer Thomas Geoghegan contends that BMW could never outsource union jobs like this in its home country, Germany, where union solidarity extending from the professional staff down to the shop floor would stomp the living daylights out of the very idea. "Foreign companies know there's no solidarity here," he says.

It's not just solidarity in the workplace that we lack. It's that in just one or two generations, corporations have managed to flip the response—in the media narrative and among far too many individuals—to seeing another worker who has it better from "my job should offer those opportunities" to "why does that guy have it so good?" And that is a tragedy for our country.