Waning Era of the Middle-Class Factory Job

By Mark Trumbull
The Christian Science Monitor

Thursday 08 December 2005

Flint, MIchigan - For Mary Aremia-Van Alst, the happiest day of her 10 years working at Delphi Corp. is easy to pinpoint: It was the day she got the job.

<>"I was ecstatic," she says, referring to that day in January 1995. The auto-parts company, then a division of General Motors Corp. (GM), was hiring in Flint for the first time in years.

The job offer was a passport to a paycheck that more than doubled her $10-an-hour wage at Citizens Bank.

It was also a ticket to a world where a working-class job could produce a middle-class lifestyle, with strong benefits and the money to send her children to a Catholic grade school.