Class, this is probably the most important lesson you can learn about history: you can tell lies simply by leaving out part of the truth. If I tell you I saw Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jones come out of the faculty restroom together, you're going to make some interesting deductions. All I did was not tell you that they were using the sink to wash off a stray puppy they'd rescued.
That's why I'm not teaching you from the text today. Every high school history text has at least one chapter on the third decade of this century, and almost every one of them leaves something out because it conflicts with the story the author wants to tell. Instead, I have distributed a set of documents that tell conflicting stories about the Second American Civil War. The oldest of them dates to the beginnings of unrest in 2019. Your task this week will be to read all those documents and form your own opinions.
I would, however, be considered a terrible teacher if I made no effort to lecture you. So today, I present you with my limited recollections of those days.
As far back as I can remember, the relationship between the big corporations and their workers tended to be strained. The corporations were tasked with making the most money they could for the people who owned them, which meant paying workers the least possible wages. This happened throughout the second half of the twentieth century with manufacturing jobs. When I was a kid, communications technology developed to a point that companies began to hire workers in other countries to take over most mundane information work. It was called "outsourcing" and I can remember much complaining about it during the 1990s.
In spite of that, Americans did well in the '90s. Going into this century, people began to realize that some segments of the stock market were vastly overvalued. Then the Patriot Day Massacre happened. The panic that resulted dragged the nation into a recession. Then we invaded Afghanistan and later Iraq.
In 2008, the economy got even worse when bank after bank failed due to incompetence. I might be simplifying that a bit. Read the linked economics articles and talk to Mr. Fiske if you want the gritty details of everything that went down. The big impact of 2008, though, was the beginnings of the popular unrest.
The first big movement was called "the 99%". They were disorganized and ultimately collapsed into obscurity, but the 99% was the first major effort this century to challenge the ability of a small group of people--the wealthiest 1%--to influence the lives of the rest of us.
Those feelings of disparity eventually turned to a demand for greater wages. By 2014, the term "income inequality" had become a major talking point in national politics, with large numbers of workers demanding that minimum wage be set to twice the existing rate. In 2015, several states and municipalities raised the wages. It became clear that a national wage hike was going to happen. The 2016 electoral cycle secured it. Politicians running on the promise of wage hikes and social programs swept most of the nationals ballots.
Just like in the 90s with outsourcing, the companies turned to technology to preserve their profits. Fast food restaurants and department stores immediately began supplementing their workforce with robots capable of stocking and cleaning. I'll never forget the first time I drove up to a McDonald's and a computer took my order. The first fully-robotic restaurant opened on December 2, 2016.
If you read the job reports I linked to this talk, you'll see what happened: unemployment began to rise steadily. I always knew automation was going to happen, I just never dreamed it would be so fast.
As more and more Americans became unemployed, employers could offer minimum wage for more of the remaining jobs. By June 2018, 25% of working-age Americans were collecting unemployment benefits. Another 43% had been reduced to minimum wage.
(I'll have to finish this later...)