Santoro: Now, I guess it would depend on what you consider functionally important. Take a professional athlete. Is that profession functionally important? Does it contribute something desperately needed to the society, say, compared to a teacher? And then, why would there be huge material differences between the ways those occupations are rewarded?

Niedermier: But the amount of money a job pays is only part of the class equation. An individual’s social ranking is also determined by occupational prestige. University of Florida sociologist Leonard Beeghley says this prestige demonstrates itself in our language...

Beeghley: People at the top, or people at high-class levels, tend to be acknowledged in subtle, but distinctive ways. The use of titles—“sir” or “doctor,”—things like that. One of the examples I use is my auto mechanic. He owns a business and has four or five employees. I’ve been using his service for many years and he knows me by name. When I roll in to have my car fixed, he says hello and we talk. He fixes my car, or one of his employees does. His employees address me as “sir,” but he does not, rather he calls me by my first name and I call him by his first name. There’s a sense of equality there, but there is not with his employees, who are working for him. And of course, they earn a lot less money.

Niedermier: Even though this social protocol has been around forever, Santoro says at the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, workers who made steel and glass were highly skilled craftsmen holding prestigious positions. But advancing technology replaced those talents with machines operated by less skilled wageworkers. Then, in the middle of the last century, the GI bill made college more affordable, and there was more change.

Santoro: We went through an enormous economic expansion after World War II. The corporate economy was growing by leaps and bounds and there was a need for white-collar skilled professionals: managers, engineers, technicians...people like that. So, the opportunity to receive a university education was cheapened. To fill this need in this expanding economy, a lot of people were recruited, I believe. One way to think about it is that a lot of people were recruited from the upper levels of the working class, and there was some mobility from the working class into the professional white-collar class. I guess the question would be: Are those opportunities still there? To an extent...perhaps. But I think the trend over the last twenty years or so has been that those opportunities have narrowed. The same opportunities that were there for people to lead middle class lives aren’t having the return that they used to have.

Niedermier: Santoro says advancing computer technology is eliminating many skilled white-collar jobs the same way industrial technology impacted blue-collar workers 100 years ago. Couple this with higher education costs, rising personal debt and the current weak economy, and he says it’s becoming harder to maintain a middle class lifestyle. But falling from the upper class is very unlikely, because the rich have the resources to weather a down economy or personal crisis.

Santoro: The ability to control capital is considered the best way to make it to the top and stay there. It’s typically not something working class people can count on, with an estimated 1% of Americans controlling nearly 40% of the wealth. But moving up, or at least improving your income, is not impossible.

Niedermier: Raw steel is being stamped into fasteners at Fastener Industries in Berea, a 105-year old company that became employee-owned in 1980. That is, the workers gained control of the capital, like pension funds, and more money is spent on training, while promotions are generally made from within the company. Forty-six-year-old welding supervisor Ron Foreman was hired the year employee ownership began...

Foreman: The average person would probably have left here, if they were lucky, with not even six digits if they worked all year under the previous owner–and he was a very generous person. As far as what they left here with under employee ownership is almost into the million range, some probably even left with a million dollars. Financially, it is a much better package. The only thing you’re going to have when you work under someone else is your job. Here, you have your job and your work experience and you know that each day everybody has to do their job in order to make this place profitable. So you care about other people more so than if you worked under someone else.

Niedermier: The head of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center, John Logue, says employee-owned companies will never make workers wildly rich, but the stock options alone can change lives...

Logue: We do have cases where the accumulation of wealth through company success is substantial enough to change class status. We’ve got folks retiring as machine operators, for instance, at Fastener Industries in Berea, who are retiring with $300-400,000 worth of stock in the company. And that’s a powerful tool. It’s because of the fact that they’ve been working in this system—in Fastener’s case—for 23 or 24 years. They’ve accumulated enough capital to become, by normal Ohio standards, pretty well off, in jobs that otherwise would have moved to South Korea and China...like so much of the rest of the nut and bolt and fastener industries in the Cleveland area.

Niedermier: Nearly nine million Americans are employee owners, but sociologist Leonard Beeghley warns not to expect significant class structure change in the future. The movement tends to be generational...

Beeghley: People who are in jobs that require initiative—that require that people are autonomous and take responsibility for their decisions and that require intellectual activity—tend to teach those traits to their children. And those tend to be (though not always), middle class jobs–professional jobs. People who are in jobs that are highly supervised and there is not a lot of autonomy and not a lot of decision-making responsibility tend to teach their children those kinds of traits. That inhibits mobility. In order to overcome that, you need to be in a good school or you need to meet significant others. People who are significant to you who push you to develop your skills. That doesn’t happen to everyone, it happens only to a minority of people.

Niedermier: If you do not meet that special person, the U.S. Labor Department says the biggest job growth during the next 7 years will be in the computer and health care fields, while manufacturing and construction jobs will only increase slightly.