By Mark Price, Third and State

Labor Day 2012 is behind us, but the challenges confronting the middle class are not.

As we do each year around this time, the Keystone Research Center has released the State of Working Pennsylvania. My co-author, a.k.a El Jefe, had a Labor Day op-ed in the Harrisburg Patriot-News where he laid out the theme of this year's report — namely, that the middle class in Pennsylvania and the U.S. cannot afford another lost decade.

The next three figures lay out the major elements of this year's State of Working Pennsylvania: employment growth over the last decade has been weak (Figure 1.10); as a result, incomes over the last decade declined (Figure 1.11); and in the first year of the recovery and of the new decade, income inequality resumed its growth as the top 1% increased their share of all income (Figure 5.1). 

With job growth weak and many policymakers advocating that we lay off more teachers and continue to put off needed investments in infrastructure, we are very concerned that working and middle-class families may end the next decade with less income from work than they started with in 2010.