There is a constant refrain from union officials and their
allies in the media, academia and politics about the need to
strengthen unions to restore the vanishing middle class. Being
unencumbered by too much formal education, such complaints seem
very strange to me. In our relatively classless society, terms
like "middle class" are usually defined by household income and
household income is analyzed by quintiles, or fifths. The third
quintile is considered to be the middle class, the second the
lower middle class and the fourth the upper middle class, the
first the poor and the fifth the wealthy. It is impossible for
quintiles to disappear, vanish or even shrink. After all, a
fifth is a fifth. (This analysis does not, of course, apply to
fifths of good whiskey. They have been known to vanish,
sometimes rapidly. I have witnessed this myself.) Perhaps then,
those who complain about a vanishing middle class believe that
the purchasing power of the middle quintiles is diminishing.
That, for example, the average h