HUNTINGTON, W.V. For Tabitha Waugh, it was another typical day of chaos on the sixth floor cancer ward. <\/p>\n
The fire alarm was blaring for the second time that afternoon, prompting patients to stumble out of their rooms. One confused elderly man approached Ms. Waugh, a registered nurse at St. Marys Medical Center here, but she had no time to console him. An aide was hollering from another room, where a patient sat dazed on the edge of his bed, blood pooling on the floor from the IV he had yanked from his vein. <\/p>\n
Hey, big guy, can you lay back in bed? she asked, as she cleaned the patient before inserting a new line. He winced. Hold my hand, O.K.? she said. <\/p>\n
Ms. Waugh, who is 30 and the main breadwinner in her family of four, still had three hours to go before the end of a 12-hour shift. But despite the stresses and constant demands, all the hard work was paying off. <\/p>\n
Her wage of nearly $27 an hour provides the mainstay for a comfortable life that includes a three-bedroom home, a pickup truck and a new sport utility vehicle, tumbling classes for her 3-year-old, Piper, and dozens of bright blue Thomas the Tank Engine cars heaped under the double bed of her 6-year-old, Collin. <\/p>\n
Nicole Bengiveno\/The New York Times Tabitha Waugh, 30, a registered nurse at St. Marys Medical Center in Huntington, W.Va., is the main breadwinner in her family of four. The daughter of a teachers aide and a gas station manager, Ms. Waugh, like many other hard-working and often overlooked Americans, has secured a spot in a profoundly transformed middle class. While the group continues to include large numbers of people sitting at desks, far fewer middle-income workers of the 21st century are donning overalls. Instead, reflecting the biggest change in recent years, millions more are in scrubs. <\/p>\n
We used to think about the men going out with their lunch bucket to their factory, and those were good jobs, said Jane Waldfogel, a professor at Columbia University who studies work and family issues. Whats the corresponding job today? Its in the health care sector. <\/p>\n
In 1980, 1.4 million jobs in health care paid a middle class wage: $40,000 to $80,000 a year in todays money. Now, the figure is 4.5 million. <\/p>\n
The pay of registered nurses now the third-largest middle-income occupation and one that continues to be overwhelmingly female has risen strongly along with the increasing demands of the job. The median salary of $61,000 a year in 2012 was 55 percent greater, adjusted for inflation, than three decades earlier. <\/p>\n
And it was about $9,000 more than the shriveled wages of, say, a phone company repairman, who would have been more likely to head a middle-class family in the 1980s. Back then, more than a quarter of middle-income jobs were in manufacturing, a sector long dominated by men. Today, it is just 13 percent. <\/p>\n
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Read more here:<\/p>\n
Health Care Opens Middle-Class Path, Taken Mainly by Women<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" HUNTINGTON, W.V. Continue reading