Even high earners in the U.S.

feel the pressure to have two incomes.

More than 60% of six figure earners, say one income feels nearly impossible to live on.

26% of U.S. households report their basic needs take up more than 90% of their income, and it takes two working parents to afford a middle class lifestyle.

Households where the husband is the single breadwinner have been steadily declining since 1986.

In 2024, nearly half of households had both spouses working outside of the home, and that number rose to two thirds among families with children. Today's financial conversations often focus on the cost of housing, childcare or education, but history shows this shift to a dual income as the norm isn't simply due to rising prices.

If you have the largest employing sectors in the economy not offering reliable, dependable, high-wage, consistent employment, then no family is going to be able to make it on one and probably even two, incomes.

Over the last 50 years, we've seen this decoupling between wages and productivity, and workers have not seen those returns.

In the 1980s, temp jobs started to move into every sector of the economy.

Firms began to outsource jobs to staffing companies.

But not everyone agrees the story is that straightforward.

Any story about people having to send a second worker into the workforce to stay afloat, that's too pessimistic a story to tell, because that would be more plausible to me if men's pay, for instance, had stagnated or declined.

So why do Americans struggle to support a family on a single income? From the 1950s to the 1970s, a single income could support a middle class lifestyle, but only for certain workers.

The Fair Labor Standards Act was written in 1938, where the model form of employment was working in a factory for a manufacturing company that employed 50,000 workers on a long-term basis.

So much of our work experience in the U.S.

doesn't look like that anymore.

There was a time when the working class and the middle class always supplemented the earnings of one worker.

However, what was different about American employment from the 1940s through the 1970s is that the job became more standard. You worked a 40 hour work week.

You had a weekend, you had paid vacations.

And I think we have to look at what made that possible, because it comes from two forms of leverage.

One, that came from workers having more power through unions but it also worked in combination with social and economic policy.

These protections lifted the bottom of the labor market, but they weren't applied universally.

Many women and workers of color were excluded from those protections.

With the 1960s, women and African Americans were certainly working before, they were in the labor market, but they were in the marginal labor markets, the ones with the insecure employment. What really opens up in the 60s with the growth of these kinds of jobs, and with the elimination of racial and gender barriers to employment, is women could really move into the full-time jobs that made employment worth it.

The problem is, is that over the last three decades, those kinds of jobs have been disappearing.

Those have been entirely restructured, and they've been restructured around the model of temp employment.

Temp work was typically reserved for seasonal or clerical work, but that began to change.

In the 1980s, temp jobs started to move into every sector of the economy.

Firms began to outsource jobs to staffing companies.

Large companies outsourced entire departments.

We shifted from thinking about workers as assets, who you really wanted to invest in for the long term, to thinking about workers as liabilities to the bottom line. And here's why this is important and why it really increased people's insecurity so much, is because to qualify for those social policy benefits like unemployment compensation and a social security pension, and for the Fair Labor Standards Act coverage, you have to have the status of employee. And so the more these companies shifted to changing the classification of workers and not having them full time employed, the less access they also had to the social policies that were meant to compensate precisely for these kinds of insecurities.

So the American workforce gets like a double slam.

They're hit by increasingly casualised employment, the undermining of unions and collective bargaining.

But they're also hit by the inability to access the policies that would compensate for that.

Temp contract and contingent work, expanded rapidly from the 1990s through the mid-2010s.

Even today, millions of Americans still work through temp agencies, contract firms or on-demand platforms. App-based gig platforms built on that shift, turning millions of workers into independent contractors, who may have flexible hours but frequently lack stable pay, benefits and core worker protections.

We have 26 million Americans who are working as independent contractors, various forms of temp work or contracted labor.

But others say this picture can be misleading and that gig and contract work make up a much smaller portion of the workforce than headlines suggest.

If you look at objective measures of churn in the labor force, the extent to which people are moving in and out of jobs, those seem to be down, actually, rather than up despite the gig economy.

So people are actually staying in their jobs longer than in the past. Part of that, I think, is that the gig economy is smaller than a lot of people tend to think it is.

It tends to draw people who are looking for the flexibility that non-40-hour-a-week provides, and so they're able to cobble together gigs, with parenthood, with school, with other things that they're doing.

For workers without predictable hours or benefits, even a full-time schedule isn't necessarily enough to guarantee a stable income, or to be able to support a household on a single paycheck. Another factor in the need for two incomes is since the 1970s, wages have diverged from worker productivity.

Hourly wages have grown so slowly over much of the last 50 years. That hasn't happened the entirety of the 50 years, but there are large periods of time when we saw wages essentially grow only as fast as inflation.

I think the wage productivity gap is being overstated because it's comparing the typical worker who productivity may have increased less over time than in the overall workforce.

A lot of researchers, unfortunately, use cost of living adjustments that are known to be less accurate and to overstate the increase in the cost of living. When you use the most sophisticated cost of living adjustments that have been developed by economists inside the federal government and outside of the federal government, over time, you do find pretty solid increases the wages and earnings of both men and women over the long-run.

For today's families, it's not just wages that are causing an issue. It's also the rising cost of everything required to participate in the economy.

Because the costs have been rising so much for so many families. We know the cost of childcare, the cost of health care, the need to be able to earn more money just to keep up necessitated more hours per family.

In the US. childcare costs are between 25 to more than 100% higher than annual rent payments.

Health insurance premiums for family coverage have jumped more than 25% since 2020, slightly outpacing inflation.

Workers wages have increased by 28.6% in that same period. College tuition has increased 197.4% since 1963, and an estimated 5 million unit housing shortfall has helped push rents and mortgage prices far beyond what a single earner can afford.

I think more broadly, there is some economic uncertainty out there and even if you have a job, there is concern that you are going to lose it.

Some economists argue that Americans may be feeling worse off, even as many long-term indicators look better on paper.

If you look at trends, in, say, hourly wages or trends in annual earnings, what you find is some point between 2019 and today, is when you see the high points for both wages and for earnings, both for men and for women.

So I think it's hard to argue that workers are worse off than they were in the past, or that they're even just treading water, especially among women.

Winship says people often fixate on the categories where prices have exploded, such as housing, health care, childcare and higher education.

Even though many goods and services have become cheaper over time relative to income.

There's a lot of real anxiety that's reflected in reality. Prices are a lot higher than they were a few years ago. That said, when you look over longer periods of time and you think about how much prices have increased over 40 years, 50 years, what tends to happen is people focus on a few categories that have seen really big price increases. There are also a number of categories that have gotten a lot cheaper over time, or at least cheaper relative to the increase in income.

Winship also argues the shift to dual-earner households isn't simply economic pressure.

It reflects more opportunities for women and different expectations of what a middle class lifestyle entails today.

Any story about people having to send a second worker into the workforce to stay afloat?

That's too pessimistic a story to tell.

The increase in work among wives in particular, married women in particular, has been just as impressive among the wives of the best earning husbands, the wives of the best educated husbands, as it has been lower down the income scale. So that suggests to me that this is really just broad societal change that we're seeing.

Women have a lot more opportunities than they used to have, and so they're working longer and they're working for higher pay.

And I think a lot more women actually want to work today and have careers. So somehow forcing more of them to stay home would, uh, good luck with that.