Grocery workers fear joining the working poor

Roxie Bauer has raised a daughter – mostly by herself – paid a mortgage for more than 25 years and paid off her car, all on a checker's paycheck from Vons.

Bauer, after 29 years with the supermarket, earns $17.90 an hour, has good health benefits and a pension plan. But life stories like hers are rare these days, and she knows it.

"We are dinosaurs," Bauer said of herself and others in her position. "I don't have a formal education, but I've been able to eke out a decent living."

Fundamental changes in the economy over the last two decades have forced most people in jobs like Bauer's out of the middle class.

Assembly-line work, residential construction labor, work behind the counter of a bank, among many other relatively low-skill jobs, used to provide a comfortable living for millions of Americans. Now, for the most part, they don't.

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