I'm Go Mortgage. It's good to have your ear, this week on Mortgaging Company.

Two decades in the making, the intimate and revealing story of two American families to be profiled next week on front line.

As America went from recession to recovery to economic boom, both families have struggled to find their

place in the new economy. I'm joined by journalist Barbara Minor and Barbara Garson.

This deindustrialization, the growing disparity, just didn't happen as some sort of natural

event like the rain falling from the sky, but it really is the result of policy decisions.

We have to raise wages.

Now, to say it is not to do it because 40 years of concentrated effort have gone on to lowering wages.

Not only have we abandoned Americans as workers, we are now abandoning them as consumers.

Thanks for joining us.

Twenty-two years ago, we began to document the story of two working families in Milwaukee,

Wisconsin, families whose breadwinners had lost good-paying factory jobs. Little did we know when we began in 1991

that this would become the defining story of our times. There was hardly anything more

American in the belief that if you work hard, you will be able to make a living and build

a better life for yourself and your children.

But these two families, the Stanleys and the Newman's, like millions of others who thought

they were pursuing the American dream, discovered that something had gone terribly wrong.

Even as they found other jobs, went through retraining, worked any time and overtime, they

were on a downward slope, working

harder and longer than ever for less pay and fewer benefits.

Yet they fought courageously to hold on to their homes, school their kids, and keep them

sliding into poverty.

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