Barbara Ehrenreich August 2001.
The view from the White House, not to mention much of Capitol Hill, is idyllic.
True, there are a few
blotches on the landscape--a queasy
stock market and what conservatives see as a long-running
deterioration of America's core
moral values. But other than that, what's to complain? Americans are
gratefully cashing in their tax
rebates to redo the kitchen counters or pay off some credit card bills. Welfare
reform has been declared a universal
success, with more than 60 percent of former recipients making their
own way in the job market. Unemployment
is yesterday's problem, and the official poverty rate has
reached a comfortingly low 12
percent.
But look more closely and the scenery becomes a whole lot grimmer. On July
24, the Washington,
D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute
released a report showing that 29 percent of American families with
young children--precisely the
sort of families that policymakers should be most concerned about--do not
earn enough to live at any acceptable
level of comfort and security.
The EPI researchers got to this appallingly high number by calculating the
basic--make that very
basic--budget a family needs to
live on. This is a budget that includes health insurance, child care costs,
and
telephone, but no meals out, vacations,
movies, cigarettes, beer, or other routine middle class indulgences.
So, for nearly a third of American
families, things that the more affluent take for granted--like Internet
access, video rentals, and occasional
cab rides--are almost impossible luxuries.
But they get by, don't they? Not exactly.
Of the families who earned less than the "basic" budget, which amounts to
$33,511 for a family of four,
more than 70 percent worried about
food, sometimes missed rent payments, and/or had to rely on an
emergency room for their medical
care. Nearly 30 percent reported facing far more dire hardships--having
to miss meals, forgoing needed
medical care, being evicted from their housing.
In a purely selfish way, I'm relieved by all this statistical bad news: At
least it shows that the conditions I
faced while researching my recent
book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, were not due
entirely to my own bad luck or
incompetence.
I spent a total of three months, in three different cities, attempting to
support myself on the wages I could
earn as an entry-level worker--as
a waitress, a hotel housekeeper, a maid with a housecleaning service, a
nursing home aide, and a Wal-Mart
floor clerk. At the risk of spoiling the story for you, the result was that
I
could not make ends meet, not
with one job, anyway. I averaged $7/hour, an amount that fell tragically
short of my barebones expenses--gas,
food, and, above all, rent.
My co-workers had various strategies for coping.
Many of them shared expenses with another breadwinner--a husband, boyfriend, or grown child.
A surprisingly high number worked more than one job--typically an eight-hour
shift followed by a six-hour
one--an arrangement that is utterly
destructive to family life as well as health and stamina.
Most passed on the company's health insurance, simply because they couldn't
afford to pay the employee
contribution, which was often
well over $100 a month.
Possibly some of them received help from the government in the form of food
stamps or the Earned Income
Tax Credit, although I never once
heard these programs mentioned.
But some of my co-workers were
clearly not coping.
I worked alongside people who turned out to be homeless, although in the
peculiar hierarchy of poverty,
they didn't consider themselves
homeless as long as they had a van or a car to sleep in.
Others were not getting enough to eat, and not, as I first imagined, because they were dieting.
Lunch, in low-wage America, can mean a small-size bag of Doritos or a few hot dog rolls.
What my experience shows anecdotally, and the EPI's "Hardships in America"
report shows far more
systematically, is that we've
been fooling ourselves with the official poverty level, now pegged at $17,463
for a family of four. That number
is still calculated by the archaic method of taking the bare bones cost of
food for a family of a given size
and multiplying this number by three. Yet food is relatively inflation-proof,
at least compared to medical care
and housing costs. Rents especially have gone through the roof: I found a
half-size trailer renting for
$625 a month, a room in a genuinely creepy residential motel for $250 a week.
But the government persists in
believing that "low-rent" is an appropriate synonym for "poor."
There's another reason for our leaders' inability to see the true extent
of economic misery in America:
They're used to thinking of poverty
as a consequence of unemployment. Hence, for example, the optimistic
assumption that welfare recipients
would be lifted out of poverty once they were hustled into the workforce.
But the relatively high-paying,
traditionally unionized blue collar jobs that brought an earlier generation
into
the middle class have been deindustrialized
out of existence. What's left are the service and retail jobs--and
a new world of relentless toil,
rewarded by poverty-level wages.
If the consequences of this massive economic shift are almost invisible from
Pennsylvania Avenue, they are
painfully evident to America's
hard-pressed charities.
According to the hunger-relief organization America's Second Harvest, food
banks all over the country are
experiencing "a torrent of need
which [they] cannot meet," and the U.S. Conference of Mayors reports that
67 percent of the adults requesting
emergency food aid are now working people with jobs.
Almost everyone--94 percent of Americans, according to a 2000 poll conducted
by Jobs for the Future, a
Boston-based employment research
firm--agrees that "people who work full time should be able to earn
enough to keep their families out
of poverty." When that straightforward proposition no longer holds, then
the social contract, at least
as I always understood it, is no longer in force. And it is hard to imagine
a more
serious abrogation of "America's
core moral values" than that.
We have a choice: either raise all wages to a "living wage" level or greatly
expand the government programs
that make life a little easier
for low-wage families--food stamps, health insurance, child care subsidies,
the
Earned Income Tax Credit, and--yes--welfare
for families whose breadwinners must stay home as
caregivers for the very young,
the elderly, or the chronically ill. Ideally, we should do both.
At 4.5 percent unemployment, most Americans who can work have jobs. Now it's
the system that isn't
working.
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Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist
for The Progressive and the author of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not)
Getting By in America" (Metropolitan
Books, 2001).