White Courtesy Telephone

Labor Day 2007: A Rising Tide Lifts All Yachts

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Dear Fellow Workers:

Happy Labor Day!  It’s dry and sunny in my east coast village with just enough of a breeze to give my American flag a satisfying snap.

I’m writing because I heard money was a little tight for you.  I’m going to assume you’re making the current minimum wage ($5.85 an hour) and your tax rate is about 15 percent; your housing expenses, including utilities, are $832 per month; your food costs on the “Thrifty Plan” are about $34 per week; you take public transportation to and from work (about $12.50 each week, say); and you pay about $40 per month for the cheapest phone plan.  When I do the math I discover you’re already overspent by $2,631 for the year, leaving you imaginary dollars to buy clothes, do your laundry, and catch the occasional movie, never mind save for your retirement or visit that niece in Columbus.

You might consider ordering a copy of Preparing for a Financial Setback, a handy guide distributed by Northwest Airlines to its employees.  The four-page booklet contains suggestions such as shopping in thrift stores, taking “a date for a walk along the beach or in the woods,” and not being “shy about pulling something you like out of the trash.”

Fortunately, the news isn’t all bad.  Thanks in large part to your efforts, the richest one percent of Americans now earn 15 percent of all income and own 38 percent of all wealth.  There’s also been a boom in the building of mega-yachts, some as long as a football field, creating new labor markets for folks like us.  Low- and moderate-income people by the thousands are now able to start military careers in Iraq while helping to preserve our American way of life.

So suck it up.  And God bless America!

In Case Anybody Asks: Notes on the Report of the CAP Taskforce on Poverty

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This past April, and without much fanfare, the Center for American Progress released the final report of its Taskforce on Poverty.  The report, titled From Poverty to Prosperity: A National Strategy to Cut Poverty in Half, lays out twelve recommendations the authors believe could cut poverty* in half over the next ten years.  Taskforce recommendations range from raising and indexing the minimum wage to promoting unionization to helping former prisoners reintegrate with their communities.  Omitted from the list of recommendations is any mention of universal health care, but who’s going to quibble with a plan that promises to reduce the ranks of the poor so dramatically?

You can download a copy of the report here.   The Poverty and Race Research Action Council invited a range of policy experts and activists to comment on the plan in its July/August 2007 newsletter, available here.

If the body of the Taskforce report provides food for thought, its “Next Steps” section makes for an unsatisfying end to the meal:

In 2009, we will have a new president and a new Congress. Across the nation, there is a yearning for a shared national commitment to build a better, fairer, more prosperous country, with opportunity for all.

There can, and should, be active debate about the best ways to reach a national goal of cutting poverty in half. We hope and believe there is a potential for people of differing parties, ideologies, and stations in life to come together in shared commitment to the goal.

At the same time, we need not and should not wait for the federal government to act. In communities across the nation, policymakers, business leaders, people of faith, and concerned citizens can come together to ask what they can do within their community and how they can join with others to seek a national commitment to cut poverty in half in 10 years …

Yes, I suppose they can. 

In his comments on the report, Herbert Gans, professor of sociology emeritus at Columbia University, calls this a bit of “consensual rhetoric,” pointing out, if I may paraphrase, that the American public doesn’t generally give a pig’s freckle about the poor.

If and when we hear that joyful tintinnabulation of the bells in 2009, will this report be remembered, I wonder?  Will it resonate with a polity that was all too quick to forget the more immediate and powerful promptings of Hurricane Katrina?

_____

* A family of four is considered poor if the family’s income is below $19,971.  By this standard, roughly one in eight Americans were poor in 2005; one in three had incomes below 200 npercent of the federal poverty threshold.

Image source: phillyringers.com

Class-Talk in the Third Sector

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Via Gift Hub : The American Ruling Class, a new documentary from Harper’s magazine editor Lewis Lapham, will air July 30 and 31 on the Sundance Channel.  What follows is a reworking of an earlier post on the subject.

Discussions of socioeconomic class are rare and fleeting in the nonprofit sector.*  This is a great shame.  Thirty years ago, the powerful images and texts of American Pictures taught me the meaning of the word “underclass.”  I didn’t hear the word used again with any frequency until Hurricane Katrina blew ashore.

Nobody talks about the underclass anymore.

Foundations are fortunate to do their work largely independent of government and corporations (including the media).  They have a good chance of introducing the topic of class and sustaining the conversation.  Yet despite continuing reminders about the myth of class mobility in this country, and an oft-stated concern for low-income communities, there are significant barriers to engaging the topic:

1.  Race, not class, structures the primary American narrative of oppression   In their book Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s,  Omi and Winant write that

Historically speaking, the call for “class” unity across racial lines has amounted in practice to an argument that non-whites give up their racially based demands in favor of “class” unity on white terms.  This will not be achieved by appeals to “class unity” or by reliance on “bargaining power theory,” which merely offer an abstraction to minorities confronted by racial inequities in the workplace.

Likewise in the nonprofit world, class-talk is sometimes seen as a distraction from issues that are more clearly rooted in racial antipathy.

2.  Class-talk produces in some a mental cramp   Paul Kingston and his intellectual heirs have argued that American society is essentially classless.  These authors don’t deny that sociologists, political scientists, and others can usefully divide the American public into various income categories.  What they deny is the notion that the members of these categories share “life-defining experiences” that license our referring to them as members of a distinct, coherent class.  Make of this kind of argument what you will.  It reminds me of Bill Clinton’s narrow definition of “sexual relations.”

3.  Class-talk is impolite   Few topics will more quickly cast a pall over middle class dinner parties than the history of class struggle in the United States.  In 2003, the President effectively silenced the critics of his tax cuts by accusing them of fomenting “class warfare.”

How do we incorporate class-talk into nonprofit work in a way that doesn’t elide hundreds of years of racial oppression?  How do we bring the lived experience of the poor and working poor into institutions governed by middle class values and norms?  How do we dispel the myth that America is essentially a classless society?

_____

* Based on recent data from the White Courtesy Telephone Department of Armchair Sociology that conducted a mental survey on this subject approximately 45 minutes ago.

Black and Brown on the Immigration Debate

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As we move closer to the 2008 presidential election, an increasing number of politicians and political operatives will attempt to use the immigration issue to drive a wedge between the Black and Brown communities.

Some will blame the hiring of low-skilled immigrants for the decline in employment among Black American men.  (A very thoughtful article by Bill Fletcher, Jr. at the Black Commentator addresses this issue.)  Others will point to longstanding tensions between African Americans and Latinos. 

But those of us inside and outside these communities need to resist the claim that it’s a zero-sum game.  We need to acknowledge the legacy of hundreds of years of slavery, colonialism, and other forms of oppression.  We also need to begin shifting our focus from the competition for low-paying jobs to guaranteeing a living wage and strong safety net for all Americans.  One immigration advocacy organization puts it this way:

As long as the “ladder” that allows different race and ethnic groups to, over time, climb into other employment opportunities (through training, employment, etc.) is broken, multiple groups will get stuck at and compete along the same rung – for the unskilled, non-stable and, for the most part, non-union jobs in the secondary sector.

According to a new study by the Economic Mobility Project, American men have less earning power today than their fathers did (when adjusted for inflation).  Workers are losing ground.  And we have yet to fully appreciate the links between the dynamics of labor markets in the United States and increasing globalization.

The more our Black and Brown communities are divided and conquered, the less likely they’ll be able to counter the larger forces eroding their earning and savings power.

Flu Shots: Blogging the Approaching Pandemic

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The Department of Health and Human Services is sponsoring a blog summit on preparing for the coming flu pandemic.  I agreed to participate after being assured that bloggers would not be censored and that all comments adhering to reasonable standards would be posted.  You can find influenza and bird flu resources here.  I cross-post my first submission below ...

As with most natural disasters, a flu pandemic will not be an equal opportunity killer.

The winds and rains of Hurricane Katrina buffeted the just and the unjust, the black and the white.  The storm wasn’t selective about the structures it destroyed.

But it didn’t affect all populations equally.  The poor, the elderly, and the infirm were hardest hit, populations least able to shelter properly, or flee, or recover from the storm’s devastating effects.

Likewise, while a flu pandemic can affect anyone, at any income level, those of us who are not already weakened by food insecurity, who have access to quality health care, who can afford to stay home from work to avoid infection—have a much better chance of surviving.

In 2004 there were 46 million uninsured people in the United States, most of them poor or low-income.  Eleven percent of U.S. households in 2005 were food insecure.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 6.4 million working poor in 2000; by 2003 that number had grown to 7.4 million.

I applaud the efforts of the Department of Health and Human Services to help Americans prepare for an influenza pandemic.  But as I see it, the most effective way to help those in the lowest income brackets prepare for this tragedy is to urge this and all Administrations to bolster—rather than dismantle—the safety net for the poor.

The President’s 2008 budget proposed deep reductions in domestic discretionary spending to continue financing tax cuts for those of us who are well-off.  According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:

The discretionary programs in the budget subfunction known as “health care services” include community health centers, HIV/AIDS programs (for U.S. residents), maternal and child health programs, the Indian Health Service, substance abuse and mental health treatment ...  This subfunction is slated for $2.5 billion in cuts over the next five years, relative to the expected fiscal year 2007 funding level adjusted for inflation.  The cuts would reach $861 million, or 4.1 percent, in 2012.

The President’s budget also included a provision that would cut the Food Stamp Program by $740 million over the next five years, taking more than 300,000 low-income people off the program in an average month.

If we want to help all Americans prepare for the inevitable flu pandemic, what’s the sense in decreasing, rather than increasing, the resiliency of our most vulnerable neighbors?  What, if anything, did we learn from the experience of Hurricane Katrina?