empathy with and ability to make real the lives of working people to
others, and the brilliance and energy with which they do it.
Check 'em out.
-Ed
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/opinion/14ehrenreich.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2
Too Poor to Make the News
"In late May I traveled to Los Angeles ..."
By BARBARA EHRENREICH
NY Times Op-Ed: June 13, 2009
THE human side of the recession, in the new media genre that's been called
"recession porn," is the story of an incremental descent from excess to
frugality, from ease to austerity. The super-rich give up their personal
jets; the upper middle class cut back on private Pilates classes; the merely
middle class forgo vacations and evenings at Applebee's. In some accounts,
the recession is even described as the "great leveler," smudging the
dizzying levels of inequality that characterized the last couple of decades
and squeezing everyone into a single great class, the Nouveau Poor, in which
we will all drive tiny fuel-efficient cars and grow tomatoes on our porches.
But the outlook is not so cozy when we look at the effects of the recession
on a group generally omitted from all the vivid narratives of downward
mobility - the already poor, the estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of the
population who struggle to get by in the best of times. This demographic,
the working poor, have already been living in an economic depression of
their own. From their point of view "the economy," as a shared condition, is
a fiction.
This spring, I tracked down a couple of the people I had met while working
on my 2001 book, "Nickel and Dimed," in which I worked in low-wage jobs like
waitressing and housecleaning, and I found them no more gripped by the
recession than by "American Idol"; things were pretty much "same old." The
woman I called Melissa in the book was still working at Wal-Mart, though in
nine years, her wages had risen to $10 an hour from $7. "Caroline," who is
increasingly disabled by diabetes and heart disease, now lives with a grown
son and subsists on occasional cleaning and catering jobs. We chatted about
grandchildren and church, without any mention of exceptional hardship.
As with Denise Smith, whom I recently met through the Virginia Organizing
Project and whose bachelor's degree in history qualifies her for seasonal
$10-an-hour work at a tourist site, the recession is largely an abstraction.
"We were poor," Ms. Smith told me cheerfully, "and we're still poor."
But then, at least if you inhabit a large, multiclass extended family like
my own, there comes that e-mail message with the subject line "Need your
help," and you realize that bad is often just the stage before worse. The
note was from one of my nephews, and it reported that his mother-in-law,
Peg, was, like several million other Americans, about to lose her home to
foreclosure.
It was the back story that got to me: Peg, who is 55 and lives in rural
Missouri, had been working three part-time jobs to support her disabled
daughter and two grandchildren, who had moved in with her. Then, last
winter, she had a heart attack, missed work and fell behind in her mortgage
payments. If I couldn't help, all four would have to move into the cramped
apartment in Minneapolis already occupied by my nephew and his wife.
Only after I'd sent the money did I learn that the mortgage was not a
subprime one and the home was not a house but a dilapidated single-wide
trailer that, as a "used vehicle," commands a 12-percent mortgage interest
rate. You could argue, without any shortage of compassion, that "Low-Wage
Worker Loses Job, Home" is nobody's idea of news.
In late May I traveled to Los Angeles - where the real unemployment rate,
including underemployed people and those who have given up on looking for a
job, is estimated at 20 percent - to meet with a half-dozen community
organizers. They are members of a profession, derided last summer by Sarah
Palin, that helps low-income people renegotiate mortgages, deal with
eviction when their landlords are foreclosed and, when necessary, organize
to confront landlords and bosses.
The question I put to this rainbow group was: "Has the recession made a
significant difference in the low-income communities where you work, or are
things pretty much the same?" My informants - from Koreatown, South Central,
Maywood, Artesia and the area around Skid Row - took pains to explain that
things were already bad before the recession, and in ways that are
disconnected from the larger economy. One of them told me, for example, that
the boom of the '90s and early 2000s had been "basically devastating" for
the urban poor. Rents skyrocketed; public housing disappeared to make way
for gentrification.
But yes, the recession has made things palpably worse, largely because of
job losses. With no paychecks coming in, people fall behind on their rent
and, since there can be as long as a six-year wait for federal housing
subsidies, they often have no alternative but to move in with relatives.
"People are calling me all the time," said Preeti Sharma of the South Asian
Network, "They think I have some sort of magic."
The organizers even expressed a certain impatience with the Nouveau Poor,
once I introduced the phrase. If there's a symbol for the recession in Los
Angeles, Davin Corona of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy said, it's
"the policeman facing foreclosure in the suburbs." The already poor, he
said - the undocumented immigrants, the sweatshop workers, the janitors,
maids and security guards - had all but "disappeared" from both the news
media and public policy discussions.
Disappearing with them is what may be the most distinctive and compelling
story of this recession. When I got back home, I started calling up experts,
like Sharon Parrott, a policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities, who told me, "There's rising unemployment among all demographic
groups, but vastly more among the so-called unskilled."
How much more? Larry Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute,
offers data showing that blue-collar unemployment is increasing three times
as fast as white-collar unemployment. The last two recessions - in the early
'90s and in 2001 - produced mass white-collar layoffs, and while the current
one has seen plenty of downsized real-estate agents and financial analysts,
the brunt is being borne by the blue-collar working class, which has been
sliding downward since deindustrialization began in the '80s.
When I called food banks and homeless shelters around the country, most
staff members and directors seemed poised to offer press-pleasing tales of
formerly middle-class families brought low. But some, like Toni Muhammad at
Gateway Homeless Services in St. Louis, admitted that mostly they see "the
long-term poor," who become even poorer when they lose the kind of low-wage
jobs that had been so easy for me to find from 1998 to 2000. As Candy Hill,
a vice president of Catholic Charities U.S.A., put it, "All the focus is on
the middle class - on Wall Street and Main Street - but it's the people on
the back streets who are really suffering."
What are the stations between poverty and destitution? Like the Nouveau
Poor, the already poor descend through a series of deprivations, though
these are less likely to involve forgone vacations than missed meals and
medications. The Times reported earlier this month that one-third of
Americans can no longer afford to comply with their prescriptions.
There are other, less life-threatening, ways to try to make ends meet. The
Associated Press has reported that more women from all social classes are
resorting to stripping, although "gentlemen's clubs," too, have been
hard-hit by the recession. The rural poor are turning increasingly to "food
auctions," which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates.
And for those who like their meat fresh, there's the option of urban
hunting. In Racine, Wis., a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he's
supplementing his diet by "shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them
stewed, baked and grilled." In Detroit, where the wildlife population has
mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver is doing a
brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with
vinegar and spices.
The most common coping strategy, though, is simply to increase the number of
paying people per square foot of dwelling space - by doubling up or renting
to couch-surfers. It's hard to get firm numbers on overcrowding, because no
one likes to acknowledge it to census-takers, journalists or anyone else who
might be remotely connected to the authorities. At the legal level, this
includes Peg taking in her daughter and two grandchildren in a trailer with
barely room for two, or my nephew and his wife preparing to squeeze all four
of them into what is essentially a one-bedroom apartment. But stories of
Dickensian living arrangements abound
In Los Angeles, Prof. Peter Dreier, a housing policy expert at Occidental
College, says that "people who've lost their jobs, or at least their second
jobs, cope by doubling or tripling up in overcrowded apartments, or by
paying 50 or 60 or even 70 percent of their incomes in rent." Thelmy Perez,
an organizer with Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, is trying to help an
elderly couple who could no longer afford the $600 a month rent on their
two-bedroom apartment, so they took in six unrelated subtenants and are now
facing eviction. According to a community organizer in my own city,
Alexandria, Va., the standard apartment in a complex occupied largely by day
laborers contains two bedrooms, each housing a family of up to five people,
plus an additional person laying claim to the couch.
Overcrowding - rural, suburban and urban - renders the mounting numbers of
the poor invisible, especially when the perpetrators have no telltale cars
to park on the street. But if this is sometimes a crime against zoning laws,
it's not exactly a victimless one. At best, it leads to interrupted sleep
and long waits for the bathroom; at worst, to explosions of violence.
Catholic Charities is reporting a spike in domestic violence in many parts
of the country, which Candy Hill attributes to the combination of
unemployment and overcrowding.
And doubling up is seldom a stable solution. According to Toni Muhammad,
about 70 percent of the people seeking emergency shelter in St. Louis report
they had been living with relatives "but the place was too small." When I
asked Peg what it was like to share her trailer with her daughter's family,
she said bleakly, "I just stay in my bedroom."
The deprivations of the formerly affluent Nouveau Poor are real enough, but
the situation of the already poor suggests that they do not necessarily
presage a greener, more harmonious future with a flatter distribution of
wealth. There are no data yet on the effects of the recession on measures of
inequality, but historically the effect of downturns is to increase, not
decrease, class polarization.
The recession of the '80s transformed the working class into the working
poor, as manufacturing jobs fled to the third world, forcing American
workers into the low-paying service and retail sector. The current recession
is knocking the working poor down another notch - from low-wage employment
and inadequate housing toward erratic employment and no housing at all.
Comfortable people have long imagined that American poverty is far more
luxurious than the third world variety, but the difference is rapidly
narrowing.
Maybe "the economy," as depicted on CNBC, will revive again, restoring the
kinds of jobs that sustained the working poor, however inadequately, before
the recession. Chances are, though, that they still won't pay enough to live
on, at least not at any level of safety and dignity. In fact, hourly wage
growth, which had been running at about 4 percent a year, has undergone what
the Economic Policy Institute calls a "dramatic collapse" in the last six
months alone. In good times and grim ones, the misery at the bottom just
keeps piling up, like a bad debt that will eventually come due.
***
COMMITTEE OF CORRESPONDENCE FOR DEMOCRACY AND SOCIALISM
INVITES YOU TO A PRESENTATION AND DISCUSSION WITH
CARL DAVIDSON
THE LAY OF THE LAND
GETTING UNITY AND CLARITY ON THE LEFT IN THE OBAMA ERA
THURSDAY, JUNE 18th, 7:00 PM
3910 MELROSE AVENUE, #4, 2ND FLOOR
(Between Virgil and Hoover, near the Vermont exit from the 101 freeway)
For more information, please call 323-661-1905 or Email:
margordon@sbcglobal.net
"The meeting will be a discussion about how leftists and progressives work
in the present period. That will of course include discussion about Obama,
but the main focus will be on our role, and how we win grassroots people
over."
Carl Davidson is a veteran peace and justice organizer and community
technology advocate. Today, he works as webmaster for 'Progressives for
Obama,' field organizer for the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, and a
leading member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and
Socialism. Carl's work during the pre-election period consisted of
organizing among the tens of thousands of people who were excited about
Obama, with the perspective of moving grass-roots people to the Left. He is
the co-author, with Jerry Harris, of CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a
Global Age, available at lulu.com/changemaker. He was a leader of the 1960's
new left, and long active in Chicago politics. Carl now lives and organizes
in Beaver County, Western Pennsylvania, where his family is deeply rooted.
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