Thanks for posting, Mike. Both interesting and depressing. I read
Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed" a few years ago and may still have it somewhere
on my shelves. What it suggested is that there is a third world in the US, the
wealthiest country in the world. What Ehrenreich says in the current article
is that the American third world is sinking, perhaps into a fourth world.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: Michael Gurstein
To: [email protected]
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2009 10:13 PM
Subject: [Ottawadissenters] FW: Too Poor to Make the News
Apropos of Arthur's recent note...
M
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2009 6:36 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Too Poor to Make the News
Too Poor to Make the News
By BARBARA EHRENREICH
The New York Times
June 14, 2009 Op-Ed Contributor
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/opinion/14ehrenreich.html?_r=1
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.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of
"This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided
Nation."
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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