...don't you have to take challenge the
myths, of prosperity, of the bootstrap, of a secure middle-class?
A New Kind Of
Poverty
Anna Quindlen in Newsweek, Dec
1st issue
Winter
flits in and out of New York City in the late fall, hitching a ride on the
wind that whips the Hudson River. One cold morning not long ago, just as day
was breaking, six men began to shift beneath their blankets under a stone
arch up a rise from the water. In the shadow of the newest castle-in-the-air
skyscraper midwifed by the Baron Trump, they gathered their possessions. An
hour later they had vanished, an urban mirage.
There's a new kind of homelessness in the
city, and a new kind of hunger, and a new kind of need and humiliation, but
it has managed to stay as invisible as those sleepers were by sunup. "What
we're seeing are many more working families on the brink of eviction," says
Mary Brosnahan, who runs the Coalition for the Homeless. "They fall behind
on the rent, and that's it, they're on the street." Adds Julia Erickson, the
executive director of City Harvest, which distributes food to soup kitchens
and food pantries, "Look at the Rescue Mission on Lafayette Street. They
used to feed single men, often substance abusers, homeless. Now you go in
and there are bike messengers, clerks, deli workers, dishwashers, people who
work on cleaning crews. Soup kitchens have been buying booster seats and
highchairs. You never used to see young kids at soup kitchens."
America
is a country that now sits atop the precarious latticework of myth. It is
the myth that work provides rewards, that working people can support their
families. It's a myth that has become so divorced from reality that it might
as well begin with the words "Once upon a time." According to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, 1.6 million New Yorkers, or the equivalent of the
population of Philadelphia, suffer from "food insecurity," which is a fancy
way of saying they don't have enough to eat. Some are the people who come in
at night and clean those skyscrapers that glitter along the river. Some pour
coffee and take care of the aged parents of the people who live in those
buildings. The American Dream for the well-to-do grows from the bowed backs
of the working poor, who too often have to choose between groceries and
rent.
Even
if you've never been to the Rescue Mission, all the evidence for this is in
a damning new book called "The Betrayal
of Work" by Beth Shulman, a book that should be required reading
for every presidential candidate and member of Congress. According to
Shulman, even in the go-go '90s one out of every four American workers made
less than $8.70 an hour, an income equal to the government's poverty level
for a family of four. Many, if not most, of these workers have no health
care, sick pay or retirement provisions.
We
salve our consciences, Shulman writes, by describing these people as "low
skilled," as though they're not important or intelligent enough to deserve
more. But low-skilled workers
today are better educated than ever before, and they constitute the linchpin
of American industry. When
politicians crow that happy days are here again because jobs are on the
rise, it's these jobs they're really talking about. Five
of the 10 occupations expected to grow big in the next decade are in the
lowest-paying job groups. And
before we sit back and decide that that's just the way it is, it's
instructive to consider the rest of the world.
While the bottom 10 percent of
American workers earn just 37 percent of our median wage, according to
Shulman, their counterparts in other industrialized countries earn upwards
of 60 percent. And those are
countries that provide health care and child care, which cuts the economic
pinch considerably.
In
America we console ourselves with the bootstrap myth, that anyone can rise,
even those who work two jobs and still have to visit food pantries to feed
their families. It is a beloved myth now more than ever, because the working
poor have become ever more unsympathetic. Almost 40 years ago, when Lyndon
Johnson declared war on poverty, a family with a car and a Dutch Colonial in
the suburbs felt prosperous and, in the face of the president's call to
action, magnanimous. Poverty seemed far away, in the shanties of the South
or the worst pockets of urban blight. Today that same family may well feel
impoverished, overwhelmed by credit-card debt, a second mortgage and the
cost of the stuff that has become the backbone of American life. When the
middle class feels poor, the poor have little chance for change, or even
recognition. Does anyone think twice about the woman who turns down the
spread on the hotel bed?
A
living wage, affordable health care and housing, the bedrock understanding
that it's morally wrong to prosper through the casual exploitation of those
who make your prosperity possible. It's a tall order, I suppose. The lucky
thing for many Americans is that they don't even have to see or think about
it. The office hallways get mopped somehow, the shelves get stocked at the
stores. And on Thanksgiving Day, children will be pushed up to the table for
a free meal in a church basement or a soup kitchen, with the understanding
that that is the point of the holiday--a day of plenty in a life of want.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/997103.asp?0dm=N11QO
