NY Times, May 6, 2004 Low-Tech or High, Jobs Are Scarce in India's Boom By AMY WALDMAN
HYDERABAD, India - Two years ago, with the employment market in his drought-stricken rural district as dry as the earth, Bhaliya made his way to this high-tech capital in southern India and found salvation in a low-tech straw broom.
He became a city street sweeper, earning 1,800 rupees a month, or roughly $40. The pay was so low, and his 1,000 rupee-rent for one room in this inflationary city so high, that his wife became a sweeper too, leaving three toddlers in neighbors' care.
Each day since, they have bent to clear errant flotsam from the curbs, and straightened to see the immaculate imagery of the new India: hundreds of billboards advertising cars, mobile phones and Louis Phillipe shirts.
The temptations are forever out of reach, yet Mr. Bhaliya, 25, counts himself lucky. "We have to work to live," he said, knowing better than to ask for more.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/international/asia/06indi.html
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NY Times, May 6, 2004 4-Hour Trek Across New York for 4 Hours of Work, and $28 By JOSEPH BERGER
There are some small mercies to living a two-hour subway and bus ride from a low-paying job.
Intesar Museitef always gets a seat in the morning on the D train because her stop is the second from the line's start in the north Bronx. On the return trip home she always get a seat on the E train because her stop in Queens is its first.
Otherwise, her four-hour trip, which takes her under virtually the full breadth of the city and includes the added torment of two 15-minute bus rides in Queens, is achingly dull.
"It's boring," Ms. Museitef (MOO-seh-tef), a 32-year-old Palestinian immigrant who cares for a frail elderly woman, said as she started her return trip on a recent Tuesday. "To sit for two hours on a train is boring."
Sure, there are suburban commuters from, say, Dutchess County or the Poconos who endure four-hour commuting, but usually they are drawn by Wall Street jobs with large bonuses or less glamorous blue collar jobs with good wages and benefits. Still, some workers in all corners of the city are willing to travel breathtaking distances — sometimes for as many hours as they work — for few dollars and virtually no benefits. They do this because whatever small amount they make is essential.
Ms. Museitef commutes four hours each workday to work just four hours at $7 an hour.
More than 18,000 household workers — nannies, cleaners, home health aides — endure daily trips of 90 minutes or more for jobs paying less than $25,000 a year, according to an analysis of 2000 Census data. Most are immigrant women from the West Indies and South America and elsewhere. (Illegal immigrants, leery of government officials, are often not counted.) These are workers who may travel from eastern Queens across the city to New Jersey, or even from New Jersey through Manhattan and the Bronx to Westchester County, almost always by several trains and buses.
Sociologists say that these workers often have no choice, because they live in the city's poorer precincts while the jobs they need are scattered around the region. In the 1950's, unskilled immigrants could rely on manufacturing jobs clustered in a central place like the Garment District, said Daniel Cornfield, a sociologist at Vanderbilt University who specializes in labor. But manufacturing jobs have since evaporated while much of the low-wage job growth has been in areas like household work.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/nyregion/06COMM.html
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