And if wages do show any sign of creeping up, count on Uncle Alan to step in and stomp on them. Alan Greenspan, as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, is the ruling authority over our nation's monetary policy, and he hates wage increases. You see, if wages rise, they might possibly pinch corporate profits ever so slightly, and this might spook your big Wall Street investors, causing the high-flying stock prices of corporations to slip a notch. Since today's upper-class prosperity is built almost entirely on the bloated prices of those corporate stocks, both parties are determined that nothing should spook those investors, even if this means keeping Flo down. It's really a choice of who you want to help-the few who profit from stock prices, or the many who depend on decent wages. Both parties have made the same choice -- Greenspan, first appointed by President Reagan and reappointed by Presidents Bush and Clinton, has been their bipartisan hit man on Flo. There's no relief in sight for the poor lady, either, since both Democrat Gore and Republican Bush have signaled that they want Uncle Alan back for yet another term. It's a convoluted process, but essentially Greenspan uses the Fed's power over interest rates to hammer Flo, much like some clod might use a sledgehammer to swat a fly. At the slightest hint (even if imagined) that it's possible sometime in the future for wages somewhere to rise even negligibly ... Greenspan pounces. This guy hunts down wage hikes like Joe McCarthy used to hunt down commies, and he'll use every power the government has to keep working people's paychecks down. Last summer the cold-eyed, pursed-lipped Greenspan openly urged Congress to bring in more immigrants, using them as wage-busters: "1 have always thought ... we should be carefully focused on [what] skilled people from abroad and unskilled people from abroad ... can contribute to this country.... If we can open up our immigration rolls significantly, that will clearly make [wage inflation] less and less of a potential problem."
Add to Washington's wage-busting policies the delight that Wall Street takes in corporate downsizing, and you have a surefire formula for holding wages (and people) down. The politicians who talk so loud and lovingly about America's job- creating machine go mute on the topic of America's job-destroying machine, which has been ruthlessly efficient. Challenger, Gray & Christmas is a highly regarded employment firm that tracks job cuts daily, and it reports that companies have been eliminating some sixty-four thousand jobs a month, most of which are the higher-paying jobs that come with health care, pensions, and vacation time. It gets little media coverage, but downsizing in the late nineties has been more rampant than it was in the eighties and early nineties, when it was a major media story and led to Clinton's '92 presidential victory. Remember his slogan, "It's the economy, stupid," and his pledge to create "good jobs at good wages"? Instead, he learned that if he just laid low, like Brer Fox, while corporations punted those jobs, Wall Street investors would cheer lustily and run up the stock price for the companies doing this "streamlining," then the media would focus on the lightning flash of the Dow Jones average, and he would get credit for presiding over a thunderous, stock-driven boom.
Clinton's self-congratulatory claims about job creation and prosperity for all call to mind "Boss Daley," the longtime mayor of Chicago, who once said with a slip of the tongue, "We shall reach greater and greater platitudes of achievement." The President and other politicians have averted their eyes from the massive loss of good middle-class jobs, hoping that if they don't see it, maybe no one else will either. But working families already know all about it, of course, since they know the people being punted ... and fear they'll be next. Stephanie Schmidt, an economist with the Urban Institute, surprised herself when she did a paper titled "Workers' Beliefs About Their Own Job Security,'' published in 1999. She had assumed that all the upbeat reports on stock gains and job creation would have just about everyone loaded with optimism. Newsweek had even done a cover story called "The Year of the Employee." It went on at great length about "this white hot job market," claiming that people want to be fired because they get such "hefty severance packages." Besides, said the magazine, today's lucky job seekers can take their choice of job offers that not only include "stunning pay increases and gold-plated stock options" but also such perks as being allowed to bring your dog to work (complete with company-supplied Milk-Bones). "It's the revenge of the downsized," Newsweek prattled.
But Schmidt found that most working people must not have read that issue of the magazine. Instead, workers today have as much job anxiety-fear of losing their jobs-as in the bad old recessionary days prior to Clinton's election, and they're even more scared that if they lose their current job, they won't find another one as good in terms of pay and benefits. She also found that this insecurity is no longer the burden of blue-collar workers alone but now has permeated the white-collar world as well.
Lest you think such anxiety is mere paranoia, take a peek behind the glowing job-creation numbers that politicians and the media toss around. "Job Growth Remains Strong," blared the headline on an Associated Press story in May of 1999, reporting that 234,000 new jobs had been created the previous month. But what kind of jobs? Not high-paying manufacturing positions -- indeed, twenty-nine thousand of those had been lost during the month. Instead, the bulk of the additional jobs were in the low-paying service sector, including eighteen thousand new hires by temporary help firms, twenty-three thousand in health-care services, and sixty-four thousand in restaurants and bars.
Yet, the public keeps being told not to sweat the loss of America's manufacturing jobs, because the future for the middle class is in high-tech "knowledge jobs," so "cross that bridge to the twenty-first century," as President Clinton says repeatedly. Al Gore flatly proclaims that 60 percent of new jobs will require advanced technological skills, and both George W. Bush and Bill Bradley echo the mantra that the "new economy" means you've got to be a college-educated techie.
But this is just another middle-class mugging. Education analyst Richard Rothstein of the New York Times reports that in the next decade, "employers will hire more than three times as many cashiers as engineers. They will need more than twice as many food-counter workers, waiters, and waitresses than all the systems analysts, computer engineers, mathematicians, and database administrators combined." He adds that "we already enroll enough college students to fill foreseeable vacancies in professional fields," yet, 'corporations and their political puppets are deliberately flooding the job market with overeducated workers - a cynical ploy that will turn the middle-class's high tech future into low-paid work. The real job market is decidedly low tech. Between now and 2006, according to Clinton's own Bureau of Labor Statistics, the thirty fastest-growing job categories include only seven that require even a bachelor's degree. Most of the other twenty-three jobs are decidedly low-tech, with more than half of them paying less than $18,000 a year. Here's the real "middle class" future, ranked in order of the occupations expecting the most job growth:
EDUCATION / MEDIAN ANNUAL PAY / EDUCATION OR TRAINING REQUIRED
Cashiers / $12,844 / Short-term on-the-job training
Registered nurses / $36,244 / Associate degree
Salespersons, retail / $19,344 / Short-term on-the-job training
Truck drivers / $25,012 / Short-term on-the-job training
Home health aides / $15,184 / Short-term on-the-job training
Teacher aides and educational assistants / $13,312 / Short-term on-the-job training
Nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants / $15,184 / Short-term on-the-job training
Receptionists / $17,628 / Short-term on-the-job training
Child-care workers / $12,324 / Short-term on-the-job training
Clerical supervisors and managers / $28,860 / Work experience
Marketing and sales worker supervisors / $26,988 / Work experience
Maintenance repairers, general utility / $25,220 / Long-term on-the-job training
Food counter, fountain, and related workers / $12,116 / Short-term on-the-job training
Food preparation workers / $13,728 / Short-term on-the-job training
Hand packers and packagers / $16,120 / Short-term on-the-job training
Guards / $17,472 / Short-term on-the-job training
General office clerks / $19,344 / Short-term on-the-job training
Waiters and waitresses / $14,092 / Short-term on-the-job training
Adjustment clerks / $21,580 / Short-term on-the-job training
Cooks, short order and fast food / $13,728 / Short-term on-the-job training
Personal and home care aides / $14,820 / Short-term on-the-job training
Food service and lodging managers / $23,816 / Work experience
Medical assistants / $22,412 / Moderate length on-the-job training
(Source: Bureau of labor Statistics)
I AIN'T GOT NO HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE
When she was First Lady, Nancy Reagan received a letter from a single mom whose job paid so little she had to use food stamps to help make ends meet for her family. She was getting only $27 a week in stamps, which didn't buy a lot of groceries, but Ronald Reagan was on his high horse at the time railing that these "handouts" for food should be slashed (even while the Gipper was also demanding that much fatter handouts to Pentagon weapons contractors be grossly increased - a perverted policy of beating plowshares into swords). The letter writer was upset by the President's political rant at her expense and wanted to know directly from the First Lady how she thought a family could get the nourishment it needed on less than $27. The working mother did get a response, though not one she could have anticipated: The First Lady sent a White House recipe for crab-stuffed artichokes. Cost-per-serving: $20.
Her office later claimed there had been a mix-up in the mail room, but Nancy's "Let them eat stuffed artichokes" incident is a pretty fair representation of the attitude that Washington has had ever since the Reagan years, not only toward matters of poverty but also toward matters of deep concern to millions of middle-class people-especially those paid under $30,000 a year, which is roughly half of us. In our Land of Plenty, not only is this half of Americans caught in a wage squeeze, but they're also caught in a health-care squeeze (a fourth of them are without any coverage at all), a pension squeeze (six out of ten have no pension), and another squeeze that receives almost no publicity: housing. Since most politicians and the media live in upscale neighborhoods and have grown oblivious to "how the other half lives," it would likely surprise them to hear that schoolteachers, bank tellers, computer programmers, police officers, secretaries, travel agents, firefighters, hair stylists, latte-slingers at Starbucks, and others whom they brush by in their busy lives are unable to afford skyrocketing apartment rents, much less the purchase price of today's homes.
Indeed, like the wage squeeze, the housing squeeze is buried in a blizzard of blithesome statistics. "How can you say the middle class is hard hit, Hightower," asked an incredulous Pittsburgh caller to my radio talk show, "when the papers are full of stories about people everywhere buying new houses?" He was right about the news coverage: "Sales of new homes rose in November to a record," exulted a 1999 New York Times piece. "Low mortgage rates and consumer optimism pushed up sales of new single-family houses.... The housing market is on track to register a third consecutive yearly record," the Times marveled. But, as Yogi Berra once,. said, "Half the lies they tell me aren't true," and the full truth behind today's redhot housing stats is that they hide more than they reveal.
It's true enough that construction abounds-just follow the sounds. From sea to shining sea concrete is being poured, power saws are buzzing, nail guns are going bam-bam-bam, and new homes are being raised like totems to the Gods of Prosperity. If you need a house, just reach out and grab one, since houses aplenty are being built. But this "grab one" attitude reminds me of a series of radio and television ads that Fort Worth oil-well magnate Eddie Chiles ran incessantly in the late seventies. Known as "Mad Eddie" for his right-wing diatribes against Jimmy Carter, his ads closed with this tag line, delivered in a hard Texas twang: "If yew don't own an awl well, git one!"
The problem with "gitting" either an oil well or a house is money. This is where the economic powers clobber the housing-hungry middle class coming and going-most folks have seen no pay hikes coming, even as they've seen housing prices going, going, going ... right through the roof. For them, the construction boom is just a lot of noise.
Practically all of those power saws and nail guns we hear are at work on expansive and expensive homes for the bankers, lawyers, executives, m,,4ia managers, aJ,1d politicians. In Austin, the high-tech boom town where I live, construction is roaring. A recent article, for example, reports that sixty-two more homes are going up in the Costa Belia subdivision. Grab one, if you can - this is a gated subdivision in which the developers require that each house contain at least 5,500 square feet of living space and at least a three-car garage. My entire block in south Austin doesn't have that much square footage. Prices go as high as $5 million, though, in fairness, I should note that a mix of economic classes are welcome at Costa Bella; some homes there sell for as little as $750,000. Probably starter houses.
OK, your bankers, bosses, and big shots need housing, too, so we can't begrudge the industry for meeting this market demand. But where is the industry when it comes to the swelling demand for homes priced at $80,000 or under? I'm not talking here about public housing projects or federally subsidized housing (though as the number of the working poor has risen so dramatically in the nineties, and as Washington has whacked funding for housing programs, there's a surging need for this housing, too). Rather, I'm talking about the vaunted marketplace that we're told is so omniscient that it responds to all demand. Well, there's a tidal wave of demand that has built up for modest homes with mortgages that a family making $20-$25-$30,000 a year can afford without having to sell off their kids. Try to find such a house.
Sticking with the Austin example, the city council approved a measure last year to offer a mortgage discount to police officers, firefighters, and paramedics if they buy a home in the city. At present, the very people we entrust with our safety and lives, people who should be a living part of our community, mostly commute from outlying areas, chiefly because housing prices are through the roof. Rodolfo Estrada has been an APD patrol officer for five years. He lives in an apartment in the city but is looking to buy a home for his family. He earns about $39,000 a year, but he says, "I've been looking in the city of Austin, and I've also looked in Hays County [to the south of us]. I'd prefer to stay in the city, but it's so expensive." More than half of Austin's police officers live outside of the city they are sworn to protect, and about half of our firefighters are also out-of-towners.
The rule of thumb is that you can't spend more than 30 percent of your monthly pay on housing and still have enough to cover food, car, and other expenses. Most bankers, however, are even stricter, refusing to grant a mortgage that takes more than 25 percent of your paycheck. For someone making $30,000, this comes to $625 a month. You're going to go house shopping on that?
Forget a new house. Homebuilders today would get a hernia from laughing uncontrollably at you if you came around flashing that kind of money. Hey, they'd say between bursts of guffawing, we'll sell you one of these three-car garages for $625 a month. Of course, the square footage in some of the garages being built would do nicely for the modest-home market, but it's way more profitable for developers to serve the luxury clients, so that's where practically all of them have gone. In the small but growing city of Austin, there are some 350 developers putting up some ten thousand homes a year. Less than 5 percent of these houses, however, are priced below $100,000. Of the 350 developers, only a couple are even trying to build for the rising surge of Austin families who make under $30,000 a year, and they are faced with indifference and outright rejection from the financial community. One who is trying to respond to these families is Haythem Dawlett, a developer who says lenders had zero knowledge about this market and even less interest in serving it. Just to prove that there is a demand, Dawlett and his partners built three model houses with their own funds, then held an open house. They got forty-eight buyers in a single weekend. Those homes got built, but still the lenders and builders hold back, not because these homes aren't profitable, but because they are not mega-profitable like the high-end houses, so this gusher of a market goes begging.
So, you say, I don't have to have a new house, I'll just get a used one. Well, get in line fella. The kind of used home you've got in mind already has someone using it, and even if they're moving out there's a long line of buyers at the doorstep. Since the industry is no longer building this scale of house, the supply of them is so low that even the most modest old houses are being priced way beyond that six-and-a-quarter a month you've got in your pocket, especially if they're in a neighborhood being gentrified, as so many are now that more upscale buyers decide they want to live near downtown rather than out in the scenic hills, the lake region, or other primo spots of ultra-urbia.
Not that every old house is priced out of reach. If you're willing to go far enough out, you can find affordable housing around every city. Here in the Austin area, for example, Clyde Puckett will sell his house to you, and the price might be right. Drive about thirteen miles from Austin to the neighboring town of Manor, then go another seven and a half miles northeast from beautiful downtown Manor and there you'll find Puckett's place, just off Hog Eye Road. Local humor writer John Kelso, after hearing so many complaints that housing here has become prohibitively expensive, went looking for affordable and came across Clyde, who's thinking of selling because even Hog Eye Road is getting too crowded for him. He says there are nearby neighbors now, and their dogs make . it impossible for him to let his chickens run loose in his yard anymore. Besides, he no longer feels entirely comfortable stepping out on his front porch to take a piss.
His house is what the real estate people might call a "fixer-upper." It's a trailer that he bought twenty-three years ago, plus a wooden structure adjacent to it that is presently filled with trash. "I was tearing it down," says Clyde of the wooden building, "but I ran out of steam." So it's still there, lending a bit of rustic charm and available for whatever creative whimsy the new owner might bring to it. He concedes that the main house-the trailer-could use a new floor, though he's kept it patched up pretty well, including having put a Neighborhood Crime Watch sign over "one of the bad spots." But, he notes proudly, "I don't have a rat or a snake. I got six cats, and they run a tight ship."
The Puckett Place sits on two acres that offer exciting landscaping opportunities. At the moment, the grounds are graced with an abundance of "yard art," including eight rusting vehicles, a pile of used tires, an oil drum, a supermarket basket, an old kitchen sink, and many other fine pieces. "If I didn't live around junk, I don't know what I'd do," Clyde says of his collectibles. Much of the junk is inoffensive, though, because it's invisible, covered with weeds that range up to fourteen feet high. "I'm a naturalist," says the keeper of this kingdom. "I think if the good Lord put it out there to grow, give it a chance." Writer Kelso, who took a tour of the place, says there is no pool or hot tub, but there's a sizable low patch near the road with standing water in it, which the realtors would describe as a "natural habitat." Clyde, being more down to earth, simply warns: "Don't fall in this pond, or a bullfrog will eat you."
What will it cost to make all this yours? Clyde says, "I imagine I could get $40,000 if I cleaned it up and mowed a little bit." Alright, alright, you scream in frustration, the American dream of home ownership has been put out of my reach, so I'll simply have to settle for renting a place. Good luck. Affordable apartments are becoming a thing of the past, too. Again using Austin as a bellwether, rents have almost doubled here during the nineties and are now averaging nearly $900 a month for a small, two-bedroom apartment-well beyond the budgets of the middle-classers I'm talking about. Damion McKeon, an Austin firefighter earning $30,000 a year, says he can't touch an apartment here: "I would be pretty much scrimping by if I lived in Austin. The rent is astronomical here." Because there are so many people chasing so few apartments, even complexes that the experts refer to by the architectural expression "a dump" are bringing premium prices.
The good news is that apartment construction in Austin is up in the last couple of years. But these are not being built for working stiffs. Of the 4,312 apartment units built in 1998, only 5 percent were moderately priced. Indeed, a bitter irony for the construction crews building these apartments is that they're averaging maybe ten bucks an hour and have a hard time finding anything they can afford to live in. They sure won't live in these new complexes, which are mostly luxury nests for the affluent, including a new category of upscale rentals called "corporate accommodations," catering to those executives needing an in-town place.
Just a couple of blocks from Threadgill's World Headquarters, the great Southern-cooking Mecca from which we broadcast our daily radio program, is a downtown apartment complex named River Woods. It's nothing fancy, but its twelve brick buildings, nestled among a dozen graceful, old live oak trees is plenty pleasant. The cars parked here are mostly American with a lot of miles on them: Malibus, some Ford pickups, a low-slung Camaro, a Jeep, a meter-reader's truck, several vans, a '72 Lincoln Continental, a Mercury Cougar, and two dump trucks. There's no swimming pool, but there are barbecue grills on the balconies, children's toys on the patios, and one apartment with a couple of prized racing pigeons in a cage. River Woods is a place of two- and three-job working families, and they're paying $550 for a two-bedroom here. Located on South Congress Avenue within sight of the state capitol building, the complex is the kind that most cities need more of, yet this one is about to be bulldozed. Dallas mega-developer Trammel Crow has bought the property, and the Austin newspaper has reported excitedly that he is contributing to our downtown's revitalization by planning to raze River Woods and erect some 250 fabulous new luxury apartments going for $1,500 a month and up. Crow's new digs are to bear the appropriately toney name of Reserve on Congress. Current residents have already been told to take their Malibus, barbecue grills, and pigeons and kindly fly the coop, get out of the way, vamoose.
Also in downtown Austin is Sixth Street West, a low-cost apartment complex in a neighborhood that has long prided itself in its economic and racial diversity. But the boom at the top of the economic ladder is destroying the diversity. Ruth Granjeno, her husband, and her two boys, Jose and Erik, are residents of the complex, which has 129 units for folks of modest means, with apartments priced between $350 and $600 a month. She works as a janitor and is a housecleaner for five nearby families, plus she is vice president of the PTA for Matthews Elementary, the school her boys attend, only five blocks away. She has lived there fourteen years. "This location is safe," Ruth says. "1 walk to work. 1 walk to the houses I clean. 1 know everyone." A grocery store, a washateria, a dry cleaner, a drugstore, and other services are right there in her neighborhood. It is what city living should be for families like hers.
But along comes Royce Gourley Jr. He owns ten apartment complexes in Austin, and in 1999 he added Sixth Street West to his fiefdom. This is a hot and happening area now, with antique shops, beaucoup boutiques, sidewalk cafes, espresso joints, and other wondrous improvements coming to the neighborhood. So many improvements that families like Ruth Granjeno's are viewed by developers as low-class eyesores who need to be sent packing. Last summer, Gourley tried to do just that-one month before school was to start, he started handing out thirty-day eviction notices to Ruth and about twenty of her neighbors. Think about that. Not only were these families being dumped out of their homes and forced to scramble furiously to find a place before school opened, but their children also were being booted out of Matthews Elementary by this developer, since no other affordable housing is available in the Matthews district. "I'm willing to pay $800 for a two-bedroom apartment," said Ruth, "but there aren't any." When asked by the Austin American-Statesman, Gourley said he didn't really even know how many families he was booting, nor -would he say what his new, upscale rent structure would be, but, he snickered, "Obviously, I'm not spending money over there to keep the units leased at $350 a month."
He didn't snicker long, however, because a coalition of Matthews families and eight tenants, including the Granjenos, sued Gourley for racial discrimination. It seems the tenants he booted out all just happened to be Mexican-American. A judge issued a restraining order against ousting the families that were suing, and that brought Royce galloping to the settlement table. The Granjenos will have their rent raised substantially, but they get to stay: "When I thought we had to leave, I cried because I thought we'd lose the school and my friends. Now I'm very satisfied." It does pay to fight the bastards. About a third of the families, however, had already moved out or could not afford the jacked-up rents.
Where are the families of Sixth Street West and River Woods ' to go? Away. They'll end up like so many other families who und themselves in what the bureaucrats coolly term "inadequate" housing. Dora Johnson knows about such inadequacies. She and her two-year-old daughter live in a two-bedroom Austin apartment, but not alone. Four others are crammed in with them, none able to find apartments with rents they can afford on their own. That's six people trying to get along in two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room. The same local paper that hailed Trammel Crow's luxury project reports that it's no longer a matter of poor people being left out but of "working, middle-class citizens [whose] chance of finding an apartment or house that is affordable is more difficult than at any time in Austin's history." Nationally, some 40 percent of renters don't have the income to qualify for the average two-bedroom apartments in their area. What do they do?
• They do what Dora and her little girl are doing-they live with family, friends, co-workers, or strangers, cramming together in small spaces.
• They live in rundown places, often in dangerous areas of town, where the rents are lower (but still expensive-in Austin; $500 a month has become the low end for a one-bedroom apartment).
• They go to the outer edges of the city, which means they are in slurburbia, facing long commutes to their jobs -- Courtney Gentry and her roommate, for example, came to Austin with $500 each to spend on rent, which they hoped would put them in the University of Texas area, near where they worked. "We couldn't find anything," she says, so they're in a complex out in northwest Austin, nowhere near the center of the city, commuting for forty-five minutes in rush hour, and still paying $980 for their apartment.
• Or, they lie about their income or find a manager who'll let them in even though the rent is substantially more than a third of their paycheck, which means they have less to spend on food, medicine, and other needs 170 percent of renters in the United States now pay more than a third of their monthly income on rent).
They make do ... and stew. They also scorn a political system that doesn't respond to them, doesn't want them, doesn't seem to know them. In a song he titled "I Ain't Got No Home," Woody Guthrie wrote about an everyman of the depression era who is a direct ancestor to today's majority that's been rendered invisible in a culture of wealth and is being ignored by both political parties:
I mined in your mines, and I gathered-in your corn
I've been working, mister, since the day that I was born
And I worry all the time, like I never did before
Cause lain 't got no home in this world anymore.
Well now I just ramble 'round to see what I can see
This wide wicked world is sure a funny place to be
The gambling man is rich and the working man is poor
And I ain 't got no home in this world anymore. ©
How soon we forget our own history-or, rather, how quickly our real history is buried by the Powers That Be in the futile hope that if today's citizens don't know about it, we won't think to rebel in similar fashion. The economic disparities, social dislocations, and political alienations of the twenties and thirties produced a massive upheaval that had the cock-sure capitalism of the time grappling uncertainly with everything from native fascism to homegrown socialism. It was this grassroots rebellion against the Wall Street elites and their corrupted cronies in Washington that finally produced-after angry and bloody battles all across the countryside-the social contract and the middle-class framework of laws that are now being so cavalierly dismantled. Today's economic destruction is being wrought under cover of a media-hyped middle-class prosperity that simply does not exist. It's a suicidal social order that thinks it can push its majority to the edges. It's a stupid political system that has two political parties representing the 20 percent minority, and none standing up for the 80 percent majority. Hush, say those in charge, everything is golden. Let the people eat stuffed artichokes.
FIGHTING THE SIN OF WAGES
There's a comic strip I like entitled "Frank & Ernest"-two disheveled, often beleaguered, somewhat Chaplinesque fellows who live on the hardscrabble side of life yet are always mirthful about the absurdity of the system and of the situation in which they find themselves. Created by Bob Thaves, a recent strip showed a frazzled Frank at the end of the workweek with his desk still piled high with stacks of paperwork to get done, his wastebasket overflowing, his files a jumble, saying: "I think the only person who ever got his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe."
And, as you'll recall, Friday was not actually paid money.
There you have the tension in today's economy for most folks: mucho work, poquito money. Peek behind the facade of our national prosperity, and you'll see that it's propped up by the working poor who are working diligently in high-rise office buildings, in the celebrated service economy, in the industrial parks of our cities, and elsewhere-people who are there day in and day out doing all the basic chores that keep the system going, yet getting shorted every payday. "You know why they call it 'take-home pay'," I asked a caller to our radio show. "Because that's the only place you can go on it." READER ALERT: STUNNING STATISTIC DEAD AHEAD: Twenty-five percent of the jobs in today's celebrated economy pay a poverty wage! That's 32 million people.
There is very good news, however, for something is being done to lift these wages. Not by Washington (where both parties continue to tinker around with the minimum wage, doing their part to keep it as minimal as possible), but by a grassroots movement of America's low-wage workers themselves. It's called the Living Wage Campaign, and it has spread from Baltimore, which enacted its ordinance in 1994, to twenty-eight other cities that have already put living wage standards on their books and to another forty where campaigns are under way. This is an amazing success story of people taking matters into their own hands, getting organized, and defeating the formidable power structure of city after city, yet you would not know from the arbiters of national news that it is even happening (no doubt they are too busy celebrating the roaring economy in which, as Money Magazine told us in a 1999 cover story, "Everyone Is Getting Rich")·
These campaigns start from a basic principle of justice: Fulltime work ought not leave you in wretched poverty. Yet talk with the people on the front lines of poverty-the churches and social workers-and they'll confirm that every city in America is experiencing a crush of working families living in homeless shelters and going to soup kitchens for meals. To fight paycheck impoverishment, the Living Wage movement has begun by targeting corporations that are given contracts and subsidies by local governments. Why should our tax dollars be paid to companies that return only poverty pay to our communities? Annually across the country, for example, billions of dollars worth of tax abatements and taxpayer-financed giveaways are handed out to corporations as lures to get them to build a store here and a factory there. The rationale for the handout is always that it will produce JOBS! But in case after case, the city gets suckered - many of the promised JOBS! are never created, and those that are pay too little for a family to make ends meet. Many billions more of taxpayer dollars are being given through contracts to corporations - build a public swimming pool, provide meals for the jailhouse, handle the city's waste disposal, manage the public parking lots, run the buses, process the payroll, landscape the parks, and all sorts of functions that the city (or county, school district, etc.) used to do but has since privatized. But privatization has meant privation for the people hired by the corporation to do the work.
Here's a radical thought: Our public funds should not depress the wages of our own citizens and be the cause of poverty, which saps the vitality of a city and costs taxpayers even more in social services to the deprived workers. This has been the compelling political message of the Living Wage movement, which has pushed through various initiatives and ordinances requiring that corporate contractors and recipients of corporate subsidies pay a wage that a family can live on, even if it is at a meager level. How much? Every local campaign has developed its own standard, with most using the poverty level for a family of four in their area, which usually puts the wage somewhere between seven and ten dollars an hour. As the movement has gained experience and strength, more of the ordinances also require health care benefits and some paid vacation time.
Los Angeles Times writer Nancy Cleeland wrote in February 1999, about that city's ordinance, putting a face to the technicalities of it: "Let the academics, politicians, and labor leaders debate the definition of a living wage. For airport janitor Jose Morales, it means two concrete things-a bed and a car." Working for a private company that has a contract to provide janitorial services at LA International Airport, Morales, thirty-six years old, was making $5.45 an hour, which doesn't stretch very far, certainly not in Los Angeles. Cleeland reports that, for housing, "he shared a converted garage with his sister, her husband, and the couple's two young sons. Too poor to buy furniture, they scavenged cardboard boxes from a nearby supermarket and spread them on the floor to make a communal bed." Mr. Morales had to get up at 4 A.M. each day because his only transportation was the city bus system, and it took two hours, including changing buses, to get from his garage to LAX. It was also a two-hour bus ride back to his garage. Twice he was mugged at his corner bus stop.
Now life has picked up a bit for him, thanks to the city's 1997 Living Wage law, which lifted his pay a buck-eighty an hour. It doesn't seem like much, $1.80. A pack of cigarettes costs more, a draft beer is more, a single copy of Money Magazine is more. But it's $3,600 a year for a full-time American worker like Jose Morales. Admittedly this is not as generous as the $4,600 that members of Congress gave themselves in a cost-of-living pay raise in 1999, on top of the $3,100 cost-of-living "adjustment" they received the year before ("I know there are members that have three or four kids," wailed House Speaker Dennis "The Menace" Hastert during the 1999 debate; "I am not crying crocodile tears, but they need to be able to have a life and provide for their families''). Meanwhile, back on earth, Cleeland writes that the $1.80 boost for Morales "moved him from a chronic state of crisis to a more manageable level of poverty [$7.25 is about $14,500 a year gross income]. He still counts pennies. He still scans the garbage he dumps for discarded treasures. He still considers a rare fast-food meal to be a dining-out experience."
Morales concedes that "The truth is, it's not a very livable wage. But it's a big change for the better." As an active union member, he will keep organizing and working with others to put more livability in people's paychecks, more fairness in the system. For now, however, the Living Wage victory at least provides what he calls a salario digno, for it has meant that he and his extended family could get out of the garage and into a two-bedroom home. It's only 800 square feet; it's not exactly in the 90210 zip code, and it's still mighty cramped with the five of them in there, but it's a real house. And it has a real bed in it. Morales' first purchase was to get the family off of that stack of cardboard. Slowly, they have since been able to add other furniture, including a small dining table. His second purchase was a '93 sedan-so, no more two-hour commute, no more 4 A.M. wake-up, no more bus stop muggings. Another big change was that the LA Living Wage law includes health insurance, "and for families," Mr. Morales says simply, "that means a lot."
In my work, I spend a big chunk of time flying around the country. In an airport a few years ago, I noticed for the first time a routine that I've since seen repeated several times in various airports. I saw a custodian making his rounds, gathering the trash that passengers leave strewn about the gate area when they board their plane. I watched him work his way down the concourse from one gate to another, and as he went, he would quickly make a pass along the banks of pay phones between the gates, checking the coin slots to see if anyone had left some change. Maybe it's a compulsion, I thought, or just an amusement (like some sort of custodian's Las Vegas). My assumption was that airport jobs, while not Fat City, were after all city positions and certainly wouldn't be so poorly paid that coin-slot change would count as income.
But that was before realizing just how extensive privatization has become in local governments. In Los Angeles, for example, most of the janitorial jobs - from the airport to the zoo - have been "outsourced," a bit of new economy jargon that means public tasks land public money) have been farmed out to private interests. This has been sold to voters on the ideological assertion that corporations can run the public's business better than governments can, so just give us the contract and, by Jove, watch us save the taxpayers a bundle! Local politicians, eager to look like budget saviors (even as they take campaign contributions from the contractors), have been more than happy to go along. But the corporation always builds into its contract a juicy profit for itself, incredible salaries for its executives, an advertising budget, and other costs far beyond what a government agency has-so where does it get the "savings"? From Jose Morales and the janitors I've seen gleaning change from pay phones.
This hidden subsidy for privatization was the genesis of the Living Wage Campaign in LA, which David Reynolds of Wayne State University has described in an excellent and comprehensive guide he authored with ACORN, the grassroots organizing group, bearing the straightforward title "Living Wage Campaigns: An Activist's Guide to Building the Movement for Economic Justice." In the City of Angels, the campaign began in 1995 with an organizing effort at LAX by two unions (Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees, and Service Employees International). During the next several months, more than a hundred Los Angeles organizations joined the grassroots coalition to battle the wage ripoff-from homeless groups to small businesses, from taxpayer groups to churches, from political groups to retirees. It would be an arduous battle against a recalcitrant power structure that included Mayor Richard Riordan and the city's business establishment, which presented itself under the disingenuous name of The Coalition to Keep LA Working and snidely referred to the Living Wage proposal as the Job Destruction Ordinance. Their claim was that $7.25 an hour would force the privateers to eliminate the jobs rather than "suffer" the economic blow of paying a higher wage (though who exactly was then going to do the janitorial chores the company had contracted to perform was not addressed-perhaps some junior executives from headquarters!. Of great worry also for the corporate crowd was that this ordinance would "only add to the perception that Los Angeles is not business friendly." Oh, great, better that the Morales family sleep on cardboard boxes stacked on a garage floor than that the city be seen as less than embracing to every rapacious contractor that wants to make a killing.
With the mayor in the pocket of the business establishment, the Living Wage advocates had to win not merely a majority of votes on the city council, but a veto-proof supermajority. Reynolds reports that they laid siege to the council, steadily barraging the members with letters, phone calls, faxes, e-mails, and visits. At Thanksgiving, 1996, more than a thousand plates arrived in council offices, each one hand-decorated with some illustration of the "challenge" of trying to feed a family on poverty wages. In the Christmas season, a hundred clergy led others to city hall, accompanied by an actor draped in chains and playing the part of Jacob Marley, decrying Mayor Scrooge's opposition to the living wage. In addition, a group of merry carolers went to city hall and nearby restaurants singing carols with lyrics suitably adjusted for the message of the campaign. At LAX itself, low-wage workers like Morales took the media on a tour to highlight their working conditions.
They also kept expanding their coalition-as any janitor knows, the more straws in your broom, the more dirt you can sweep out. To the surprise of the establishment some business leaders supported the coalition, ranging from companies like Bell Industries to retailers like All American Home Center to smaller shops like The Stationery Place. Executives from these firms pointed out that good wages are pro business, since they reduce turnover, increase morale, produce better-skilled employees, and improve productivity. They also noted a basic lesson of economics-your workers are your customers. As Henry Ford wrote in 1926, "An underpaid man is a customer reduced in purchasing power. He cannot buy. Business depression, is caused by weakened purchasing power. Purchasing power is weakened by uncertainty or insufficiency of income. The cure of business depression is through purchasing power, and the source of purchasing power is wages." These business advocates also raised the point of fair competition-the public subsidy of low-wage contractors undercut those, like themselves, who pursued a high-road business strategy of good wages.
A big breakthrough for the Living Wage advocates came when Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders were organized into Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice-CLUE, Bringing a moral and theological dimension to the campaign, CLUE leaders prompted discussions of the wage issue in their own congregations, preached of the justice aspect from their pulpits, wrote op-ed pieces, made pilgrimages to city hall, and used their own political contacts to press the issue.
In January, 1997, council members were greeted by a flood of New Year's cards beseeching them to do the right thing, For the next three months, coalition delegations visited the council twice a day, three days a week, They kept reaching out, kept focused, kept pushing-and on March 18, they won a unanimous vote for a living wage of $7.25 an hour indexed yearly to inflation increases, with family health benefits, and twelve paid days off each year. Mayor Riordan vetoed it. The city council overrode his veto.
Versions of this success story have been repeated, so far, in:
Baltimore
Boston
Buffalo
Cambridge
Chicago
Cook County (IL)
Dane County (WI)
Des Moines
Detroit
Duluth
Durham
Gary
Hayword (CA)
Hudson County (NJ)
Jersey City
Los Angeles County
Madison
Miami-Dade County
Minneapolis
Multnomah County (OR)
New Haven
New York City
Oakland
Pasadena
Portland (OR)
San Antonio
San Jose
Santa Clara
Somerville (MA)
St. Paul
Tucson
Ypsilanti (MI)
Key players have been ACORN (which operates the National Living Wage Center); unions like AFSCME, HERE, and SEIU; an up-and-coming progressive political group called the New Party; the central labor councils in these cities, along with an umbrella labor group called Jobs With Justice; and local churches and interfaith groups like CLUE.
The Living Wage campaigns themselves are only a start, for the wages established still can be achingly low and apply only to the relatively few workers employed by government contractors. But they are a start, and an encouragingly strong one, too, delivering substantial benefits for regular folks too long ignored. The effort alone is enormously important, for it is getting thousands of people informed and involved, getting them into the streets, giving them confidence that their activism matters, developing battle-experienced grassroots leaders, and uniting a broad coalition for the long haul. The effort is also generating a phenomenal debate that Washington and Wall Street thought had been suppressed - a debate not only about the working poor, but also about questions of fairness and justice in a society that is being taught to value nothing but predator economics.
The very existence of such a movement-one that is now organized and linked from coast to coast, one that has the moral high road, and one that is actually moving -- sends a chill through the nation's economic and political powers. It's like the hunter's nightmare, in which someone shouts: "Look out-the rabbit's got the gun!"