No Fooling: Inadequate Wages Drive Poverty Numbers

Wages connect to quality of life. . .duh!

People like me, very fortunate and privileged people like me don't worry about housing in terms of "having it" or losing it or the basic quality of it.

In fact, most of us seldom give a thought to the cost of housing as it relates to wages earned in the work place and how this connection drives the quality and reality of the rest of life.

For example, most readers at this site have never considered breaking down their monthly housing costs in terms of hourly wages required to afford a two-bedroom apartment. Take a look at the chart below that indexes housing costs to hourly wages required.

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Knowledge

Picture is worth a 1,000 words. . .from Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty.

Low wage workers and raising the minimum wage

In 2013, CitySquare worked alongside over 50,000 different individuals.  The vast majority of these neighbors, who worked, earned less that the amount needed to make life work--or as we say, "make ends meet."

A large part of the challenge relates to wage levels.  Unskilled workers must settle for minimum wage pay ($7.25 an hour).  That's just not enough.

Currently, a national discussion is underway again about the pros and cons of raising the national minimum wage to $10.15 an hour.  That would help lift a large number of "sinking ships."

Of course, whenever the issue of increasing the minimum wage standard comes up, critics emerge warning that raising the wage level would force people out of employment, curtail job creation and hurt business, especially small businesses.  In spite of the fact that every serious study over the years debunks and discredits these notions, the argument persists.

The experience of Washington State and of Seattle provides a refreshing backdrop for understanding the economic impact associated with raising the minimum wage.

Check this out!

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Now

We're long overdue on this one.

Even though it's a bill we don't want to open, the time has come.
The moment has arrived.  Now is today.

Comprehensive immigration reform must be accomplished.

Here are just a few of the obvious reasons:

1)  Hard-working, honest men, women, youth and families earn pennies on the dollar from countless unscrupulous employers who take advantage of and exploit the uncredentialed status of their undocumented workers.

2)  Undocumented workers are in violation of civil law, their coming to the United States is not a criminal matter.  They come here for many of the same reasons my family came here.  Why is my family considered noble and theirs not?

3)  I benefit from the Social Security contributions made by undocumented labor.  These workers pay the equivalent of 10% of the Social Security Trust Fund annually--benefits that the undocumented will never be able to claim.

4)  Families who came to the U. S. seeking a better life continue to live in fear and do business in an underground economy.

5)  The children of the undocumented  brought here with no knowledge of or part in the decision to move face grave limitations as they grow older.  For example, those who graduate high school and go on to college have no assurance of being able to work when their training is complete.

6)  Millions of these wonderful people have been in the country for decades and consider themselves to be exactly who they are:  Americans.

7)  Reform will mean a dramatic increase in the net worth of those given this just relief.  Driving poverty rates down will follow closely on the heels of reform.

We can't wait any longer.

The time has come.

No more excuses.

Now.

Employment for crew hired off "the Corner"!

I love this photo!

Jerry James (shown here on one knee in front) serves as the "foreman" for our landscape crew.

We hired each of these folks off of "the Corner" where we show up on Thursdays for refreshments, conversation and friendship creation.

Jerry comes from a tough background himself that includes time behind bars.  He works as hard as anyone I've ever known.  His crew follows his lead.

This group of formerly unemployed, homeless persons executed the landscape plan for the Opportunity Center that CitySquare is building at the corner of Malcolm X and I-30.

What you see here is a moment in time on a pathway to renewal and transformation.

This is our work.

Out of poverty via hard work? Not so fast, buddy!

[We've always thought that the way out of poverty is hard work.  Not so fast there.  The way out of poverty is hard work at a living wage job.  Those jobs aren't nearly as available as many of us surmise.  In fact, more and more people are working hard and slipping deeper into poverty.  It's more accurate to say that the way out of poverty is two, full-time jobs!  Read the following report.  You'll see what I mean. LJ]

McDonald's Can't Figure Out How Its Workers Survive on Minimum Wage
JORDAN WEISSMANNJUL

In a financial planning guide for its workers, the company accidentally illustrates precisely how impossible it is to scrape by on a fast food paycheck.

 Well this is both embarrassing and deeply telling. In what appears to have been a gesture of goodwill gone haywire, McDonald's recently teamed up with Visa to create a financial planning site for its low-pay workforce. Unfortunately, whoever wrote the thing seems to have been literally incapable of imagining of how a fast food employee could survive on a minimum wage income.

As ThinkProgress and other outlets have reported, the site includes a sample budget that, among other laughable assumptions, presumes that workers will have a second job.

Read the entire report here. 

Justice at work: Living wage jobs?

This Week in Poverty: The Fiscal Cliff and the Janitors Who Are Already on It

Greg Kaufmann on November 16, 2012 - 9:23 AM ET

“I really want people to understand that we all work just as hard as the next person that’s in a business suit,” says Tamika Maxwell, mother of three, describing her work as a janitor in Cincinnati, her hometown.

Along with 1,000 colleagues in the city, Maxwell hopes that current negotiations between SEIU and the city’s cleaning contractors will raise their $9.80 hourly wage—which, for annual full-time work, still leaves a family of three below the federal poverty line and relying on food stamps and Medicaid. In essence, the state ends up subsidizing corporations to continue paying people a non-living wage.

“My paycheck is the same amount as my Duke Energy bill,” says Maxwell. “And you know they don’t care—they will cut you off if you don’t have their money.”

Maxwell works part-time while also pursuing a business degree at Cincinnati State. She’s now employed byScioto Services, which recently won the contract for the Public Defender’s office building that she has cleaned for four years. The company retained Maxwell but cut back all of the janitors’ hours. Instead of working the 5–10 pm shift five days per week, Maxwell now works only four.

“That’s a big deal when you’re only making $9.80 an hour,” she says.

But perhaps what is most frustrating to Maxwell and her colleagues is that among the cleaning contractors’ clients are some of the richest companies in the world. Macy’s, for example, made $1.25 billion in profits last year; Fifth Third Bancorp took in $1.3 billion; and Kroger netted more than $600 million. In all, thirteen Fortune 1000 companies with their corporate headquarters in Cincinnati earned combined profits of nearly $17 billion in 2011. If any of them told the cleaning contractors to pay a living wage, the contractors would do so, and would pass the additional cost onto the multibillion-dollar corporations.

Indeed, Procter & Gamble instructed its cleaning contractor, Compass, that the janitors who clean its headquarters should earn a living wage. Compass then offered the workers healthcare and guaranteed full-time hours, as well as an hourly wage increase of $0.30 in the first year, $0.25 in the second year, and $0.30 in the third year. That would result in a $10.65 hourly wage in 2015, and an average annual salary of $19,863 (just over the poverty line for a family of three). In contrast, the other contractors involved in negotiations with SEIU are offering next to nothing: a wage freeze for two years and a ten-cent increase in 2015.

“We just want to be paid fairly, and treated fairly. And the big businesses need to know that we have families that we want to take care of too,” says Maxwell. “I’m struggling right now, trying to figure out what I’m going to do for my kids’ Christmas. I know the big businesses aren’t worrying about their Christmas.”

Maxwell takes her son to school every morning at 7:45, then gets on a bus to go to school herself. After classes, she is home to help her son with homework, and then takes the kids to day care at 4:30—in time to arrive at work at 5 pm for her five-hour shift.

“By the time we get home it’s bedtime,” she says. “So the only time I really get to spend with my children is on the weekends. It sucks, really. But hopefully it will all be worth it when I finish school and won’t have to struggle as hard.”

Maxwell believes that part of the reason for the plight of the janitors is that “people really don’t understand the work that we do.” In her shift, she cleans forty-three bathrooms on thirteen floors. Half of the bathrooms have two stalls, half of them are singles. That’s about sixty-five toilets a night, or thirteen an hour—about four and a half minutes per toilet. That’s hard enough to do in five hours, and of course the job involves a lot more than cleaning toilets.

“I stock the bathrooms—paper towels, tissue, soap, seat covers. I clean them all, mop them all, and dust them all. Clean the mirrors, the countertops, the sinks, the stainless steel,” she says. “It’s really hard work. I go through more gym shoes than anyone can imagine.”

With so much stress over their reduced hours, one way Maxwell and her colleagues try to make up their lost income is by working overtime to fill-in for someone who can’t make it to work. But she says collecting the extra pay can be a challenge.

“I worked two extra hours over four weeks ago and still haven’t gotten paid,” she says.

She has also been waiting for three months for Scioto to fill out a job verification form that she needs so that her family will not be cut off of food stamps.

“Every time I see the manager and ask him about it he says he’ll get it back to me or the office hasn’t sent it back yet—gives me the runaround,” says Maxwell.

A look at the Scioto website and this kind of treatment of employees—in terms of poor wages, reduced hours and irresponsibility—flies in the face of the image the company is projecting:

It is our human resource investment, however; [sic] that makes us most proud. Scioto Services associates are encouraged to become volunteers with community organizations including the local Chambers of Commerce, Project Parks, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, YMCA, Meals on Wheels, youth sports programs, regional food banks, adult literacy programs and youth tutoring, just to name a few. At Scioto Services, we’re convinced that community involvement is the best way to show our pride in who we are, what we do, and in the communities where we do business.

Another way to invest in human resources and the community is by paying workers enough so that they can eat.

In the meantime, Maxwell hopes that people will rethink their assumptions about janitors and their labor, and get involved in the fight for better pay.

“People think janitors are people who either aren’t trying hard enough, or didn’t try hard enough back when they [were younger], and that’s simply not the case,” says Maxwell. “Somebody has to do these jobs. Workers couldn’t function without our work.”

 

Ain't got no home. . .

A song about my daddy and his people. . .

Labor Day. . .a bit of history

Growing up, I was taught in countless ways that work and working people should always be respected.  The trade, the position, the field, the career didn't matter so much.  As long as it was legal, work and workers were to be respected, honored and celebrated.  Labor Day is about work and workers.  We would do well to remember what labor has done in this nation in the past and what can be accomplished going forward.  Happy Labor Day!

Labor Day: How it Came About; What it Means
Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.

Founder of Labor Day

 More than 100 years after the first Labor Day observance, there is still some doubt as to who first proposed the holiday for workers.

Some records show that Peter J. McGuire, general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a cofounder of the American Federation of Labor, was first in suggesting a day to honor those "who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold."

 

But Peter McGuire's place in Labor Day history has not gone unchallenged. Many believe that Matthew Maguire, a machinist, not Peter McGuire, founded the holiday. Recent research seems to support the contention that Matthew Maguire, later the secretary of Local 344 of the International Association of Machinists in Paterson, N.J., proposed the holiday in 1882 while serving as secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York. What is clear is that the Central Labor Union adopted a Labor Day proposal and appointed a committee to plan a demonstration and picnic.

The First Labor Day

The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, 1883.

In 1884 the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, as originally proposed, and the Central Labor Union urged similar organizations in other cities to follow the example of New York and celebrate a "workingmen's holiday" on that date. The idea spread with the growth of labor organizations, and in 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers of the country.

Labor Day Legislation

Through the years the nation gave increasing emphasis to Labor Day. The first governmental recognition came through municipal ordinances passed during 1885 and 1886. From them developed the movement to secure state legislation. The first state bill was introduced into the New York legislature, but the first to become law was passed by Oregon on February 21, 1887. During the year four more states — Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York — created the Labor Day holiday by legislative enactment. By the end of the decade Connecticut, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania had followed suit. By 1894, 23 other states had adopted the holiday in honor of workers, and on June 28 of that year, Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each year a legal holiday in the District of Columbia and the territories.

A Nationwide Holiday

The form that the observance and celebration of Labor Day should take was outlined in the first proposal of the holiday — a street parade to exhibit to the public "the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations" of the community, followed by a festival for the recreation and amusement of the workers and their families. This became the pattern for the celebrations of Labor Day. Speeches by prominent men and women were introduced later, as more emphasis was placed upon the economic and civic significance of the holiday. Still later, by a resolution of the American Federation of Labor convention of 1909, the Sunday preceding Labor Day was adopted as Labor Sunday and dedicated to the spiritual and educational aspects of the labor movement.

 

The character of the Labor Day celebration has undergone a change in recent years, especially in large industrial centers where mass displays and huge parades have proved a problem. This change, however, is more a shift in emphasis and medium of expression. Labor Day addresses by leading union officials, industrialists, educators, clerics and government officials are given wide coverage in newspapers, radio, and television.

The vital force of labor added materially to the highest standard of living and the greatest production the world has ever known and has brought us closer to the realization of our traditional ideals of economic and political democracy. It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pay tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation's strength, freedom, and leadership — the American worker.

Scenes of progress from CitySquare's new Opportunity Center. . .

CitySquare's new Opportunity Center development continues to progress! 

Located at the southeast corner of Malcolm X and I-30, the new 53,000 sq. ft. multi-purpose campus intends to bring many new opportunities to men and women seeking improved lives. 

Here are scenes of our current progress!  To learn how you can become an investor, contact me at ljames@CitySquare.org.

Attacking the income disparity gap

Here's a fascinating essay comparing how the U. S. handled its income gap between the well-to-do and the bottom early in the 20th Century when William Howard Taft served as President.  The analysis quickly reveals how so much more conservative our nation has become, a trend that appears to be growing. 

Read the article and tell me what you think.


Radical Solutions to Economic Inequality

If only Americans today were as open-minded about leveling the playing field as we were 100 years ago.

By Beverly Gage|Posted Wednesday, Feb. 15, 201

In one of his last acts of office, President William Howard Taft attempted to solve the problem of inequality in America. In August 1912, on the cusp of a brutal third-place finish in the presidential election, he created a Commission on Industrial Relations to investigate “the general condition of labor in the principal industries.” Despite its fusty charge, the commission turned out to be one of the most sensational sideshows of the Progressive Era, a cross-country journey through the wilds of American class conflict. For three years, government commissioners traipsed from city to city asking capitalists, union organizers, and reformers what it was like to work in America, and whether the spoils of industry seemed to be distributed fairly among the rich and poor.

The commission’s answer, released in a 1916 report, speaks volumes about the persistent dilemma of inequality in the United States, and about the intellectual timidity of today’s political responses. “Have the workers received a fair share of the enormous increase in wealth which has taken place in this country…?” the report demanded. “The answer is emphatically—No!”

Their numbers bore this out. According to the commission, the “Rich”—or top 2 percent—owned 60 percent of the nation’s wealth. By contrast, the “Poor”—or bottom 60 percent—owned just 5 percent of the wealth.

Today, after a century of ups and down, we’ve landed back at those extremes, give or take a few percentage points. But what’s striking about the commission’s report, read from a 21^st-century perspective, is how limited our own debate about inequality seems by comparison. For the commission, inequality was a fundamental problem that threatened the entire fabric of American democracy. Today, by contrast, we’re busy debating whether a multimillionaire like Mitt Romney ought to pay a few more percentage points in federal taxes.

To read the entire article click here.

Beverly Gage, a Yale history professor, is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded.

Working, but still poor. . .

Here at CitySquare, we've known the hard truth for a very long time.  Most of the low-income people with whom we work also work at a job, often more than one job. 

The problem is not work. 

The problem is pay and earning power. 

Consider the analysis of Bill Quigley that follows.  Take time to go to the complete text of the report.  Then, tell me what you think. 

Is it realistic to think that everyone who works should be able to sustain themselves by that work?

Working and Poor in the USA
Sunday 22 January 2012
By: Bill Quigley, The Center for Constitutional Rights

"Our nation, so richly endowed with natural resources and with a capable and industrious population, should be able to devise ways and means of insuring to all our able-bodied men and women, a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.” -Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937

Millions of people in the US work and are still poor. Here are eight points that show why the US needs to dedicate itself to making work pay.

To read the entire report click here.