Hustling Backwards - How the Economy Fails the Working Poor

By Bob Burnett
CommonDreams.org

Friday 20 January 2006

We all remember that, after Katrina, folks were abandoned in New Orleans because the system failed. That's what the documentary Waging a Living is about, Americans who work for a minimum wage and still are left behind by our economy. No matter how hard they struggle, they are "hustling backwards."

Whenever the growing gap between America's rich and poor is brought up, conservatives respond that the rich do more work than the poor. Therefore, they should be compensated more. In the abstract, no one disagrees that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers, should be paid more than the janitors that clean up after other Apple employees go home. The question is how much more?

Twenty years ago the ratio between America's highest paid and lowest paid employees was around 40 to one. Now it's 431 to one. According to a recent report, the average CEO pay is $11.8 million, while the average work pay is $27,460. "If the minimum wage had risen as fast as CEO pay since 1990, the lowest paid workers in the US would be earning $23.03 an hour today, not $5.15 an hour."

Roger Weisberg's Waging a Living describes what it's like to be at the bottom of our economy. For three years, Weisberg followed four low-wage workers as they struggled to hold onto the American dream. Mary Venittelli is a waitress in New Jersey. Jerry Longoria is a security guard in San Francisco. Barbara Brooks is a recreational counselor at a home for troubled girls in New York. Jean Reynolds is a nursing assistant in a convalescent hospital in New Jersey.

They're not slackers. All four of Weisberg's subjects work fulltime, and take as much overtime as they can get. Three things make their lives particularly difficult: they are on their own - they have no adult partner or family to help them, they have children, and they are relatively uneducated. Mary Venittelli is a recently divorced, middle-age woman with no previous work experience. She works as a waitress for $2.13 an hour plus tips. In her struggle to maintain her three children in the same life style they had before the divorce, she is forced to feed her kids from a food pantry. She covers the huge monthly difference between her income and her expenses by maxing out her credit cards. In the one of the documentary's most poignant scenes, Mary applies for yet another credit card. When her friend asks her if she isn't worried about identity theft, Mary quips, "What do I have to worry about, someone stealing my identity? Please! Take it."

Between child support and rent for a tiny room in a San Francisco "single room occupancy" hotel, Jerry Longoria's expenses gobble up his monthly income. He's thrilled by a twenty-five cent an hour raise, because that will enable him to open a savings account and set money aside for a visit with his children whom he hasn't seen in nine years.

Barbara Brooks depends upon public assistance to supplement her income so that she can adequately care for her five children. She works full-time, does all the housekeeping chores, and still finds time to attend one class a semester at the local junior college - she explains she gets by with four hours sleep per night. The documentary chronicles her triumph when she finally secures her associate's degree. The next week she finds that her new degree rewards her with a raise of $450, but $600 less in public assistance. "I'm hustling backwards," she laments.

Jean Reynolds is a certified nursing assistant supporting three children and four grandchildren. She earns $1,200 a month working a forty-hour graveyard shift, with as much overtime as she can get. In common with most low-wage workers, Jean has no health insurance. Her daughter, Bridget, has terminal cancer. When Jean is forced to use her rent money for Bridget's medication she's evicted and the family narrowly escapes having to live on the streets. "There's no American dream anymore," she remarks.

A favorite conservative myth about the poor is that they are shiftless neer-do-wells. But this stereotype doesn't match the reality of Weisberg's quartet. They are working as hard as they can, but are falling farther and farther behind. They're not unusual. One in four American workers - 30 million - are mired in low-wage jobs that do not provide for a life with dignity.

When progressives call attention to this situation, Republicans attack them - accuse them of fomenting class warfare. A typical conservative reaction is that the rich are "those who are industrious and willing to work hard (the HAVES)," while the poor are "those who are lazy louts looking for a handout (the HAVENOTS)." The GOP argues that it's the fault of the individual; if you're working full time and not getting ahead, you did something wrong, you deserve it. But it's not the working poor who have failed. It's the system - the American economic system conceived by Republican conservatives and promoted by the Bush Administration.

There's no reason that we can't have an economy that works for everyone. A system that rewards low-wage workers, like the quartet in Waging a Living, with a decent standard of living. For that to happen, Americans will have to decide that its morality that matters - the golden rule. Instead, we are governed by the ethics in the Randy Newman song,

It's money that matters,
Hear what I say,
It's money that matters,
In the USA.