Partial Readings: The Rise in U.S. Poverty, and the Degradations of the Service Sector
Partial Readings: The Rise in U.S. Poverty, and the Degradations of the Service Sector
Partial Readings: The Rise in U.S. Poverty, and the Degradations of the Service Sector
Poverty
Last fall, a Census Bureau report showed poverty on the rise in the United States. As Lisa McGirr writes, the upswing in poverty has had unprecedented effects in a rather unexpected place: the suburbs.
The climbing rates of suburban poverty mark a definitive end to the Fordist model of mass production and consumption, and its most internationally recognized poster child: homogeneous middle class families cradled safely in ever expanding suburban developments. To be sure, this now quintessential form of American living?tract subdivisions distant from work, shopping and urban amenities?was itself once an American novelty.
In a post on the New York Times Campaign Stops blog, Douglas MacKinnon, a Republican and former White House and Pentagon official, writes about the bipartisan, willful ignorance about poverty in Washington.
In the past, when I wrote a column on, say, the space program, or immigration, I heard from certain politicians. But on poverty, never.
I find this odd and more than a little troubling. This is not about me. I don?t care if it?s other people who write a column or a book based on their own experience of unrelenting poverty. I don?t care if they are liberal or conservative. But when poverty remains one of the unsolved tragedies of our time, shouldn?t the observations of someone who truly suffered through it matter to at least one elected official?
In many ways, the mind-numbing ignorance of our ?leaders? with regard to true poverty is the largest obstacle to finding actual solutions.
On the other side of the Atlantic, some eyes are on U.S. poverty. Last month the BBC screened ?Poor America,? a half-hour program focused on the ?tent city? encampments that serve as homes for an increasing number of impoverished Americans.
In better news, the World Bank’s latest figures show a decline in extreme poverty worldwide. But Robin Broad and John Cavanagh at the Institute for Policy Studies view the World Bank report through a more skeptical lens:
[O]ur experience living with poor families in rural areas suggests that it has been the opening of their natural resources to global agribusiness, factory fishing fleets, and corporate interests that often leads to real poverty. Millions have been pushed off their land over the past few generations into urban slums where they live in squalor, although they may bring home a few dollars a day. In sum, the statistics upon which most poverty elimination strategies are based are extremely misleading….
What is behind the data that shows those in poverty outside China increasing in most regions from 1981 to 2005? This period coincided with the heyday of corporate-friendly neoliberal policies in most countries. So the data could be read as a confirmation of what critics of neoliberalism have been saying: the wave of market fundamentalism contributed to increases in the numbers of people in poverty. That data also reveals that in one region, sub-Saharan Africa, the percent of people living below the poverty threshold also rose over this period. We hardly need to point out that in the one country where poverty plunged–China–leaders did not pursue blind neoliberalism, but instead combined state direction of much of the economy with market-openings in selected sectors.
How about the subsequent period from 2005 to 2008, a time range during which the data reveal poverty numbers and rates falling in all regions of the world? As opposed to 1981-2005, this was a period of spreading cracks in the neoliberal Washington Consensus. It was also a period of rising of commodity prices and rising of balance of payments surpluses in many Southern countries. As a result, many Southern countries were able to repay the IMF and World Bank and wean themselves from World Bank and IMF loans and neoliberal conditionality.
Service Workers
With the end of the ?Fordist model of mass production and consumption? has come the rise of the service sector in the U.S. economy. A recent article by Nona Willis Aronowitz in Good magazine, ?Minimum Rage,” looks at some of the struggles of service workers in New York and Mississippi, specifically when it comes to organizing a union. Aronowitz paints a bleak picture of the industry?s working conditions.
Factory work, once the default employment choice for many newly minted adults, was backbreaking and monotonous. But, if unionized, it was also stable, full time, and decently paid.
None of these things are true of the modern service industry, and shockingly few people are working to change that. Only 2 percent of food-service workers are union members. When you subtract the ones who work at hotels, that number goes down to approximately zero. Big unions like the AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union opt to organize health care workers and teachers instead of the folks behind America?s bars and cash registers.
Aronowitz finds that fear of being fired and the temporary outlook of many service workers offer some explanation as to why so few are unionized:
Activists like Erik face a two-pronged problem: Middle-class kids don’t want to bother with unions because they have one eye on the door. Workers from the permanent underclass like Levi don’t join because they accept that these jobs are shitty, and if they’re fired, they’ll just have to go get another one. It happens all the time?Levi lost his job this fall, for reasons having nothing to do with the union. Turnover is what the industry depends on.
Click here for a confessional Tumblr page stemming from the article, where low-wage service workers can upload and share their stories of exploitation.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 5.4 percent of the U.S. retail trade was represented by unions in 2011. This makes the unionized workers at the Strand, one of New York City?s most famous bookstores, all the more notable. Now, these employees are fighting a new management-proposed contract, which they believe represents an attempt to undermine their union.
MetroFocus posted a detailed write-up of the ferment around the negotiations, and quoted employees who said that they were considering a strike. In a press release sent out last week, workers from the Strand?s union outlined their opposition to the new contract:
Their contract proposals include reducing personal days and holidays by almost half and more than doubling the amount employees must pay toward health insurance premiums, which would make health insurance unaffordable for many employees. Ownership?s most hostile proposal, however, is the creation of a two-tiered system. Such a system would stipulate that employees hired after a certain date would receive lower wages and benefits than those hired before. The implementation of such systems is becoming understood as a method of union busting, since it inevitably undermines solidarity between new and senior union members.
Other service workers in New York City have recently begun organizing. Drivers from the Tom Cat Bakery launched a campaign with a march and the announcement of a ?Declaration of Dignity,? which demands respectful treatment, affordable family health care, and equal treatment of all workers. The organizers of the action were members of Focus on the Food Chain, a member-led campaign that aims to help food processing and distribution workers to organize in their workplaces.
The New York Times has also highlighted the efforts of car wash workers to organize for economic justice, with the help of Make the Road New York and New York Communities for Change. A recent report showed that 66 percent of NYC car wash workers reported sometimes being paid less than minimum wage, even as a majority of them work over sixty hours a week.
