The Blow the Working Class Saw Coming

[question everything]

washingtonpost.com

The Blow the Working Class Saw Coming

By Iain Levison
Sunday, February 15, 2009; B01

Mark and Robert tell me that they've finished laying the carpet in the bedroom of an apartment in Raleigh, N.C. One small bedroom in one small apartment. It is the first time they have worked since Dec. 2. They've driven in from Youngsville, which is 60 miles round trip, four gallons of gas. The pickup doesn't get great mileage when it's pulling a trailer full of carpet and tools. So take out $8 for the gas, $60 for supplies, and the job, which paid $220, nets $152 to be split between two guys. That's their total earnings for two months.

(snip)

I remember working with Mark and Robert last summer, when they would lay carpet all day in the stairwells of a large apartment complex, then head off to another job in the evening. At the end of a day doing general maintenance, I was usually exhausted. Carpet-laying is one of the more physically demanding trades, and I asked them how they did it. "You gotta work when you can," Robert answered. They saw it coming. The working poor always see it coming, well before the Wall Street analysts and the Federal Reserve wonks. From the bottom rung of the ladder, you get a more immediate view of the economy and the direction it's taking. Mark knows that when he makes $8 an hour, and gets a flyer in the mail telling him that he has guaranteed approval on a $40,000 SUV, there is something amiss in the world of finance, a disruption in the force. He doesn't care, because he likes nice cars, but he knows. And Mark and Robert also know that when the tsunami rolls in, they will be the first ones to be swept off their feet. Robert tells me that he has 50 applications out, even at Burger King, but no one is hiring. I ask Mark what he plans to do.

"I hope the Steelers cover the spread," he says.

They don't. And where gambling on football is the investment strategy, the lottery is the retirement plan. Wynn Dozier, 58, a painter who has been laid off from everything from Nortel (a long time ago) to his friend's painting company (a few weeks ago), plays the lottery every Wednesday. When I run into him in the store buying his ticket, he tells me that he has applied at Home Depot. "I'll take you sailing when this hits," he says, waving the ticket. It doesn't. And Home Depot, like most big-box stores, is laying off workers -- 7,000 to be exact. Not only is Wynn not getting hired, the market is now flooded with people with his skill set, more people to fight over what scraps of business are left. The tsunami is here.

"This crisis is urgent," the people on television keep saying, and when the cameras are turned off, they probably go home to plush apartments in Washington and New York. The people for whom it really is urgent have stopped listening, and not just because the cable is getting cut off. The problems are simply too immediate for them to pay attention to people who talk about economic theories, about bailouts and tariffs and gross domestic product. In this world, there are actual sheriffs with actual eviction notices. Something needs to be done now, today. It won't be. For a lot of people, it is already too late. People have moved back in with their parents, started living out of RVs, moved into trailer parks that are mushrooming around cities such as Las Vegas the way developments with real houses used to. Even pricey Santa Barbara, Calif., recently made several gated parking lots available to people living in their cars.

(snip)

But this time around, we appear to have a class of individuals who think that they should not have to suffer with the rest. Circuit City, currently liquidating all its stores and laying off thousands, asked a bankruptcy court judge to let it give bonuses to executives to convince them to stay for the "wind-down process." The New York Post reported on a disgraced financial executive who transferred property to his wife to protect it from legal action. It is this type of behavior, rather than economics, that the working poor don't understand. I earned $3.35 an hour at my first job washing dishes in 1981, and today, 28 years later, the minimum wage has barely doubled. Congress voted not to raise it for nearly 10 years, while members awarded themselves pay raises on a nearly annual basis. And during the years that the minimum wage was stalled, the pay of a CEO swelled to hundreds of times the wage of an average worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

(snip)

But maybe guys like Mark and Robert would have warned you about this economy years ago, when the jobs began moving overseas, and their credit limits went up even as they got pink-slipped. They didn't know when it was coming, but they knew. And their warning would have been plaintive: Stop taking so much. Does anyone really need a $20 million salary? If you have that salary, do you need a bonus? If you take that much, won't somebody else be deprived?.. Most people here believe that the new stimulus package will create them, but the question is, what kind? Will these be more of the jobs that Robert is being forced to apply for, the minimum-wage, part-time, day- labor kind of jobs? Or will they be actual jobs, work that stays around for decades and provides a chance for a steady, decent life? "The word 'jobs' can mean a lot of things," Teal says, skeptically. They have a right to be cynical. It turns out, the people who understand money the best are the ones who don't have it.

Iain Levison is the author of the memoir "A Working Stiff's Manifesto" and the forthcoming novel "How to Rob an Armored Car."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/13/AR2009021301645.html

[chill_wind]

1. K & R n/t

[jannyk]

2. Must Read!!! k&r

[tosh]

3. K&R. And thanks.

[AdHocSolver]

4. The economy will never recover until trade and tax laws are revised to bring jobs back to the US.

Corporate cartel agreements like NAFTA, the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank must be rewritten or eliminated to make it profitable to manufacture everyday goods in the U.S. again.

When most everything we consume is made offshore, we send our assets overseas just to live our lives. We don't save money buying cheap foreign goods. We wind up in debt and the value of the dollar decreases so that our economy suffers from inflation. The once cheap imports are becoming more expensive. Foreign goods are cheap in quality as well as price. We have become a "throwaway" society which wastes resources as well.

At the same time, foreign workers don't pay taxes in the U.S. and unemployed Americans don't pay taxes either. That is a major reason for government deficits. Corporations who import goods rather than manufacturing them here also avoid taxes by setting up corporate subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. The tax laws need to be rewritten to make that unprofitable.

Moreover, mergers and acquisitions never benefit the consumer when they reduce competition and eliminate jobs. Most advances in technology have come from startup companies which innovated when the companies the startup entrepreneurs previously worked for refused to support them. The current economic climate in the US is stifling real innovation.

[undergroundpanther]

5. The greedy created the Needy

And I HATE the extravagant rich pigs who do not like hearing the reality,that, THEY TAKE TOO MUCH.
TAX the Rich make them pay for their privilege to live in society.The world would be better off if greedy rich people
were forced to live within the means of "the middle class".

[truedelphi]

6. Gosh oh gee, it is just so good to know that

Back when this was posted, Feb 2009, things were dire. But now the economy has turned around, Bernanke is in for another four and everything is roses!

Not!

[Naturyl]

7. Wow, 20 recs on a poverty thread? What's going on?

Ah, okay. "Working class." Emphasis on WORKING. That explains it.

The WORKING poor are objects worthy of compassion in the public mind, while the non-working poor are to be ignored until they (hopefully) go away.

[truedelphi]

8. Why does this have to be so divisive?

Many people who are "Working poor" today, will be "non working poor" tomorrow.

When their job is outsourced.

When that funny mole on their shoulder turns out to be skin cancer and they exceed their insurance cap from employer paid health care, and still are sick, and now are too sick to continue to work.

When the car that gets them to their job craps out.

When the employer's son robs the till, but the finger is pointed at them.

Poor is poor. Why is one type of poverty "real" poverty" and another, not? (To your way of thinking?)

Many of the working poor have the same problems that a non-working poor person does, but with the added expense of trying to get to work.

[bobbolink]

10. Thank you for seeing that! I really appreciate it! It's hard enough to be invisible because of

poverty, then if somehow a story about poverty actually sees light of day, we're still invisible BECAUSE we aren't working.

Then they wonder why people give up.

[Craftsman]

9. Been there done that and got the scars

Will never for get it either.