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Poverty
At a rally outside Philadelphia International Airport today, workers and members of Fight for Philly and SEIU 32BJ protested airport workers' wages and turned the focus on Mayor Nutter and City Council.
“[Nutter] can literally change the lives of thousands of workers,” said Rev. Greg Holston of the New Vision United Methodist Church in Philadelphia. The call to reform comes in anticipation of a hearing during which members of City Council will review the lease agreement between the city and US Airways. Currently, airport and airline subcontractors employe nearly a thousand workers who earn a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, or $2.83 plus tips.
The "Poverty at PHL Doesn't Fly" campaign seeks the extension of the 21st Century Living Wage and Benefits Standard to airport workers. The standard has been in place since 2005, and City Council recently passed an ordinance introduced by Councilman Wilson Goode Jr. to extend that living wage — 150 percent of federal minimum wage — to employees of airport subcontractors and sub-lessees. However, the administration informed Council that it was not bound by that ordinance and would not, therefore, enforce it.
Workers say that being employed by a subcontractor does not make their needs any less than those employed by primary contractors.
“We want [to be paid] enough to make us feel dignified and human,” said Onethea McKnight, an airport worker for 10 years who has never received a raise from her $7-per-hour starting wage.
Next up, workers and activists are inviting the Mayor and City Council to, “walk a day in our shoes” during which the Mayor or a City Council member would spend a day following an airport worker around, from “the moment they get up in the morning … to the moment they go to bed at night,” said Julie Blust of 32BJ.
Charles Murray, a leading right-wing polemicist, has spent three decades beating up on poor black people. His new book, however, is an act of more equal opportunity opprobrium, arguing that white working class America is in crisis because it has a fucked up and backward culture. And his main example is Philadelphia's Fishtown.
Murray published summaries of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 in the Wall Street Journal and another in the right-wing New Criterion. His argument is a mean and vicious slander against the people of Fishtown and working class people everywhere, detailing the decline of what he calls the “Founding virtues” of industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion amongst the rabble. It's based on the Philadelphia neighborhood, but Murray uses “Fishtown” as an exemplar to generalize about white Americans with “no academic degree higher than a high school diploma...[and unemployed or working in] a blue-collar, service, or low-level white-collar occupation.”
Murray complains that Fishtown residents are increasingly less moral than people in Belmont, based on the wealthy white Boston suburb full of “successful people in managerial and professional occupations―the elites who are in positions of influence over the nation’s economy, media, intellectual life, and politics.” Which is where Mitt Romney lives―so I suppose he offers a lesson in hypocrisy, avarice and greed, huh? But beyond Murray's poisonous politics, the biggest problem is that his argument is wrong.
City Controller Alan Butkovitz today slammed Governor Tom Corbett's attack on food stamp recipients, joining other city leaders in warning that the new 'asset test' will harm low-income Philadelphians. Pennsylvania's Department of Public Welfare announced that on May 1, people under 60 with more than $2,000 in savings or other assets will be barred from receiving food stamps. People over 60 would have a $3,250 cap.
“This decision is not only ‘mean-spirited’ but counter-productive in helping those on the lower economic rungs gain eventual long-term financial self-sufficiency,” Butkovitz wrote in a letter to Public Welfare Secretary Gary Alexander and Governor Corbett. “In a time when many are still struggling to recover from the near-collapse of our economy, both of these groups are especially vulnerable and in need of financial help to feed their families while trying to secure their future financial survival.”
The food stamp program feeds 1.8 million Pennsylvanians, including 439,245 in Philadelphia.
Butkovitz criticized Corbett for playing politics with hungry people's lives, saying the campaign for “eliminating food stamps for the poor and working is really a red herring aimed at masking an ideological agenda.”
As I noted yesterday, eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” is an old and recurrent refrain from those who seek to dismantle the country's social welfare system. But it's a cynical ruse with almost no basis in reality: 30 percent of those eligible for food stamps in Pennsylvania don't receive them. According to federal data, the Inquirer notes, Pennsylvania has a fraud rate of just one-tenth of 1 percent.
In the face of widespread and growing need alongside dwindling resources, the conservative answer is to change the subject and blame the poor.
Republican Gov. Tom Corbett has announced a major assault on the food stamp program that feeds 1.8 million Pennsylvanians, including 439,245 in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania's Department of Public Welfare announced that on May 1, people under 60 with more than $2,000 in savings or other assets will be barred from receiving food stamps. People over 60 would have a $3,250 cap.
As the Inquirer points out in a detailed look, the move to cut food stamps is way out of line with what other states are doing: “Pennsylvania plans to make the amount of food stamps that people receive contingent on the assets they possess — an unexpected move that bucks national trends and places the commonwealth among a minority of states.”
The trend during the Great Recession, with millions falling into poverty, has been to remove such barriers to assistance. Gov. Ed Rendell eliminated the state's asset test in 2008. Pennsylvania now joins 11 states with asset tests — including Indiana, Kansas, Missouri and South Dakota.
“I am not a poor black kid,” writes Philadelphia small business motivational writer-speaker Gene Marks near the beginning of a Forbes screed entitled “If I Was a Poor Black Kid.”
Marks writes books with charming titles like “In God We Trust: Everyone Else Pays Cash” and “The Complete Idiot's Guide To Successful Outsourcing.” He is a board member of the National Speaker’s Association and gives a speech titled “Quicker! Better! Wiser!” and his biography states that he is a “short, balding and mediocre certified public accountant.”
Philadelphia and our suburbs experienced the biggest increase in income segregation of any metro region in the country, according to a study released today by Stanford University, the Russell Sage Foundation, and Brown University. The same, however, is pretty much true nationwide: rich people are increasingly likely to live in rich neighborhoods, the poor evermore likely to live in poor neighborhoods.
The middle class? You can find them in The Onion’s National Museum of the Middle Class, “featuring historical and anthropological exhibits addressing the socioeconomic category that once existed between the upper and lower classes.”
Not that things were pretty during the halcyon days of the 1950s — but they are getting much, much worse now. As I’ve written about (somewhat obsessively), Philadelphia’s rich are retreating into ever more exclusive highway-bound exurbs further and further away (same elsewhere too), while old post-war middle-class suburbs follow their urban counterparts into disinvestment and decline. And since black and Latino people are much more likely to be poor — and thanks to a post-World War II history of the government subsidizing white peoples' resettlement to racially exclusive 'burbs while intentionally concentrating black people in the 'hood — Philly and many other metros are also severely segregated by race. Oh, and our region’s schools are the nation’s most separate and unequal — take that Brown v. Board!
The Media Mobilizing Project, a Philadelphia coalition of community groups that uses the media to get their message out, helped produce a five-part documentary for The Poverty Tour: A Call to Conscience. The 11-state tour is being organized by big-time television host Tavis Smiley and the high-wattage Princeton intellectual Cornel West, and was launched to raise two prominent black voices highlighting President Obama’s failure to deal with poverty — in the black community and throughout America.
Some 46.2 million Americans live in poverty — that’s one in six of us. And the Census Bureau only counts people who make, say, $17,374 for a family of three as impoverished.
Here comes Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Philly, Occupy Everywhere — and it looks like pretty serendipitous timing to air their films.
CP contributor Daniel Schwartz was on the scene this past Thursday at an anti-foreclosure protest held at Sixth and Market. The protest was organized by the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, a national group combating "economic human rights violations."
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