Economy: July 2009 Archives

A few months ago, we looked at the recession as a potential wake-up call for the political forces that brought us welfare reform during the Clinton Era. Now that epidemic levels of joblessness and homelessness are creeping into the “middle class”—and exploding stereotypes about poor Black single mothers lacking “personal responsibility”—a welfare system that blames the poor for their plight seems tragically out of sync with today's economic reality.

Maybe someone in Washington is paying attention. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has identified potential green shoots in Recovery Act that could undo some of the damage that poor communities of color have suffered under punitive welfare policies. The stimulus enables states to revamp Temporary Assistance for Needy Families programs through measures that could both expand access and reorient assistance toward more systemic supports.

photo credit: Majeed Babar, c/o New York Community Media Alliance

By Miriam Leshin

On Monday, ethnic and community news media representatives gathered for a press conference on the recent 10-cent increase in the New York state minimum wage and its implementation in immigrant communities.

Terri Gerstein, deputy commissioner of the New York Department of Labor; Maritere Arce, director of the Department of Labor Bureau of Immigrant Workers Rights; Hector Figueroa, secretary treasurer of the Service Employees International Union; and Rajesh D. Nayak, staff attorney for the National Employment Law Project briefed the audience on the challenges facing the enforcement of the new minimum wage, which increased from $7.15/hour to $7.25/hour on July 24.

Initially, I was impressed that this press conference—which The New York Community Media Alliance organized in collaboration with several other groups—even occurred in the first place. Sitting in the CUNY Graduate Journalism Center on Monday, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Gerstein and Arce detail several ways in which the Bureau tries to reach out to immigrant communities—through town hall meetings, know-your-rights workshops, and collaboration with community-based organizations. In theory, it all sounded well thought-out and even innovative.

Then I went home and did the numbers.

Although the 10-cent increase may seem like nothing (and it is), this is really a $200 increase per year, for people working 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year. Before taxes, that is. Under the previous minimum wage of $7.15/hour, workers earned $14,300/year without overtime hours, whereas with the new minimum wage this is up to $14,500/year.

Earlier this week, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, signed a budget plan sent to him by legislators to close the state's deficit, but only after he used his line-item veto power to slash an additional $500 million in cuts.

According to the LA Times the additional cuts Schwarzenegger made Tuesday took funding from the most vulnerable:
• $80 million that pays for workers who help abused and neglected children
• $50 million from Healthy Families, which provides healthcare to children in low-income families
• $50 million from services for developmentally delayed children under age 3
• $16 million from domestic-violence programs
• $6.3 million from services for the elderly.

What do all these dollar amounts mean? Well, take for instance, The Domestic Violence Center in Santa Clarita Valley outside of Los Angeles who has lost 45% of their annual funding. In their case, unless the community steps in they will have to shut their doors as a result to these cuts.

We've all heard about the incident at the Philly pool. Color of Change put out a great incident report in case you missed it. The incident is a classic whites-only racism incident, and it's reminded me that as responsible racial justice thinkers we must always look at incidental racism as tips of icebergs.

The real iceberg moving through Philly this summer, and many other American cities, is that tons of resources for black youth are being cut 'due to the economy', which is to say, when the money starts running out in racist systems, you see a rise in racist budgeting.

To put it more gently, when the decisionmakers around a municipal budget - whether they are white or black or any other color - are the kind of folks who like the complexion of their own world to be white on white, you best believe the needs for the growth, engagement and safety of black kids are not going to be prioritized.

Its not as easy, and its not as fun as 'reactivism', but we have to stop pouring quick energy (and for some of us - ANY energy) into getting into white-only spaces. We have to look within ourselves and our communities and recognize that we are not inferior to whites, and good enough only for a place at the white table, or 60 spots at the white pool. We have to position ourselves to have our own of whatever it is we want.

To be clear - I don't mean our own place to be exclusionary, but our own spaces to be who we are, free from the practices of a society that only works by making us believe we are a 'minority', or 'inferior'.

Folks in Philly are already on this, working to ensure that all Philly residents get equal access to public resources, and specifically highlighting the racism inherent in the resource removal. Inform yourself about this work, and find out if your city is facing similar racist budgeting.

I'm at the Localize This! action camp, and literally the one thing the participants have in common is the understanding that the new world is everywhere we are, it is us who must see that it is ours. Think deeply about how you can liberate resources for your community.

As soon as I heard this story a song came to mind, with Billie's voice on it:

"God bless the child, that's got his own, that's got his own."

Here we go again. California may soon seek to balance the budget on the backs of immigrant families.

The LA Times reports that Governor Schwarzenegger has proposed imposing a five-year limit on state welfare support for citizen children of undocumented immigrants, which “would affect approximately 100,000 U.S.-born children in about 48,000 California households headed by illegal immigrants, who receive a monthly average of $472.”

In total, the state estimates that denying benefits to undocumented immigrant households for these children “could save about $640 million annually if it survives legal challenges.”

Now that's bang for your buck, eh?

Facing a fiscal gap of over $26 billion, state lawmakers ought to carefully weigh the ramifications of this move. Is the amount "saved," compared to the monstrous deficit, really worth taking away a family's monthly welfare stipend—money that, in the midst of a recession, barely buffers a household against starvation and homelessness?

The pushback against another stimulus package is in full force, with conservatives arguing that the “failure” of the first stimulus proves that another fiscal boost would be a mistake.

Let us turn to the annals of wonkdom to establish some fundamental truths:

First, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains that the stimulus is generally working as planned, but must be revamped. Rising unemployment was expected from the outset, although “virtually all forecasts in both the public and private sectors underestimated the severity of the downturn. Nevertheless, the law has slowed the decline and will help the turnaround occur sooner than it would have otherwise.”

Second, the Obama administration's initial stimulus hasn't trickled down to many communities and critical sectors. The Economic Policy Institute's Ethan Pollack says:

the next round of stimulus should focus on what the first round underfunded or ignored: aid to cities and states, school construction, aid to transit agencies (to avoid fare increases and service cuts), and more support for low-income families.

Although I'm a little reluctant to admit it sometimes, I'm from Fresno, CA. But when my girlfriend and I got lost driving back to our Oakland homes from Los Angeles this last weekend, my loyalty to the Central Valley came rushing in. Nearly every orchard and field we saw on our detour had one of these signs sticking out of its dry, dead land.

Apparently, Congress has almost entirely diminished water irrigation from lakes up north into the state's aqua-duct system to protect the preservation of the smelt, a small three-inch non-commercial minnow. This, and a three-year drought, have dried up roughly 450,000 acres statewide and have left an estimated 35,000 people without jobs in an already bad economy.

But as the smelt frolic in their north lake homes, New America Media reports that small farm towns like Huron, CA (the producer of 95 percent of processing tomatoes in the US) are seeing their unemployment rate reach 35 percent, three times as much as the state unemployment rate forcing many residents (who are mostly Latino) to sublease whatever space they have in their homes to make rent, leaving up to 35 people squeezed into a three-bedroom house.

I'm not one who believes in prioritizing issues on some kind of hierarchy. But while I'm sure the smelt is important to California's ecological system, jobs to make money to buy food is a significant priority to the thousands of farmworkers who are mostly non-English speakers, often undocumented and rely on farmworking for survival because that's what they've been doing most of their lives. Saving the smelt just doesn’t trump that.

by Jonathan Yee

Need a job? Well, the National Recovery Act has created a great deal of excitement for green jobs and their potential to save the environment and create jobs for low income communities; for example, Oakland’s Green Jobs Corps' first graduating class is just one of many similar programs in the nation.

However, the history of job training programs and their founding philosophy paves the way for plenty of skepticism about the Recovery Act's ultimate impact.

When I say job training, I don’t mean training within a successful company, or in an established trade where employees learn new skills to be more productive at their work; I mean state-funded job training for low-income communities, usually communities of color. These groups historically have been excluded from the formal economy and have benefited relatively little.

Job training is relatively new in the United States. Before the passage of the Job Training Partnership Act in 1982, state programs that directly intervened in the job market focused on job creation rather than job training. Reagan passed the JTPA based on the philosophy that there was nothing wrong with the economy, but there was something wrong with the people who couldn’t find jobs. The thinking was that the unemployed and underemployed were not acclimated with the new times or the new technology, and they needed training.

This is typical of Reagan policies -- blaming the individual, rather than looking at the institutional factors that attribute to inequity and poverty. The institutional push by Reagan and Clinton to dismantle the welfare state and remove all social safety nets has actually increased poverty and devastated communities of color. These policy shifts created a weak foundation for the current state of workforce training programs.

It could easily be argued that this approach to job training was not meant to do anything but institutionally stigmatize individuals for not keeping up with the economy. At the very least, these programs continue to be a go-to political pacifier for policymakers who promote them as poverty reduction measures, though studies have shown for years that job training has been a failure as a means of countering unemployment. As the New York Times said today,

a little-noticed study the Labor Department released several months ago found that the benefits of the biggest federal job training program were “small or nonexistent” for laid-off workers. It showed little difference in earnings and the chances of being rehired between laid-off people who had been retrained and those who had not.