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Today’s New York Times has a really fascinating pair of articles that center on working women and how they balance their jobs and family lives. I’m pretty sure they weren’t meant to be read side by side, but doing so is an instructive exercise in compare-and-contrast.
Article one amounts to one of the rich-people-porn pieces the Times Style section so often specializes in. Much of it concerns how high-powered women executives are able to take abbreviated maternity leaves if they choose to do so, because they have abundant resources to help with child care, and enough clout on the job to work from home or maintain somewhat flexible schedules:
New parents with the financial means have solutions that others don’t when they have to answer to both a newborn and a boss. [Yahoo CEO] Ms. Mayer, for example, will be able to hire as many nannies and baby nurses as she needs. Ms. Sankar’s parents and in-laws are living in her home in Palo Alto, Calif.
When Ivanka Trump flew to Miami on business eight days after giving birth to her daughter, Arabella, last summer, she rode in her father’s plane, returning late that night.
Compare this scenario with the one sketched in Gina Bellafante’s piece about the plight of low-wage workers in New York City. The Times reports that NYC’s unemployment rate is ten percent, about two points higher than the rest of the country. Unlike the women profiled in the other article, many of the low-wage workers in this article don’t have even have paid sick days, and a bill to require paid sick leave has been stalled in the City Council.
In contrast to the other article, which offered such heartwarming vignettes as the one about Ivanka Trump being whisked away in daddy’s private jet in order to travel for work, we get a glimpse of the considerably less glamorous, and far more exhausting, commuting schedule of an immigrant working as a cleaning person:
Ms. Ordonez, a single mother who lives in the Bronx and came to the States from Ecuador in 1981, was already working full days as a home health aide in East Harlem when she accepted the 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. cleaning shift at Con Edison, embarking on a schedule and route — multiple subways and two-hour trips in the middle of the night — that allowed her no more than three hours of sleep.
Ms. Ordonez recently lost her job. Bellafante notes:
Because she is paid so little beyond minimum wage, she requires two full-time jobs to meet expenses that include a rent burden of $1,475 a month, on which she is now 60 days behind.
The article makes it clear just how much ground has been lost by low-wage workers over the past several decades, and the enormous difficulties they now have in making ends meet:
In the 1960s and ’70s, the report states, the earnings of someone working full time, year round at the minimum wage were enough to lift a family of three above the poverty line. The purchasing power of New York State’s minimum wage, which stands at $7.25 an hour, is now dramatically lower than it was 40 years ago. Today, a person earning the minimum and working year round would earn about $16,000, or 82 percent of the poverty threshold for a family of three.
We then move on to another outrageous vignette:
At J.F.K. last week, I met a security worker, Prince Jackson, employed by Air Serv (whose chairman, Frank A. Argenbright Jr., the report handily tells us, owns a $6.8 million compound in Sea Island, Ga.) as he ended a night shift. Part of his job involves the important work of monitoring a passenger-exit area in a Delta terminal, ensuring that no one breaks through into the arrivals area.
For this he is paid $8 an hour. His health plan’s co-pay is too high, so he never uses it, he told me. Mr. Jackson, who is galvanizing his co-workers and speaking at Tuesday’s event, said that were it not for his church’s food pantry, he could not afford groceries. His son is a junior at Clark University, and he would like to be able to send him some money occasionally so the young man could study more and work less. But he can’t.
I’ve written a couple of blog posts now blasting the Jason DeParle article that blamed single moms for inequality. And certainly, over the years the Times has published more than its share of dumb lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous pieces like the executive-moms-on-maternity-leave piece.
But credit where credit is due: Gina Bellafante really hit the nail on the head with today’s piece on low-wage workers. Several of the workers she profiles are single moms, but she doesn’t attempt to frog-march them to city hall for the marriage licenses, as if that would be their get-out-of-jail-free card out of a lifetime of poverty, near-poverty and constant economic struggle. Instead, she views them, correctly, through the lens of work, and sees that, first and foremost, what they need are jobs that pay them adequately and provide good benefits. And what we need to be asking ourselves is, why it is that such jobs were once so abundant, and why they aren’t now, and what we can do to bring them back.
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c u n d gulag on July 22, 2012 2:44 PM:
"What we need to be asking ourselves is, why it is that such jobs were once abundant, and why they aren’t now, and what we can do to bring those jobs, or jobs like them, back."
1. Companies once actually gave a sh*t - they needed to pay their workers so they could buy products, some of them made or sold by the company.
2. Companies don't give a sh*t anymore - they want cheap labor, and if they can't have it here, will leave the US.
They don't care anymore if employees can buy products, including their own, since they now have global markets, and cheap labor is dispensable, and easily replaceable, as desperate people, in the race to the bottom, will do anything to get even the worst job, working for most abusive bosses and compaanies.
3. See above.
4. Have a revolution, and have trade embargo's once the rich are dead and torched, and their dust has settled down.
OR - have Congress pass, the President sign, and SCOTUS approve, a variety of worker laws - including higher, LIVEABLE, minimum wages; affordable health family care plans; time off for vacation, personal days, and sick time - and, flex-hours, where possible; and PROFIT-SHARING plans (anyone remember those?) for employees, and not just shareholders and executives.
AND, incent companies with tax breaks to stay where they are - in their town, city, district, state, and country - and punish unmercifully the assholes who don't do the above with tax rates that won't just make a dent in their profit margins, put make those profit margins look like they had a feckin' head-on collision with a fully-loaded semi, pulling two loads.
One way or the other, things are going to come to a head sometime soon.
People are being bent beyond the breaking point, and violence may become the choice of many people - especially guns, since getting a gun to shoot-up your workplace and your bosses, seems fairly easy to do.
So, rich people and your corporations - you can start paying us now, and GET A HEAD, or do nothing, AND LOSE YOUR HEADS!
The choice is up to you.
bleh on July 22, 2012 3:03 PM:
Reagan made it okay for the middle class to hate the poor.
Remember what they said about the Southern oligarchy: they took everything for themselves, and they game the poor white man Jim Crow. That's what's happening now, on a national scale, and with a heavy dose of Calvinist class disdain, plus a little perverted theology, mixed in with the racism. The poor deserve their fate, because they are lazy, and because it must be God's plan.
Until the broad middle stops falling for the GOP's divide-and-conquer tactics, things will steadily get worse for both of them, very slowly for the middle class and faster for the poor. And FSM help us if ever the poor slip completely off the ladder and take to the streets -- it'll be carnage.
hornblower on July 22, 2012 3:05 PM:
Can New York absorb low-skilled workers into the mix anymore? Health care should be a given and maybe a raise in the minimum wage is possible but there are so few manufacturing jobs. I really don't think they are coming back. The years when you could prosper with a high school education are long gone. And your right the articles should not be read side by side
j on July 22, 2012 3:30 PM:
Gulag - as always I enjoy the wisdom of your comments.
Just talking to my husband I posed the question "Did you ever think in your lifetime you would see a man being considered for president who has made a habit of sending American jobs overseas, hidden his multi millions in off shore accounts and refused to reveal how much, if any taxes he pays? To my mind that counts as being a traitor to the country.
My husband said - they just want to get the black man out of the white house!
Please people don't let them succeed!
hornblower on July 22, 2012 3:58 PM:
Bad weekend to talk about guns.
Anonymous on July 22, 2012 4:35 PM:
bleh on July 22, 2012 3:03 PM:
Reagan made it okay for the middle class to hate the poor.
no, sorry, that began centuries before. if you doubt that, take a look at our language. look at the root of words like noble, gentle, villain, generous.
the poor are like patients with a terminal disease. we tolerate them, pity them and may even help them -- as long as they maintain their distance. they make us feel better about our own lot but they also remind us of our own vulnerabilities.
"One way or the other, things are going to come to a head sometime soon.
People are being bent beyond the breaking point, and violence may become the choice of many people - especially guns, since getting a gun to shoot-up your workplace and your bosses, seems fairly easy to do.
So, rich people and your corporations - you can start paying us now, and GET A HEAD, or do nothing, AND LOSE YOUR HEADS!"
hey now that's a great answer: Armed Violence!!!! it'll do wonders for gun and ammo manufacturers, who'll have to put on extra workers to keep up with demand!!! and just think about the impact it will have on the funeral industry!!!! Demand for real estate will boom to keep with the growing need for cemetery plots. States will have to build more prisons, spurring the construction industry!!! and of course, those new prisons will need more guards!!!. The prison/industrial complex is drooling with anticipation!!!
lots of cheap solutions for an extremely complex problem.
c u n d gulag on July 22, 2012 4:57 PM:
Anonymous, I'm not advocating it - but we're nearing a breaking point.
Many people whose incomes and lives are declining, have guns, and may seek violence as a solution - especially since our political system is now further rigged for those with wealth and power.
That, of course is not the best way to handle this. But people may see the French Revolution as a model for citizenry taking on the moneyed nobility and establishment, or the violent Russian Revolution - both successful against powerful odds.
And today's wealthy people in this country may seem invincible - but wipe out the power grids near them, and all of a sudden, the money, arms, and troops they have to protect them, may find themselves outnumbered.
Again, I'm not advocating this, since I abhor violence.
I'm just saying what, under the worst of circumstances, might be possible.
Preferable to that is, of course, and increase on the taxes of the wealthy and corporation, reestablishing "The Estate Tax" to former high levels, and the elimination of loopholes.
A progressive income tax has gone a long way in quelling revolutions in this world.
TCinLA on July 22, 2012 5:44 PM:
Most of you may not be old enough to remember this, but until about 1975, the minimum wage was a living wage. Generally, back then working full-time at minimum wage allowed a person to rent a small 1-bedroom apartment, eat good food, go out to the movies maybe twice a month on a date, and have a car. I know it did this in the late 1960s because I lived like that on a minimum-wage job.
Today - and I do not live expensively - if I worked a full-time minimum-wage job, I wouldn't be able to pay the rent, let alone anything else, and that's in California where it's $8.25/hour, not the rest of the country where it is less.
And f I moved to "cheap" housing in a neighborhood I would feel "pretty safe" in, it would not be more than a couple hundred a month less than I am paying, for a far worse place, and I still wouldn't be able to take care of the rest of my monthly expenses. Oh, and I wouldn't qualify for food stamps on a full-time minimum-wage job - I'd be making "too much."
That's what 40 years of Republican bullshit "creates."
Bernard Gilroy on July 22, 2012 6:00 PM:
I have never understood how the rich -- who tell us they are the best and brightest -- so completely misunderstand Social Security, Medicare, and other forms of social insurance. They're not insurance given to society. They're insurance of society -- they are the minimum investment made to allow the system to continue on a level keel and to avoid escalating cycles of envy and violence.
Social insurance helps two populations: First, those who are able to live in society even when they are not "winning"; and second, those who have won, who through funding social insurance, buy their way out of hanging from lampposts when the poor get too fed up.
If you truly support capitalism, you support progressive and significant taxation. The greatest threat to the capitalist system are those who have benefited most from it.
Texas Aggie on July 22, 2012 8:21 PM:
"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist" .- Dom Helder Camara
Right there you have the cause of the problem. This man was censured by the catholic church, specifically by the head of what was once the Inquisition, a person by the name of Cardinal Ratzinger, for trying to solve the problem of poverty rather than just treat the symptoms. The powerful have no intention whatsoever of giving up anything that would benefit someone else who needs the help. They are going to set the system for their benefit, no one else's.
"No somos izquerdo, no somos derecho. Somos los de abajo y venimos por los de arriba." - The 99%
R on July 22, 2012 8:32 PM:
@Anonymous: An interesting British take on hating the poor is the book _Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class_. We're not so different after all.
http://www.versobooks.com/books/1100-chavs
Patango on July 22, 2012 11:42 PM:
Kathleen Geier
Thank you
I feel the 2 articles should be read together, I felt like I got a kick in the gut while reading what you posted , these Dickenson scenarios go completely under the radar in todays society , it is appalling to witness , we get a feel good piece about a 5 year old kid who has had 5 surgery's and is brave enough to live life still , while my neighbor has had a strange head ache for a year and can not afford to go see the doctor about it , there is such a massive disconnect , and I appreciate The Washington Monthly employing you to at least air some of it
My cousin took a 12% pay cut when the economy tanked , the company owner said he would give it back after things got better , it is not happening now , he drives around in 2 deferent rolls royce , and goes on vacation constantly , they have no bennies
Solutions ? Pass laws that require companies who have high cash flows , to pay living wages and bennies , period , we should, all be fighting for these changes , but it is not even on the radar , they are just going to have to start opening massive amounts of soup kitchens every where , because these are the wages and NON living conditions our society has deemed acceptable
American Exceptionalism
Anonymous on July 23, 2012 1:00 AM:
Worth reading by Robert Reich, about the state of employment in America:
robertreich.org/post/27527895909
Too much to quote here, just go read it.
Snaveca on July 23, 2012 3:54 AM:
I think if there is any kind of "organized" violence because of the deteriorating position of the not rich, it won't be against the rich it'll be poor "us" vs. poor "them". I just don't see a NYC mob (for instance) pulling a hedge fund guy out of his Lincoln town car and beating him in the street in my lifetime. Otoh, it's completely likely that some marginalized group might end up battling with another marginalized group over the small amount of resources that are left to them. Americans just don't have a French Revolution in 'em. At least not now.
I've tried the "social welfare programs protect YOU and your well being better than any phalanx of security guards" argument with wealthy friends of mine, but they just won't buy it. They know The Poors have been too well trained. Isn't that the whole purpose of the corporate media these days?
Neildsmith on July 23, 2012 6:08 AM:
Americans have, for several decades now, elected political leaders concerned only with the business elites. Left-wing concerns about poverty went out the window when Bill Clinton ended "welfare as we know it" and embraced free trade with NAFTA and Chinese entry into the WTO. And so the single mothers making minimum wage will be with us forever now. It is, frankly, painful at this late date to hear the wails of protest coming from the left. In a world where several billion people live on a small percentage of the US minimum, there will always be someone willing to work for less.
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