We Need More Than Just More Jobs

“Poverty in America: Why can’t we end it?” Professor Peter Edelman asks. Or maybe the New York Times headline writer asks, since Edelman proceeds to tell us that we can — and how.

Top of the to-do list is to create more jobs that pay decent wages.

Well, how do we do that?

We need a full employment policy, Edelman says. This, I take it, means both public investments and diverse fiscal and labor policy changes that would achieve — and then sustain — a negligible unemployment rate.

We’d have more jobs, but also a relatively small pool of jobless job seekers. Employers would thus have to offer decent wages if they wanted to hire people qualified for the jobs they needed to fill.

Professor Robert Pollin, author of the new Back to Full Employment, says this happened in the 1960s and again in the late 1990s, especially for people “at the low end of the labor market.”

Progressives, Edeleman among them, also call for larger investments in education and skill-development.

Not the answer, according to an analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

We’ve already got a higher percent of college graduates in the workforce than we did at the end of the 1970s. Yet the share of good jobs, as CEPR defines them,* is smaller — and was even before the recession set in.

The problem, it says, isn’t that workers’ skills haven’t kept up with the pace of technological change — though many allege a “skills mismatch” as the source of our persistently high unemployment rate.

It’s that workers have lost their bargaining power, especially those at the middle of the income scale and below.

Diverse changes in the labor market are responsible for this, e.g., jobs outsourced from the public sector and from local manufacturing to cheap labor markets overseas, a “dysfunctional immigration system” that depresses both wages and other aspects of job quality.

For these and a variety of other reasons, many of the top-growing occupations are in service areas where wages are characteristically low — retail sales, home care, food preparation and other restaurant work, etc.

These jobs obviously can’t be exported. Nor can the people who do them be replaced by machines.

But barring policy changes, they’ll still be low-wage jobs with few or no benefits.

I’m all for improving our public education system and for making it possible for low-income people to go to college — and graduate. We’ve got a long way to go.

But if every working-wage person in the country had a college degree, we’d just have even more college graduates doing work well below their competencies — and effectively pushing out people whose skills match the job requirements.

So we obviously need more good jobs for these current and future college graduates.

But if we’re going to end poverty, we need to make those low-paying service and other proliferating bottom-of-the-barrel jobs better too.

I’ll have more to say about this. In the meantime, Happy Labor Day to you all.

* A “good job” pays at least $18.50 an hour — the 1979 inflation-adjusted median for men. It also offers employer-subsidized  health insurance and an employer-sponsored retirement plan. CEPR considers other aspects of job quality important, e.g., paid sick leave, but couldn’t get reliable data to measure changes since the end of the 70s.

“Poverty Is First and Foremost a Problem of Work”

A thought-provoking Q&A session with Professor Peter Edelman and Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for America Progress.

The occasion was Edelman’s new book, So Rich, So Poor. And like the book, the discussion revolved around poverty in America — why we have so much of it, what we could do to have less.

For both Edelman and Boushey, the key to both is work. Poverty is “first and foremost a problem of work,” Boushey said.

She wasn’t referring to the current shortage of it, but rather, as Edelman later put it, “work that produces a decent income.”

Back in the mid-1970s, “something happened to male wages,” Boushey said. The “something” was a leveling-off in their real value — and an actual drop in wages for men with, at most, a high school diploma.

Family incomes were “held up by women.” Many more of them in the labor force and remaining there after marriage or rejoining when things got tough.

But workplaces are generally “hostile to families,” Boushey added. And it’s still the case that work/family conflicts affect women more than men.

The bigger issue, however, is the growing number of single-mother families — a major theme in Edelman’s book.

No second income here. And wage losses — job losses too — because there’s no dad around to help cope with the child who gets sick or the late-announced scheduling changes that throw child care arrangements out of whack.

Family-friendly workplaces won’t solve the wage problem, however.

Edelman attributed it in part to macroeconomic policies, citing trade and immigration specifically.

He’s referring, among other things, to trade agreements that advantage imports from countries with low labor standards.

Also, I would guess, to policies that allow employers to import temporary workers who will accept lower wages than would otherwise have to be paid. Policies that enable U.S. companies to maximize profits by exporting jobs belong in this category too.

Coming at the issue from a different angle, Boushey said that our macroeconomic policies need to focus on good jobs — specifically, on developing “human capital” by investments in education.

Edelman concurred. He’d like our high schools to offer pathways to work other than college prep — vocational and technical training for bona fide careers.

This, he said, is especially important for youth — most of them racial and ethnic minorities — who are in danger of becoming disconnected from both school and work.

Solutions like these could perhaps lift more of the upcoming generation into the endangered middle class. But what about people who are already working age?

Some, of course, are doing very well, thank you. But, according to Edelman, half the jobs in our economy pay less than $34,000 a year. For a family of four, that’s less than 150% of the federal poverty line — the standard commonly used for low-income.

No silver bullets identified. Edelman, in fact, said he was “very concerned about the next decade.”

He floated some policy changes that could make a difference, but added that we’d first have to decide we have “an income problem.” We’re not facing up to that, he said.

People deflect attention from the wage issue, e.g., by blaming single mothers for having children. Those low on the income scale think that’s where they are because of their “failings” — or because that’s “just how things are.”

Edelman is refreshingly optimistic. We’ve “had other times that were really terrible,” he said. Think of the robber-baron era at the beginning of the 20th century.

But then “people stood up.” They voted to put an end to it. We’re “voting against our own interests now” — and at a time when “we need the largest we we can get to defend what we have.”

Recall that Congressman Paul Ryan, among others, is claiming that we’re helping people too much — and for too long.

So where will the “largest we” come from? Ironically, given the context, Edelman’s said that what we need to do is get people outside of think tanks thinking and talking about poverty — or perhaps about specific poverty-related problems.

This seems to me one of the big challenges of our time.

What will create a broad-based, sustained conversation about work, wages, income supports and the rest? What will translate talk into a political force?

Why Are So Many People So Poor in America?

The gross national income in our country was nearly $14.6 trillion in 2010 — more than $47,300 for every man, woman and child.

So, as Professor Peter Edelman observes, if the GNI were divided equally, everyone would be middle class.

But, of course, it isn’t. In fact, a greater share has been flowing to the notorious 1% for quite awhile now. For Edelman, this is a key reason it’s so hard to end poverty in America — the subtitle of his new book, So Rich, So Poor.

Or more precisely, income inequality is a key reason. For the last 40 years, he says, “our economy has been very unkind to the bottom half of our people.”

At the very bottom, we’ve got nearly 20.5 million people so poor that their household incomes fall below 50% of the Census Bureau’s very low poverty thresholds.

In 2010, about six million — roughly one in 50 — had no income at all except the cash value of their food stamp benefits. For a family of three, this meant, at most, $526 a month — and, of course, available only to buy groceries.

We’ve got terrific public policy, Edelman says. It’s simply not true, as some say, that anti-poverty programs don’t work. Without them, over 40 million more people would be poor.

But the enactment of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program ripped “a terrible hole … in the safety net.”

In fact, “welfare is gone,” Edelman says. It’s “basically disappeared in large parts of the country” because states have no obligation to provide cash assistance (or any equivalent) to families who would qualify according to a common standard of need.

This, however, is only one part of Edelman’s far-ranging analysis.

We’ve had “a flood of low-wage jobs,” he says. And “people in the bottom half have been absolutely stuck.”

Well, not quite, but pretty damn near. Between 1968 and 2010, inflation-adjusted incomes of households in the bottom half grew, on average, about half a percent a year.

And at the end, incomes of households in the bottom tenth averaged just $11,904 — well under the federal poverty line for a family of two.

It’s a stretch to attribute this to a flood of low-wage jobs, however. And I doubt Edelman means to.

If there are relatively more of those jobs now, it’s partly because our economy has fewer living wage jobs for workers with no more than a high school education.

Many of been exported to low-wage countries. Many have simply vanished. When was the last time you called, say, the gas company and didn’t get a recorded message?

I suppose it’s also the case that more jobs have become low-wage — relative at least to rising living costs.

What we know for sure is that wages have been stagnating for a long time. In other words, workers haven’t been getting a fair share of productivity growth, as they did during the post-World War II period.

This is especially true for workers without a college education.

The Economic Policy Institute reports that real wages for high school graduates in the private sector increased by 4.8% between 1989 and 2010 and by just 2.6% for those in state government. During the same period, productivity, i.e., the total output of goods and services per hours worked, grew by 62.5%.

Lots of reasons for this. I’ve mentioned a couple. A fine paper from the Economic Policy Research Network takes up these and many others.

Edelman deals not only with low-wage work, but with poverty children inherit from their parents, disparities rooted in race and gender discrimination and the problems single parents (usually mothers) face trying to support themselves and their children.

Also housing policies, public education and, as Nation blogger Greg Kaufmann says, “much, much more.”

Notwithstanding the complexities, however, Edelman believes that poverty in our country is not an unsolvable problem — or rather, collection of problems.

We need “much more political will” to attack them. That, he thinks, will require, above all, a widely-shared view that it’s in our common interest to have “an economy that includes everybody.”

The sticking point here, he says, is that the vast majority of us middle-class voters think we have more in common with the people at the top than the people at the bottom.

This, I suppose, has something to do with the extraordinary hold the myth of boundless upward mobility has on our imagination. The Great Recession has certainly shaken it, though by how much and for how long is hard to say.

But, says Edelman, if we in the middle don’t see “which side of the line” we’re really on — that our fate rests with what happens to the bottom half — “we are cooked.”

TANF Turns Fifteen

Fifteen years ago today, President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act — the bill that created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

He’d promised to end welfare as we knew it. And, with a stroke of the pen, he did.

Cash assistance would henceforward be time-limited — a five-year lifetime maximum, with some limited, optional exceptions. None for program “graduates” who later suffered setbacks.

The federal government would pay states a fixed amount, based on what they were spending under the program TANF replaced. But they’d get bonus rewards for “decrease[s] in illegitimacy.”

States would have a good bit of flexibility, but they’d have to construct programs that, as the bill’s name implies, promoted personal responsibility and provided work opportunity, i.e., got recipients off the rolls and into jobs.

Big focus on personal responsibility — not be be confused with responsible personal choices.

The PRWORA includes, among other things, detailed work activity requirements, beefed-up child support enforcement, a related benefits cut for single parents who didn’t cooperate, a mandatory program component to reduce the rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancies, especially among teenagers, and some extra requirements for teens who had babies anyway.

The legislation was controversial from the get-go. Clinton reportedly wasn’t altogether happy with it, but went along because he’d already vetoed two more extreme Republican alternatives.

Peter Edelman resigned from a high-level position in the Health and Human Services Department because, as he later explained, the bill wasn’t welfare reform at all.

It wouldn’t promote work effectively. It would “hurt millions of poor children.” And it would deny federally-funded assistance to “hundreds of thousands of immigrants” who were legally authorized to live here — children included.

Similar views from other prominent poverty experts, including Senator Daniel Moynihan, who called the bill “the most brutal act of social policy since Reconstruction.”

Needless to say, conservatives thought it was quite a fine thing. And they generally still do, though an upcoming hearing suggests that some Republican House members want to further tighten up on those work requirements.

I’ve put in my two cents on a number of occasions. Basically, I’m persuaded by the substantial body of research showing that the “success” the Republicans tout has little or nothing to do with enabling TANF recipients to find — and keep — living wage jobs.

Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich, best known for her classic Nickled and Dimed, sum up the evidence well.

Legal Momentum offers an even broader point-by-point indictment in its review of what’s happened to poor women and children in the 15 years since “welfare reform” began shredding the safety net.

What I think we need to understand is that the defects don’t reflect poor implementation. They’re an outgrowth of why welfare was “reformed” to begin with.

I recall TANF’s pre-history well, from my husband’s days in the Carter administration’s social policy planning office. The big deal then, as it was under Clinton, was to put a curb on federal welfare spending — especially support for single mothers.

By this measure, TANF has succeeded.

Congress has consistently level-funded the program, notwithstanding rising living and program operations costs and the growing number of families in need. At the same time, it’s allowed states to use unspent TANF funds for other, more politically-popular programs.

States have responded by adopting policies and condoning — if not actually encouraging — practices that minimize their caseloads.

The end result, says Ehrenreich, in a scathing review of our poverty policies, is that some recipients refer to TANF as “Torture and Abuse of Needy Families.”

TANF will expire at the end of September unless Congress reauthorizes it or, as it did last year, passes a short-term extension. The latter seems more likely, given the other preoccupations — and hyper-partisan battles — on Capitol Hill.

But sooner or later, the White House and Congress will turn their attention to reauthorization.

One would hope that they’d reform welfare reform to provide a genuine safety net for parents who can’t support themselves and their children, plus education, training, child care and whatever else those who can work need to embark on career paths that will lead them out of poverty.

But, as Legal Momentum observes, “Congress could also consider proposals that would take TANF an even less effective safety net.” Might even pass some of them in one of those bad compromises that gave us the program we have today.

In the meantime, watch out for what happens to TANF when Congress gets busy on the spending cuts required under the new debt ceiling/deficit reduction deal.