The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (28 page)

Both sets of claims were true: Texas
was
seeing more jobs being created—between January 2006 and January 2011 it added over half a million positions, while other states were hemorrhaging employment. But they were low-paying, non-benefited, and frequently dead-end in character. The state wasn’t educating workers well enough to help them move up the economic ladder; it wasn’t investing adequately in job training programs; it wasn’t putting resources into monitoring workplace conditions. For employers, Perry’s Texas was a low-wage, low-regulation paradise. For employees, too often it was a place of crushing drudgery.
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Unfortunately, where Texas goes, so goes much of the nation, an argument developed by
New York Times
columnist Gail Collins, in her 2012 book
As Texas Goes
. Increasingly, at the state level, conservative GOP legislators and governors, at the urging of groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Legislative Exchange Council, have moved against public sector unions, welfare recipients, against services offered by federally funded programs like Medicaid, and even against the unemployed—in Florida and elsewhere, legislators have pushed for unemployment insurance applicants to have to be fingerprinted and drug-tested, essentially putting in place practices that send out the none-too-subtle signal that the unemployed are to be viewed and treated as criminals. Georgia and a handful of other states, have pushed similar measures on welfare applicants.

In Wisconsin, Tea Party–backed governor Scott Walker spent the first several months of his gubernatorial tenure attempting to break public sector unions in the state. His counterparts in Ohio and Indiana launched similar campaigns, as did Paul LePage, in Maine.

The unions, Walker announced, were “special interests,” stubbornly unwilling to negotiate away unreasonably generous benefits to help a hard-pressed state balance its books. His message, however manipulative, resonated with a significant percentage of the workforce. When the trade union movement generated enough petition signatures to force a recall election against Walker, outside groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent tens of millions of dollars on a campaign defending the governor. On Election Day, in June 2012, Walker handily won re-election.

DOING BUSINESS TEXAS-STYLE

If the private sector experience with rampant anti-unionizing efforts, and the emergence of a workforce lacking decent benefits and having almost no clout in negotiations with management, is anything to go by, Wisconsin’s public sector workers, as well as those in the other states contemplating changes to their collective bargaining rules, have plenty to fear.

Let’s return to Texas again, this time to hear from 67-year-old Mary Vasquez, whose Social Security check was $600 and whose rent was $500. A little woman, her health broken by cancer, heart attacks, diabetes, high blood pressure, and a multitude of other ailments, her crinkled face a map of pain and heartache, Vasquez, to make ends meet, worked as a phone operator at a Walmart on the outskirts of Dallas. When we met in December 2011, she showed me her pay stubs to date for the year. In the first eleven months of 2011, she had earned slightly under $23,800. After taxes, exorbitant health insurance premiums, and automatic deductions to buy Walmart stock—a faux-savings option that the mega-company strongly encourages its employees
to make, despite the fact that most such workers remain too poor to ever be able to retire on these savings—in those eleven months she netted $15,887, a large part of which went to pay for medical expenses covered neither by Medicare nor her Walmart healthcare plan; much of the remainder of it went to pay down usurious payday loan debts that she’d accumulated in recent years as her health declined.

Sitting in a union hall in the suburb of Grapevine—Vasquez was one of a handful of local Walmart employees pushing to unionize her workplace—the elderly lady, who hobbled around using a walker, explained how she skipped “mostly breakfast and sometimes lunch.” Diabetic, she was supposed to eat fresh produce; instead, she said, for dinners “a lot of times I buy a TV dinner; we have them on sale for 88 cents. A lot of times, food I can’t pay for.” Vasquez’s plight was all too common in the Lone Star state. Recall, again, that according to the Center for Public Policy Priorities, three years into the Great Recession, despite boasting relatively strong job growth, Texas had the second worst rate of food insecurity in the country.
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Yet, at the same time, compared to much of the country, it had a low unemployment rate: as of the summer of 2012 it stood at 7.2 percent, far below California’s 10.7 percent, or New York’s 9.1 percent, and significantly below the national rate of 8.3 percent.
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Texas governor Rick Perry had run his ill-fated campaign to become the Republican presidential nominee in large part by touting his state’s low unemployment numbers.

So why the skyrocketing food insecurity in Texas? In large part because more and more of the working poor, in a state with only the federal minimum wage, were earning rock-bottom wages. In 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that Texas and Mississippi were tied for having highest percentage of their workforces earning only at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Fully 550,000 Texans were stuck at this wage level—about half of them actually earning
less
than the legal minimum—with millions more earning not much more.
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For companies such as Walmart, all of this was, quite simply, great for business. Taking advantage of the anti-union, anti-labor environment, the world’s biggest retailer opened up dozens of stores in the 1990s and 2000s in the Lone Star state. In the Dallas region alone, by 2012 it had more than twenty outlets.
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Texas’s low-wage environment apparently meshed perfectly with Walmart’s employment philosophy. According to the online wage-monitoring site Glassdoor, as of mid-2012 the average pay for a Walmart sales associate was $8.88 an hour; for a “guest service team member” it was $8.42; for a cashier $8.62.
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When meat-cutters in its Jacksonville, Texas, store tried to unionize in 2000 to better their working conditions, the company responded by eliminating the butcher’s section from its store, limiting itself to prepackaged meats instead so as to avoid having to negotiate with a labor union.
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It’s a tactic the company has perfected all over the country—rousing the wrath of organizations such as Human Rights Watch but proving remarkably good for business.
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In 2011, Walmart posted profits of more than $15 billion.
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After all, keeping workers nonunion allows the company to pay wages so low that the children of many employees end up on Medicaid, the workers themselves on food stamps.

In October 2012 several Walmart workers in the Los Angeles area launched a strike against the company; and a month later, on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, Walmart workers in several stores around the country, including some in Dallas, walked off the job, in a rolling attempt to force the company to recognize the UFCW and other unions. Walmart’s response? A spokesperson denounced the action as a “union-funded publicity stunt.”
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But for the employees, this wasn’t a stunt; it was about basic dignity. Mary Vasquez routinely borrowed from payday loan companies to tide her over; she scrounged food from friends and relatives; she had so little money set aside for retirement that she believed she would have to work until she died. Several of her co-workers, she confided,
were in their seventies; one, in her eighties, worked until she finally couldn’t do so anymore and then, lacking the money to stay in her own home, had to go to live with one of her children. “Makes me feel cheated,” Vasquez declared. “Just the way I feel; don’t know why I feel like that. You don’t know what it [poverty] is unless you’ve experienced it, unless you’ve been down that road.”

Trapped by circumstance, Vasquez had no way out. She had the misfortune to be an elderly, low-wage American worker during a time of growing insecurity and—when it came to poverty—national myopia.

“If America was a corporation, it would today be the equivalent of IBM in the early 1990s—an industry giant that’s failing to keep up with the times,” wrote the statistician and United Nations health economist Howard Friedman, in his 2012 book
The Measure of a Nation
. “Once a world leader, it is now facing bankruptcy, lagging behind in major market segments like health, safety, education, democracy and even equality.”
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INEQUALITY’S A GOOD THING . . . UNLESS YOU’RE POOR

The low-wage-low-benefit vortex generally affects not just individuals but whole communities. Bereft of opportunity, such locales prove unattractive to those with options—with education, with valued skills, with drive. These men and women tend to leave, to bigger cities, to other states. Left behind in small towns with only low-wage employment, the rest of the population face daunting prospects.

Drive into a speck on the map such as Caldwell, in Canyon County, Idaho, and one is instantly hit by a sense of futility. The storefronts are beaten up; the homes ramshackle, paint flecked, walls akimbo. On the afternoons that the local food pantry is giving out boxes of food, about half a mile from a sprawling, mean-looking
trailer park nestled off to the side of a freeway on-ramp, the lines are quite simply immense.

Many of the pantry clients are out-of-work loggers. Others are farmers who can no longer make ends meet. Some are on disability. Several are on unemployment or welfare. There’s a
Grapes of Wrath
quality to their appearance, something weathered, stoic, patient. They stand in line by the score, still, quiet, under the large pantry logo of two palm trees rising up on the edge of a gorgeous blue sea, waiting for bags of old lettuces and onions, soggy cucumbers, frozen hot dogs and bologna, and lots of bread.

Not surprisingly, given this diet, most of the clients are chronically overweight. Others, like 60-year-old Robert Burke, a disabled ex-logger, trucker, and general jack-of-all-trades, in battered jeans, a faded green T-shirt, and a thick red-and-black parka, are skinnier, harder looking. “When you can’t afford it, you can’t afford it,” he said in simple explanation for why he was on line for free food, his sandy eyebrows raised slightly, his face deeply lined. “You’ve got to find it someplace. I’ve done ranch work, logged, trucked, worked on most everything I can work on. And now I can’t. I don’t feel right doing it [visiting the pantry]. But they give you canned goods, frozen food, meat, bread, potatoes, onions, carrots.” Two-thirds of his meals, he estimated, came from pantry donations. “I’m taking care of three grandkids, and they eat before I do. It’s hard. You go without what you can go without. Sometimes you go without fuel; sometimes you go without gas, propane—for cooking. I cook on open fire. Ever since the job situation has been going down, a lot of people been needing.” One-third of Burke’s friends were out of work. “Truck drivers, ranchers, some of them just been common laborers. A lot are on unemployment. People need it [food], got to get it. It hurts a lot of people.”

For many conservative politicians, however, that squalor isn’t all bad. In fact, an increasingly vocal line of reasoning, harking back
to the Social Darwinism, survival-of-the-fittest rhetoric of the late nineteenth century, has it that it represents something quintessentially hopeful. The flip side of inequality, they argue, is opportunity. Anyone can, in America, strike it rich. All one needs for success is a little bit of gumption and a willingness to take risks. That was, in many ways, the key argument that GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum laid out in a major speech before the Detroit Economic Club on February 16, 2012. “I’m about equality of opportunity. I’m not about equality of result when it comes to income inequality. There is income inequality in America. There always has been, and hopefully, and I do say that, there always will be,” Santorum told his audience, in a city in which two-thirds of children were currently living below the poverty line. “Why? Because people rise to different levels of success based on what they contribute to society and to the marketplace. And that’s as it should be. And we shouldn’t have a society that has a president who envies or creates class warfare or envy between one group of people and another. We should celebrate like we do in the small towns all across America—as you do here in Detroit.”
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How were Detroiters celebrating America’s economic buoyancy in 2012? By increasingly resorting to small-scale urban farms to avoid hunger. By arguing over Mayor David Bing’s desperate proposal to declare largely abandoned swaths of the city beyond municipal limits and thus to withdraw basic services such as street lighting and police protection from those areas, as well as close to half of the public schools within its district. Maybe by scratching their heads and painstakingly attempting to interpret the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund report from a year earlier that had found 47 percent of the city’s residents to be functionally illiterate.
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