Commentary—

You’re Poor? But We’re A Rich Nation!

By William A. Collins

Profits zoom,

The papers shout;

So how come I’m,

So down and out?

The economic news sounds swell: the stock market is frisky, productivity is booming, employment is up, welfare is down, and exports are growing with the cheaper dollar. Plainly God is in Her heaven. OK, a lot of people are losing their homes, but only the foolish ones who over mortgaged. Dummies!

Clearly, this scenario is Connecticut’s conventional wisdom, as promoted by government and media alike. Governor Jodi Rell, for example, always offers some cheery quote along with the monthly labor statistics. Just now, it seems that employment under her leadership is almost back where it was in 2000. Wow!

Of course, dismal news exists as well, but no one thrills at being the bearer of bad tidings. Take productivity. The Associated Press loves to remind us that it is productivity growth that makes possible the payment of higher wages. But somehow, space constraints never seem to allow them to report that employers gave up that higher wages stuff decades ago. Now they keep all that juicy new profit margin for themselves.

Or let’s contemplate the current mortgage meltdown. The stock market has recovered with flying colors, even if those who were foreclosed haven’t. Oh well, collateral damage happens. But keep in mind that even today’s sobbing homeowners are still in the top two-thirds of American prosperity. The bottom third continues to rent, not able to buy a home in the first place. They’re easy to overlook because as non-investors, weak consumers, and casualties of the political process, renters don’t warrant much attention in the media.

Then there are all those new jobs that the president and the governor love to tout. But in Connecticut as elsewhere, about half of them are “service” work, which is to say, ill paid. That’s not widely reported in the economic news either. The business community prefers that we imagine this expanding new Nutmeg employment connotes white collars, and in manufacturing states, blue collars. Too often, it connotes no collars.

What so many of those new jobs actually represent is Latino immigrants, with or without portfolio, working as lawn cutters, office cleaners, sales clerks, bus boys, “security” guards, painters, hotel maids, delivery drivers, waiters, and all those other tasks where language is not a serious barrier.

These jobs pay poorly and lack benefits, though in fact, they are not always performed by immigrants. Many such workers are native born and used to be better off before all that productivity improvement, outsourcing, and union busting. Now they’ve had to swallow pride and penury.

Thus, astonishingly, in the midst of all our national glitz, there is this mess of untidy poverty. Disparity between rich and poor is growing, health coverage is shrinking, the middle class is eroding, and, unbelievably, housing analysts are now measuring the number of families who disastrously spend half their income on rent. That’s 2.1 million nationally, plus another 2.4 million homeowners in the same fix. Hartford’s incidence of such hardship ties it with elegant Detroit. When I was young, paying even a third of your income for rent was a recipe for disaster. Half is unthinkable.

Advocates for the poor understandably seek improvements: higher welfare benefits, more subsidized housing, enhanced food stamps, higher wages — the usual litany. But the greatest of these is wages. Our nation really puts its back into keeping them down. We invite in the cheapest goods from abroad, suppress the minimum wage, bust unions, and cheerfully bankrupt families over lack of health insurance. To help us fathom all this perversity, TV could really use a Labor Report to go along with the Business Report. But who would sponsor it?

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)