Rafael Pi Roman(Moderator): Let me introduce the panel. Jean Reynolds is a certified nursing assistant who was supporting her three children, the oldest of whom is too sick to work, and her four grandchildren. Thanks to emergency public assistance, Ms. Reynolds was able to find a home for herself and her family, as well as much-needed economical and medical assistance. Although Ms. Reynolds led her union's successful struggle to increase wages in a number of New Jersey nursing homes, she herself did not qualify for a salary increase, since after 15 years on the job she already earned the maximum of $11.00 per hour. In a moment, Ms. Reynolds will update us on her current situation and give us some further thoughts on her struggles to make ends meet.
Jean Reynolds: Sure. I can give you an update of what's going on with me now. My daughter still has poor health, but she's hanging in there. Her episodes of thyroid problems are coming closer together, but we have hope. Through having the means of seeing different private doctors, she's finally hit upon a doctor that's taken her condition a little more seriously. A lot of them just told us that they wouldn't do anything, just to let her go. This doctor wants to fight. She's a young woman, and she's very close to where we live so it makes it very easy for Bridget.
The other kids are doing great. My youngest daughter is going into her second year in college. She's majoring in journalism with an emphasis on music. My oldest granddaughter is going to be a senior in high school this year. The next one is just going into high school, and the two little kids are just being little kids; they're eleven and almost nine. They're the worst kids God put on the face of this earth. [Jean laughs] I know I am being punished for what I did to my parents like they told me I would be. [Audience laughs] But they're keeping me moving. They're okay.
My son has stepped up, and he takes care of me at this point. I'm not able to work now. I injured my knee and I have to have two knee replacements and they found that I have arthritis that's now spreading through my body. But I have no pain and I'm doing okay. My son works now on a research vessel. He was a commercial fisherman at the beginning of the film, but the bottom fell out of commercial fishing and he was able to get a job in what he went to school for, which is oceanography. He's working on a research vessel down in Florida. He supports me and his younger sister.
The state finally caught up with my ex-husband and we get a very small child-support check, but we get it every week and he was just court-ordered to pay my youngest daughter's medical insurance. So that part of life is better. We're more comfortable. I don't worry so much about picking up the phone. I don't worry about the electricity being shut off. I've lived in this house for three years. My son is hoping to — within the next two or three years — buy the house. He's spoken to the landlord. He's willing to work out some kind of a deal. So we're doing okay.
I feel better. I mean, I'm never going to be rich, I'm never going to be a millionaire. I still haven't found a single millionaire that wants to be with somebody with older kids. [Audience laughs] But I'm doing okay, and life is a little bit better than it had been. There's a little less pressure.
Rafael Pi Roman: Thank you, Jean. Ms. Gibbs?
Linda Gibbs: Good evening, everybody. It's a little bit overwhelming to have heard these stories, and it makes me feel small by comparison for what we're trying to do, but let me try to say a little bit of background and context about the efforts that we have under way in the city to look at the issues of poverty and, increasingly, the working poor.
It is a little bit personal, so I'm going to share with you how I got to the point. I was recently appointed the deputy mayor for health and human services by Mayor Bloomberg, so I just started this job in January of 2006. Before that, I was — for four years — the commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services. I feel very proud of the work that we did there. The number of homeless people in the city had been skyrocketing in the years before Mayor Bloomberg was elected and I was appointed. In addition to responding to the demand that was placed on the agency in terms of providing shelter, we really forced ourselves to look at the issue of homelessness and think, "Can't we figure out how to solve this issue?" It's not good enough just to build more shelters and make sure that when people needed a homeless shelter that there was a place to go. We really needed to work harder to figure out what could be done to prevent homelessness, how we could put our strategies together at a community level so that people could hold on to their housing, and we needed to do a better job to help people who were vulnerable and less able to live independently to get the supports that they needed so that they didn't wind up on the streets or in shelters. We put together a great plan that's making a lot of progress on the issue of homelessness. We're seeing a big drop in the number of homeless people in the city. There are still 31,000 homeless people, but that's down from 39,000 when the plan was released. There's still a long way to go, but we've made a lot of progress there.
The thing that always grated on me is that I felt like we were — even in homelessness prevention — constantly patching things together for people who were living on the edge. While I could feel proud that we were making progress around the issue of helping to stabilize the housing, if I looked back, I didn't ultimately feel that I had really contributed in a significant way toward helping people advance in their lives, and fundamentally addressed the poverty that they were experiencing. So when the position of deputy mayor for health and human services was created by the mayor, he told me that he wanted to find ways to bring the various agencies together in a more coordinated and comprehensive way, because by combining efforts we ought to be able to do a better job. I said, "Well, yes. Sounds really good." I worked on figuring out how we could bring together the resources that the city has in order to open up a conversation about poverty, ask questions about the dynamics of poverty and find out what can we do to make a difference.
It's a big risk for a mayor of a local government to take on that task, because so many of these conditions are broader — they're statewide, national, even beyond the government because they're about the economy overall. For the most part, at a local level, people have deferred to the federal government to say that poverty is a federal issue, and is not for local government to take up. As a result, there is an absence of local conversations about what we can do to make a difference.
The mayor agreed to take a look at this issue with us and created the Commission for Economic Opportunity, of which David [Jones] is a member, and we've been working since February to put together a set of recommendations around this issue. Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to be done next week, but we will be done in September of 2006.
I learned a lot as a member of the Commission, and now I realize that it was probably naïveté that allowed me to suggest to the mayor that we take on poverty. Once we started looking at the issues I started learning a lot.
There's tough news, but there's also good news. Very interestingly, poverty levels dropped nationally in a significant way during the 1990s, the same period of time when welfare reform took place. There were big drops in the welfare rolls, but there was also an equal increase in the number of people working, particularly young, single women who had never married. So during the period of welfare reform, the welfare rolls declined, employment went up and, significantly, child poverty went down. There were a lot of skeptics who felt like welfare reform was going to hurt a lot of people in a very serious way, and I think even the critics now will recognize that welfare reform in fact helped a lot of people.
At the same time, since 2000, poverty levels across the nations have started to increase. It hasn't a huge jump, but it is inching up a bit, and on August 29th of this year [2006,] we'll get the newest numbers on poverty in the country. What we see from 1990 through 2004 is that the population in poverty is changing; increasingly, those who live in poverty are working. In 1990, 28 percentof the individuals who were in poverty were working. In 2004, 41 percent of the households in poverty had an individual who was working. Primarily those individuals are working part time.
Because there's wage stagnation at the lowest tier of employment, individuals who are working are slipping behind as inflation drives up costs, because the value of their work isn't able to purchase as much. Over the past decade, we have seen an increase in income inequality. There are now larger portions of the population at the lowest income levels and at the highest income levels, and there has been a shrinking at the middle-income levels.
So when we see the gains from welfare reform, I think we have to be cognizant of them and learn the lessons they have taught us. We also see that increasingly, working is not enough to get you out of poverty. What the Commission realized is that we need to focus on two things at a local level: think about what tools you have locally, and realize the dynamics of your population. We needed to help people increase their skills, training and education so that they can move up the economic ladder and advance their careers; simultaneously, we have to make sure, as I think these stories in "Waging a Living" made abundantly clear, that work pays, that if you move ahead you shouldn't also be losing ground. We need to look at these critical factors and think about how a city government can make a difference when so much of this issue is defined by the federal government.
The other thing that I think, Jean, your story in particular emphasized, is the challenge of raising children as a single parent. Interestingly, a lot of welfare reform focused on the recipients of public assistance, and reinvested a lot of dollars, support and strategies into those who were the head of the household on the case. In a way, I think that strategy passed by the men, and it didn't think about why men were not actively involved in the house; it didn't address the needs that men have in terms of advancing their own careers, and didn't look at which programs and policies might be put in place to allow men to participate more fully and responsibly in their children's homes. I think that's another lesson we have to consider when thinking about how to move forward. It's pretty clear that an adult working full time is not going to allow children who are living in the households of single parents to move out of poverty, and we have to find ways to bring more resources from the non-custodial parents into the household.
We at the Commission are working hard. We said we wanted to get our report out by Labor Day of this year because we thought that was a meaningful time frame, but it's going be a big challenge, and I think the results of the report are going to be something that we really want to organize the entire city government around over these next four years. Hopefully in that time we get things built enough so that it will be something that will naturally continue working in the city in the years following that.
David Jones: I want to congratulate Mayor Bloomberg and Linda for what they've undertaken. I've certainly been one of the great pests on this particular panel already, as Linda knows. But I think what the mayor is undertaking is unique. We can't find a record of any New York administration that's ever even attempted to raise the question of poverty. I think the difficulty the mayor faces and the commission faces, however, is that no one is going to escape the issue of poverty in the city of New York now. There are approximately 1.8 million people who are living below the federal poverty line in the city of New York, an additional 1.6 million who are near poverty, meaning that they live below 200 percent of the poverty line, and in total, that constitutes about 40 percent of New York's population.
The prognosis, I'm afraid, is not good, because you have to link different factors together that are contributing to poverty. We have a city that's increasingly black and Latino and Asian; we have an education system which Mayor Bloomberg, Chancellor Joel Klein and others — unlike some other mayors in other parts of the nation — have come to realize has been particularly unsupportive of poor children; we have less than 10 percent of black and Latino children who graduate with a Regents degree from the city of New York, with a 50 percent dropout rate. That means we're pumping out tens of thousands of young people who have no skills to participate in the workforce and with no means to get beyond a low wage, and we've been starting to get an understanding of that through a number of techniques. We at Community Service Society (CSS) began using a national pollster, Lake Snell & Perry, which does national polling, to actually start talking to people who are living at or below poverty.
We've been told there are no polls of the poor in the United States going on that we can find. Obviously the credit card companies don't think that the poor are worth it, and the population at large doesn't think the poor vote. We've been conducting the poll for four years, and the outcomes have been rather frightening. The poll is called the Unheard Third, because we don't think they're being heard very much, and the picture they're painting confirms much of what Jean and Linda have talked about. Overwhelmingly, these are working poor people; overwhelmingly, they spend about 65 percent of their income just on rent; they have approximately 30 dollars a week for everything else, including food; and they're not getting ahead. They're literally locked into poverty. Health care is driving them to the wall. About 50 percent have been unable to fill prescriptions and get needed medical care. They find themselves relying increasingly on food pantries for their basic needs. And again, they don't see much movement and hope.
The difficulty we're facing, I think, is that this poverty we're dealing with is a process that's going on at a time of an upward-climbing economy in New York. My concern is that we haven't seen a real economic dip yet to roll this out, and without a safety net, we're in for some very troubled times for the city of New York and for other major cities. As I talk to my counterparts everywhere from Detroit to L.A. to D.C., the same pattern is beginning to emerge: There are larger and larger numbers of people, particularly young people, who are coming out of an education system that has been rather slipshod, especially when it comes to poor children of all races, and this education system is not equipping them with skills for anything other than low-wage work, which increasingly does not have enough income to support them.
Rather than leaving you with those thoughts, I do think there are a couple of things we have to discuss going forward. Clearly we have to push for — and I think this is something that's been off the table for a long time — low-wage workers to be unionized to bring political power to bear, then make sure they can at least have a hope for their children and themselves to get adequate benefits and health care.
We also have to recognize that this poverty situation is not stable for a city like the city of New York. It is politically unstable and it is unsafe. There is a problem of a growing group of people who are working hard but don't have adequate resources to support their children and themselves, as well as an education system which is systematically under-funded andunde- supported. Every report we see goes the same way. The recent report stated that there's been the sharpest drop on record in terms of participation of blacks and Latinos in the elite high schools of New York. If you visit the nonacademic high schools of New York, which I think Education Chancellor Joel Klein is the first one to have really undertaken, there's a night-and-day difference between what poor black and Latino children are offered and what the students who are getting elite education are offered. We can't find operating laboratories in many of the places where that's a Regents requirement, and clearly we have a reform message that is going to have to start with prevention, particularly for young blacks and Latinos, and particularly for males, but also generally for kids who are on non-academic tracks in a highly competitive economy where low-wage workers are really having struggles. Again, I think this is not the worst challenge New York has been up against, but we better get about it. I think the mayor's initiative has to be driven far beyond just his term, and it is a question of what large cities are going to do with this problem of poverty, as so much of their population is mired in this structural problem of working hard and still being poor.
Lawrence Mead: It's a pleasure to be here, and I want to say, first of all, how much I enjoyed watching Waging a Living. I give a lot of credit to Roger Weisberg and his cast. I have to say I'm particularly pleased to see Jean Reynolds and Barbara Brooks here, who are the two stories that I found most affecting. It's terrific to get to meet them and see what they've done with their challenges.
Let me say a bit about the film. I was quite surprised by the film, as I thought it was going to be about working poverty, the minimum wage and those sorts of issues. That's not what I encountered. The people in this film are making wages around twice the minimum wage, so they're considerably above a level that we're normally talking about when we talk about working poverty, and they're above the population that David Jones has just been talking about. The people in the film are people in the lower echelons of the middle class; they're not poor, and they're not non-working poor. These are not the people I spent most of my career writing about. These are people who are definitely employed at well above the minimum wage, and so they're above the level that we normally talk about when we talk about poverty or near-poverty.
At the same time, they clearly have problems. These are people in deep difficulties, and I've wrestled with how to define their difficulties. How, with these sorts of wages, can they be in this much difficulty? Well, I came to a couple of thoughts, and these are not definitive. The most immediate reason is that all four of these people are divorced. They are all single parents, and in three cases they're single mothers who are supporting children without regular assistance from the father. So that's the first thing that stands out. What really struck me about the film was that the source of distress wasn't immediately the economic system or the wage system or the social-benefits system. It was divorce. It was the great family problem that we're all struggling with today.
The second thing that struck me, particularly in reference to Jean's case, was health care. The one thing that seemed to me to jar any idea that this was a normal situation was the fact that, in Jean's case, her daughter was unable to get assured health care for a very serious condition. There were concerns about Medicaid expressed in Barbara's case, and it came up in a couple of the other stories as well. So health care is an issue that is in the background, but seems to me a more acute source of difficulty than wages.
Then I asked myself, what are the implications for public policy? In situations like the ones we see in this film, it's hard to say that wages are the concern that jumps out. After all, these wages are well above any idea of the minimum wage that's been talked about recently. It's not as if government could immediately mandate that all these people make twenty dollars an hour; that's simply beyond possibility. Aside from the politics of it, it would also lead to the destruction of massive numbers of low-wage jobs for people with fewer skills than the people in this story. I actually agree with David Jones. I think unionization is part of the answer here. I think there's something attractive about union action as a way of dealing with low wages. In fact, two of the four people in this story are involved in union activism. One of them is Jean and the other one is Jerry, the man who was the security guard. What's appealing about being in a union is that workers have a sense of what their industries can afford, and then they are accountable for the economic consequences. That is, they have to live with whether the industry is still competitive after the wages are raised. I like that. I think there's something self-reliant about that. I also like the idea that those who need a better shake take action directly to bring it about themselves, rather than have advocates go to government and speak on their behalf.
But the clearest implication has to do with health care. There clearly needs to be some system to rationalize the health care system such that care is available, particularly for acute conditions and serious conditions, and the financing has to be somehow rationalized so that we all pay more reliably than we do, and at the same time we don't have people who are free-riding, and right now there's quite a bit of free-riding going on on the part of many people in the system. Many people do not pay for insurance. They assume they can go to emergency rooms. A great deal of charity care is given. Charity care is in fact alluded to in a number of the stories. I don't have strong views about what the new system should be, but health care is clearly the place where government has the most work to do, and where there is the strongest case for changing what we're doing now.
The other thing that came up, and this was particularly dramatic in Barbara Brooks' story, is the problem of notches — where people go up in income, suddenly their benefits go down by more than their wages go up. Now I don't think that's typical. I think what happened in Barbara's case was quite unusual, and I'd like to know the specifics about how that occurred. But maybe something has to be addressed here where there's a greater phase in and phase out of the benefits. Part of the story in the three cases involving single mothers was that they went in and out of the benefits system. In a way, what saved Jean's situation was that she went back on to the benefit system. All three women are at the top end of the benefit system where they might get support. So there's an issue there, too. I would say health care and the notches are the places where government ought to focus its attention.
Jean Reynolds: First of all, they treat you very inhumanely. They are the pits. The very first time I went to social services I was very, very upset. I have never, ever relied on anybody else to raise me or my children, including when I was married. I was the breadwinner. And I resent that it's divorce that's put me in this position. My husband never contributed enough, and that was because of his illness. He was an alcoholic, and that's an illness, and that's what did it.
The first time I went to welfare I was told I was a liar because when I gave my address, the woman told me she was very familiar with the town I lived in and there was no such street. So she proceeded to prove me wrong, and of course I did give her the right address. I'm not a liar.
The next thing was that she told me that I made absolutely too much money. To support a family of eight, I was paying $1,200 a month in rent, which is exorbitant for where I lived, but it was the only place I could find because of what the situation was when I left my ex-husband. It was the only home I could find. Housing in Monmouth County, New Jersey, is outrageous; I'm sure it is in New York City as well. The price of living and everything else is also outrageous in New Jersey. When I asked this woman from social services for any kind of help, she offered me a five dollar coupon to get my medication filled. I worked and my union provided my health care benefits, so I myself didn't pay more than three dollars for any prescription. I said, "Well, could my daughter use it?" And she said, "Absolutely not."
My daughter did apply for charity care — I filled out the forms at least three times. She filled them out many times as well. And the forms were lost, they were misplaced, they weren't complete, they were whatever. I tried to explain all this to the woman and she really did not care. I went home and cried and screamed and couldn't figure out what to do, but I read on the form that I could protest it, which I did. The next person they assigned to me was a young single woman who was probably a year or two out of college. She said to me, "Why don't you take another job? Take a second job. You should be able to make ends meet then." And I said, "But you don't understand. I work 37.5 hours a week." I travel by bus back and forth to my job. I also work as much overtime as possible. I was working double shifts, I was working on my days off. I never took vacation time; I used that for school clothes, for doctor visits, for whatever needed to be done. She basically told me that I needed to find a way to support my family without begging the government.
Then I went and I told the producer of the film, whose name is Eddie, because I was livid and hysterical at this point, I told Eddie. I did not know what I was going do because now I was being evicted, because I put my daughter's life ahead of my rent by paying her medical bills and her doctor bills. Doctors don't see you unless you pay. I was paying the doctors. I was paying for her medicine. So I told Eddie what happened, and Eddie said, "How about if I get that on camera?"
Well, of course the minute he got social services on camera and spoke to them on the phone, they sent a supervisor. I had to go to Atlantic Highlands each time, which meant a day of travel for a distance that should have been an hour of traveling, because I had to take public transportation. I had to do this all the time. I went every time with this whole briefcase full of papers, and the third time I went there nobody else was there. They had closed the office to clients that day. So of course the receptionist said, "Hi, how can I help you?" whereas before she had said, "Take a number, sit down and don't ask me any questions." [Jean and the audience laugh]
There's a lot that they didn't show you in the film because I have the typical Irish temper and do not know how to keep my mouth shut. I kept biting my tongue, because I knew if I flipped out they would kick me out. So when I went back they brought me upstairs in an elevator, whereas before they made me walk up flights of stairs every time. I went in an elevator with a supervisor and she was very patronizing at first. She treated me like I was an imbecile until I opened my mouth and got a little Irish, and then things changed. And they changed, I still believe to this day — I don't care what anybody says — because there was a camera there. When they saw the camera, they didn't want to be seen as the bad guys, and they don't want people to think that they're insensitive, they don't want people to be so against them. They think they're doing a wonderful job. So that time, they called me at home the same day and let me know everything went through, which is amazing, because I've never heard of anybody getting welfare the same day they've applied. [Jean laughs] Never, ever, ever, ever. So it was like a miracle.
I did have to go back and forth to Freehold several times to get paperwork and all of that, but that was the least of my problems. At this point I knew at least that the kids weren't gonna be taken from me, because I was also threatened by welfare that this could happen, that they would turn me in to the Department of Youth and Family Services in New Jersey.
Rafael Pi Roman: Jean, the camera is rolling now, so I'll be very nice. [audience laughs] But we have a lot of questions, and I think Deputy Mayor Gibbs wants to say something.
Linda Gibbs: Based on Jean's comments, I have a couple of thoughts. One is the issue of how we can bring technology into the social services field to better serve clients, and this is particularly relevant when you have a mayor in New York City whose wealth was made on technology. We're about to unveil the first step of an electronic calculator where a client can go into a terminal, or access it on the Web, so it's accessible in a library or somewhere else, and you can put in your family information and it calculates the benefit programs that you would be eligible for. For each program the calculator will tell you that to get that one you go here, to get this one you go here. The ideal will be to get to the point where you can have an electronic filing of an application. So this is to save all the time and travel that people have to incur in order to access the benefits, and save the trouble of not knowing what you can and cannot get. The purpose of this technology is to try to make sense of all of the government programs, and we're trying to pull together not just the city programs but also the state and the federal programs.
Which gets me to my second point, and that is that we spent a lot of time on this issue of notches, of falling behind when you get ahead, and we mapped it out and found a couple of things. One is that if a client is in fact receiving all the benefits that they're eligible for in New York State, the notches have been, with the exception of child care, smoothed out. But, in order to get to that point you actually have to be successful in making an application and receiving all of the benefits, so that includes food stamps, public assistance, the earned income tax credit and Medicaid. There has been a lot of attention on this issue. The big exception is child care, and the cost of child care is huge, and so that is an issue. Particularly for parents of children who are not school age, it can be a huge impediment, and we think it is a big impediment for individuals going from part time to full time.
For the sake of argument right now, assume that all the notches have been worked out. Even if it is true, it means you have to be successful in getting to each one of those programs, staying on them, maintaining your eligibility and doing all of the certifications. I think part of what government can do is try to do more to support those who are working hard and eliminating some of the barriers that come up when you have to apply and reapply and meet a variety of obligations.
Rafael Pi Roman: Thank you. Does anybody else have a question? Yes, over here.
Audience Member: Hi. I just want to thank you all for being here, and I appreciate watching the documentary. I have a question about the unions. You've all mentioned unions, how unions can strengthen workers and help keep people working, increase their benefits and so forth. I'm a union chapter leader at my school where I'm a teacher. With regard to teachers, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein in particular have a pretty bad record of what their reputation is in terms of protecting unions, and I'm just wondering, for the people who know the mayor and who might know Joel Klein, with regards to their opinions on unions, could you give us a briefing on what the mayor might think of unions going forward? [audience laughs]
Rafael Pi Roman: Deputy Mayor Gibbs?
Linda Gibbs: Hopefully a simple answer can address your comment. In creating the commission with its 32 members, we intentionally wanted to make sure that we had a very diverse representation. When the mayor reviewed the list that I brought to him of recommendations for commission members, he noticed that there was not a union representative, and he added a person to the list that he asked to participate in order to bring the union perspective to the discussion. I mean, he's really brought in the smartest, most committed individuals who have made this work their life's work, and he has been willing to open the agenda to their discussions and hear their recommendations, and he specifically included a union representative to address that issue.
Rafael Pi Roman: Mr. Jones?
David Jones: I think the unionization question is, to try to look at this as a political problem, part of the difficulty for this group of impoverished New Yorkers — who are 40 percent of the population — because they're perceived as not politically potent. New York has one of the largest reserves of unregistered eligible voters of any large city in America at nearly a million people.
The question becomes not what the mayor feels, but what voters can start to exercise as a mandate if they're able to organize. Low-wage workers have not been organized particularly well in the city of New York and in other places, so this is not a matter of whether a politician likes certain people or unions or not. You have to have something more potent than just moral persuasion here. That's why I find myself in the weird position of being allied with Professor Mead on this matter. Part of this situation is a political problem, and to think of it in any way other than that is a mistake. We're dealing with people on the other end of the political spectrum who have vast stores of money and political influence, and then we're supposed to ask them for change as a moral responsibility, even though they're in America. We're asking them to have some long-term obligation to the poor, particularly the poor of color, but also in a broader sense, as a moral obligation. I think that's why there have to be political solutions, and that unionization, particularly of low-wage workers, has to be something we have to start talking about seriously.
Lawrence Mead: The unionization that I would advocate is not predominantly that of municipal workers. They are usually well above the income level we're talking about in this film. They're usually not low income. In fact, municipal workers are relatively well paid by the standards of workers with their skills and kind of jobs. Although I'm not taking any stand on municipal union issues per se, the pay-off is more substantial for the low-wage worker in the private sector, people like the security guard in the film or Jean Reynolds. There would also be strong public support for the union in the private sector because of a common perception that workers in the private sector are relatively low paid. So unionization should be aimed at them.
There is a broader concern that I would share, and I think David alluded to it earlier, and that is a concern that low-paid Americans and Americans with low education levels are becoming too passive. One of the problems in terms of them getting attention and so on is that they themselves are not organized, they don't vote at high levels, they don't join unions and they don't join other organizations. They typically get spoken for by the better off, and that has a lot less impact than having the workers themselves march on Albany or march on Washington, so we have to get back to a more populist conception of what society's about. I see that as offsetting the apparent dependence that might arise from greater government program and greater government support, provided that this greater support comes about through political action by the beneficiaries. They could be taking responsibility for themselves in a different way. Maybe they're relying on the government to live, but they're also making sure the government does the right thing, and that's a very different thing from the kind of elitism I think has overtaken social policy in the last 20, 30 years.
David Jones: I'd like to follow up on that comment, and I'll keep quiet after that. I don't want to condemn working people and poor people who haven't been able to organize. When we look at the lives of trying to keep children fed, dealing with not being evicted, these are overwhelming circumstances, and I'd like to see anyone try to be politically active under those kinds of concerns. But that's essentially why you need unions to start helping the organization, because once people get a platform of benefits and supports, then you can start to get the political muscle to bring some attention to bear on the problems. But I think it has to go together. This is not a condemnation of the poor, "Well, they're just lazy, you know, they're not in the town hall fighting." I'd like to see anyone work this hard and also be able to help politically bring pressure to bear on anybody. So that's where the unions fit for my vantage point.
Rafael Pi Roman: We have a question from another audience member.
Audience Member: I'm Marlis Harris, I'm a finance editor of Consumer Reports. I have two questions for Professor Mead. The first is about the minimum wage, which is$5.50 an hour now. It's an artifact; it's not pegged to anything that has any reality. In fact, couldn't Congress pass a law tomorrow saying the minimum wage should be $2.75? They actually could. That wouldn't change the facts of what it takes to support a family. So in fact, I think there's something economists have to do, which is to decide what the minimum wage should be. If we're going to have a minimum wage at all, which perhaps you would not grant, shouldn't it be pegged to something like the minimum amount it takes to live and survive?
The second thing I'd like you to address is the so-called slack on the health care system, which I take it you interpret as a lot of charity care. I'm wondering about some of the other slack in the system. I'm thinking of, for example, Medicare Part D, where I have to pay for Warren Buffet's drugs and I have to pay Merck and company the full price for drugs; in fact, they've even raised the price, and I have to pay the huge salaries of the executives of health care companies. Isn't that greater slack in the healthcare system than charity care is?
Lawrence Mead: Since I thought this would be about the minimum wage, I dug up some numbers. The gist is these numbers show that minimum wage is virtually unimportant. You could almost say that hardly anyone is paid the minimum wage. I mean, there are certainly people who are paid the minimum wage, but they're not the sort of people we see in this film at all. Of those paid the minimum wage — and I'm quoting this figure from 1988, which is the last year I could find information for, but I'm sure the situation is roughly similar today — only 5.5 percent of them were husbands; 19 percent were wives; 7 percent were women maintaining families, in other words, single mothers; 36 percent were teenagers; 33 percent were full time, 67 percent part time. So most of the people on the minimum wage are not supporting families, they're not in the position that you're assuming, where there would have to be enough income to support a family.
The point I'm making is only that the image we have of the minimum wage worker as someone struggling to support a family on the minimum wage is almost nonexistent, that there are almost no such people. Almost everyone who has a family, like those that we saw in the film, is working at well above the minimum wage. They may still have problems, I'm not saying that there isn't a case for higher pay, but the minimum wage is really irrelevant to their situation. Also, a large majority of people paid the minimum wage are not poor, because they're in families where other people are working, and as a result, the family's above the poverty level. The poverty level for people who are working steady hours is very, very low. It's from three to six percent. I don't mean we should ignore it, but the idea that you can work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year and be poor easily is false. That's really not the case, and most of the people that we saw in this film are not poor. When I say "poor," I'm using the federal definition; if you want to set a higher poverty line, which is what we have implicitly done as some of this discussion, that's another matter. But the federal poverty line is one that you get above very quickly if you're working steady hours at any legal job, and that job will usually be above the minimum wage. So the issues are important, but we shouldn't imagine that the people earning the minimum wage are in the situation we saw in the film. That's really not the case.
To address your second question about Medicare, I largely agree with you that the Medicare system is confused and irrational in many respects, and that the health care benefit that was added is confusing and difficult in lots of ways. There are a lot of issues with Medicare, but it's really part of a larger health care problem where we have these three parts: Medicaid, Medicare, and private insurance. Most people are under one of those three systems, the three parts don't fit together well, and they're confusing and inefficient in lots of ways. The prescription drug system raises other issues about costs and who's paying for the development costs. We don't really have time to go into that now, but I'm just going to say that I think your points about Medicare, to me, have greater relevance to our discussion than the minimum wage.
Rafael Pi Roman: Another question from the audience.
Audience Member: Good evening. I would like to say thank you to both Jean and Barbara, because what you really did was put a human face on so many issues that every-day poor people have to deal with whether they're trying to live on the minimum wage or not. While race is always a factor in the United States of America, the film also shows that class is a big issue. So I want to thank you both because it takes a lot of courage to put your life out there, to put your stories out there, and we need the human faces or else the other experts come in and they give us statistics, they give us public policy, and the human element goes out of it. Again, I thank you both for being able and willing to put the human aspect on it.
A question for Professor Mead: I'd like to know how in a capitalist society wage is not an issue, because how much money you earn determines where you live, how you eat, how you're treated, whether you're demonized, criminalized, whether or not a doctor will see you, whether or not you can get medicine, whether or not you will get treated with respect when you go into a store, a bureaucratic office, any place that you go, how you're educated and where you're educated. So it totally baffles me when you say that wage is not the central issue.
In terms of people getting a free ride, I agree with you. I wish a lot of people would stop getting a free ride. I wish in New York that the developer Bruce Ratner would stop getting a free ride, I wish Donald Trump would stop getting a free ride. [audience laughs] I wish that all of these corporations that are able to dismiss workers here in the United States and take them over to other countries would stop getting a free ride. I wish we would stop blaming people who are struggling, working overtime each and every day to try to feed their families. They get blamed for the free ride.
To Ms. Gibbs, you said the workfare worked? It didn't work. There were thousands of students at City University of New York (CUNY) that were put out of CUNY schools when welfare-to-workfare reform took place, and they had to choose between Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance or going to college. When workfare made people go to work, it was not for academic or skills training, it was to clean parks, to clean subways, to do menial work. So you say it worked. Well, the human faces that I know, that I've seen, the children, the young adults, the mothers, all of those people, it didn't work. And I'm really tired of politicians telling us how much their policies work.
Lawrence Mead: I would only say that welfare reform's chief success has been to get these class questions back on the agenda. As long as we were talking about welfare and poverty, we weren't talking about class and inequality. Now we're more talking about those subjects in part because we have a lot more people working. So this is positive, and in the end I think some solution will emerge whereby the struggles of the working poor and the near-working poor will get more attention. That wasn't going to be possible as long as you had as many people on welfare as we had 20 years ago. So this is movement, this is progress.
Rafael Pi Roman: More questions.
Audience Member: My name is Nadia, and I wanted to thank Barbara and Jean again. But my comment really goes to the federal poverty level. I think that's a real farce, and I think I would like to challenge the panelists, particularly Ms. Gibbs and Mr. Mead, to talk about what that farce is. We're talking about essentially $12,200 for a family of one; that's considered federal poverty. So we throw this number around and say that there are 1.8 million people under poverty. We need to look at the figure and then say, "Can we survive on that?" And then that can be a real figure for poverty. What does it take to change that? Also, when real people are here saying "My life demonstrates that policy X has not worked," I think we need to pause and recognize that even though our policies may be intended to work, in reality they have not worked. For example, Barbara has seen the policies not work for her.
Linda Gibbs: I think the issue of the definition of poverty is an important one to address. The federal poverty level was defined in the late '60s at a point in time when households spent about 30 percent of their household income on food. Over the course of the years, there was some adjustment in the cost of food, but never an adjustment on that 30 percent. Spin forward to today, and now it's estimated that a household spends about 13 percent of their costs on food. So the poverty level is antiquated for that reason. As a result of that and other inconsistencies in calculating the poverty level, $19,500 is the annual poverty level estimated nationally for a family of four. There's no difference of that federal definition if you live in New York City or if you live in Nebraska, Wyoming, or Florida. It's the same everywhere, and we all know that costs vary dramatically, particularly here in New York City and other large urban areas. The housing costs are just astronomical. There is another calculator that estimates the salary that a household would need in order to live at a basic level. In New York City, for a family of four, that cost is $58,000.
So that's the federal poverty level. We can't change federal law. We can advocate around changing federal law, but we don't have the power to change it. I think a major contribution that we can make here in New York City is to talk about poverty in a different way. We struggle because we can say, "Well, you're not poor because you don't fall under the federal poverty level," but we know that people who are earning twice the federal poverty level are poor. I hope we will be able to move forward in this city by creating our own definitions of poverty that can help to give a better measure. At the same time, I think there are a number of flaws in the opposite direction, as the federal poverty level only counts income, earned income and cash benefits in a household, and it doesn't count the value of a lot of other benefits, so in some ways it also understates poverty. All things being equal, it grossly exaggerates the number of people who are not poor, but there are things that move in both directions.
Rafael Pi Roman: Professor Mead, and then Mr. Jones.
Lawrence Mead: I want to say that welfare reform succeeded in New York City, much as it did in the rest of the country, by causing a great many families to leave welfare and take jobs. This didn't solve all their problems, but it was a big step forward. The welfare roll also declined by about half a million people in New York City. This is an enormous change, and it's directly related to the drop in child poverty that was mentioned at the outset. So there has been progress in New York, because people have gone to work. That doesn't mean that their problems are all solved, but now we can address those new problems that come up because they're employed. It's notable that in this film there was no issue raised about employment. That is, all the subjects of the film assume they're going to be working, that they should be working and that they're better off as a result. It doesn't mean, again, that their problems are all solved, and there are further issues, but there is progress. It's very important not to go back on that and have an idea once again that single mothers should simply not have to work. That's not a solution. The solution is to work and then address the new problems that come from that.
David Jones: I'd just like to say a couple of things to put this in context. New York is the only major city in America that's seen increases in poverty; that's one thing we should recognize. So I'm very concerned with the local; I'm not as concerned about the rest of the country as I am about what's happening in the city of New York. Clearly we have 1.8 million people in the city of New York that are at or below the poverty level, against all the problems we're talking about in terms of extraordinarily high housing costs and health costs.
I take one exception. I see all this wringing of the hands about the fact that we can't do anything about the federal government. I've seen politicians on their heels driving Congress crazy when they think it's a priority. This issue is not a priority, and that's the reason there's no movement on the federal level. I don't see every member of the New York delegation saying, "We're not going to let anything go until you start handling this" to the federal government. Everything else seems to have a higher priority. Clearly politicians don't think that this constituent — the 40 percent of the people mired in this situation — matter as much as some of their other constituents. I think we have to recognize there's a distinct political problem going on here. Because even though New York can't solve this problem, they're not using any political capital to move the needle.
Rafael Pi Roman: Thank you, panelists, for coming and participating in this. Thank you, Roger Weisberg, for your film, and thank you all for coming and joining this conversation.
Linda Gibbs was appointed the deputy mayor of health and human Services for by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in January of 2006. Prior to that, she was the commissioner of the New York City Department of Homeless Services.
David Jones is the president and chief executive officer of the Community Service Society (CSS) of New York. Prior to joining CSS, Mr. Jones served as executive director of the New York City Youth Bureau, and from 1979 to 1983, as special advisor to Mayor Ed Koch. Mr. Jones was a member of the transition committee of New York's mayor-elect Michael Bloomberg.
Lawrence Mead is a professor of politics at New York University, where he teaches public policy and American government. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Princeton and the University of Wisconsin. He has also been a visiting fellow at Princeton and at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He is an expert on the problems of poverty and welfare in the United States.
Rafael Pi Roman (The Moderator) hosts New York Voices on Channel Thirteen/WNET. In 1999 he won an Emmy for The City, a three-part special covering all aspects of the 1997 New York City mayoral race which he executive-produced, wrote and hosted. In addition to his ongoing work at Thirteen, he is a member of the American Program Bureau speakers program.
Jean Reynolds is a certified nursing assistant in Keansburg, New Jersey, who supports three children, including her cancer-stricken eldest daughter, Bridget, and two of Bridget's four children.
Introduction
Listen to an audio podcast of this interview here or download the file (MP3, length: 59 minutes, filesize: 21 MB)
Linda Gibbs is the deputy mayor for health and human services. In that capacity, her responsibilities include overseeing the department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the Administration for Children's Services, Department of Homeless Services, the Department for the Aging, the Health and Hospital Corporation, and the Office of Health Insurance Access, among many other responsibilities. Prior to her appointment as deputy mayor, Ms. Gibbs was the commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services. During the Giuliani administration, Ms. Gibbs served as a deputy commissioner for management and planning for the Administration for Children's Services, and before that she was the deputy director for social services at the mayor's office of management and budget.
Since 1986, David Jones has been president and chief executive officer of the Community Services Society of New York, a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization that promotes economic advancement and full civic participation for low-income New Yorkers. Mr. Jones' writings includes an online column for the Gotham Gazette focusing on issues Affecting low-income New Yorkers. Mayor Bloomberg recently appointed Mr. Jones to the Commission for Economic Opportunity, a task force convened to tackle the problems of poverty and unemployment, and whose recommendations are due in early September of 2006. In his earlier career, Mr. Jones was a special advisor to Mayor Koch on such issues as race relations, urban development, immigration and education. Later he was executive director of the New York City youth bureau.
Last but not least, Lawrence Mead is a professor of politics at New York University, where he teaches public policy and American government. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Princeton and the University of Wisconsin. He has also been a visiting fellow at Princeton and at the Hoover Institute at Stanford. Professor Mead is an expert on the problems of poverty and welfare in the United States, and among academics, he was the principle exponent of work requirements and welfare, the policy that now dominates national policy. Professor Mead is also a leading scholar of the politics and implementation of welfare reform, and his work has helped shape welfare reform in the United States and abroad.
Each of the speakers will speak up to five minutes. Jean, will you start it off, please?
The other kids are doing great. My youngest daughter is going into her second year in college. She's majoring in journalism with an emphasis on music. My oldest granddaughter is going to be a senior in high school this year. The next one is just going into high school, and the two little kids are just being little kids; they're eleven and almost nine. They're the worst kids God put on the face of this earth. [Jean laughs] I know I am being punished for what I did to my parents like they told me I would be. [Audience laughs] But they're keeping me moving. They're okay.
My son has stepped up, and he takes care of me at this point. I'm not able to work now. I injured my knee and I have to have two knee replacements and they found that I have arthritis that's now spreading through my body. But I have no pain and I'm doing okay. My son works now on a research vessel. He was a commercial fisherman at the beginning of the film, but the bottom fell out of commercial fishing and he was able to get a job in what he went to school for, which is oceanography. He's working on a research vessel down in Florida. He supports me and his younger sister.
The state finally caught up with my ex-husband and we get a very small child-support check, but we get it every week and he was just court-ordered to pay my youngest daughter's medical insurance. So that part of life is better. We're more comfortable. I don't worry so much about picking up the phone. I don't worry about the electricity being shut off. I've lived in this house for three years. My son is hoping to -- within the next two or three years -- buy the house. He's spoken to the landlord. He's willing to work out some kind of a deal. So we're doing okay.
I feel better. I mean, I'm never going to be rich, I'm never going to be a millionaire. I still haven't found a single millionaire that wants to be with somebody with older kids. [Audience laughs] But I'm doing okay, and life is a little bit better than it had been. There's a little less pressure.
Rafael Pi Roman: Thank you, Jean. Ms. Gibbs?
Linda Gibbs: Good evening, everybody. It's a little bit overwhelming to have heard these stories, and it makes me feel small by comparison for what we're trying to do, but let me try to say a little bit of background and context about the efforts that we have under way in the city to look at the issues of poverty and, increasingly, the working poor.
It is a little bit personal, so I'm going to share with you how I got to the point. I was recently appointed the deputy mayor for health and human services by Mayor Bloomberg, so I just started this job in January of 2006. Before that, I was -- for four years -- the commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services. I feel very proud of the work that we did there. The number of homeless people in the city had been skyrocketing in the years before Mayor Bloomberg was elected and I was appointed. In addition to responding to the demand that was placed on the agency in terms of providing shelter, we really forced ourselves to look at the issue of homelessness and think, "Can't we figure out how to solve this issue?" It's not good enough just to build more shelters and make sure that when people needed a homeless shelter that there was a place to go. We really needed to work harder to figure out what could be done to prevent homelessness, how we could put our strategies together at a community level so that people could hold on to their housing, and we needed to do a better job to help people who were vulnerable and less able to live independently to get the supports that they needed so that they didn't wind up on the streets or in shelters. We put together a great plan that's making a lot of progress on the issue of homelessness. We're seeing a big drop in the number of homeless people in the city. There are still 31,000 homeless people, but that's down from 39,000 when the plan was released. There's still a long way to go, but we've made a lot of progress there.
The thing that always grated on me is that I felt like we were -- even in homelessness prevention -- constantly patching things together for people who were living on the edge. While I could feel proud that we were making progress around the issue of helping to stabilize the housing, if I looked back, I didn't ultimately feel that I had really contributed in a significant way toward helping people advance in their lives, and fundamentally addressed the poverty that they were experiencing. So when the position of deputy mayor for health and human services was created by the mayor, he told me that he wanted to find ways to bring the various agencies together in a more coordinated and comprehensive way, because by combining efforts we ought to be able to do a better job. I said, "Well, yes. Sounds really good." I worked on figuring out how we could bring together the resources that the city has in order to open up a conversation about poverty, ask questions about the dynamics of poverty and find out what can we do to make a difference.
It's a big risk for a mayor of a local government to take on that task, because so many of these conditions are broader -- they're statewide, national, even beyond the government because they're about the economy overall. For the most part, at a local level, people have deferred to the federal government to say that poverty is a federal issue, and is not for local government to take up. As a result, there is an absence of local conversations about what we can do to make a difference.
The mayor agreed to take a look at this issue with us and created the Commission for Economic Opportunity, of which David [Jones] is a member, and we've been working since February to put together a set of recommendations around this issue. Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to be done next week, but we will be done in September of 2006.
I learned a lot as a member of the Commission, and now I realize that it was probably naïveté that allowed me to suggest to the mayor that we take on poverty. Once we started looking at the issues I started learning a lot.
There's tough news, but there's also good news. Very interestingly, poverty levels dropped nationally in a significant way during the 1990s, the same period of time when welfare reform took place. There were big drops in the welfare rolls, but there was also an equal increase in the number of people working, particularly young, single women who had never married. So during the period of welfare reform, the welfare rolls declined, employment went up and, significantly, child poverty went down. There were a lot of skeptics who felt like welfare reform was going to hurt a lot of people in a very serious way, and I think even the critics now will recognize that welfare reform in fact helped a lot of people.
At the same time, since 2000, poverty levels across the nations have started to increase. It hasn't a huge jump, but it is inching up a bit, and on August 29th of this year [2006,] we'll get the newest numbers on poverty in the country. What we see from 1990 through 2004 is that the population in poverty is changing; increasingly, those who live in poverty are working. In 1990, 28 percentof the individuals who were in poverty were working. In 2004, 41 percent of the households in poverty had an individual who was working. Primarily those individuals are working part time.
Because there's wage stagnation at the lowest tier of employment, individuals who are working are slipping behind as inflation drives up costs, because the value of their work isn't able to purchase as much. Over the past decade, we have seen an increase in income inequality. There are now larger portions of the population at the lowest income levels and at the highest income levels, and there has been a shrinking at the middle-income levels.
So when we see the gains from welfare reform, I think we have to be cognizant of them and learn the lessons they have taught us. We also see that increasingly, working is not enough to get you out of poverty. What the Commission realized is that we need to focus on two things at a local level: think about what tools you have locally, and realize the dynamics of your population. We needed to help people increase their skills, training and education so that they can move up the economic ladder and advance their careers; simultaneously, we have to make sure, as I think these stories in "Waging a Living" made abundantly clear, that work pays, that if you move ahead you shouldn't also be losing ground. We need to look at these critical factors and think about how a city government can make a difference when so much of this issue is defined by the federal government.
The other thing that I think, Jean, your story in particular emphasized, is the challenge of raising children as a single parent. Interestingly, a lot of welfare reform focused on the recipients of public assistance, and reinvested a lot of dollars, support and strategies into those who were the head of the household on the case. In a way, I think that strategy passed by the men, and it didn't think about why men were not actively involved in the house; it didn't address the needs that men have in terms of advancing their own careers, and didn't look at which programs and policies might be put in place to allow men to participate more fully and responsibly in their children's homes. I think that's another lesson we have to consider when thinking about how to move forward. It's pretty clear that an adult working full time is not going to allow children who are living in the households of single parents to move out of poverty, and we have to find ways to bring more resources from the non-custodial parents into the household.
We at the Commission are working hard. We said we wanted to get our report out by Labor Day of this year because we thought that was a meaningful time frame, but it's going be a big challenge, and I think the results of the report are going to be something that we really want to organize the entire city government around over these next four years. Hopefully in that time we get things built enough so that it will be something that will naturally continue working in the city in the years following that.
The Working Poor
Listen to an audio podcast of this interview here or download the file (MP3, length: 59 minutes, filesize: 21 MB)
The prognosis, I'm afraid, is not good, because you have to link different factors together that are contributing to poverty. We have a city that's increasingly black and Latino and Asian; we have an education system which Mayor Bloomberg, Chancellor Joel Klein and others -- unlike some other mayors in other parts of the nation -- have come to realize has been particularly unsupportive of poor children; we have less than 10 percent of black and Latino children who graduate with a Regents degree from the city of New York, with a 50 percent dropout rate. That means we're pumping out tens of thousands of young people who have no skills to participate in the workforce and with no means to get beyond a low wage, and we've been starting to get an understanding of that through a number of techniques. We at Community Service Society (CSS) began using a national pollster, Lake Snell & Perry, which does national polling, to actually start talking to people who are living at or below poverty.
We've been told there are no polls of the poor in the United States going on that we can find. Obviously the credit card companies don't think that the poor are worth it, and the population at large doesn't think the poor vote. We've been conducting the poll for four years, and the outcomes have been rather frightening. The poll is called the Unheard Third, because we don't think they're being heard very much, and the picture they're painting confirms much of what Jean and Linda have talked about. Overwhelmingly, these are working poor people; overwhelmingly, they spend about 65 percent of their income just on rent; they have approximately 30 dollars a week for everything else, including food; and they're not getting ahead. They're literally locked into poverty. Health care is driving them to the wall. About 50 percent have been unable to fill prescriptions and get needed medical care. They find themselves relying increasingly on food pantries for their basic needs. And again, they don't see much movement and hope.
The difficulty we're facing, I think, is that this poverty we're dealing with is a process that's going on at a time of an upward-climbing economy in New York. My concern is that we haven't seen a real economic dip yet to roll this out, and without a safety net, we're in for some very troubled times for the city of New York and for other major cities. As I talk to my counterparts everywhere from Detroit to L.A. to D.C., the same pattern is beginning to emerge: There are larger and larger numbers of people, particularly young people, who are coming out of an education system that has been rather slipshod, especially when it comes to poor children of all races, and this education system is not equipping them with skills for anything other than low-wage work, which increasingly does not have enough income to support them.
Rather than leaving you with those thoughts, I do think there are a couple of things we have to discuss going forward. Clearly we have to push for -- and I think this is something that's been off the table for a long time -- low-wage workers to be unionized to bring political power to bear, then make sure they can at least have a hope for their children and themselves to get adequate benefits and health care.
We also have to recognize that this poverty situation is not stable for a city like the city of New York. It is politically unstable and it is unsafe. There is a problem of a growing group of people who are working hard but don't have adequate resources to support their children and themselves, as well as an education system which is systematically under-funded andunde- supported. Every report we see goes the same way. The recent report stated that there's been the sharpest drop on record in terms of participation of blacks and Latinos in the elite high schools of New York. If you visit the nonacademic high schools of New York, which I think Education Chancellor Joel Klein is the first one to have really undertaken, there's a night-and-day difference between what poor black and Latino children are offered and what the students who are getting elite education are offered. We can't find operating laboratories in many of the places where that's a Regents requirement, and clearly we have a reform message that is going to have to start with prevention, particularly for young blacks and Latinos, and particularly for males, but also generally for kids who are on non-academic tracks in a highly competitive economy where low-wage workers are really having struggles. Again, I think this is not the worst challenge New York has been up against, but we better get about it. I think the mayor's initiative has to be driven far beyond just his term, and it is a question of what large cities are going to do with this problem of poverty, as so much of their population is mired in this structural problem of working hard and still being poor.
Let me say a bit about the film. I was quite surprised by the film, as I thought it was going to be about working poverty, the minimum wage and those sorts of issues. That's not what I encountered. The people in this film are making wages around twice the minimum wage, so they're considerably above a level that we're normally talking about when we talk about working poverty, and they're above the population that David Jones has just been talking about. The people in the film are people in the lower echelons of the middle class; they're not poor, and they're not non-working poor. These are not the people I spent most of my career writing about. These are people who are definitely employed at well above the minimum wage, and so they're above the level that we normally talk about when we talk about poverty or near-poverty.
At the same time, they clearly have problems. These are people in deep difficulties, and I've wrestled with how to define their difficulties. How, with these sorts of wages, can they be in this much difficulty? Well, I came to a couple of thoughts, and these are not definitive. The most immediate reason is that all four of these people are divorced. They are all single parents, and in three cases they're single mothers who are supporting children without regular assistance from the father. So that's the first thing that stands out. What really struck me about the film was that the source of distress wasn't immediately the economic system or the wage system or the social-benefits system. It was divorce. It was the great family problem that we're all struggling with today.
The second thing that struck me, particularly in reference to Jean's case, was health care. The one thing that seemed to me to jar any idea that this was a normal situation was the fact that, in Jean's case, her daughter was unable to get assured health care for a very serious condition. There were concerns about Medicaid expressed in Barbara's case, and it came up in a couple of the other stories as well. So health care is an issue that is in the background, but seems to me a more acute source of difficulty than wages.
Then I asked myself, what are the implications for public policy? In situations like the ones we see in this film, it's hard to say that wages are the concern that jumps out. After all, these wages are well above any idea of the minimum wage that's been talked about recently. It's not as if government could immediately mandate that all these people make twenty dollars an hour; that's simply beyond possibility. Aside from the politics of it, it would also lead to the destruction of massive numbers of low-wage jobs for people with fewer skills than the people in this story. I actually agree with David Jones. I think unionization is part of the answer here. I think there's something attractive about union action as a way of dealing with low wages. In fact, two of the four people in this story are involved in union activism. One of them is Jean and the other one is Jerry, the man who was the security guard. What's appealing about being in a union is that workers have a sense of what their industries can afford, and then they are accountable for the economic consequences. That is, they have to live with whether the industry is still competitive after the wages are raised. I like that. I think there's something self-reliant about that. I also like the idea that those who need a better shake take action directly to bring it about themselves, rather than have advocates go to government and speak on their behalf.
But the clearest implication has to do with health care. There clearly needs to be some system to rationalize the health care system such that care is available, particularly for acute conditions and serious conditions, and the financing has to be somehow rationalized so that we all pay more reliably than we do, and at the same time we don't have people who are free-riding, and right now there's quite a bit of free-riding going on on the part of many people in the system. Many people do not pay for insurance. They assume they can go to emergency rooms. A great deal of charity care is given. Charity care is in fact alluded to in a number of the stories. I don't have strong views about what the new system should be, but health care is clearly the place where government has the most work to do, and where there is the strongest case for changing what we're doing now.
The other thing that came up, and this was particularly dramatic in Barbara Brooks' story, is the problem of notches -- where people go up in income, suddenly their benefits go down by more than their wages go up. Now I don't think that's typical. I think what happened in Barbara's case was quite unusual, and I'd like to know the specifics about how that occurred. But maybe something has to be addressed here where there's a greater phase in and phase out of the benefits. Part of the story in the three cases involving single mothers was that they went in and out of the benefits system. In a way, what saved Jean's situation was that she went back on to the benefit system. All three women are at the top end of the benefit system where they might get support. So there's an issue there, too. I would say health care and the notches are the places where government ought to focus its attention.
Audience Questions
Rafael Pi Roman: Thank you. I'd like to open it up to the audience. Does anybody have any questions right off the bat?
Listen to an audio podcast of this interview here or download the file (MP3, length: 59 minutes, filesize: 21 MB)
Audience Member: I'm Joel Berg and I'm with the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, and I want to congratulate Ms. Reynolds for your incredible struggle and the incredible work you do providing health care to our society. I personally think your wages are too low. My question to you is a series of questions about your benefits. Do you think the Monmouth County social services folks started treating you better after a camera crew was following you? How far did you have to go to get your benefits? Were they were in Atlantic Highlands or Longbranch? Or did you have to go to the county of Freehold? Did anyone ever offer to provide benefits to you over the phone? In the film, I saw that you had a boatload of documents under your arm. Did you physically have to go to the social services offices? How frequently did you have to go and how did they treat you?
The first time I went to welfare I was told I was a liar because when I gave my address, the woman told me she was very familiar with the town I lived in and there was no such street. So she proceeded to prove me wrong, and of course I did give her the right address. I'm not a liar.
The next thing was that she told me that I made absolutely too much money. To support a family of eight, I was paying $1,200 a month in rent, which is exorbitant for where I lived, but it was the only place I could find because of what the situation was when I left my ex-husband. It was the only home I could find. Housing in Monmouth County, New Jersey, is outrageous; I'm sure it is in New York City as well. The price of living and everything else is also outrageous in New Jersey. When I asked this woman from social services for any kind of help, she offered me a five dollar coupon to get my medication filled. I worked and my union provided my health care benefits, so I myself didn't pay more than three dollars for any prescription. I said, "Well, could my daughter use it?" And she said, "Absolutely not."
My daughter did apply for charity care -- I filled out the forms at least three times. She filled them out many times as well. And the forms were lost, they were misplaced, they weren't complete, they were whatever. I tried to explain all this to the woman and she really did not care. I went home and cried and screamed and couldn't figure out what to do, but I read on the form that I could protest it, which I did. The next person they assigned to me was a young single woman who was probably a year or two out of college. She said to me, "Why don't you take another job? Take a second job. You should be able to make ends meet then." And I said, "But you don't understand. I work 37.5 hours a week." I travel by bus back and forth to my job. I also work as much overtime as possible. I was working double shifts, I was working on my days off. I never took vacation time; I used that for school clothes, for doctor visits, for whatever needed to be done. She basically told me that I needed to find a way to support my family without begging the government.
Then I went and I told the producer of the film, whose name is Eddie, because I was livid and hysterical at this point, I told Eddie. I did not know what I was going do because now I was being evicted, because I put my daughter's life ahead of my rent by paying her medical bills and her doctor bills. Doctors don't see you unless you pay. I was paying the doctors. I was paying for her medicine. So I told Eddie what happened, and Eddie said, "How about if I get that on camera?"
Well, of course the minute he got social services on camera and spoke to them on the phone, they sent a supervisor. I had to go to Atlantic Highlands each time, which meant a day of travel for a distance that should have been an hour of traveling, because I had to take public transportation. I had to do this all the time. I went every time with this whole briefcase full of papers, and the third time I went there nobody else was there. They had closed the office to clients that day. So of course the receptionist said, "Hi, how can I help you?" whereas before she had said, "Take a number, sit down and don't ask me any questions." [Jean and the audience laugh]
There's a lot that they didn't show you in the film because I have the typical Irish temper and do not know how to keep my mouth shut. I kept biting my tongue, because I knew if I flipped out they would kick me out. So when I went back they brought me upstairs in an elevator, whereas before they made me walk up flights of stairs every time. I went in an elevator with a supervisor and she was very patronizing at first. She treated me like I was an imbecile until I opened my mouth and got a little Irish, and then things changed. And they changed, I still believe to this day -- I don't care what anybody says -- because there was a camera there. When they saw the camera, they didn't want to be seen as the bad guys, and they don't want people to think that they're insensitive, they don't want people to be so against them. They think they're doing a wonderful job. So that time, they called me at home the same day and let me know everything went through, which is amazing, because I've never heard of anybody getting welfare the same day they've applied. [Jean laughs] Never, ever, ever, ever. So it was like a miracle.
I did have to go back and forth to Freehold several times to get paperwork and all of that, but that was the least of my problems. At this point I knew at least that the kids weren't gonna be taken from me, because I was also threatened by welfare that this could happen, that they would turn me in to the Department of Youth and Family Services in New Jersey.
Rafael Pi Roman: Jean, the camera is rolling now, so I'll be very nice. [audience laughs] But we have a lot of questions, and I think Deputy Mayor Gibbs wants to say something.
Linda Gibbs: Based on Jean's comments, I have a couple of thoughts. One is the issue of how we can bring technology into the social services field to better serve clients, and this is particularly relevant when you have a mayor in New York City whose wealth was made on technology. We're about to unveil the first step of an electronic calculator where a client can go into a terminal, or access it on the Web, so it's accessible in a library or somewhere else, and you can put in your family information and it calculates the benefit programs that you would be eligible for. For each program the calculator will tell you that to get that one you go here, to get this one you go here. The ideal will be to get to the point where you can have an electronic filing of an application. So this is to save all the time and travel that people have to incur in order to access the benefits, and save the trouble of not knowing what you can and cannot get. The purpose of this technology is to try to make sense of all of the government programs, and we're trying to pull together not just the city programs but also the state and the federal programs.
Which gets me to my second point, and that is that we spent a lot of time on this issue of notches, of falling behind when you get ahead, and we mapped it out and found a couple of things. One is that if a client is in fact receiving all the benefits that they're eligible for in New York State, the notches have been, with the exception of child care, smoothed out. But, in order to get to that point you actually have to be successful in making an application and receiving all of the benefits, so that includes food stamps, public assistance, the earned income tax credit and Medicaid. There has been a lot of attention on this issue. The big exception is child care, and the cost of child care is huge, and so that is an issue. Particularly for parents of children who are not school age, it can be a huge impediment, and we think it is a big impediment for individuals going from part time to full time.
For the sake of argument right now, assume that all the notches have been worked out. Even if it is true, it means you have to be successful in getting to each one of those programs, staying on them, maintaining your eligibility and doing all of the certifications. I think part of what government can do is try to do more to support those who are working hard and eliminating some of the barriers that come up when you have to apply and reapply and meet a variety of obligations.
Rafael Pi Roman: Thank you. Does anybody else have a question? Yes, over here.
Audience Member: Hi. I just want to thank you all for being here, and I appreciate watching the documentary. I have a question about the unions. You've all mentioned unions, how unions can strengthen workers and help keep people working, increase their benefits and so forth. I'm a union chapter leader at my school where I'm a teacher. With regard to teachers, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein in particular have a pretty bad record of what their reputation is in terms of protecting unions, and I'm just wondering, for the people who know the mayor and who might know Joel Klein, with regards to their opinions on unions, could you give us a briefing on what the mayor might think of unions going forward? [audience laughs]
Rafael Pi Roman: Deputy Mayor Gibbs?
Linda Gibbs: Hopefully a simple answer can address your comment. In creating the commission with its 32 members, we intentionally wanted to make sure that we had a very diverse representation. When the mayor reviewed the list that I brought to him of recommendations for commission members, he noticed that there was not a union representative, and he added a person to the list that he asked to participate in order to bring the union perspective to the discussion. I mean, he's really brought in the smartest, most committed individuals who have made this work their life's work, and he has been willing to open the agenda to their discussions and hear their recommendations, and he specifically included a union representative to address that issue.
Rafael Pi Roman: Mr. Jones?
David Jones: I think the unionization question is, to try to look at this as a political problem, part of the difficulty for this group of impoverished New Yorkers -- who are 40 percent of the population -- because they're perceived as not politically potent. New York has one of the largest reserves of unregistered eligible voters of any large city in America at nearly a million people.
The question becomes not what the mayor feels, but what voters can start to exercise as a mandate if they're able to organize. Low-wage workers have not been organized particularly well in the city of New York and in other places, so this is not a matter of whether a politician likes certain people or unions or not. You have to have something more potent than just moral persuasion here. That's why I find myself in the weird position of being allied with Professor Mead on this matter. Part of this situation is a political problem, and to think of it in any way other than that is a mistake. We're dealing with people on the other end of the political spectrum who have vast stores of money and political influence, and then we're supposed to ask them for change as a moral responsibility, even though they're in America. We're asking them to have some long-term obligation to the poor, particularly the poor of color, but also in a broader sense, as a moral obligation. I think that's why there have to be political solutions, and that unionization, particularly of low-wage workers, has to be something we have to start talking about seriously.
Lawrence Mead: The unionization that I would advocate is not predominantly that of municipal workers. They are usually well above the income level we're talking about in this film. They're usually not low income. In fact, municipal workers are relatively well paid by the standards of workers with their skills and kind of jobs. Although I'm not taking any stand on municipal union issues per se, the pay-off is more substantial for the low-wage worker in the private sector, people like the security guard in the film or Jean Reynolds. There would also be strong public support for the union in the private sector because of a common perception that workers in the private sector are relatively low paid. So unionization should be aimed at them.
There is a broader concern that I would share, and I think David alluded to it earlier, and that is a concern that low-paid Americans and Americans with low education levels are becoming too passive. One of the problems in terms of them getting attention and so on is that they themselves are not organized, they don't vote at high levels, they don't join unions and they don't join other organizations. They typically get spoken for by the better off, and that has a lot less impact than having the workers themselves march on Albany or march on Washington, so we have to get back to a more populist conception of what society's about. I see that as offsetting the apparent dependence that might arise from greater government program and greater government support, provided that this greater support comes about through political action by the beneficiaries. They could be taking responsibility for themselves in a different way. Maybe they're relying on the government to live, but they're also making sure the government does the right thing, and that's a very different thing from the kind of elitism I think has overtaken social policy in the last 20, 30 years.
David Jones: I'd like to follow up on that comment, and I'll keep quiet after that. I don't want to condemn working people and poor people who haven't been able to organize. When we look at the lives of trying to keep children fed, dealing with not being evicted, these are overwhelming circumstances, and I'd like to see anyone try to be politically active under those kinds of concerns. But that's essentially why you need unions to start helping the organization, because once people get a platform of benefits and supports, then you can start to get the political muscle to bring some attention to bear on the problems. But I think it has to go together. This is not a condemnation of the poor, "Well, they're just lazy, you know, they're not in the town hall fighting." I'd like to see anyone work this hard and also be able to help politically bring pressure to bear on anybody. So that's where the unions fit for my vantage point.
Rafael Pi Roman: We have a question from another audience member.
Audience Member: I'm Marlis Harris, I'm a finance editor of Consumer Reports. I have two questions for Professor Mead. The first is about the minimum wage, which is$5.50 an hour now. It's an artifact; it's not pegged to anything that has any reality. In fact, couldn't Congress pass a law tomorrow saying the minimum wage should be $2.75? They actually could. That wouldn't change the facts of what it takes to support a family. So in fact, I think there's something economists have to do, which is to decide what the minimum wage should be. If we're going to have a minimum wage at all, which perhaps you would not grant, shouldn't it be pegged to something like the minimum amount it takes to live and survive?
The second thing I'd like you to address is the so-called slack on the health care system, which I take it you interpret as a lot of charity care. I'm wondering about some of the other slack in the system. I'm thinking of, for example, Medicare Part D, where I have to pay for Warren Buffet's drugs and I have to pay Merck and company the full price for drugs; in fact, they've even raised the price, and I have to pay the huge salaries of the executives of health care companies. Isn't that greater slack in the healthcare system than charity care is?
Lawrence Mead: Since I thought this would be about the minimum wage, I dug up some numbers. The gist is these numbers show that minimum wage is virtually unimportant. You could almost say that hardly anyone is paid the minimum wage. I mean, there are certainly people who are paid the minimum wage, but they're not the sort of people we see in this film at all. Of those paid the minimum wage -- and I'm quoting this figure from 1988, which is the last year I could find information for, but I'm sure the situation is roughly similar today -- only 5.5 percent of them were husbands; 19 percent were wives; 7 percent were women maintaining families, in other words, single mothers; 36 percent were teenagers; 33 percent were full time, 67 percent part time. So most of the people on the minimum wage are not supporting families, they're not in the position that you're assuming, where there would have to be enough income to support a family.
The point I'm making is only that the image we have of the minimum wage worker as someone struggling to support a family on the minimum wage is almost nonexistent, that there are almost no such people. Almost everyone who has a family, like those that we saw in the film, is working at well above the minimum wage. They may still have problems, I'm not saying that there isn't a case for higher pay, but the minimum wage is really irrelevant to their situation. Also, a large majority of people paid the minimum wage are not poor, because they're in families where other people are working, and as a result, the family's above the poverty level. The poverty level for people who are working steady hours is very, very low. It's from three to six percent. I don't mean we should ignore it, but the idea that you can work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year and be poor easily is false. That's really not the case, and most of the people that we saw in this film are not poor. When I say "poor," I'm using the federal definition; if you want to set a higher poverty line, which is what we have implicitly done as some of this discussion, that's another matter. But the federal poverty line is one that you get above very quickly if you're working steady hours at any legal job, and that job will usually be above the minimum wage. So the issues are important, but we shouldn't imagine that the people earning the minimum wage are in the situation we saw in the film. That's really not the case.
To address your second question about Medicare, I largely agree with you that the Medicare system is confused and irrational in many respects, and that the health care benefit that was added is confusing and difficult in lots of ways. There are a lot of issues with Medicare, but it's really part of a larger health care problem where we have these three parts: Medicaid, Medicare, and private insurance. Most people are under one of those three systems, the three parts don't fit together well, and they're confusing and inefficient in lots of ways. The prescription drug system raises other issues about costs and who's paying for the development costs. We don't really have time to go into that now, but I'm just going to say that I think your points about Medicare, to me, have greater relevance to our discussion than the minimum wage.
Rafael Pi Roman: Another question from the audience.
Audience Member: Good evening. I would like to say thank you to both Jean and Barbara, because what you really did was put a human face on so many issues that every-day poor people have to deal with whether they're trying to live on the minimum wage or not. While race is always a factor in the United States of America, the film also shows that class is a big issue. So I want to thank you both because it takes a lot of courage to put your life out there, to put your stories out there, and we need the human faces or else the other experts come in and they give us statistics, they give us public policy, and the human element goes out of it. Again, I thank you both for being able and willing to put the human aspect on it.
A question for Professor Mead: I'd like to know how in a capitalist society wage is not an issue, because how much money you earn determines where you live, how you eat, how you're treated, whether you're demonized, criminalized, whether or not a doctor will see you, whether or not you can get medicine, whether or not you will get treated with respect when you go into a store, a bureaucratic office, any place that you go, how you're educated and where you're educated. So it totally baffles me when you say that wage is not the central issue.
In terms of people getting a free ride, I agree with you. I wish a lot of people would stop getting a free ride. I wish in New York that the developer Bruce Ratner would stop getting a free ride, I wish Donald Trump would stop getting a free ride. [audience laughs] I wish that all of these corporations that are able to dismiss workers here in the United States and take them over to other countries would stop getting a free ride. I wish we would stop blaming people who are struggling, working overtime each and every day to try to feed their families. They get blamed for the free ride.
To Ms. Gibbs, you said the workfare worked? It didn't work. There were thousands of students at City University of New York (CUNY) that were put out of CUNY schools when welfare-to-workfare reform took place, and they had to choose between Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance or going to college. When workfare made people go to work, it was not for academic or skills training, it was to clean parks, to clean subways, to do menial work. So you say it worked. Well, the human faces that I know, that I've seen, the children, the young adults, the mothers, all of those people, it didn't work. And I'm really tired of politicians telling us how much their policies work.
Lawrence Mead: I would only say that welfare reform's chief success has been to get these class questions back on the agenda. As long as we were talking about welfare and poverty, we weren't talking about class and inequality. Now we're more talking about those subjects in part because we have a lot more people working. So this is positive, and in the end I think some solution will emerge whereby the struggles of the working poor and the near-working poor will get more attention. That wasn't going to be possible as long as you had as many people on welfare as we had 20 years ago. So this is movement, this is progress.
Rafael Pi Roman: More questions.
Audience Member: My name is Nadia, and I wanted to thank Barbara and Jean again. But my comment really goes to the federal poverty level. I think that's a real farce, and I think I would like to challenge the panelists, particularly Ms. Gibbs and Mr. Mead, to talk about what that farce is. We're talking about essentially $12,200 for a family of one; that's considered federal poverty. So we throw this number around and say that there are 1.8 million people under poverty. We need to look at the figure and then say, "Can we survive on that?" And then that can be a real figure for poverty. What does it take to change that? Also, when real people are here saying "My life demonstrates that policy X has not worked," I think we need to pause and recognize that even though our policies may be intended to work, in reality they have not worked. For example, Barbara has seen the policies not work for her.
Linda Gibbs: I think the issue of the definition of poverty is an important one to address. The federal poverty level was defined in the late '60s at a point in time when households spent about 30 percent of their household income on food. Over the course of the years, there was some adjustment in the cost of food, but never an adjustment on that 30 percent. Spin forward to today, and now it's estimated that a household spends about 13 percent of their costs on food. So the poverty level is antiquated for that reason. As a result of that and other inconsistencies in calculating the poverty level, $19,500 is the annual poverty level estimated nationally for a family of four. There's no difference of that federal definition if you live in New York City or if you live in Nebraska, Wyoming, or Florida. It's the same everywhere, and we all know that costs vary dramatically, particularly here in New York City and other large urban areas. The housing costs are just astronomical. There is another calculator that estimates the salary that a household would need in order to live at a basic level. In New York City, for a family of four, that cost is $58,000.
So that's the federal poverty level. We can't change federal law. We can advocate around changing federal law, but we don't have the power to change it. I think a major contribution that we can make here in New York City is to talk about poverty in a different way. We struggle because we can say, "Well, you're not poor because you don't fall under the federal poverty level," but we know that people who are earning twice the federal poverty level are poor. I hope we will be able to move forward in this city by creating our own definitions of poverty that can help to give a better measure. At the same time, I think there are a number of flaws in the opposite direction, as the federal poverty level only counts income, earned income and cash benefits in a household, and it doesn't count the value of a lot of other benefits, so in some ways it also understates poverty. All things being equal, it grossly exaggerates the number of people who are not poor, but there are things that move in both directions.
Rafael Pi Roman: Professor Mead, and then Mr. Jones.
Lawrence Mead: I want to say that welfare reform succeeded in New York City, much as it did in the rest of the country, by causing a great many families to leave welfare and take jobs. This didn't solve all their problems, but it was a big step forward. The welfare roll also declined by about half a million people in New York City. This is an enormous change, and it's directly related to the drop in child poverty that was mentioned at the outset. So there has been progress in New York, because people have gone to work. That doesn't mean that their problems are all solved, but now we can address those new problems that come up because they're employed. It's notable that in this film there was no issue raised about employment. That is, all the subjects of the film assume they're going to be working, that they should be working and that they're better off as a result. It doesn't mean, again, that their problems are all solved, and there are further issues, but there is progress. It's very important not to go back on that and have an idea once again that single mothers should simply not have to work. That's not a solution. The solution is to work and then address the new problems that come from that.
David Jones: I'd just like to say a couple of things to put this in context. New York is the only major city in America that's seen increases in poverty; that's one thing we should recognize. So I'm very concerned with the local; I'm not as concerned about the rest of the country as I am about what's happening in the city of New York. Clearly we have 1.8 million people in the city of New York that are at or below the poverty level, against all the problems we're talking about in terms of extraordinarily high housing costs and health costs.
I take one exception. I see all this wringing of the hands about the fact that we can't do anything about the federal government. I've seen politicians on their heels driving Congress crazy when they think it's a priority. This issue is not a priority, and that's the reason there's no movement on the federal level. I don't see every member of the New York delegation saying, "We're not going to let anything go until you start handling this" to the federal government. Everything else seems to have a higher priority. Clearly politicians don't think that this constituent -- the 40 percent of the people mired in this situation -- matter as much as some of their other constituents. I think we have to recognize there's a distinct political problem going on here. Because even though New York can't solve this problem, they're not using any political capital to move the needle.
Rafael Pi Roman: Thank you, panelists, for coming and participating in this. Thank you, Roger Weisberg, for your film, and thank you all for coming and joining this conversation.
About the Participants
About the Event
This panel discussion was conducted at the Channel Thirteen/WNET Studios on August 22, 2006.