CHAPTER 1
INTERDEPENDENCE AND THE WORKING POOR
ALICE Is Our Neighbor
Who is ALICE? Who is ALEC?
She is the young woman who washes your dishes at that fancy restaurant.
He is my grandfather who didn't plan for retirement and is working as a greeter at Walmart.
He is David, the formerly well-off middle-aged manager who is deemed expendable.
She is Susan, the McDonald's service worker who takes your order.
She is Sheronda, the woman down the street who has just lost her job.
They are our children, who are living hand to mouth after having made some bad choices.
He is Jamal, the worker who makes only $8.25 an hour.
They are our neighbors.
She and he may be you and me one day, if we are not there already.
There are reports that suggest that almost half of us will be working but living in a financially shaky situation for some period of our lives.
The United Way commissioned a six-state study in 2014 to determine how many households in those states, including Florida, were living in the gap between the poverty line and what the United Way terms the "survival line," earning more than the official U.S. poverty rate but less than the basic cost of living in those six states. They discovered that 44 percent of the households in Florida's Central West Coast experienced financial hardship, while only 15 percent were technically under the poverty line. The cost of living in this seven-county area — labeled a "survival budget" or "basic cost of living" — ranged from $49,777 to $53,300 for a family of four. The average gap for ALICE and ALEC ranged from $4,000 to $8,000 below that threshold.
If you were to go about your daily errands in Bradenton, Florida, where I live, or in the town or city where you live, you might not suspect that one of every two people you encounter does not make enough money to meet the basic cost of living there. Fifty percent are not earning what they need to live. For those dining in Panera, the percentage is probably less. For those shopping in Walmart, the percentage is probably more.
How about your community? How many people there live on less than a survival budget? The issue is not just that a large number of people are the working poor but that we as a society are dependent on their labor. So the working poor (ALICE and ALEC) are those who wait on us in restaurants, who are our secretaries and public school teachers, who cook our food, who serve us in stores, who fix our cars, who grow our food, who clean our offices and homes, who landscape our public spaces, and who work on our highways. We are economically interdependent with them, and the well-being of all of us is tied up in everyone's being able to live decently. We are interdependent, and increasingly many of us are living payday to payday.
What Does Economic Instability Feel Like?
Though we are born with different abilities and into divergent circumstances, we are essentially interdependent. Our economic interconnectedness turns malicious when our natural solidarity is so shattered by disparate conditions that some are deprived of what they need to survive and flourish. Let me tell you a story: Joe got a job with a small firm that laid tile for floors and bathrooms. He learned how to do it well. When work was slack, his boss would have to give him time off. Because his income was not steady, he decided to start his own company. He had his own tools and borrowed money to buy a used truck and other equipment. His workmanship was high quality, contractors gave him more jobs, and he was busy.
Joe, his wife, and their children lived in a home they rented from a citrus grower. His landlord offered him a job on weekends in exchange for free rent. Joe took him up on it and was starting to pay down his loans with the money he saved on rent.
After six months his landlord demanded about $10,000 in back rent.
"Whoa! What are talking about? We agreed I would work for you weekends in exchange for free rent!"
"No. You must have misunderstood me. I never said that."
Joe, very angry, with expletives said: "You sure did! And I don't have $10,000!"
The landlord said, "If I had intended that, I'd have given you a written agreement. The only written agreement is the one where you will pay me $1,480 per month rent. Since you have not paid, you will have to move."
The next day Joe was driving to a job and had an accident that totaled his truck. His insurance did not include replacement coverage. He could not work without the truck. His few savings were gone quickly. Without a job, Joe, his wife, and their children were homeless.
It can happen that fast. One calamity can destabilize a household that is living paycheck to paycheck. It can reverse even a hopeful story. The series of events in Joe's family situation indicate the tightness of our interconnection. What might have been merely an inconvenience to the financially stable became a matter of being able to make a living for Joe. The health and education of his whole family depended on Joe's truck and the trustworthiness of their landlord. The thinness of the margin on which Joe's family was living reveals the fragility and importance of the interconnections.
Other calamities can revolve around the impact of an accident that causes an injury; of being out of work; of having a spouse close out a joint banking account and abandon the family; of sudden medical crises; of being physically exhausted as a result of working multiple jobs, which results in being prone to accidents at work or to explosive outbursts against supervisors. The scenario of being one paycheck away from poverty is one that both the poor and increasingly the middle class know first- or at least secondhand.
Those poised to address this precariousness from a policy perspective tend to be removed from such risk themselves. Former Florida governor and presidential candidate Jeb Bush relayed the facts of the matter to an audience in Detroit on February 3, 2015, saying that "two out of three American households live paycheck to paycheck. Any unexpected expense can push them into financial ruin. We have a record number of Americans on food stamps and living in poverty." Ironically, it was Trump, the wealthiest candidate of all, who went beyond facts to strike an emotional chord with the white working poor, for whom these statistics are a distressing reality.
ALEC Is Us
There is a new poverty that surpasses what we have known to this point. The sheer quantity of widespread economic insecurity and soaring levels of income inequality are unlike anything since the Great Depression. This exacerbates our fear of what may happen to us in the future. "How much risk do I face?" we may ask ourselves. Mark Rank and Thomas Hirschl have answered that question. In an article titled "Calculate Your Economic Risk," they report that nearly 60 percent of Americans between the ages of twenty and seventy-five will spend at least one year below the official poverty line, and a full 75 percent of us will experience a year below 150 percent of the poverty line. By the current definition, this means that three-quarters of us will experience a year living on $24,030 for a couple.
What that means in terms of living conditions is hard to imagine. It may involve learning what real hunger is, working fourteen-hour days, choosing between dental work and eating out, paying usurious interest rates at a payday loan store to keep the power from being shut off, sending children to school without adequate food or attention- — this is the stuff of inequality. It also means working for inadequate wages and perceiving that others are living the high life off your back, buying goods that are so cheap only because you are paid so little. This interdependence can be galling.
If you think this insecurity is far from you (and me), consider this story:
Kathy and her teenage son recently found themselves in an unfamiliar part of town- — at the Chattanooga Community Kitchen. Used to living in an upscale part of the city, Kathy came home one night to discover the locks changed on her doors and her husband nowhere to be located. She and her son had been living in her Cadillac Escalade for a week. A resident of one of the city's wealthiest zip codes for years, she came home one day to find that her estranged husband had changed the locks on the couple's McMansion. She hadn't yet consulted an attorney concerning her rights. Kelly and her son had been sleeping in her Cadillac Escalade for more than a week.
The moral of the story? "The homeless aren't always who you think they are," said Mark Williams, the Community Kitchen's case management director. "Just because you're driving an Escalade doesn't mean you have a garage to park it in." I am sure that this woman figured that her comfortable socioeconomic situation was beyond instability. She probably felt that her wealth put her beyond the reach of poverty, that she was free of such hurdles. This situation revealed, instead, that she was dependent on several relationships and circumstances. The passage between the "have-mores" and those whose incomes fall below the survival level is not hermetically sealed. The affluent cannot insulate themselves from the effects of this disparity. According to Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, inequality impacts us all.
Stiglitz, in his book The Price of Inequality, argues that the large gap between the poor and the affluent is preventing an economic recovery from the Great Recession that began in 2007 and has continued for all but the wealthiest. Much has been said about the disappearance of the middle class, as families' incomes drop and they fall into poverty. They primarily live in income segregation (if not racial segregation as well), and unless one consciously focuses on those who wait on tables, staff fast-food restaurants, clean motels, and stock shelves, they can be overlooked; in fact, they become virtually invisible. The long-term concern is that children will fall into the same insecure situation as their parents.
Nearly 15 million children in this country are poor, and 6.5 million of them are extremely poor, living below half the poverty line. The Children's Defense Fund (CDF) estimates the long-term costs to society at $500 billion in lost productivity, government assistance, health care, and incarceration. This daunting figure is, the CDF says, "six times more than the $77 billion investment we propose to reduce child poverty by 60 percent."
What Do We Value?
The choice we are making as a society, theoretically, to pay $500 billion to treat the effects of poverty rather than investing $77 billion to reduce the causes of poverty, reflects a web of moral, social, and political values. There is a divisive sense of antagonism along class lines. The so-called class war has emerged not as a result of intentional division but as a result of ALEC's frustration in the face of this inequality and the simmering sense of fear and threat among the affluent. One sees this quagmire in the anger and sense of being marginalized that fueled the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and the disconnect between the billionaire populist's voters and his party's establishment. Many pundits were saying that the working poor do not even vote anymore because it seems a waste of time as ALICEs lose their sense of being represented in this democracy, but working-class white men and women turned out to vote for Trump; he identified the rage that has been burning among white working people, and they felt as though someone had at last heard them.
Others who live fairly comfortable lives lament government social services and emphasize a "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" version of the American dream. Yet others throw up their hands and wonder what can be done about the unstable situation many Americans live in.
I am concerned that the culture of consumption will outstrip the culture of civic engagement and our government will adopt policies that further disadvantage the less well-off. Christians should be outraged at the direction our economic distribution has taken. This new type of poverty is widespread. But we can do something about this. Rather than letting the downward spiral continue, many groups- — Christians and civil and college and other — are doing something about it. They are recalibrating the situation. We can do that as well.
There is clear evidence that this new poverty, however it may be labeled, violates traditional American values such as these:
— fairness
— care for all children
— equal opportunity, mobility, nondiscrimination
— work and making a contribution
— national destiny
— the value and dignity of each life
Not that those values have evaporated; they are being tattered, however.
We as a society are denying poor people, the working poor, and a large number of the middle class a chance to enjoy their lives free from gnawing insecurity. We are jeopardizing our sense of spirituality and responsibility by not treating these people as our neighbors; we do not love them as we love ourselves. Such neglect boomerangs back on the affluent's morality and spirituality.
In his statement on the environment, Laudato Si' ("On Care for Our Common Home"), Pope Francis reasserts the interconnection between the health of the environment and human economic well-being. The Roman Catholic Church has in its papal letters and encyclicals stressed the importance of human solidarity. Francis emphasizes "the intimate relationship between the poor and the fragility of the planet, the conviction that everything in the world is connected, ... the call to seek other ways of understanding the economy and progress, the value proper to each creature, the human meaning of ecology, ... the serious responsibility of international and local policy, the throwaway culture, and the proposal of a new lifestyle." He can hardly be clearer in calling all Christians and all people to a recognition of our interdependence in a new economic and environmental situation.
The Cost to Us All
There is a difference between constructive and malicious inequality. Inequality in the service of the common good is not a sin. Indeed, wealth in the service of the common good is estimable. If that inequality and wealth serve the well-being of many, it is admirable. But when our economic system fails to serve the common good and in fact permits suffering, it has become malicious. When underregulated capitalism fails to provide the opportunity for the majority of people to earn the resources to afford a decent life while others benefit disproportionately, it has crossed that line. It has transgressed the contractual terms by which it operates. It no longer serves the common good but promotes an inequality that has neglected many of its citizens, trapping children in poor public schools, resulting in underemployment, and degrading us all. This is not a "soak the rich" book; it does not believe that any simple sort of fix is possible. Instead, it is about making life more fulfilling, more meaningful for all of us. This includes both material sufficiency and also spiritual blossoming. The affluent and the poor are both in distress, however different the two are, because the material poverty of some causes spiritual poverty in us all if we do not take action.
That is why this book is addressed to the whole population, the well-being of the whole, rather than just to the plight of the poor and working poor. Simon Reid-Henry, in his recent book The Political Origins of Inequality (2015), suggests the magnitude of the new poverty. He assesses the current situation as the most "unequal and unjust" that the world has ever seen. He writes, "We still have not properly confronted how the poverty and suffering of a great many are connected to the wealth and privilege of a few. We are slow to admit that the problem is one not of poverty traps at the bottom of the pyramid but of a great confinement of wealth at the top." Reid-Henry's analysis is global in scope. My intention here is not to blame the affluent- — nor is Reid-Henry's- — but to suggest that this inter-dependent situation is universally destructive of our future.
All of us do better when everyone enjoys a basic level of well-being. Thus, this chapter has focused on our first argument: an ideal state of economic justice would reflect the inter-dependence of all citizens in our environmental and social life. Though we may not attain this ideal, there is much room for improvement in this area. An improved standard of income stability is a benefit that all Americans need to realize. A more level playing field would make for a healthier society, economically, spiritually, and politically. There is a high cost to the present degree of inequality that characterizes our society.
