Politics is Personal: How Our Taxes Subsidize Walmart and Hurt Local Workers

We talk a lot about workers in this space— at the Center for Working-Class Studies and in our  Working-Class Perspectives blog—but for the most part we do it on the macro level: massive job losses precipitated by NAFTA and other foreign trade agreements; the collapse of domestic manufacturing; the Walmartization of  America; a stimulus package that pours too much money into the financial institutions that caused the economic meltdown and far too little into job producing infrastructure projects; weak unions; falling wages; vanishing pensions; disappearing health care; fading opportunity.

Sometimes, we’re too focused on the big picture to see how these macro issues affect people in our community.  We have a sense that government’s coddling of business is problematic, but do we really understand why?  We feel in our gut that a neutered union movement leaves working families vulnerable, but can we truly identify with the moms and dads who lie awake at 3:00 A.M. worried that their jobs may evaporate in a week, a month, a year?

Probably not, and that’s too bad, because if we can personalize the devastation caused when the economy stops working for the working class we may actually be able to solve some of the problems that are steadily eroding the American Dream.

For example, I firmly believe that health care reform would have been easier to achieve if, instead of talking about the 47 million people who don’t have health insurance, we gave the problem a face by talking about the 60 year-old woman living down the street who nearly died of colon cancer because she had no health insurance and could not afford to get the follow-up colonoscopies she needed after her first bout with the disease.

That woman, by the way, is my now 75 year-old mother.  She’s a walking, talking advertisement for reform: she had insurance when she first contracted cancer, had it cancelled shortly thereafter, was repeatedly denied coverage because of her pre-existing condition, could not afford the $3,000 per month premium for the only policy she could get, and finally made it to age 65—the point at which she qualified for the government-run health care system that has saved her life repeatedly: Medicare.

If we put my mother and the millions like her who live in every community in the nation out front in the health care debate, would Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck really be able to call reform advocates commies?  Would the health insurance industry have any credibility at all after callously attempting to kill my mother and thousands like her every year?  The answer to both questions is no.

It’s also way past time to personalize the discussion about the many ways in which working-class taxpayers are subsidizing gargantuan multi-national corporations like Walmart. We’re all familiar with the storyline: state and local governments roll out tax abatements and other incentives to attract the chain.  The Bentonville, Arkansas behemoth comes to town and builds a store that devastates the competition.  Shortly thereafter the store owners and employees who paid the taxes that funded the abatements are out on the street.  Meanwhile, many of the giant retailer’s employees are eligible for food stamps and qualify for Medicaid.  Walmart may save us money at the check-out, but we pay for it in taxes and lost jobs. Even though we all know the story, it is for some inexplicable reason, repeated year after year in community after community.  Why?  Perhaps because the government officials who work so hard to entice Walmart and the residents who breathlessly anticipate its arrival don’t know or have any connection to the people whose lives will be changed forever once the store opens its doors.

So let’s personalize the situation and talk about the new Walmart in Liberty Township, one small business owner who operates in its shadow, and the response of the union that represents his workers.

I’ve known Sandy Zander for a long time. He was my boss when I worked for the grocery chain he helped run. He was a fair-minded and able negotiator when we sat on opposite sides of the table during contract talks, and he’s been a successful small businessman since 1988 when he bought a few stores from the company that employed us until it went of business in the wake of a strike neither of us wanted but couldn’t avoid.  He’s genuinely a good guy.

Today, he and his family own two stores: a Giant Eagle in an upscale township east of Youngstown and Union Square Sparkle, one of the few full-service markets still operating in the distressed city.  Sandy’s stores are unionized, so his workers earn a decent wage and have health care and pension benefits.  For two decades he’s managed to survive despite the fact that he’s competing with non-union operators whose wage cost is much lower than his.

In Poland his main competitor is Henry Nemenz.  Henry’s been in the grocery business a long time.  He’s always been a non-union, low-wage, no benefits operator who profits by exploiting his employees.  His owns only a handful of stores, and the Zanders clean his clock every week.  When you drive by the two markets, which are located across the street from each other, you notice two things.  First, there are ten times more cars in the Giant Eagle lot and, second, the UFCW is conducting informational picketing at Nemenz.  The union is spending a lot of money to let people know that Henry’s non-union.  Good for them.

In Youngstown, Sandy’s main competitor is the new Walmart that Liberty Township officials begged for on bended knee.  When you drive by the two stores, which are located less than a half mile apart, you’ll notice two things: first, there are a lot of cars at Walmart and far fewer at Sandy’s than there used to be and, second, there is no UFCW picket line even though Walmart is every bit as bad an employer as Nemenz.

Picket line or no picket line, Sandy will continue to dominate the market in Poland.  But in Youngstown the prospects are not quite as bright.  If people continue to flock to Walmart, Sandy, his store, his workers, and the neighborhood he’s served for two decades could be in trouble.  His employees will lose their good jobs, their health care benefits, and their pensions.  Youngstown will lose the income taxes they pay, and 30 or 40 more city residents will be added to the unemployment rolls.  All because Liberty Township went out and bought themselves a Walmart.

Maybe, just maybe, if the UFCW decided to stand in front of the new store and make sure that people knew that every dollar they spent was putting a neighbor or friend in jeopardy they’d think twice about going in.  Maybe, just maybe, if the union decided to air some ads that highlighted the importance of good-paying retail jobs to the community customers would make different decisions about where they shop.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to start fighting back — one township and one worker at a time.

Leo Jennings

Taking Working-Class Students Seriously

As I wrote last week, I was initially surprised by the claim that working-class students are less likely to graduate if they attend a working-class college or university than if they go to a more selective school.  While working-class schools do many things well, including providing support services, lower tuition and expenses, and a more comfortable atmosphere, we can and must do a better job of educating first-generation college students from lower-income households.

Renny Christopher understood this ten years ago.  In an essay on teaching working-class literature in Teaching Working Class, she noted the differences between the undergraduates she taught at the highly selective University of California Santa Cruz and MA students at a much less selective California State University campus.  The differences were not primarily about students’ abilities; rather, Christopher found that the MA students were less interested in exploring theoretical concepts or critical interpretation of literature.  They expected a graduate course in English to emphasize their personal connections with literary texts, because they had been trained to do so.  Some of the more privileged students at UCSC resisted the course content, but they were quite willing to engage with challenging material and ideas.  Her experience persuaded Christopher that “working-class students are oppressed and cheated in both elite and nonelite educational arenas” (220).

Christopher’s experience echoes Jean Anyon’s findings about how working-class and middle-class schools approach education.  While her work focused on K-12 education, her findings should challenge those of us who teach at working-class colleges and universities.  According to Anyon, working-class schools focus on controlling students’ behavior and teaching students to follow directions, fill in worksheets, and memorize facts.  In other words, working-class schools have long provided “workforce preparation” rather than true education.  At middle-class and elite schools, students learn to explore problems, develop their own analyses, and see themselves as knowledge-makers, not just knowledge-consumers.

Do these patterns play out on the college level?  Certainly, many working-class institutions these days emphasize workforce preparation, in part in order to foster local economic development and help disadvantaged students improve their individual economic positions.  At elite colleges, and often even at flagship state universities, faculty and administrators understand that students are likely to succeed professionally regardless of what they study.  Such institutions emphasize research for faculty and, increasingly, provide rich opportunities for students to pursue research, as well.  This approach prepares students for entrepreneurship and management, for graduate study and the professions.  As Christopher noted, her elite students had learned to grapple with theory and criticism, while her working-class students had been trained to see such abstract thinking as useless.  At the working-class institution, she says, students “are not invited into the realm that the true holders of power in our society inhabit, that of theoretical abstraction” (220).

These different missions reinforce students’ attitudes toward college.  Many students go to college these days with stronger interest in getting a diploma than in learning, an attitude that reflects national discourse that defines higher education as a requirement for getting a good job but not as an exploratory, developmental, educational experience.  For working-class students, this instrumentalist attitude may be even stronger, since the best way to justify the cost of higher education is in economic terms.  And public discourse about education encourages students not to care about what they learn and focus only on getting the degree as easily and quickly as possible.

If we want to provide all college students with a good education, many things need to change, from access to funding to the very idea that the only way of measuring college success is years to graduation.  Educational inequality reflects and is reinforced by the social and economic system, and change has to happen in many parts of that system.  As faculty, our ability to change public discourse and policy may be limited, but we can and must challenge the definition of higher education as job preparation.

Along with critiquing this definition and being conscious of the challenges that our working-class students face (at institutions of all kinds), those of us who teach at working-class institutions must take responsibility for what happens in our own classrooms.

Is it possible that one of the reasons working-class students succeed at more selective institutions is that more is asked of them?  Might this not encourage students to wrestle with complex problems and difficult materials?  On the other hand, I worry that our efforts to accommodate working-class students’ needs might inadvertently encourage them to expect less of themselves and to view college as just another hoop to go through.

I don’t mean to disparage my hard-working colleagues at working-class institutions around the country.  Most of us are passionate about serving our students well.  As I noted last week, we sometimes ask less of our students because we think that will help them.  We want them to succeed, so we accommodate their busy lives and work schedules.

And yet, we’re frustrated when students who refuse to do the reading, continue to write muddled papers well into their college careers, skip class and thus don’t learn how to do projects well, and so on.  The temptation, often, is to “dumb down” courses because our students aren’t ready for challenging readings or assignments.

When I hear these concerns from my colleagues, I have to wonder whether we can’t find a different solution.  Instead of asking for less, and possibly cheating our students, couldn’t we give them both serious challenges and serious instruction that helps them learn how to do better work?

Many of those who teach at working-class institutions feel conflicted about how we can best serve our working-class students.  But we don’t have to choose between two evils.  We can raise our expectations and teach our students how to manage difficult readings and abstract thinking.  We can be flexible enough to help them navigate overloaded schedules and demanding enough to engage them in the education that is taking up so much of their time and money.  Painful as it is, we can even talk with them about the inequities of the system, about how working-class students are usually encouraged to get less out of school, and we can encourage them to demand more, of us and of the system.

Sherry Linkon

College Choice and the Success of Working-Class Students

In recent years, we’ve heard a lot of talk about increasing college access for working-class students.  As I have noted before, access is just the starting point.  A new study by William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities, finds that while lower-income students may be entering college, they are less likely to graduate than their wealthier counterparts.  (It’s worth noting here that their data focuses almost exclusively on income rather than other aspects of class.)  At flagship universities, only 68% of lower-income students graduate in 6 years, compared with 83% of higher-income students.  Across state systems, the numbers are even worse (for both groups): 55% of lower-income students finish in 6 years, while 74% of higher-income students graduate in that time.

Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson identify two primary causes for this disparity.  The first, money, seems obvious.  Especially these days, as workers lose jobs amid the economic crisis, working-class students and their families are more vulnerable to tuition increases as well as other rising college costs, such as books, transportation, and housing.  As states defund higher education, many colleges have responded by raising tuition and other fees, and we shouldn’t be at all surprised that some working-class students drop out, at least for a while.  Working-class families tend to have less wealth to help them get through a tough economic period, so often students’ only option when faced with either lost family income or increased college costs is to drop out of school.

But the other reason offered in Crossing the Finish Line is more surprising:  the authors suggest that lower-income students often “undermatch” in their college choices.  That is, they tend to enroll in less-selective institutions than they could.  Students with family incomes in the lowest quartile and/or whose parents did not attend college are the most likely to choose a less-selective and the authors therefore surmise less demanding college than their test scores and high school grades suggest they could.  While this choice seems to puzzle the authors, it actually makes perfect sense to me.

Many working-class families have limited knowledge about the landscape of higher education, so they may not recognize the differences among types of institutions.  Working-class students may also choose less-selective schools because they are closer to home, less expensive, or offer aid packages that cover more of the cost of attending school.  For others, undermatching may reflect self-doubt about whether they will succeed in college.  Working-class students often have less confidence in their academic abilities than more well-off students have.

As someone who has taught at an open-enrollment university – exactly the kind of place that Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson would see as an “undermatch” for a bright working-class student – I have long believed that less prestigious campuses with many working-class students serve those students well because we are likely to provide a friendlier atmosphere, better support, and stronger faculty commitment to teaching working-class students.  In some cases, such schools also provide more financial aid, and a scholarship at a lower-cost institution can go much further toward covering the cost of college.

Certainly, the experiences of working-class students on elite private or more-selective flagship campuses would support this notion.  As Bobby Allyn notes in an essay on his experience as a working-class student at American University, such elite settings can be alienating.  He advocates creating “spaces where like-minded students from comparable socioeconomic backgrounds can come together and foster a community,” exactly what the Working Class Student Union is doing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

So I was puzzled by the claim that undermatching could undermine students’ academic success.  One reason might be that academic challenge yields better performance.  A Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching study of student learning at community colleges advocates for asking more of our students rather than less.  Faculty who teach working-class students are often tempted to make their courses a little easier than they would at a more elite school.  After all, we know that many of our students come from high schools that didn’t offer strong college prep programs.  Many are also working long hours to pay for school, or commuting long distances to avoid the cost of campus housing.   We’re also concerned about the challenges that single parents face in juggling school, work, and family.  Because we want to help students succeed, we ask a little less.  This study suggests that we may be cheating them.

While feeling like an outsider creates emotional and social obstacles for working-class students, it might also work as an academic motivator.  Such students want to prove that they do belong among their more elite peers, so they may work harder just to “show them,” while on a more working-class campus, they fit in and may feel less of a need to demonstrate their full abilities.  Indeed, working-class schools may even encourage this, as strong networks of support services to help students get through college can communicate, inadvertently, that the goal is to get through, not to excel.  Because middle-class culture emphasizes individual success and competition, more elite campuses may, in contrast, create a stronger atmosphere of achievement.

Another key difference in the educational experiences of working-class students who attend more selective schools and those who undermatch is geographical.  Attending a selective school is, in many cases, more likely to involve moving away from home.  Allyn’s experience is typical, as he went first from Pennsylvania to Ithaca, New York, and later to Washington, DC.  Why would leaving home help?  After all, going away to school usually means leaving behind a family support system.  On the other hand, that very support system can leave working-class students feeling torn between the competing demands of school, which is an essentially individual pursuit, and family, which reflects the greater commitment to the communal that is often part of working-class culture.  When students live near home, the pull of family commitments can often interfere with their school work.  As one of my students explained a few years ago, she had to miss classes for two weeks because her sister was having surgery and she had to look after her young nieces and nephews.  It may well be that families are less likely to make demands on working-class students, and students may be less likely to respond to family needs, if they’re living on a campus more than a few hours’ drive away.

While all of this may explain why working-class students are more likely to graduate if they attend a more selective college, it doesn’t solve the problem.  The real challenge posed by this study is to less selective, more working-class institutions:  how can we do a better job of helping students succeed?   Stay tuned.  I’ll take up that question next time.

Sherry Linkon

The Political Parabola, the Media, and the Direction of Working-Class Populism

Media pundits regularly describe American politics in terms of a spectrum, from far right to far left.  It’s time to recognize that this simplistic model has lost some of its explanatory value. It’s convenient, but it doesn’t adequately describe what is happening politically in the country.

Rather, I have been using the term political parabola. For those who are geometrically-impaired, a parabola looks like the cables on a suspension bridge or half of the McDonald’s golden arches. In the political parabola of American cultural politics, the right meets left politically. The ends of the so-called spectrum – right and left — are closer to each other than they are to the middle. This concept clarifies much current political discourse as well as the way working-class people are represented and are participating in the debates.

People on the political margins have a lot in common these days. For example, many Catholics are at once anti-war and anti-abortion. Here in Youngstown, our former Congressman and newly-released prisoner, James Traficant, is a cross between a West-Texas populist and a member of Posse Comitatas.  Like many liberal commentators, he deploys class and cultural resentments over the economy, government bailouts, foreign policy and a myriad of social issues, often expressed in highly emotional terms.

Meanwhile, on the right, the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly are increasing their populist rhetoric as they decry the impact of high unemployment and economic crisis on the working class.  O’Reilly goes in further in Who’s Looking Out for You? He begins by using economist Michael Zweig’s definition of the working class, according to which over 60% of US families are working class, and he goes on to claim that he, O’Reilly, is their best representative.

The result is a growing American style of populism that has a cross-class appeal and important political implications. As Frank Rich has suggested, “The recession-spawned anger that (Glenn) Beck has tapped into on the right could yet find a more mainstream outlet in populist revolt from the left and the center.”

Both Republicans and Democrats are aware of the growing politics of resentment on both ends of the parabola.  It’s hard to determine just how deep this discontent runs, just as it is uncertain how it could influence voting patterns.  At this point, both parties are trying to mobilize the discontent and influence current debates. But as many Democrats have faltered and caved to corporate interests on the health care debate and corporate bailouts, Republicans seem to be winning the battle for the populist hearts and minds. If nothing else, they’re making a lot more noise.  Just look at this summer’s tea parties and town hall meetings.

But where does the working class fit in this emerging populism?  While the protesters’ politics may seem conservative, their social class is not clear.  Some liberal commentators can’t seem to figure out whether to dismiss them as privileged elites (or would-be elites) fighting to protect their own tax breaks or as working-class dupes who don’t understand their economic interests.  Of course, no one asks about income, education, or occupation at these rallies, so it’s hard to know who’s really turning out.

Still, amid their high anxieties about Obama’s citizenship and socialist plots, they do have one thing right:  neither the political debate nor media reports are paying enough attention to how the economic crisis is affecting ordinary Americans.  A recent poll by the Pew Project on Excellence in Journalism indicates that economic news pays more attention to banking and finance, the auto crisis, and the stimulus package than to the impact of the economic down turn on housing, unemployment, and the lives of working Americans. To help improve reporting on the current economic crisis, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism has even initiated a new Nieman Watchdog project entitled “Reporting on the Collapse.”

Class confusion is nothing new in America, but given the current state of affairs, we need to keep in mind a few key points about working-class populism.  One, the working class is diverse culturally, politically, and geographically.  That means that the “working-class position” is always complex and contested.  Second, the recession has added large numbers to the working class, as people who once thought of themselves as comfortably middle-class struggle to recover from the loss of jobs, homes, and retirement accounts. Consequently, any analysis that views the working class as dupes or no longer relevant economically or electorally may be short-sighted. Today’s working class is probably both larger and better educated than at any point in American history. Third, as unemployment grows, working-class populists may push even conservatives to view government spending more positively. We’ve seen this recently with conservative politicians in Texas who initially refused to accept stimulus funds but are fighting to make get their share of public support.   Even conservatives know that hungry citizens can be dangerous.

John Russo

Bending the Cost Curve on Health Care

After a summer of “lying Muslim, socialist Hitler” vitriol, a recent Pew Research Center poll shows that two-thirds of Americans think President Obama is “a strong leader” who is “trustworthy” and is “someone who cares about people like me.”  Though the President does not score as high on general approval or for his “handling of health care reform” (and for good reason), his character numbers are a major asset as we finally get into the substance of what kind of health care we are going to have in this country.

On the substance of reform, the details are devilishly complex not only because several variations are still being debated in Congress, but also because the economics of health care are actually just a little less complicated than brain science.  Fortunately, as public debate moves toward real issues of substance, we are all likely to go rapidly up a learning curve on something that is as morally and economically important to us as individuals as it is for us as a nation.

For example, after this summer’s now thoroughly debunked charge that Obama was proposing “government death panels,” there should be more interest in a study that will be published this December in The American Journal of Public Health.  The study calculates that each year about 45,000 Americans die because they lack health insurance coverage.  As lead author Dr. Andrew Wilper explains:

The uninsured have a higher risk of death when compared to the privately  insured, even after taking into account socioeconomics, health behaviors and           baseline health. We doctors have many new ways to prevent deaths from     hypertension, diabetes and heart disease – but only if patients can get into our        offices and afford their medications.

45,000 of what the study calls “excess deaths” (meaning people died unnecessarily) is a small percentage of all U.S. deaths in a year, but think of it this way:  It’s five times the number of American deaths caused by the terrorist attack on 9-11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past eight years.  Or, it’s equivalent to four towns the size of Wasilla, Alaska.  Even in the best of systems, accidents happen, mistakes are made, but about 45,000 Americans die needlessly every year because we choose as a nation to make access to health care a lottery game.

Likewise, though eyes glaze over when the President talks about “bending the cost curve on health care,” recent news coverage of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s annual report on health care costs helps illustrate why that bending is so important.   The average annual cost for family coverage more than doubled from about $6,000 to $13,500 in the past ten years, and it’s projected to nearly double to $24,000 in the next ten.  Employers typically pay about 73 percent of the total cost – which will be about $17,500 by 2019, or an increase of $7,700 a year over what they are paying now.  If this were a tax increase, conservative Republicans would call it a Giant Job Killer that will undermine economic growth, but though it appears as an increase in labor costs on employer balance sheets, these increases have exactly the same effect as tax increases would – fewer jobs, slower economic growth, and in this case, fewer employers providing health insurance for their workers.  Likewise, those workers who still have jobs with health insurance in 2019 will see their premiums increase from $3,500 a year now to more than $6,000 a year then.  This is what will happen if nothing is done.

“Bending the cost curve” is not about government budgets.  It’s about reducing the rate of increase of both health insurance and health delivery costs.  By 2019, according to Kaiser, the average worker will be paying at least $500 a month for family coverage, versus about $300 now.  If Obamacare can “bend the cost curve,” it will not mean that average insurance costs will actually go down, but that they would increase to only, say, $400 a month – $100 a month more than now, but a savings of $100 a month from what will happen if nothing is done.

What’s more, under Obamacare tens of millions of families will have some part of their premiums paid by federal government tax credits – 100 percent for families earning less than $29,000 and smaller percentages for families earning as much as $88,000.  When you add it all up, most working-class families should eventually see a real increase in their disposable incomes.

These tax credit subsidies need to be paid for, however, and that’s why the debate on health reform may initiate a sensible discussion about increasing taxes.  As I’ve documented in my last three blogs, progressive think tanks are finally starting to do the math on how to raise taxes on the top 5 percent of taxpayers.   The leading progressive outfit on this topic, Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), recently did a Review and Comparison of Six Progressive Options to Finance Health Care Reform.  CTJ provides three “moderate” options, which together would produce about $70 billion a year, more than enough to pay for the health insurance tax credits and all other aspects of Obamacare.  The increased taxes would fall almost exclusively on the top 1 percent of taxpayers whose average annual income is $1.5 million, and it would cost those folks an average of $45,000 a piece.  The next 4 percent from the top, with average incomes of about $280,000, would see their taxes increase by about $700 a year.

If I made $1.5 million a year, I’d be glad to pay an extra $45,000 in taxes just to live in a country where nobody died because they lacked health insurance.  But I’d also probably be economically savvy enough to know that a substantial increase in working-class incomes is good for business and that the President is right when he claims that the future of our economy is riding on bending that cost curve.

Jack Metzgar

The Costs of Becoming a Journalist

A report by the British Cabinet Office released this summer offers stark evidence of the disappearance of the working class from the journalism profession, and the study offers some relevant observations for American media as well.

The report, Unleashing Aspirations, notes, among other things, that journalists born since 1970 predominantly come from middle class to upper middle class backgrounds.  And Journalism ranks third in the list of the most socially exclusive professions, just behind doctors and lawyers.

The study finds that:

Between the 1958 and the 1970 birth cohorts, the biggest decline in social mobility occurred in the professions of journalism and accountancy. For example, journalists and broadcasters born in 1958 typically grew up in families with an income of around 5.5% above that of the average family; but this rose to 42.4% for the generation of journalists and broadcasters born in 1970.

The National Union of Journalists told the panel compiling the report that a 2002 Journalism Training Forum poll showed that fewer than 10 per cent of new journalists came from a working-class background and only three per cent came from homes headed by semi-skilled or unskilled workers.

One of the many troubling findings of the report, and the one most readily applicable to the profession here in the US, is that a prerequisite for entrance into a career in journalism is at least one internship experience, and that many, if not most, are unpaid. A cursory glance at available internships here in the US reveals that of 50 intern opportunities listed on journalismjobs.com, only 15 offer pay. Of the 50 internships posted, another 15 offer no pay but college credit, which at many universities, ours included, means that doing an internship actually costs a student tuition money.  Here at YSU, students can earn six hours maximum for internships, but at many universities, 12 to 16 are allowed, paving the way for students to spend several thousand dollars (at least) to get an entire academic semester of work experience.  .

If the student can afford this luxury and the cost of living in the city in which he or she interns, s/he in theory gains the passkey to an entry-level position somewhere upon graduation. Of course, many of the most prestigious internships are located in the media hubs of New York and Washington D.C. where the costs of living are beyond the reach of a student from an average, let alone below average wage earning household.

Of the 15 internships listed that offer pay, the average salary is just under $250 per week for an average of 35 hours, before taxes. If a student is working to pay his or her tuition and rent and also, in many cases, supporting a family while going to school, even the paid internship is an impossibility.

This means, of course, that only students who can afford to work for free for several months are gaining the credentials to access their chosen profession.

The broader implications of this exclusion from the journalism profession are obvious and have been documented by ourselves and others—fewer opportunities for working- class students to enter the profession equals fewer journalists attuned to the complex issues facing the working class and fewer stories about the issues facing working-class people.

Of course, the best-case scenario to remedy this inequity would be if news organizations paid living wages to interns, but in the current media market, one in which many outlets are struggling to survive, this seems unlikely.

And, if the current enrollment trends in journalism programs continue, there will be ample supply of candidates ready to pay to work or work for no pay. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that despite the dismal outlook for jobs upon graduation, more and more students are choosing journalism majors, increasing the competition for scarce jobs and furthering the entrenchment of unpaid internships as a means to gain a leg up on the competition.

The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson even suggests that while the current practice is clearly exclusionary, “It’s not the responsibility or the interest of the businesses like magazines and non-profits who operate on slim budgets and narrow margins to design an internship that can accommodate even the least fortunate.” Rather Thompson argues that colleges should instead expand their acceptance of accredited internships or provide financing.

Some schools, like Dartmouth College, have done just that by providing financing for students to complete internships. The college has grants available for students to take on unpaid internships, and offers additional funds for financial aid recipients based on need.

But for working-class students at colleges and universities that lack the deep pockets of Dartmouth the choice still most often comes down to an unpaid internship that will drive them deeper into debt or a job that allows them to pay another year’s expenses– not much of a choice.

The consequences of this increasing social exclusivity of the profession are dire, and more complex than a matter of equal class representation within the ranks of professional journalists for the sake of equality or diversity.

If journalists increasingly come from a more privileged social class or segment of society, even the best of them will likely not question the master narratives that have victimized the working class for decades: maximum profit takes precedence over fair and equitable treatment, what’s good for business is always good for America, and so on.

The end result will be more stories that fail to question these fundamental assumptions, stories that inevitably reduce the worker to a trite anecdotal device, a narrative stepping stone to “really important” people and issues.

Alyssa Lenhoff and Tim Francisco

Lessons from the Health Care Debate

Now that Senate Finance Committee Chair and Blue Dog Democrat Max Baucus has introduced his overdue and incredibly inadequate version of health care reform legislation, all eyes are on the Obama administration and House and Senate leaders as they stuff the provisions of five different bills and hundreds of amendments into the Congressional sausage-making machine and attempt to grind out a palatable reform package.

Away from the spotlight, however, strategists aligned with both political parties are already engaged in an exercise that is even more important than fixing the nation’s crippled health care delivery system.  Democrats are busily attempting to figure out what went wrong and how they can make sure they don’t screw up like this again, while Republicans want to figure out how to make sure that it happens again, and again, and again, until we end up back in power?

The answers have far deeper implications than the provisions of the health care bill that will eventually reach the president’s desk.  The side that finds the right answers will control the policy and electoral battlefield for years to come.

Among those offering answers are William Galston, Stan Greenberg, and Ruy Teixeira, the influential editors of the web-based journal The Democratic Strategist. In their most recent issue, they and writer James Vega assert that the Democrats’ difficulties were not caused by the administration’s flawed strategic and legislative decisions related to health care reform.  Instead, they place the blame on the Obama team’s failure to create and organize around a clearly defined core message within one month of taking office.

Their prescription for curing what ails the Party?  They suggest that the President clearly define himself and his agenda, that the Democrats establish a highly motivated corps of volunteers dedicated to spreading the word about the message, and that the Party develop local activities, including selling or distributing coffee mugs, tire gauges, and soap emblazoned with the words “Yes we can,” that will eventually involve into “enduring” institutions.

My reaction: wrong diagnosis, wrong cure.  And that’s dangerous because Galston, Greenberg, and Teixeira are so influential that some Democratic leaders may actually attempt to implement their misguided strategy instead of focusing on fixing what’s really gone wrong—and what most threatens the Democratic grasp on the reins of power.

Let’s start with their contention that the president’s failure to define his overall message, rather than his flawed health care strategy, is to blame for the current debacle.  This ignores the fact that the American people were extremely familiar with and supportive of Mr. Obama’s overall philosophy and agenda immediately before and after he took office.  They knew health care reform was his signature initiative, they overwhelmingly agreed that the system needed to be fixed, and in poll after poll, including one recently conducted by the Center for Working-Class Studies, they name him as the person they trusted most to get the job done.

It wasn’t necessary to lay out the big picture—everyone got it, including the suddenly cooperative health care stakeholders and dispirited conservatives: reform was inevitable.  Not even Rush Limbaugh, who assumed virtual leadership of the GOP after the 2008 election, or the incredibly bizarre Glenn Beck could stop it.

Then the President made a strategic blunder. He turned responsibility for crafting the final plan over to Congressional Democrats.  The minute he did so the public’s confidence in and support for reform began to erode, especially among critically important independent voters.

That created the opportunity for conservatives to gain control of the debate.  As five separate Congressional committees dithered for months, anti-reform activists began spreading lies about the various proposals.  Suddenly we heard about government-run death panels that would cavalierly kill grandma, dangerous cuts in Medicare, and Canadian-style socialized medicine that would leave Americans dying in the streets as they waited for heart operations and chemotherapy.

As the falsehoods gained traction in the media, reform advocates grew increasingly frustrated.  Not because no Democratic activists were prepared to enter the fray.  To the contrary, the nearly ten million members of Organizing for America were eager to become involved.  But without a concrete reform plan to counter the lies being spread by Limbaugh, Beck, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannitty, and Sarah Palin, they found it hard to fight.  You can’t beat something—even a compendium of BS—with nothing.

And that’s all the Democrats had until the president addressed a joint session of Congress on September 9.  Reclaiming ownership of the issue, he used his impressive rhetorical skills to inspire supporters, engender trust among skeptics, and shame the liars.  We won’t know for months whether he acted in time.  But at least reform, which had entered a permanent vegetative state during August, is now showing spasmodic signs of life.

No matter the outcome, Democrats must learn some important lessons from the current battle.  The first is that Barack Obama was elected to lead and despite his apparent compulsion to seek consensus, he must do exactly that when the stakes are high.  Damn the Republicans and the Blue Dogs.  Take charge. Get the job done.

A number of difficult issues remain on the table, including reshaping the American economy, re-regulating Wall Street, and restoring workers’ rights.  The outcome of those battles is entirely dependent on whether the president will use his personal political capital to fight for what’s right.  If he does, progressives will win.  If not, they will almost certainly lose.

The second lesson is not to re-invent the organizational wheel.  Democrats weren’t out-organized on health care.  They were out-communicated.  The millions of Organize for America activists who check their e-mail everyday hoping to be called to action would have totally overwhelmed the conservative wing-nuts if only they’d been given the message they needed to do so.

Finally, Democrats don’t need to waste time, effort, money, and energy building a new organization or printing up a bunch of doo-dads emblazoned with “Yes, we can.”  Organize for America has already demonstrated that.  And they’re out there waiting for the opportunity to show that they can do it again.

Leo Jennings

Growing Food, Growing a Movement

Until recently, I’ve been largely ignoring the movement to change how we eat.  Too much of the movement focuses on upper-middle class denizens of big coastal cities, people sipping on soy lattes as they drive their Volvo stations wagons out to do a shift of sweat equity on a small community-supported farm and who pay twice what I’d be willing to spend for organically-raised free-range buffalo meat.  Of course, I sort of belong to that group.  I love to cook, I grow my own poblano peppers and Japanese eggplant, and I can be as much of a snob as Alice Waters when it comes to what I eat.  But I just couldn’t embrace a movement to improve the eating habits of wealthy white people, even though I’m one of them, because it mostly ignored the fact that thousands of people eat poorly or go hungry in this country every day because they either can’t afford good food or don’t have access to a decent grocery store, much less an organic farm.

But lately I’ve been hearing about a different version of the good food movement, a version that explicitly addresses the needs of poor and working-class people of color in urban communities.   And clearly I’m not alone: the September 21 issue of The Nation focuses on food, with a cover headline promising to tell us “how to grow democracy.” The food movement, it seems, has discovered the working class.

In the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with two men who are part of the working-class wing of the good food movement, men whose work goes far beyond feeding people.  They also foster cross-class coalitions in support of good wages, fighting crime, and improving the environment.  Their work reminds us that some of the most promising organizing in working-class communities these days is happening on street corners, in food pantries and shelters, at schools, in churches, and on empty lots transformed into community gardens.

Joel Berg is the executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.  When I interviewed him in July, he told me that more than 36 million Americans can’t afford to buy enough food, and about a third of them are children.  Food banks help, but he says the real problem is low wages.  Most of those who don’t have enough food live in families where at least one person works.  The problem is that too many working-class jobs won’t support a family.  His answer to hunger in America:  livable wages.  In All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?, he describes the problem, explains why so many people are going hungry, and challenges President Obama and other political leaders to eradicate hunger by ensuring that workers are paid enough to afford to feed themselves and their families.

Will Allen runs Growing Power, Inc., a multifaceted urban agriculture project that not only raises thousands of pounds of good food in the heart of urban Milwaukee and Chicago every year but also provides good jobs for 35 full-time workers and summer jobs for hundreds of urban teenagers.  Allen “grows soil” through a massive composting program, but he also grows community by teaching young people from schools and juvenile justice centers how to plant and raise their own food.  His farm provides fresh organic vegetables, honey, and even meat and fish to low-income families.  Best of all, Growing Power has designed a sustainable non-profit organization, supporting most of its programs by selling the food and gardening supplies that it produces.  Urban agriculture expands on the model of community gardens, demonstrating that feeding the hungry can also provide jobs and contribute to local economies.  Allen has been spreading this model around the US and around the world.  He’s helped local groups start urban farms in places like Arkansas, Mississippi, Kenya, and the Ukraine.

Allen was in Youngstown earlier this month, in part to help a local organization, Grow Youngstown, develop its urban agriculture program.  Grow Youngstown is just one part of an emerging movement to stop complaining about how economic change has battered us and start finding creative ways to transform the local economy and the local landscape.  In Youngstown, as in other cities built around the steel and auto industries, neighborhoods are full of abandoned houses and empty lots.  When their laid-off owners could no longer make payments, the houses fell to decay, arson, and demolition.  While many have noted the ways that these vacant properties undermine community agency as well as property values – indeed, John Russo and I have made that argument ourselves –, organizations like Grow Youngstown view them as resources.  In a low-income neighborhood near my house, amidst too many trash-strewn empty lots, a small plot is being transformed.  For now, it’s mostly about growing soil – composting, bringing in worms, preparing the ground for planting – and planting a few trees and small gardens.  Neighbors, community organizations, and a summer day camp have all been involved.  And the organization will soon hire its first employees.

One more urban farm won’t, of course, revive our national economy, nor will it soon solve the problems of hunger among poor and working-class residents of the city, or even of this one neighborhood.  But livable wage campaigns and sustainable urban agriculture programs offer good models for how to improve the quality of life in low-income neighborhoods.  Together, they combine advocating for policy change with grassroots economic development, working from both sides of the economic system to foster concrete, realistic changes.  And that I can embrace.

Sherry Linkon

Stop Stealing from Workers

Late last year I sat in the office of an Ohio County Prosecutor and provided her and the County Sherriff thick notebooks documenting a systematic theft of workers’ wages by a local construction contractor by means of misclassification under Ohio Prevailing Wage Law and systematic underpayment. The theft was compounded by the fact that company officials signed false verifications of compliance with state prevailing wage laws under penalty of perjury.   To add insult to injury, the job on which the wage theft took place was being paid for with tax dollars from that same county.

I asked the Prosecutor what would happen if a local construction contractor had brought evidence that one of their workers, perhaps a bookkeeper, had fraudulently written herself tens of thousands of dollars in checks from funds belonging to the company and then lied about the theft on government mandated reports signed under penalty of perjury. The Prosecutor, Sherriff, and their assistants and deputies all assured me that the culprit would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

I smiled, certain that  these law enforcement officials, ethical office holders, and civil servants would be as anxious to arrest and prosecute the owners of the construction company for stealing wages from their employees and lying about it under penalty of perjury as they would be to prosecute that bookkeeper.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

They flatly refused to treat the wage theft as a criminal offense.  Instead, the company’s conduct was treated as a “mistake,” blamed on failure to understand the law.

Enforcement was left to the Ohio Department of Commerce, which could only require the company to pay back wages.  While more than $40,000 was ordered to be paid to the 9 employees and a 100 percent civil penalty assessed, the company owners were spared the life changing consequences of a criminal prosecution.

My experience was put into disturbing context by Kim Bobo’s new book, Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid—and What We Can Do about It (New York: The New Press, 2009) .  Bobo documents a wage theft crime wave across the United States. The victims range from illegal immigrants who fear deportation if they report violations to skilled construction workers who are forced to kick back parts of their paycheck on government projects, and includes childcare and home healthcare workers, sales clerks, and many others.  Bobo makes a compelling case that wage theft is far more pervasive than most of us understand or would like to admit.

Bobo draws her analysis primarily from her experience in running Interfaith Worker Justice Center in Chicago and cases handled by other worker centers throughout the country, and  a recent study of over 4000 low wage workers dramatically verified Bobo’s conclusions.  The study, “Broken Laws: Unprotected Workers,” makes stunning discoveries of the rampant nature of wage theft in America. Here are a few of the conclusions:

• 26 % of respondents had been paid less than the minimum wage in the previous workweek.
• 25% of the respondents had worked more than 40 hours in the previous week but a  whopping 76% of them were not paid overtime.
• 70% of workers who arrived early or stayed late at their employer’s request were not paid for the extra time.
• 69 % of workers entitled to meal breaks didn’t get them.

Wages are stolen from tens if not hundreds of thousands of American workers every day.  If employers were stealing from customers in such a systematic way, law enforcement at all levels would be forming task forces and putting thousands in jail.

Why should theft of wages from American workers be different?  Bobo suggests that most instances of wage theft can be traced to old-fashioned greed.  Greed is sometimes dressed up with rational sounding names like “pressure from competitors in low wage countries” or “innovative” compensation schemes.  But at the end of the day employers steal from those who work for them in order to make more money.

Bobo correctly points out that wage theft is also driven by the greed of consumers who demand low prices.   That demand leads some companies to indirectly encourage wage theft.    Bobo quotes the Congressional Testimony of MIT Professor Thomas Kochan, regarding the poster child for wage theft in America: “Wal-Mart executives have established corporate policies that are ethical and appear to conform to legal requirements. However Wal-Mart has also established financial and business objectives that managers find difficult to achieve without circumventing those rules.”  This is a scenario not unique to Wal-Mart. Despite ethical, legal policies, many companies repeatedly steal from their employees in order to reduce labor costs.

But perhaps the biggest factor is the lack of consequences.  Wage thieves are only rarely caught, and those who are face almost no legal, financial, or societal consequences.  Often the worst penalty for a wage theft is being forced to pay workers what they should have been paid to begin with and then only for the period of time allowed under the statute of limitations (often as little as two years).   Weak enforcement of relatively weak laws is as much to blame for the widespread practice of wage theft as employer or consumer greed.

Wage Theft in America proposes a variety of potential solutions to the problem.  Bobo’s proposals range from creating more worker centers to dramatically beefing up the enforcement capacity of Federal and State Wage and Hour Enforcement Agencies to policies that increase the number of workers represented by labor unions.  While her proposals would work, much of what she suggests would require legislation and appropriations that are politically unattainable even with Democratic control of all three branches of the federal government. (See the recent collapse of card check provision of the Employee Free Choice Act, if you have any doubt about this).

However, some less controversial and inexpensive strategies can help.   Congress needs to simplify economic protection laws and make it easier for employees to report wage theft offenses.  In particular, workers need reliable protection against retaliation for reporting violations.  Workers currently risk of termination or other workplace punishment if they report wage theft.

But ending wage theft may not require new laws.  Instead, government agencies should simply enforce existing regulations.  It won’t take many well-publicized arrests to persuade employers to stop cheating workers.

Making that happen will require political pressure.  Activists, religious organizations, and labor unions need to reignite the kind of moral outrage that brought about our current labor laws almost a century ago.  Rooting discussions of wage theft in religion can help.  Bobo argues that religious teachings from the Old Testament to the Quran demand that workers receive their fair day’s pay.  Because of this, religious organizations can be fertile ground for generating moral outrage against those who exploit the least among us.

Labor Unions and political activists should educate elected prosecutors and sheriffs about wage theft and how it undermines local citizens and the community.  And they should pressure law enforcement officials to do their jobs.  Local business communities should also support such efforts, since cheating competitors have an unfair advantage over ethical businesses that follow the law.  And since Bobo’s book demonstrates that companies with labor unions are less likely to commit wage fraud than their competitors, union leaders should engage their counterparts across the bargaining table to join in efforts to encourage more serious enforcement.

Unions and their lawyers can devote resources to investigating and documenting wage theft, providing overburdened state and federal officials the evidence they need to bring cases.  Efforts by construction unions to promote “fair contracting” have forced non-union competitors to comply with prevailing wage laws. Organized labor should embrace these efforts as tools to strengthen unionized competitors in every industry and for organizing more companies in the future.  Such efforts also show management and potential members the added value that having a union can bring to a company and its workers.

Wage Theft in America frames the debate as about not just the value of labor unions in the workplace, but also the value of workers themselves.  Reframing wage and hour violations as crime, reclaiming the moral high ground, and refusing to tolerate wage theft not only discourages cheating of workers but also reminds companies that operate ethically, as most do, that wage theft cuts into their bottom lines.  Such changes in the public debate would certainly have changed the outcome of my efforts to prosecute the cheating contractor in Ohio.

Marc Dann is a lawyer in Cleveland who represents labor unions and workers seeking fair wages and contracting practices and has been a community affiliate of the Center for Working-Class Studies for four years .

Reinventing Journalism

In March, we wrote about the “deindustrialization” of journalism, the displacement of traditional journalists by the steady closures of newspapers as readers increasingly rely on free online news. . For those in former steel and auto towns like the Mahoning Valley, the story rings familiar: a once great industry displaces experienced workers in search of  cheaper labor and newer technology, while the workers who once fueled the industry are left scrambling for their next paycheck.

In her address to graduates of The Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Barbara Ehrenreich welcomed newcomers to a dying industry and assured them that they have plenty of company as practitioners of a weakened craft in a rapidly shifting economy:

How do you think it feels to be an autoworker right now? And I’ve spent time with plenty of laid-off paper mill workers, construction workers and miners. They’ve got skills; they’ve got experience. They just don’t have jobs.

Through our journalism projects with The Center for Working-Class Studies, we’ve spent time with professionals from some of the trade’s most storied institutions — The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, The Columbia Journalism Review, and others. We’ve listened to their anxieties, sparked, in part, by diminished job security but also reflecting their genuine concern that the decline of journalism will undermine the future of democracy, which functions best with a concerned, well-informed electorate.

Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Shultz, who often writes about the plight of working-class people, is worried that already under-represented members of society will become invisible if newspapers and other traditional media no longer have the resources to conduct important investigative and enterprise reporting. On the other hand, she suggests that as veteran professionals increasingly find themselves under the ever-present threat of unemployment, “most of us have a lot more in common these days with the people we cover.”As journalists are displaced, they may become better able to understand the struggles and perspectives of working-class people, whose stories have too often been ignored.

Schultz and others are exploring strategies for saving traditional journalism.  Media companies and journalists alike are searching for strategies that might protect not only their own existence, but the future of serious reporting. In a June 28 column, she explains that tighter copyright laws could allow traditional media outlets to own their content for a longer period of time before bloggers and others start posting it on their own sites and pulling readers and advertisers away from the organizations that produced the work in the first place.

Schultz and The Plain Dealer are not the only ones embracing the call for tougher copyright regulations. Cleveland Attorney David Marburger and many newspapers advocate these ramped-up regulations. And while it may be easy to dismiss such attempts as mere self-preservation by what Shultz wryly terms “dinosaurs wheezing toward extinction,” many of the practices of traditional journalism are worth protecting.

Subscribing to this view, Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland introduced legislation in March designed to help newspapers garner non-profit status, allowing them to stay afloat. Both proposals have ignited a firestorm of online chatter and robust debate.

Responding to Shultz’s column, Clint Hendler writes in the Columbia Journalism Review that the proposed copyright tightening is “unworkable, illogical, and unnecessarily legalistic,” and John Temple, the former editor, president and publisher of the late Rocky Mountain News, criticizes Schultz for failing to make a compelling case for how tightening copyright laws will help save newspapers.

And yet he also says the closing of The Rocky Mountain News has had a pronounced negative effect on the community and state it served.  “The watchdog role of the media is being diminished,” Temple says. “There are stories that are never going to be told.” According to Temple, the closing of The Rocky Mountain News is a dramatic reminder about the importance of fostering meaningful innovation that might help the media.

On the other hand, bloggers and citizen journalists might actually help to revitalize traditional media, for if Shultz is correct and traditional journalists begin to feel more empathy with the legions of displaced workers, they might produce more of what we call working-class journalism.

All watchdog journalism is really working-class journalism.  Three principles might characterize this important work:

1.)    Stories rely on multiple sources and treat everyday people with the same weight as official sources;

2.)    Stories show how, ultimately, most political issues are “pocketbook” issues;

3.)    Stories empower everyday citizens by carefully scrutinizing the actions of elected officials and powerful individuals and entities and are produced by journalists brave enough to dispute factual errors and inconsistencies rather than allowing false information to be spouted in the name of “balanced” reporting.

Of course, these principles are not new.  But they were lost as the class and status of the profession shifted. Perhaps, equipped with a renewed mission, empathy, and purpose, journalists might embrace the technology of today, bring to it a sense of urgency and responsibility, and use it to tell important stories effectively.

For instance, many newspapers, including The New York Times, have launched community journalism projects. Some involve hyper-local reporting, while others experiment with new delivery mechanisms. Another new venture is trying to help traditional media organizations earn advertising revenue and understand new business models. Numerous foundations, including the Knight Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation, are funding experimentation in journalism and journalism education.

No single answer is likely to solve the problems currently plaguing the media. Nor will any one business model reverse years of financial declines.  Instead,the media must consider both new ideas and old practices.  These ideas require constructive debate and discussion.  The future of the media is simply too important.

Alyssa Lenhoff and Tim Francisco