War, the Working Class, and the Media

The holidays are traditionally a time for reflection — looking back at the year nearly passed and forward to the one about to begin.  I’ve been doing a lot reflecting as 2009 draws, mercifully, to a close and 2010 looms menacingly near. I’m sharing my pain because, as that sage philosopher Ellen Griswold says in the heartwarming seasonal epic Christmas Vacation, “It’s the holidays and we’re all in misery.”

For starters, I’d like each of you to watch the “In Excelsis Deo” episode from the first season of the West Wing.  In it Toby Ziegler arranges a full military funeral for a homeless veteran who dies of exposure while wearing a coat that he had donated to the Salvation Army. You have to watch the entire episode, not just the two minute clip on You Tube. When you do you will be uplifted.  You will be touched.  Tears will well in your eyes and pour down your cheeks.  You will sob audibly.

When you are done crying—and you will whether you are watching for the first or the 100^th time–you will be outraged by the sheer believability of the episode. Writer Aaron Sorkin didn’t have to make it up.  We all know there are homeless veterans living under bridges and in shelters in Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, L.A., and a hundred other cities large and small.

There’s no real reason why these men and women –many of whom come from working class families and served in the military either because they were unable to dodge the draft like Dick Cheney or because it was the best job they could find in post-industrial America — should have to live this way in the richest nation in the world.  But they do and they will and that’s wrong.  We should all be ashamed.

When your vision clears, take a moment and read two columns by Bob Herbert of the NY Times.  The first, “A Tragic Mistake,” begins thus:  “I hate war,” said Dwight Eisenhower, “as only a soldier who has lived it can, as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”  He also said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”

I guess we will never learn.

Mr. Herbert asserts that committing an additional 30,000 troops to the Afghan war was the “easier option” for President Obama and says, “It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan, to face up to the terrible toll the war is taking — on the troops themselves and in very insidious ways on the nation as a whole.”

He’s right, it would have taken real courage to stand up and say “no” to the military establishment and the likes of Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Cheney, and the other conservative compulsive liars who have hijacked patriotism and distorted its meaning.  In fact, it would have taken the same type of courage to refuse to commit more troops to a losing cause that it would take to refuse a Nobel Peace Prize that hadn’t been earned.  But as anyone who has been watching over the past year has seen, courage and conviction seem to be in short supply at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

In the second column on my suggested reading list, “A Fearful Price,” Mr. Herbert bluntly and accurately identifies why Mr. Obama did not have to fear public revulsion over his misguided decision to waste more human and financial capital on a conflict that history teaches cannot be won:

The reason it is so easy for the U.S. to declare wars, and to continue fighting year after year after year, is because so few Americans feel the actual pain of those wars. We’ve been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan longer than we fought in World Wars I and II combined. If voters had to choose right now between instituting a draft or exiting Afghanistan and Iraq, the troops would be out of those two countries in a heartbeat.

In that passage, he’s clearly placed his finger on something those of us who study and write about the working class have known for decades: as long as the people marching off to war are coming from working-class enclaves like Youngstown, East Chicago, Detroit,  Gary, and Compton rather than East Hampton, Beacon Hill, Georgetown, or Beverly Hills, the nation’s powerbrokers simply won’t give a damn.  They’ll just continue to invest in the stocks of defense-related industries because war is damn good for business.

Now that I’ve suggested a TV show to watch and two columns to read, I’ like to recommend a movie: Charlie Wilson’s War. This Academy Award-nominated film depicts how a bunch of nomadic goat herders and opium growers chased the Russian Army out of their mountainous, pre-historic country with the help of the CIA.  It also points out that these brave and brazen heroin producing shepherds have beat back everyone who has ever attempted to conquer their land—you can’t really call it a nation–from Alexander the Great, to Genghis Kahn, to the British Empire.

The country?  Well, it’s Afghanistan, of course.

Obviously, Generals McChrystal and Patreus, President Obama, and Secretaries Gates and Clinton missed this great flick when it was in town.  I’ve got an idea.  Let’s give it to them for Christmas.  It would make a great stocking stuffer.  Hell, we’ll even throw in some microwave popcorn.  They can dim the lights in the White House theatre and chuckle at the zany antics of the turban wearing Taliban who emerged from caves to blow the living daylights out of the Ruskies until those dirty commies turned tail and ran back to Moscow.

By the way, as the lights in the theatre come up they should consider this: the crazy guys from the Taliban are using the same Stinger missiles the U.S. gave them to blow up working-class kids from Minsk in the 80’s to blow up working-class kids from Cleveland today.

That’ll dampen the ho, ho, hos.

Leo Jennings

Jobs, Ideology, and Policy: Putting Workers First

During the 1980s recession, as steel mills closed and auto plants began downsizing around the country, neoconservative economists insisted that the jobs lost to deindustrialization would soon be replaced by new jobs.  In Youngstown then, we knew better.  And as we wrote seven years ago in Steeltown U.S.A., Youngstown’s story in the late 70s and early 80s has not only persisted here, where unemployment is among the highest in the state and the poverty rate hovers around 30%, but has become America’s story today.

Youngstown learned then how real economic shifts could be exacerbated by ideology: the idea that businesses and investments matter more than ordinary human beings and the notion that we should just get used to economic patterns that create long-term hardship for those with the least power and resources.  Youngstown learned more than 30 years ago how damaging such ideas can be.  Once again, the rest of America is learning that lesson today.

The gap between the Wall Street recovery and the continuing jobs recession was highlighted by Friday’s jobs summit.  Communities around the country understand that we are in another jobless recovery that leaves hundreds of thousands of American families vulnerable.  While markets have stabilized for the moment and investors are feeling more confident, the economy isn’t improving for most Americans.

So is the current situation just like the earlier recession? No. It is worse. As Peter Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich note in Sunday’s Washington Post, the current economic crisis reveals the glaring problems left behind by the welfare reform of the 1990s, a policy change that reflected the long-standing assumption that poverty is a “voluntary condition” and that every able-bodied adult should simply find a job – “even when there are obviously no jobs available.”  When we removed the safety net because of conservative and neoliberal worries about “fostering dependency,” we created the economic conditions that left 17.1 million Americans living in extreme poverty in 2008 – and no doubt even more today. As we learned last year, we’re willing to bail out corporations but not working people.

The current recession is also worse because it isn’t just a matter of jobs.  It’s a matter of ideology.  Blaming the victim and normalizing long-term economic struggle were part of the discourse at the jobs summit, during which Jan Hatzius, chief domestic economist at Goldman Sachs, acknowledged that unemployment will likely remain high for a long time.  She suggested that we may just have to get used to it.  Why?  Because those who have been unemployed for a long time are losing their skills and their work habits.  No doubt, long-term unemployment affects people, but the idea that unemployment will last a long time because workers won’t be prepared to return to work represents the most absurd, cruel version of blaming the victim.

On the other hand, Hatzius is not wrong that we’re in for long-term unemployment and underemployment– problems which are far worse than the official unemployment rate suggests. No doubt, business takes the cautious path during economic downturns, often by adding hours to workers’ schedules rather than by hiring additional workers. But as we learned in Youngstown, the reality is that those jobs may never come back as businesses, especially manufacturers, continue to disinvest in the United States.

At the same time, as we have argued before, we’re also witnessing long-term shifts in the nature of the jobs available.  Promises about a new “creative worker” economy or green jobs that will someday provide some former steelworkers and autoworkers with new versions of manufacturing jobs fall short when we remember the latest predictions of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:  that the job categories predicted to grow most over the next few decades involve primarily low-wage, low-education service positions.  Many of these jobs pay less than $21,000 a year.  That means that poverty is going to be a long-term problem for American workers.

What we need, in other words, is not a single jobs summit. We need long-range policy planning aimed at creating a better system of supports for the working poor and unemployed.  We need to recognize that as much as education matters, it won’t necessarily overcome long-term employment trends and growing income inequality.  We need economic policies that focus on the poor and working class and that treat them with respect, rather than blame.

Too often, economic theory has provided a distraction from the real struggles of real people.  Jan Hatzuis and her colleagues might do well to stop worrying about the work habits of the unemployed and start learning about what it’s like to lose a job after you spent years doing everything right, about the indignities associated with applying for government aid as you struggle to survive job loss, about how limitations of K-12 education, urban transportation, limited access to fair banking, overcrowded housing, persistent hunger, and lack of health care make finding a steady job that pays enough to support a family incredibly difficult.   A little moral education might help as well.

We need to stop thinking about the current crisis as a temporary recession, and we certainly have to stop talking about the economic crisis as part of an inevitable shift we can’t do anything about.  We have to recognize and act on the situation as what it is: a moral crisis.

The Obama administration must take the problem as a moral imperative, acknowledge that the private sector simply won’t solve the problem on its own, and like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, create a jobs-centered stimulus that is environmentally sound, improves the national infrastructure, and provides an economic foundation for working Americans and rebuilding the American economy.

The economy isn’t a game, with winners and losers who deserve what they get, because the players don’t occupy a fair playing field and the rules are biased.  Inequality has long been and is becoming more deeply engrained in the American system.  We cannot continue to view long-term high unemployment rates, minimal public supports for the poor, and a permanent and increasing gap between rich and poor as normal much less acceptable.  We can do better.  “Yes, we can.”  And we must.

John Russo and Sherry Linkon

Fixing the Foreclosure Problem

One of the sad legacies of the housing and mortgage securitization bubble and the subsequent collapse of the economy over the past two years is the virtual devastation of working-class neighborhoods throughout the United States.  Thousands of homes sit vacant and deteriorating after foreclosure or are listed for sale at a price half or less than their value just 18 months ago.

Foreclosures aren’t hitting just the working class, but The New York Times reports that workers in the manufacturing and distribution sectors were keeping up mortgage payments until they found themselves unemployed and unable to pay for their homes, complicating efforts to stem foreclosures.

Even as the Treasury Department appears poised today to announce efforts to force more banks to modify loans, increasing evidence suggests that the federal government’s efforts are floundering.

Rather than focusing their efforts on the complicated Homeowner Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), or on bailing out banks in the hope that they will loan more money to homeowners and small businesses, federal policymakers can accomplish more  for those facing foreclosure, not to mention their neighbors and American taxpayers, by making relatively modest changes to the business practices of the Federal Housing Administration and HUD.

The story of an Ohio worker and homeowner illustrates how the federal government is missing easy opportunities to play a meaningful role in reducing the impact of the foreclosure crisis and the recession on real people.

In 2007, Bob was employed by DHL as a driver earning over $20 per hour. He bought a modest house in a middle-class suburb of Cleveland for a fair market price of $90,000 to live in with his son.  When DHL shut down its U.S. operations in 2008, Bob, along with thousands of others nationally, was laid off.

Meanwhile, back on Bob’s street, for sale signs proliferated and one of six homes in his community is in foreclosure.  As a result, the market value of Bob’s home has dropped to less than half of what he paid for it.

Bob and his son were able to survive on his unemployment benefits but couldn’t pay the monthly mortgage.  Bob recently took a job with FedEx paying less than half of what he earned at DHL and less than his unemployment benefits, because he simply couldn’t stand “not working any more.”

His mortgage, which was insured by the FHA, is being foreclosed. With the costs of foreclosure and 18 months of late fees included, the lender claims to be owed $120,000 on a house optimistically worth $50,000.

Bob requested that his foreclosure case be sent to mediation, and he provided the lender with extensive documentation of his income and expenses and the current value of his home during the course of those negotiations. The loan servicer has refused to agree to a modification of the terms that makes any sense to Bob. They are completely unwilling to consider any modification that reduces the principal balance at all, let alone bring the figure anywhere close to the current value of the home.

Bob does not qualify for the H.A.M.P program, the centerpiece of the Obama Administration’s effort to assist homeowners in default and foreclosure, because his loan (like the loans of most people in foreclosure) is more than one year behind. That program actually pays cash to lenders and mortgage services who agree to modify loans.

During the course of the negotiations it became increasingly clear that the lender or loan servicers have no incentive to enter into any kind of meaningful modification.

Why?

Because after foreclosure, FHA stands ready to pay the lender 100 percent of its loss on the loan, including the cost of foreclosure. If the lender were to agree to modify the loan, it would be paid far less.

Here is the outrage. If the lender proceeds to foreclosure, Bob and his son will be thrown out of their home and the lender will be made whole at the cost to FHA — and ultimately the taxpayers — of $80,000 or more.

This scenario is repeating itself in mortgage foreclosure cases throughout the country, putting the solvency of the FHA at risk while throwing thousands of working people out of their homes. The New York Times recently reported that FHA itself might be in need of an infusion of cash.

If FHA were included in the negotiation and would agree to pay lenders some amount –say half of what they are likely to lose, $40,000 — to allow the principal to be reduced, Bob could refinance at competitive interest rates and stay in his home, the federal Ggvernment and ultimately the taxpayers would save $40,000, and the lender would have an interest-paying borrower (who can afford the lower payment) and earn profits from the interest.

Everybody wins under this scenario.

Another problem that could be fixed by a more realistic approach by HUD and the FHA was detailed in a recent Cleveland Plain Dealer Story about problems created by HUD’s failure to demolish or fix homes they own (mostly as a result of FHA insured foreclosures) in greater Cleveland.  Dilapidated houses drive down housing values for entire neighborhoods.  Making it tougher for guys like Bob to sell or refinance their homes and making community problems worse. Local communities are struggling to maintain housing stock in aging neighborhoods, and HUD’s failure as a homeowner has devastating effects on entire communities.

The Federal Government has a chance to raise the bar for responsible homeownership, yet instead they appear to be lowering it. HUD should be a model community citizen, collaborating with local housing officials on neighborhood wide efforts to improve home values.  The agency should hire local consultants or even contract with local governments and empower them to make quick and honest assessments of the likelihood of selling any particular piece of real estate with an eye toward the best community use for the property.  For houses that will not realistically sell in a reasonable timeframe, HUD should require that the houses be demolished within 30 days.

Increasing evidence suggests that the new programs being created by Congress and the Obama administration are not having a significant impact on the foreclosure problem. Only 1711 homeowners nationally had completed a modification by September 1, 2009 under the HAMP Program.

Bob’s story suggests that a better approach may be to find ways to make the existing machinery of the federal government’s mortgage programs work in the interests of homeowners and taxpayers.

Marc Dann

Marc Dann is a Cleveland lawyer who represents homeowners in foreclosure.

What Working-Class Universities Should Do

Sherry Linkon’s two recent blogs react to a new study that found working-class students (defined by parents’ income and education) are less likely to graduate from a “working-class college or university” than from elite, more selective schools (defined by selectivity).  As someone who took seven years at four different universities to get a bachelor’s degree and who subsequently spent three decades teaching undergraduate working adults at a “working-class university,” this probably doesn’t concern me as much as it should.  The causal weight Sherry gives to what she fears is our “low expectations” of working-class students and a “dumbing down” of the curriculum concerns me more.

Both the study and Sherry have good reasons for this concern, but my fear is that it plays into a larger dialogue that I’m convinced is mostly negative for both students and faculty at colleges and universities with large numbers of students from working-class families.

“Dumbing down” is an ugly phrase, but I’m pretty sure I do it if you compare my teaching to what goes on at elite universities.  For example, many of my students are poor (and slow) readers, so I assign shorter readings and spend more time than I should in breaking readings down into their parts for discussion and, indeed, in requiring students to pay a lot of attention to how the organization of a piece of writing affects its meaning.  This means I do not cover content they should be learning.  Likewise, far too many students can’t work percentages or do other arithmetic that are about equally important to dealing with academic facts and figures as they are in daily life. Teaching arithmetic is not something our (or, so I’m told, any university) math department is willing to do.  So in many of my classes, I take time away from other things to drill students on working percentages.

Likewise, I’m not as interested in “challenging” my students with “more demanding” material as I am in trying to engage and sustain their interest in whatever we’re studying and their commitment to improving their reading, writing, thinking, and communicating skills.  This is based on a pedagogy of taking students where they are and doing what I can to help them improve.  This – merely sustained interest and improvement — is surely a low expectation, but I’m convinced it serves most of my students well.

Sherry’s notion that creating “a stronger atmosphere of achievement” might better serve working-class students could work for the higher-achievers who may find our curriculum not challenging enough to keep them intellectually engaged.  But it could also turn away the vast majority of middling students who already often feel disrespected as well as disabled in college classrooms, while actively pushing out the most poorly prepared who are also the most difficult to teach.

Like most teachers, I suspect, I have always aimed at teaching the middle because it’s the largest group of students, while paying more individual attention to the most poorly prepared.  Though I’ve had unusual circumstances (teaching general education seminars to adults), I have never felt guilty about cheating the high-achievers in my classes.  For one thing, they’re more capable of learning on their own.  For another, they often take a leadership role in class, others look to them for help, and they generally elevate the level of discussion (and learning) regardless of what I do.  As a rule, I need them more than they need me.

For the great middle group, however, I think it is important to clearly understand that our task is different from that of the elite schools.  I reject the notion that “workforce preparation” is not “true education.”  The overwhelming majority of students in my classes are there because they want higher-paying, more secure, less dangerous and/or demeaning jobs.  To get and keep those they’re going to need to greatly improve a whole set of reading, writing, thinking and communicating skills that are characteristically “middle class” in our society, but which are of some universal value as well – even if often overestimated by us highly educated folks.

Raising expectations may be a good idea in many instances, but to foster a “stronger atmosphere of achievement” would be to heighten the already heavily middle-class cultural atmosphere of higher education as a whole.  Because of tenure and other protections for academic freedom (now eroding), university faculty and our middle-class professionalism have an unusual degree of autonomy from ruling-class and managerial oversight.  All universities, partly as a result, tend to be hyper-middle class in our ethos and culture – a culture that, as Sherry says, “emphasizes individual success and competition,” a more meritocratic place than most, and one that values individual achievement above all else.  Indeed, for a working-class student a university is where one is socialized into the values, the ways of thinking and behaving of “the educated middle class.”

Barbara Jensen, Annette Lareau, and others have argued that there is a distinctly different working-class culture, one that is much less achievement-oriented, more bonded to people and places, and one that often sees middle-class ways as lacking in “personal integrity and sincerity and [having] poor interpersonal relations,” as Michele Lamont has found.  If this is true, and I believe it is, then the college experience for working-class students is inevitably a clash of cultures in a way it can never be for middle-class students.  Heightening that clash could be good for some of our students, but it would be bad for more.  What’s more, it would be bad for most faculty, I think, because it would make it harder for us to value and learn from the good things in working-class culture.  It would make our classrooms more adversarial than they are now, and over time it would likely lead to the kind of middle-class self-righteousness I associate with wannabe second-tier universities.

For me, being a “working-class university” is an aspiration.  You shouldn’t get that designation simply by having a large proportion of first-generation college students or by having more faculty and administrators from working-class backgrounds, or even by providing a supportive environment for working-class students.  These are necessary but not sufficient conditions.  To earn that title, a working-class university must be a place where working-class and middle-class cultures meet to feed and water each other, a place where certain middle-class skills are effectively taught along with some manners and mores, but where students are not required to abandon the entirety of their culture (often including their existing network of family and friends) in order to get a better job.  A working-class university should also be one that, both in its classrooms and in its relation with the larger community, should be actively engaged in building solidarity with the two-thirds of American workers who do not now and never will have a bachelor’s degree.  Once that part of the working class has steadily improving standards of living, more secure jobs and incomes, there may be less need for workforce preparation and more room for “true education.”  Until that time, Youngstown State seems to many of us one the few places that is consciously living that aspiration.  My hunch is that creating “a stronger atmosphere of achievement” would undermine that.

Jack Metzgar

Education, Business, and Perpetuating the Class Hierarchy

In our last blog, we noted the increasing absence of working-class writers from the Journalism profession, due in part to the proliferation of the unpaid internship as the requisite for a career in the field. While the financial consequences of this requirement are obvious, the less visible and more complex results of this practice may be far more wide reaching. For example, Anya Kamenetz notes that the wholesale acceptance of the unpaid internship leads to “over-identification” with employers: “I make sacrifices, to work free, therefore I must love my work.” She cites a University of Washington study of a coping strategy of interns in communications industries that study authors Gina Neff and Giovanni Arata label “performative passion.” They suggest that this “becomes a justification for the lack of pay and need for sacrifice.”  As these findings show, journalists who literally buy into this system will be less likely to question the assumptions and structures that always privilege business and the employer over individual and social needs.

But this isn’t just an issue for Journalism.  The over-identification with the employer, or employers in general, has become a guiding principle for higher education, particularly at working-class institutions, and this contributes to the institutional missions and student attitudes that Sherry Linkon outlined in her last two blogs. At universities across the nation, internships are just one peg of a larger strategy to match college education to the needs of specific employment sectors. A brief look at Ohio’s Strategic Plan for Higher Education provides a clear example of the transformation of higher education into vocational training. In a section titled “Relationship With Business Community,” the document recommends measuring the success of higher education across the state by surveying business leaders to find out “whether business is satisfied with the product of higher education.” Such a survey, the report claims, “will be a powerful tool in helping institutions and the Board of Regents exercise this public trust.”

Aside from the alarming rhetoric of product and consumer, the plan is generally organized around a claim that has become a siren call to educators and politicians across the country—that colleges and universities are not graduating enough students in STEM fields to compete in the “21^st century” economy. In Ohio, the remedy for this deficit and the key to economic regeneration is, predictably, to emphasize and fund STEM programs and develop more internships in STEM fields, often at the expense of other fields—especially the liberal arts. Elsewhere, the Ohio plan calls for targeting resources toward programs that directly foster economic development (read STEM and business) and rewarding universities that align curriculum with the needs of employers.

And yet, it turns out that the long accepted truism that the US suffers from a shortage of graduates in science engineering and technology might not be so true. A recent study by Rutgers University finds that there are plenty of graduates in STEM fields, confirming an earlier study done by RAND in 2005 that found the shortage was more the product of “special interests” seeking a labor surplus than statistical reality. As Joe Smydo reports in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the Sloan Foundation, which focuses on STEM and economic issues, noted two years ago that the shortage cry was sounded by “’interest groups and their lobbyists,’ including employers who want to increase the labor pools and keep labor costs down; universities seeking an influx of grant money and graduate students; and others who see STEM advocacy as a way to attract funding.”

Most engaged in the debate agree the alarm over the lack of STEM talent seems to be cyclical, sparked decades ago by Sputnik, and more recently by the rise of India and China. Such events spur the fear that the US will be left behind in the tech race, and politicians are quick to throw money and resources at the educational “problem” in an effort to produce more and more tech workers.

Rather than improving conditions and fostering growth in the workplace, this approach increases the number of available applicants. Indeed, Harold Salzman and B. Lindsey Howell, the authors of the Rutgers study, suggest that the glut in STEM graduates has resulted in stagnant wages in science and technology fields.  Because of this, newly credentialed grads are taking their skills elsewhere—specifically to more lucrative careers in finance, management, and consulting.

The problem is not specific to STEM disciplines; rather the example shows the dangers of university missions that focus too narrowly on the vocational mission and creating job specific educational “products.”  Of course, this is exactly what’s happening in Journalism.  When colleges and universities are too willing to tailor curriculum to the market, or even the technology, we risk setting in place long-term educational policy based on transient factors.

At our university, and others like it, we proudly roll out degree problems as quickly as possible based on predictions of shortages, too often without carefully examining the validity of these claims or, worse, the broader implications for degree seeking students.

For while higher education is a means to a better job, we should be careful not to make our emphasis on degrees too narrowly focused.  Trends and technologies change, and a meaningful education should equip students to understand the bigger picture and adapt to new situations and knowledge.

An overly vocational focus also perhaps inadvertently reinforces the class and status divides within higher education. For while students at the most prestigious schools are learning broad concepts and acquiring intellectual and ethical frameworks for processing complex, multiple, and shifting realities, too often students at lower “tier” institutions are being trained to perform tasks, with one career or vocation the sole goal of their education.

One group will likely become the innovators and the entrepreneurs, the other the workers.

Tim Francisco and Alyssa Lenhoff

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