Social Science Labor Assignment

THE WORKING CLASS MAJORITY America's Best Kept Secret

Second Edition

Michael Zweig

ILR PRESS AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

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LOOKING AT THE "UNDERCLASS"

The"angrywhite guy" is something of a cliche in American politics, a cartoon rep- resentation of the working class person as anyone from camouflaged militiaman to hard-hat Reagan Democrat to Tea Party activist. The angry white guy is mad at people on welfare, foreigners, the government. The angry white guy is mad at gay people and resents women and minorities who have improved their social standing in the past forty years. Like any good cartoon character, the angry white

guy is alternately scary, righteous, ludicrous. And, like any good cartoon character, he also reflects something real. Tens of

millions of white guys have plenty to be angry about (although some of them have been happily laughing all the way to the bank). Lower wages, fewer chances, less time for family, demeaning culture, alienating politics: it really is enough to get a person angry, not just white men. The economic, social, cultural, and politi- cal suffering of the last quarter of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first knew no bounds of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, creed,

or geography. Anger needs a target. Hope needs a way out. ABthe conditions of working class

life have become harder, a crueler politics has come to prevail. Anger has been focused on the poor, and people on welfare in particular. In the years following the welfare reform legislation of 1996 that ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), replacing it with Temporary ABsistance for Needy Families (TANF), poor people and the very existence of poverty have largely faded from public discussions. Instead, anger has been directed at a new target: foreigners,

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"" in th U it d States or cheap foreign labor abroad, Andwhether jrnrrugrants m t e ru e , don government agencies at all levels.anger has been heape up b . hi h . ki

ith the prospect of punishing, am 109,or nn lngWhatever hope arose WI b these targets has proven raC Ise and empty . No one's life is better ecau fewer

If immigrants can't get medical treatment, and governmentpeople are on we rare, I h" services. are cut to get teeh f deral and state budgets closer to balance. ur c Iidren. donot havea bng. hter future because our anger has found _the. e target, pr vlded to us by opInIOn.. makers and political leaders. The opposite I true. In each case, the way the problem haSbeen defined and then" olved" h. , brought, m re dif- ficulty into the lives of working people, not less. Meanwhile, with e ch attack on the wrong target, capitalists have gained mor freedom, m re power, more resources, WIithin the United States and around the w rid. We need t gel a ense of how class politics has been operating without our being aware f it.

The Poor as Real People Even though poverty has largely disappeared from public ackn wlcdgment in recent years, poor people have not disappeared. Poverty rate fell in the trong economy of the late 1990s to 11.3 percent of the populati n in 2000, then rose and remained around 12.5 percent of the population after 200 I, until increa ing sharply to 14.3 percent by 2009 in the wake of the econ mic cri i .'

The passage of "welfare reform" generally ended the utility of the poor as a target of public anger and, by extension, a subject f r p lineal campaigns' Increasingly, immigrants have taken the place of the poor in thi r le. Before considering attitudes toward immigrants. though, it is imp rtant t re all that poverty remains an acute and growing problem in the United tate. Thi hould command our continuing attention, and we should remember that po t people can easily reappear as targets of anger in the midst of widespread economic hard- ship.

After years of neglect, for example, poor people and those who cater t them returned as villains in some explanations of the financial crisi of 2008. Deflect- ing responsibility from banks. insurance companies, and lax financial regula- tion, some instead blamed the spread of sub-prime loans, the housing bubble, and subsequent financial crisis on poor people who took mortgages they could not s~stam, and federal policy that encouraged home ownership for minority familIes.Whl~~this story had failed to gain widespread favor by 20J J, the fact that powerful political and media voices put it forward suggests that a renewed focUS on the poor as scapegoats may again become important. With high poverty rates 111 hard economic times and governments at all levels straining to limit spendjng

LOOKING AT THE "UNDERCLASS" 79

andavoid tax increases, we can expect more voices to call for limiting outlays for thepooras away to "save the middle class." Through the years, the poor have been blamed for most of the problems of

people in the United States. They have drained our pockets through welfare and blighted our cities by living in the center of them. They have corrupted the nation'smorals by having children out of wedlock, refusing to work, and oth- erwise setting a bad example. The drumbeat slogan "end welfare as we know it" SUlQIlIed up a twenty-five-year-long attack on the poor finally culminating in the 1996"we1&rereform" legis1ation passed by a Republican Congress and endorsed

byPresident Clinton. Wheo the law passed, the president's senior advisors on welfare policy, Mary

jo Baneand David Bllwood, resigned in protest. Welfare reform, perhaps more than any other policy initiative of the I990s, came to symbolize the scapegoating

ofthe weak and defenseless for political gain. 'JWo central facts should guide our understanding of the welfare debate and

policyregarding poor people. First, poverty is something that happens to the working class. Attacks on the poor are attacks on the working class. The poor are notsomemarginal "other"; the poor are typically working class people who don't make much money, either because they aren't working or because they make low wages. When we talk about poverty and welfare as part of the world of the poor, we aretalking about the conditions of life for a sizable part of the working class. Yetmuch of the discussion of poverty in the United States has been framed in terms of an "underclass," wrongly removing the poor from the mainstream of

American life and values. This leads to the second important fact of the welfare debate: that so much

of the attack on welfare was based on myth, stereotype, and distortion about the people receiving aid. The image of the "welfare queen" popularized by Presi- dentReagan was deeply misleading, but it served an important political purpose, makingit possible for many people to attack welfare without realizing that they

were attacking themselves. Toseehow this worked, and to help prevent such wrongheaded attacks in the

future,it pays to look backat the highlights of the welfare debate. When President Qinton declared it time to "end welfare as we know it;' he was talking about the "welfare queen," which by then was how most people had come to "know" wel- fare. Basedon the popular image to which the president appealed, it was time to cutoff people who refused to work and preferred to rip off the taxpayers for their televisionsand Cadillacs. It was time to end payments to irresponsible single mothers,often teenagers, who kept having children to get the benefits. Itwas time to stopfeeding personal irresponsibility and social dependency transmitted from generationto generation by mothers on the dole--transmitted to their children.

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e nd were unable to make it in the world of w rk, in thewho knew no other lire a .' unlikely event that they even wanted to work. It was lime to disown women who

Id t by without a man raising children out Ide of the tandardthoug h tthey cou ge, . . It .. hart to save the people on welfare by de tr ymg welfare·family. was time, IllS, . ., . . '

the politics of tough love as preached by the president joined with the p litics of meanness as practiced by the Republican majority in ongre. . . Thrown into this mix was a racial element. In media repre entau n and In

the public imagination, the "welfare queen" was usually black. The Ita k n wel- fare was one piece of a long-term Republican strategy that ha prom ted a sense of outrage among whites that they are being made chump by bla trying to get something for nothing at their expense. To many, "end welfare a we kn wit" meant an end to white people paying taxes to support lazy bla k pe pie.

The realities of the welfare population, and of the p or in general, were dra- matically different from the stereotypes. To start with, two-third ( .5 percent) of all poor people in the United States in 2009 were white (42.5 per em of the poor were non-Hispanic white), while three-quarter f II bla k pe pie were not poor.' Tens of millions of white people have also received benefit fr m "means- tested" government programs. in which the recipient must pr ve a J w inc me to

be eligible (for example, food stamps, Medicaid, and hou ing a i tan e). In 2005, non-Hispanic whites were approximately half of all th e who re eived TANF, food stamps, and Medicaid; non-Hispanic blacks were 30 perc nt f re ipients, and Hispanics 20 percent."

The stereotype that welfare recipients typically stayed on the d Ie for very long periods as part of a "culture of dependence" wa also wrong. Ye, me indi- viduals who receive aid lie around drinking beer and watching televi i n all day, paying no attention to their children, with no intention of ever w rking a long as the welfare check comes in. Every community has its example f path logical behavior, including the capitalists. But these people were not typical of welfare recipients, nor are they typical ofTANF recipients. Long-term spells on T Fare unusual. From 2001-2003, nearly 75 percent of TANF recipients collected pay- ments for less than a year, and 49.6 percent for four months Or Ie s. nJy one in SIX reciprenrs collected TANF payments for twenty months Or more.' . An easy way to understand the confusion about long-term welfare dependence involves an analogy to a hotel. Think of a hotel with a hundred rooms. The hotel serves some long-term tenants and Some short-term guests. For argument's sake, suppose seventy rooms are taken by tenants with long-term lease and thirty rooms are rented to people for an average stay of one week. On any given day, 70 percent of the people in the hotel will be long-term tenants. But if you look at t~e :ote1 ~ccupancy over the entire year, a very different picture emerges. Each a t ose thirty short-term rooms has been home to fifty-two people, each staying

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LOOKING AT THE "UNDERCLASS" 81

allflMlOyerthe yar, 1,560 people have stayed in the hotel for a short time and ~foralong time. In this example, what had been a 70 percent long-term ~on a givm day becomes a 4 percent long-term occupancy rate when

~om'ayar. IfWith the hotel example, some people received assistance for a long time,

SO"mrail."S short while. If you looked at the welfare population on a given day orin any other yar. most of the people were long-term recipients. But

lQoijns om' a longer period, the great majority of people who received welfare ~ltrorarelativelyshort time.' Welfare dependence stretching across gen- _ .. from mother to daughter was not common, either. One typical study fwDa that 20 percent of daughters of welfare-dependent mothers (defined as motbers being on welfare in each of the three consecutive years of the first phase of the study) were themselves on welfare for three years or more in their twenties, whieM percent of daughters of welfare-dependent mothers received no welfare atall in the final three-yar period of the study.' Contrary to popular myth, the SIIIlICstudy showed that when welfare dependence did stay with a family across gmera1iODS it _ much more likely to be in white families, not black.'

Myths about welfare involved money as well as people. At the time of the mid- nineties welfare debate, AFDC payments were less than 1 percent of the federal bu" not at all the budget-busting myth. Similarly, TANF payments in 2010 _$17.1 billion, less than one-half of 1 percent of federal budget outlays that year.'Evmcounting food stamps. now named the Supplemental Nutrition Assis- taneeProgram (SNAP) and much loved by farmers, who benefit directly from the program as much as poor people, the total was less than 2.3 percent of the bud- get." StaleSpay administrative costs for the food stamp program, but the federal govmunent picks up a major portion of those costs. In 2007, the year for which thelatest data are available, state administrative overhead came to $2.9 billion, or 0.2 percent of state expenditures. State TANF outlays were budgeted in 2007 at $17.6billion, just 1.1 percent of state government spending. The fiscal crisis did

not arise from caring for the poor. Nor did people on welfare and other poor people live high off the hog. Con-

siaerFrank and Carla Ricci, a family with one child living in St. Louis at the top po1erty level income in 2009, $17,285 for the year. The U.S. Department of Laborpublishes detailed information on the wayan average urban working fam- ilyspends its money." What would the Riccis have been able to buy if they spent theiriucome on goods and services in the same proportions as an average family, butin amounts scaled back across the board to get by on poverty wages? Frank audCarlacouldspendseventy-one cents per day per person on meat. They could spend$2.15 a day for all food and beverages per person. For each ~onth they wouldhave $311 for housing, not including utilities, appliances, furnishings- or

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Id tilOTIs. To~. spend more on any of these things, they would havetohouseho opera f make do with less elsewhere, less, for example, than $120 per year r hoes fOr the entire family.

And that's the good news. The Riccis' income equaled what the government II th " overty threshold." In 2009, nearly 44 percent of all poor per ns werecas ep Id"

in families with incomes less than half the poverty thresho . R=gnizing the harsh realities behind the official poverty mea ure, policy

analysts have come up with more realistic incomes required l pr vi~~e ,amities with a minimum acceptable standard of living. Using actual c t f r ba rc hous- ing, food, transportation, health care, and other nece itie (but ex luding uch extras as eating out or taking vacations), one such analy i ~ r 20 I0 ~ und lhat a family requires roughly three times the official top poverty thre h Id in me "to survive and meet its basic needs" in the United tares.'?

The decline in income support for the poor during the Reagan and linton years increased hardship from what had been a pretty di mal tarring point at the end of the 1970s. In 1977, the poverty budget provided a emily no more than "an even chance of. .. a diet meeting two-third fthe rec mmended dietary allowances of the National Research Council."!' It ha been getting w t e ever since. Despite the rhetoric of excessive living by the poor, hunger and malnutri- tion are widespread in the United States. In 1995, ab ut ~ ur million children under the age of twelve didn't get enough food. As many as half f all children in poverty ate significantly less than the federally recommended level f calories and nutrients needed for normal learning and thinking." At th arne time that President Reagan was imagining the welfare populati n a "welfare queen ,"his first administration famously tried to have ketchup declared a vegetable 0 that school lunch programs could be cut back.

During the period of mounting outcry over aid to the p r, from Reagan's election in 1980 to Clinton's 1996 reform, the cash value of the AfD payment was falling steadily, from $685 to $497 per month (in 2006 dollar ). In 2006, the average family TANF payment was $372. In Mississippi, the tate with the lowest payments, the maximum a family of three could collect per month was 170."

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that almost 15 percent of Amencans suffered from food insecurity within the past year. Almo t 5 percent of Amencan households experienced bouts of very low food ecurity, meaniJlg that someone In the household had to reduce their intake of food and had their normal eati~g.patterns disrupted because of lack of money or other resources. About 4.2 million households with children, or 10.6 percent of such households chddr~n, wer~"food insecure" at Some time during the year. Households usu- ally shield chIldren from disrupted eating patterns, but in 469,000 households chIldren were directly affected by food insecurity. The study found that the poor

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LOOKING AT THE "UNDERCLASS" 83

l'fi~ JIIOIe for than the prices paid by people who are not poor. And .theseproblems, 43 percent of households experiencing low food security di<I!1!4 participate in any of the three largest federal food and nutrition assis-

~programs.17 ~1009, 15.5 million young people lived in poverty, 20.9 percent of all

tholundereighteen years old. They made up 35 percent of those living below tM W'/i¢ial federa\ poverty level. Another 8 percent of the poor were 65 years or~ In other words, 43 percent of the poor were not working age while 57~ were working-age adults. Why didn't they work? Actually, many did. FortJ-- percent of those between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five living in ~ds earning less than the federal poverty level (26.2 million people) ~ in2009. Of those 10.7 million who did work, 2.6 million worked full-

limei

_It year-round."

When poor people do not work, it is often because they are ill, disabled, or to find work, conditions that afflict the poor more frequently than the

Doupoor.1n1990, nearly a quarter of all working-age poor people who were out of the labor force were sick or disabled (compared with 15 percent of the non- poor).Fortypereent of poor working-age people who were out of the labor force • home to take care of family (compared with 45 percent of the nonpoor who were out of the labor force)." For millions of poor adults, it is simply not

realistic to shout "Get a job!" Despite the leve\ of need among the poor, large numbers of them receive no

goyemmeotsupport of any kind. Fewer than half of poor people received any means-tested cash assistance at all in 1992. Only 51 percent received food stamps, and ooly 56 percent of poor households had one or more people covered by Medicaid." Even before welfare reform dramatically reduced the numbers of peoplt receiving government assistance, millions of eligible people were getting nothing, and the pattern continues. In 2005, only 40.4 percent of eligible families received TANFpayments, and 59.1 percent of eligible households participated in

the food stamp program. 21

ImmigrantsIn Place of the poor Inmany ways, immigrants have replaced the poor in the stories some people tell to explain the economic hardships so many Americans face. Again, facts don't seemto matter. We need to examine in some detail the realities that contradict theeasy assumptions that so often lead to popular hostility toward immigrants. Let'sconsider three common claims: that immigrants cost native-born Amen- canstheir jobs and drive down wages; that immigrants, especially those in the

food

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. d nents are a major drain on public finance; andcountry without proper ocut '.. . . . that immigrants are poor people with cnmmal mcl.matlOns. .

. .. al tiIVlity , "There's a real disconne t between emolionsConcerrung crrrrun ac ..

hen i to the border" says £1Paso, Texas, city coun IImemberand facts w en It comes k "V'.lOU t a lot of politicians

I

exploiting . ..

thl fear that the MeXI- .

Beto O'Rour e. ve go .' 04 •

cans are commg. Ove r to kill us".• Yet as reported in Time magazine, A rdlng. to h FBI the four large u.s. cities (with populations of at lea t 5 0,000) with the

t e , . . f I P I west violent crime rates-San Diego, Phoenix, and the Texa ciue aso o h ., band Austin-are all in border states. 'The border i afer 1"10\-\1' t an It ever cen,' u.s. Customs and Border Protection spokesman LI yd fa terling t Id the ci- atedPress [in june 2010]."" Looking at thecountrya a wh le, tudie by ihe jus. tice Department and the U.S. Comrni sian on Imrnigrau n Ref! rrn d ument lower crime rates among immigrants compared with narivc-b rn re idem .'J

If immigrants were a significant source of crim we w uld expe 1 to find that communities with the fastest growth in immigrant p pulati n would have faster-growing crime rates compared with other area. But th oppo ite i the case. University of Colorado sociologist Tim Wad w rth examined crime rates for murder and robbery in nearly 450 U.. urban area with p pulauon ver fifty thousand and found that "cities that experienced greater gr wth in immigrant or new immigrant populations between 1990 and 2000 tended 1 demon trate sharper decreases in homicide and robbery'?' omparing 2006 with 1999, the eighteen states with the highest immigration influx experien ed a 13.6 percent decline in crime, compared with a 7.1 percent decline in the re t of the c untry" If all you know is that a crime has been committed, and n thing else, y ur be t bet isthat a native-born U.S. citizen is the guilty party, n t an immigrant.

Hysteria about imnugranr crime rates blends into the claim that immigrants drain OUf communities of resources and strain our public Finan e .Again, ample evidence documents the opposite. Most immigrants, even tho e without paper, work in jobs where the employer deducts income and s ial security taxes. (Some immigrants working in the informal cash economy a day laborer pay no mcome or social security taxes, but the Same can be said f native-born worker in the cash economy.) Adding further to government revenues, aU immigrants pay the same state and local sales taxes as the native-born. Immigrants pay local property taxes, too, even when they rent, because landJord pass the co t of prop- erty taxes (and other costs of ownership) on to their tenants immigrant and natrve alike, in the rent they charge.26 '

On the expenditure side of public finances, immigrants without papers the foc~sof much public hostility, will never collect On their ocial Security co~tri- butlOns when they P .d f I

rOVI ease papers to secure work. Undocumented imrni~ grant workers contribute $85 billi d

. I IOn ollars every year into the ociaJ Security

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and Medicare trust funds, payments they and their children will never see as benefits.These payments are pure gains to the funds, making them more secure for native-born workers who rightly expect benefits upon retirement or dis-

ability." More generally, the claim is also false that immigrants unfairly drain public

resourceswith claims on welfare, food stamps, and other assistance to the poor. U.S.law requires, with almost no exceptions, that even immigrants with legal residencewait at least five years after entering the country before they are eligible to apply for food stamps, Section 8 housing, 551, and other income support pro- grams." Immigrants without documents are never eligible. States can impose further restrictions on Medicaid and TANF benefits. The only government expenditures immigrants can claim as a matter of right are emergency hospital medicaltreatment and public education for their school-age children. But these arepaid for through state and local taxes, which, as we have seen, immigrants pay togetherwith their native-born neighbors.

We often think of immigrants as being poor and working low-end jobs. It is true that immigrants tend to have disproportionately lower education levels and work in lower paid jobs than native-born workers. In 2000, 39 percent of immigrant men had less than a completed high school education, compared with 12percent of non-Hispanic white men, 27 percent of non-Hispanic black men, 10percent of non-Hispanic Asian men, and 31 percent of Hispanic men. Simi- lar disparities existed for women. But immigrant men also had higher rates of master's degree and PhD completion (11 percent) than native-born workers."

This distribution of educational background is reflected in the jobs immi- grants hold. In 2009, foreign-born people made up 18 percent of the workforce, 27.8of 155.6 million. Roughly eight million immigrants, less than 30 percent, were undocumented. (There were almost 12 million undocumented people in the U.S.,but many were children or others not in the labor force.) Immigrants were overrepresented in seven of fifteen major occupational categories tracked by the Department of Labor, mostly paying relatively low wages. Of all work- ers in farming, fishing, and forestry, for example, 69 percent were immigrants. Among cleaning and maintenance workers it was 44 percent. But, reflecting the high education levels of many immigrants, they were 24 percent of all science and

engineering employees in 2009.30 It is not clear what impact immigrants have on the employment and wages

of native-born workers. These questions have been the subject of an extensive scholarly and technical literature stretching more than twenty years in which thereis no consensus. Disagreements arise because of different methodologies based on different plausible assumptions. The limits of statistical methods are another source of disagreement because it is difficult to distinguish the specific

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. f i tion from the many other factors that affect em pi ymentmfluence 0 imnugra I

and wages in particular industries, occupations, and part of the country. New immigrants entering the labor market can tend to pu h wage do~n and

take jobs from existing workers with whom they directly compete. me evIdence suggests that low-wage workers who haven't completed high sch .01are parncu- lady vulnerable, although the effects seem to be qurte limited. While native-born workers, especially African American men, experience orne f the e effect I

most downward pressure on jobs and wages impacts earlier immigrant ,n t the native-born, since new immigrants typically enter into lab r market f< r empl y- ers where previous immigrants have found work."

A couple of ironies are worth noting in thi respect. Fir t, while negative effects on the lives of poorly educated African Ameri an men h uld be real social concern, the needs of these men are hardly the pri rity f anti-imrmgram activists. And the problems of wage and job compeLiti n are a tually m de w r e by tightening border controls and making movement in and ut f the nited States more difficult. This is because the competiti n f< r j b i m re inten when the economy is in recession. If it were easy for immigrant t om int the country when times are good, it would be easy for them t leave when econ mic opportunity shrinks and many want to return to their native pia es, laking it risky to enter the United States only increases the resident immigrant p puJation in bad economic times because immigrants, once in the country, will not want to risk the inability to return should they leave. lt is also true that immigration can push em pi yment and wage up f< r me

native-born workers. Immigrants contribute many hundred f billi n f d l- Iars in market demand each year for all sorts of pr ducts that are pr du ed in the United States, generating jobs. And if employing immigrant worker requires employing other workers in complementary jobs (like ar hitects, killed trade _ people, and construction managers whose jobs COOle aJong with laborer ), imrni- grant employment supports the employment of native-born as well.

The poverty rate among immigrants is somewhat higher than among the native-born, but the gap is much less than that between native-born black and white .pove.rty rates. Immigrant poverty is concentrated among the newly arrived. After rmrtugrann, are in the United States for at least five years, a they gain lan- guage skills and better knowledge of employment Opportunities, and as the less successful return to their native countries, their poverty Tate falls to about the same as that for the native-born. Consistent with research findings that immi- grants have a negligible . t .

rmpac on natIve-born wages, there is "little evidencefa an effect of immigration on ti th k ..» na ve poverty rough immigrant-native labor

n:a~ et comhPetltlO , Steven Raphael and Eugene Smolenskywrite in an Institute or esearc on Poverty report. 32

LOOKING AT THE "UNDERCLASS" 87

One area in which immigrant experience is dramatically different from the native-born is the extent of employer violations of wage, hour, and safety laws. Undocumented workers especially are regularly victimized by employers who pay no overtime premium as required by law, pay less than the legal mini- mumwage, or even pay no wages at all. Employers regularly deny these workers requiredsafety equipment. The widespread abuse of undocumented workers is a majorfocus of worker centers that mobilize immigrant workers and address their needs.Far from the stereotype of people entering the United States to mooch off the system, undocumented workers experience a well-documented life of illegal

abuseby their employers," Images of immigrants in the media and the popular imagination are as full

of inaccuraCies, myths, and racial biases as are images of the poor. These misper- ceptionspersist in part because the supposed presence of an "underclass" plays a particuiarrolein the culture that we turn to now. We will return to the immigrant story in chapter 7.

TheFunction of the "Underclass" If the poor are not, in reality, eating up vast resources, and if immigrants are not a financialdrain and moral threat to the country, why have immigrants and people on welfare been targets of such vicious attacks? Why have the myths dominated the debate, despite SO much evidence that shows the stereotypes are false? The answers to these questions tell us much about the way class works in America. Tosee how. let's look first at the claim that there is an "underclass" in the United States, and then at the relationship of the poor, immigrants, and the so-called

underc1ass to the working class. Since the term came into widespread use in the early 1980s, "underclass" has

been defined in different ways: the inner-city poor, the chronically unemployed, those involved with illegal drugs and prostitution, violent criminals, those on welfare,or the poor in general. But policy makers' vagueness hasn't stopped the concept of the underclass from playing an important part in American social discourse. In all its meanings, this concept serves the same function. lt defines a group of people as outside the mainstream of society. Once the group is on the outside, its members become an "other," different from the rest of us. The "oth- ers" can then serve important political and psychological functions. They can become a social lightning rod, grounding vast amounts of anger and fear. The idea of an underclass fits well with the idea that most Americans are in

the middle class. The underclass, as the name so well suggests, is at the bottom, below most of us. Unlike the rich, who are presented as role models whose lives

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ewe should seek Ctor ourse Iyes. the poor are to be shunned, feared, changed. W

don't drive. throug h theielf neig. hborhoods for fear of being robbed. We want Ihei

graspmg. han d s taken ou t 0four pockets. Calling the poor an underclass separates

them from society. III. a way that allows and even encourages everyone. . el I treat them in dehumanizing ways. Demonizing undocumented immigrants ha th

same etrect.U Th e actUal facts1, of their lives become irrelevant when the. poor• and.

immigrants take on a social and psychological role in the popular rrnaginau n. They stop being people and become symbols, freighted with the baggage f fear and loathing." Often the hostility we express toward the po r i di appr val we cann t

express toward ourselves or those with real power in ociety. If we have d ubts about the value of the work we do, we reject any noti n that we migh: be I king for a leisurely life and condemn the poor instead for being the lazy nes, When we cannot admit that we live in dysfunctional familie ,we ondemn the po r as dysfunctional instead. If middle class teenagers are having ex, il cann I be because sex is a normal thing for all teenagers to want t do; it mu t be be au of the wicked influence of the poor. If the values expre sed in the d g-eat-d g world of the capitalist marketplace undermine our sense of community and elf-worth, how much easier it is to see the source of moral decay in the p Of, nd e ape the need to confront the powerful. If we cannot find work, we find il easier 10

blame powerless immigrants than to imagine taking On an econ mic ystern thai throws tens of millions of people out of work. Even the story f the "g d immi- grant" is a challenge: the immigrant who, according to empl yers, fl n w rks more diligently than the native-born and takes the "dirty" job mo t native-born workers are unwilling to do, certainly at the low wages typically paid. We di place onto immigrants and the poor OUf Own weaknesses and those part of urselves we find most threatening and frightening.

Certainly lazy people exist, who take maximum advantage of the welfare y_ tern, cheating the taxpayers to lie around on the dole. Anyone living in a poor neighborhood has known a few personally, and resents them a much as others do. But the cheats are a tiny fraction of the poor and hardly characterize welfare recipients as a group.

Beside~, every section of society has its tax cheats and frauds, stretching every rule, playing every angle. In 1999, eight Medicare contractors paid $275 million in fines to the government after admitting to defrauding the health-care system they were supposed to administer. 35And then came the far more extensive Enron, WorldCom, and other scandals of the early years of the new century, followed by the frauds leading to the financial crisis in 2008 and th B . M d a

. , en er nre a orr. Compared With this level of fraud, the poor are again poor indeed. Even more InSIdIOUS, some people have the political power to write the rules On their own

r

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Poverty Happens to the Working Class Fortunately we have quite a lot of information about who the poor and people on welfare really are. Getting past the myths, we come to see that poverty mostly

behalf,aswe have seen in the financial crisis. Then their self-serving use of the government turns into something perfectly legal and bureaucratically appropri- ate,rather than the massive cheat it actually is. When they are shamed and punished through welfare reform, the poor serve

the important psychological function of the scapegoat. It doesn't matter if what we"know" about the poor and immigrants isn't true. Facts alone don't overcome myths.Saving money is not really the point of the attacks, anyway. Deeper sym-

bolicissues are in play. Conservatives aren't the only ones who have defined the poor as "other:' It is

ironic that awareness of poverty as a serious problem in the United States began withthe publication in 1962 of The Other America by socialist and Catholic activ- istMichael Harrington. The "other" in the title were the poor, then invisible in a country much taken with its power and affluence compared with the rest of the world and compared with the United States itself not twenty-five years earlier, when the Depression seemed endless. Harrington wrote of the poor with pas- sionate concern, not with disdain, and sought to include them in the broader society,not punish them. Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty followed within three years, a central part of the liberal agenda. But as different as the liberal and conservative agendas for the poor have been,

one thing unites them. Each looks at the poor from the outside. For members of the capitalist elite and often for the middle class professionals who write about socialquestions, the poor are literally other. The liberal approach to poor people involvesno small amount of mythologizing, too. "Blessed are the poor:' through whom we redeem our worth, after our success in the soul-destroying market system, by doing good on their behalf. Blessed are the poor, pure victims of the juggernaut that we ourselves have managed to negotiate successfully. Are we not then also blessed in our ability and desire to help the poor among us? "Liberal guilt" and patronizing attitudes can distance the poor as much as conservative

"meanness." So for conservative and liberal alike, the poor become objects for use in psy-

chosocial dramas of one sort or another. The beatification of the poor by liberals in the 1960s turned into the demonization of the poor by conservatives in the 199Os;the War on Poverty in the sixties and the war on the poor in the eighties

and nineties were two sides of the same coin.

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happens to the working ca.ISS Understanding this ba ic fact tell thu rnething . I t of the assault on welfare. The attack on e POOrisanabout the practtca erreca s . " u

attack on the working class, not some marginal oth~r. In 1995, near Iy 14 Percent of the U.S. population was countedI . a poor."

But most of the poor don't stay poor for long period . They cy e.1n and Out of poverty, depending on employment, family situation, change In earnings on the job. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the chance that apr per on would escape pover ty within a year was about 50 percent, and after a year UI. f pov- erty, a previous. ly poor person had about a 25 percent chance of falhng back among the poor." A 2009 Census Bureau study f und that over a f ur-year period (2003-2007) 31.6 percent of the populati n had at lea t ne pell of poverty lasting two or more months. Meanwhile, '·c~ron~c.p v.cuy WlJ; rela- tively uncommon, with 2.2 percent of the population living m p verty all 48 months of the period."" An earlier Harvard/MIT tudy, which f, Uowedthe population over a ten-year period, found that 40 percent experi n ed poverty in at least one year."

In other words, more than half the working class experien e p verry in a ten- year period." The poor are not some persistent lump at the ball rn of ociety; they are working people who have hit hard times.

The cycling of working people into and out of poverty i refle ted in the expe- rience of many welfare recipients. A large fraction of people who were on wel- fare for long periods of time in the seventies and eightie actually experienced many shorter spells of welfare interrupted by spells of w rk. As Mary 10 Bane and David Ellwood have explained, most were "people who have tried t leave welfare, often repeatedly, but who seem unable to maintain fujj independence. They obtain a job or find additional support elsewhere, but the impr vement is only temporary. Their child becomes ill or they miss a day of w rk, and they are back on welfare.?"

Poverty is not evenly distributed across the working clas ; it i relatively con- centrated among blacks and Hispanics, and among WOmen. In 2009, 14.3 percent of the U.S.population lived below the poverty line. Among white non-Hispanics. 9.4 percent were poor; among blacks, it was 25.8 percent; among Hispanics (of any race), 25.3 percent; and among women householders without a husband present, it was 29.9 percent. The poverty rate among single women in 2009 was 24 perce~t; it was 20 percent for single men.42 While it is certainly true that women, either living alone or as heads of households, endure a disproportionate share of poverty, men are no strangers to being down and out.

Sadly,the situation is even worse for children. In 2009, when just over 20 per- cent of children lived in poverty, among white non-Hispanic children 11.9 per- cent were poor; for black children it was 35.7 percent, and for Hispanics (of anY

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LOOKING AT THE "UNDERCLASS" 91

race)it was 33.1 percent." Half of all children living in female-headed house- holdswere living in poverty in 1996.

The fact that minorities are poor in greater numbers than their share of the total population contributes to the misconception that the face of poverty is blackor brown, not white. The continuing legacy and practice of racism in the UnitedStates helps explain the disproportional number of minority people who arepoor. But it is wrong to say that poverty itself is solely the result of racism. Racismcannot directly explain the poverty of the 18.5 million white Americans whomake up 43 percent of those who live below the federal poverty threshold."

Confusion on this point can lead to unfortunate political consequences. When JohnEdwards tried to make poverty the hallmark of his 2007-2008 campaign for theDemocratic Party nomination for president, he opened his campaign in the LowerNinth Ward of New Orleans, an all-black neighborhood that had been devastatedby Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Surrounding himself with dispossessed blackresidents, he declared his goal of ending "two Americas;' by which he meant

richand poor. In the southeastern Louisiana region severely damaged by Katrina, 30 percent

of working blacks had jobs paying less than $9 per hour when the hurricane struck, a poverty wage for a family of three. But 24 percent of working whites hadsuch jobs, too, and they outnumbered the black working poor in the region, 85,000to 65,000." Associating poverty with blacks, who endure it dispropor- tionately,while ignoring the larger numbers of white people living in poverty (often in the same area), develops a politics that ignores and therefore affronts manywhites.We fail to make the linkages that must be made across racial lines to mount a full campaign against poverty, linkages that class analysis brings forward and makes possible. At the same time, making those class connections endure requiresus to recognize and address the disproportionate suffering borne among

communities of color and women. Within the working class, racism and sexism operate to push minorities and

women into the lower-paying, more unstable jobs, and they experience longer spellsof unemployment. (The same kind of thing happens in the professional andmanagerial jobs of the middle class and in the capitalist class as well.) That's whythey experience poverty in greater numbers than they "should;' and why it can appear that the problem of poverty is really a problem of race and gender.

Affirmative action and other programs designed to reverse the operatIOn of discrimination are important tools to correct the imbalance of poverty across race andgender,but they do not address the problem of poverty as such. If we address the problem of poverty exclusively with tools that focus on rninorrttes, and do not look at it in the context of class, we ignore the bulk of the problem, and mistake the source of it as well. We tend to neglect the white poor and divide the

CHAPTER 492

. .' If "Ii get at poverty effectively requires improving the working class against rtse h 0 of the working cla s as a whole and. within conditions and mcreasmg t e power b h db II that, addressing racism and sexisexism so the advance can e are ya.

Wrongly Dividing the Poor from Workers It may seem surpnsmg,. . give. n the concerted attack on the p r in recent .years, that It. has not been th e poor 0......'110ngthe working cla wh have tak n the biggest hit to their standard of living. We saw in chapter 3 that belWee~ 1. an.d2009, the poorest 20 percen t of the Population saw a 19 per ent decline In their hare of society's income. But the core of the working cia .' the e o.nd 10':'e t 20.~er- cent, lost 23 percent of their share in the same period. De pile their r.l. tively greater losses, these people were not generally eligible ~ r pr gram •vaiiable to the poor. This helped fuel the resentment many w rker felt ab ut wei are nd government in general.

To treat the poor in isolation from the experience f the entire w rking cI is to obscure what has been going on. Two results follow. Fir t, by making the poor seem fundamentally different, poor people are more ea ily ubject t abu and disregard. And when the poor appear in the popu.lar irnaginati n not J workers but as minorities, racist attitudes are reinforced, ju t a raci t attitudes lend lO make the false claim credible in the first place.

Second, when we push the poor into a separate category out ide f"regular society," the problems of the poor are more easily explained by the upposed deficiencies of the poor themselves, rather than the working of iety and the economy. We come to believe that poverty is poor people's fault.

This all-too-human tendency to blame the victim i extremely p werful. For conservatives, it can justify hard-heartedness toward the par, t gether with calls for the poor to transform themselves, their attitude, their culture and val- ues, before they can expect to be treated with respect. For liberals, it can ju tify a charitable and paternalistic attitude, and policies designed to help the poor through education and training, and by teaching the poor proper work attitudes and behavior, all good things to do. Our society would be much worse off with- out the liberal impulse to help the poor. But for conservative and liberals alike, the lack of a class context for poverty leads to a variety of programs designed to ~hange. the poor, to make them more mainstream. In one way or another, the idea ISthat If only the poor could be like "us:' their problems would be solved. Then they could have jobs and everything would be fine.

As hopeful as this recipe appears, it is simplistic because the premise is largely wrong. The poor are workers. Even the bulk of the destitute and long-term

LOOKING AT THE "UNDERCLASS" 93

It ~it ,~;;l'~ 'f >,. :l," .,

unemployedof the inner city ghettos are workers whose jobs have disappeared fromthe cities around them, as sociologist William Julius Wilson has shown." Thesepotential workers will work if the jobs are there. Many commentators hadwritten off young black men in the inner cities as hopelessly lost, but in the unusuallystrong economy of 1999, with the national unemployment rate at a thirty_year low, these potential unemployed outcasts were drawn into regular jobs." The experience of urban black working families left without jobs when companiesfled to the suburbs parallels the experience of Appalachian coal min- ersin the 1950s and 19605, when the shift from coal to oil destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs and created hundreds of thousands of poor rural white workerssunk into long-term unemployment. It was the poverty of these white workersthat first drew the nation's attention when the War on Poverty began. At thebeginning of the twenty-first century, it remains true that poverty is dispro-

portionately rural rather than urban." The idea that the welfare poor are lazy leeches with terrible work habits misses

the actual possibilities and limitations of the lives of the working poor. People unfamiliar with the daily life imposed by poverty have a hard time understanding thelifecircumstances that often make the "culture of poverty" a reasonable set of hehaviors. Leaving welfare and Medicaid for a low-paying job with no medical benefits is hardly a rational economic choice. For anyone with children, it is an irresponsible choice. The chaos of personal life in crowded quarters (no place to study);no money for regular health care and a host of illnesses that come with poverty (days lost to long and unexpected waits in hospital emergency rooms): sick children and elders to take care of (hard to keep a regular work schedule): unreliable cars or long bus commutes to work or school (if public transporta- tion is even available)-these and other everyday life circumstances of the poor, includingthe working poor, are obstacles that no capitalist family and few middle

classfamilies have to confront. Yet those who condemn the poor for nonstandard behavior expect "main-

stream"behavior to arise from nonmainstream conditions. For example, in the late 199Os,it became fashionable to condemn poor and working class young penplewho did not graduate from college in a "standard" amount of time. They werecalled dropouts and quitters who should have been excluded from college in the first place, unworthy of access to public higher education and a possible

wayout of poverty. Sociologist Herbert Gans has well identified the problem:

Unlike the affiuent, the poor cannot mask their occasional inability or unwillingness to practice mainstream behavior, which is why the affluent imagine the poor have bad values. For example, while middle

94 CHAPTER 4

class I h become jobless generally have family connectionspeop e w 0 1

networ ks, and other resources to faU back on and u ually even remain

home owners, the working poor who lose their job often go on welfare, d me eventually become homeless, or how up in the treet crime

ansa . heir Iivistatistics. If the better-off use drugs, they d ID I el~ rvmg rOOms. And if the more fortunate fail repeatedly in their rnarnage , Ihey can still hope that the next one will succeed. Po r w men who have rarely met men with decent and secure jobs learn t expect fr m the tan that marriage is not in the cards for them, and g vernmenr data lIeclors frequently make sure that the illegitimacy f their children becomes public knowledge. Poor women who ur n m rriage are lIgmatized while their middle class peers become the luff of TV it m, n t evi- dence of moral failure."

The poor are ruined workers, pushed out f the ec n my or t it lower reaches. In the early history of capitalism, the poor in ur pe were mainly ruined peasants and small farmers pushed off the land int urban lum, in the initial process that created the working class. This proces is still g ing on a pital- ism extends more deeply into Mexico, China, India, Brazil, and ther d vel ping countries. There today, as in Britain and the United rates in earlier time I the newly created working class includes a very high percentage f women nd chil- dren. In past centuries, the hardships of early capitali m pu hed ur pean p or people to immigrate to the United States, where th y became pan of the lowest echelon of the working class. The immigrant story i repeated t d y a capital- ism penetrates further into the developing countrie of A ia and Latin America. But within advanced capitalist society, where traditional ociety ha already been destroyed, the home-grown poor also come from an ther ur e: the working class already in existence.

In the hard times working people face, they are often t Id t believe that their difficulties could be relieved if the poor led less cushy lives. Thi Can appeal to

the millions of working people just above the poverty line wh are nOI eligible for welfare, housing assistance, food stamps, Or Medicaid, yet suffer all kinds of difficulties because they too don't have enough money. The "angry white guy" lives in this milieu.

More recently, in the fiscal crises that hit local governments, tares, and the fed~ral government after 2009, new false targets were created to deflect the Irus- tratl~n and anger of ordinary people away from the corporate elites who had dommated the policy makin th I d th . .

g at e to e cnses. We Once again saw people WIth su~posed priVileges-teachers, firefighters, and other public sector workers- vilified for having what others do not. But in this case the anger settled on people

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LOOKING AT THE "'UNDERCLASS" 95

wilhpeusionS and medical coverage won through collective bargaining by public sector unions, while those benefits had been wiped out for millions of private sector .vorkers whose unions were weakened or destroyed. We will return in cItaplm 6 and 9 to WISCOnsin Governor Scott Walker and his 2011 attack on publicsectorunions that touched off such a furor.

GoiDg after false targets misses the real target. Poor jobs, poor education, poor prospects. weak unions, corporate elites demanding to make and keep more moneywbilestarving public services, private sector workers losing jobs and pen- sioDS:these tbings aren't caused by poor people or immigrants or public sector workai.They lie part and parcel of a social and economic system run for the

bene6l of the capitalist. EcollOmiC grievances belong at the boss's door. This is true on the shop floor

and it is true in the political system. But the ability to carry those grievances to !he capiIaIist requires the power of an organized and united working class, and a clear lllldentanding of the proper target. While many were aiming at the false targttofwelfaJ:erdOrm. the real one went unnoticed, and divisions among work- ersby race, gender. and relative economic standing were intensified. (jiving voice and power to the poor and immigrants requires giving voice and

power to the working class, bringing into focus its reality in a class-conflicted society, In c:bapters 6 through 9, we will investigate the prospects for an explicit working class politia inthe United States. But first it will be helpful to explore the values that underlie political action. In doing so, we will see that class can help us understandhow "family values" have been another false trail, and how thinking about class can help US define a different set of values that are more useful for the

lives and needs of working people.