Fallacies about jobs and poverty
A selection of points that are useful in
addressing some common media fallacies concerning work, welfare,
poverty addressing both the US and UK:
UK Since 1970, national income (GDP)
has doubled, but the low-paid are worse off in real terms.
In 1970 the bottom 10% of workers earned 67.3% of median earnings
equivalent in today's terms to a minimum wage of £6.55
per hour, or £262 a week, compared to the pathetic £164
of the current minimum wage (at the time of writing).
US To put the wage gains of the late
1990s in perspective: they were not sufficient to bring low-wage
workers up to the amounts they were earning a quarter of a
century earlier, in 1973. In the first quarter of 2000, the
poorest 10 percent of workers were earning only 91 percent
of what they earned in the distant era of watergate and disco
music. Relatively well-off workers in the eighth decile, or
ten-percent sized slice, where earnings are about $20 an hour,
are making 106.6 percent of what they earned in 1973.
UK Tony Blair's promise of greater "opportunity"
and "social mobility" looks like a fallacy. Research*
comparing children born in 1958 and 1970 found a sharp drop
in social mobility between the two generations ie less
chance of movement up the social or wages scale.
US It takes on average nationwide, an
hourly wage of $8.89 to afford a one-bedroom apartment (National
Coalition for the Homeless, 1998) and the odds against
a typical welfare recipient landing a job at such a "living
wage" are about 97 to 1 (according to the Preamble
Center for Public Policy). Nearly 30 percent of the workforce
toils for $8 an hour or less (Washington-based Economic
Policy Institute, 1998).
UK The government-funded ESRC's Future
of Work Programme finds people working harder and longer,
with only 16% happy with the hours they work (half as many
as in 1992). 81% work long hours not because they enjoy it
but because they need the money. (ESRC stands for Economic
and Social Research Council).
US There has been a steady decline in
the number of affordable apartments nationwide. In 1991 there
were forty-seven affordable rental units available to every
one hundred low-income families, while by 1997 there were
only thirty-six such units for every one hundred families.
UK Study after study shows a sharp increase
in hours worked, causing rising stress and a matching sharp
decrease in work satisfaction in the last decade, reaching
right from professional and managerial down to low-paid jobs.
US If there seems to be general complacency
about the low-income housing crisis, this is partly because
it is in no way reflected in the official poverty rate, which
has remained at a soothingly low 13 percent or so. The reason
for the disconnect between the actual housing nightmare of
the poor and "poverty" as officially defined, is
simple: the official poverty level is still calculated by
the archaic method of taking the bare bones cost of food for
a family of a given size and multiplying this number by three.
Yet food is relatively inflation-proof, at least compared
with rent. In the early 1960s, when this method of calculating
poverty was devised, food accounted for 24 percent of the
average family budget and housing 29 percent. In 1999, food
took up only 16 percent of the family budget, while housing
has soared to 37 percent. So the choice of food as the basis
for calculating family budgets seems fairly arbitrary today;
we might as well abolish poverty altogether, at least on paper,
by defining a subsistence budget as some multiple of average
expenditures on comic books or dental floss.
UK There are more working poor than
there are unemployed.
US Federal Reserve chief, Alan Greenspan,
informed congress in July 2000 that the forecast seemed largely
trouble-free. He went so far as to suggest that the economic
laws linking low employment to wage increases may no longer
be operative, which is a little like saying that the law of
supply and demand has been repealed. Some economists argue
that the apparent paradox rests on an illusion: there is no
real "labor shortage", only a shortage of people
willing to work at the wages currently being offered. You
might as well talk about a "lexus shortage"
which there is, in a sense, for anyone unwilling to pay $40,000
for a car.
UK 70% of the low-paid are women.
(UK) Hard Work, Polly Toynbee (Bloomsbury Publishing
(US) Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich (St Martins