EDITORIAL: There may be lots of jobs, but many of them don’t pay well
Last week, The New York Times published a story about tougher food stamp rules that have been instituted in West Virginia and how a considerable number of the Mountain State’s residents have been squeezed by the more stringent requirements.
It highlighted the predicament of Chastity and Paul Peyton, who live outside Huntington, W.Va. They both work at a Taco Bell restaurant, but they aren’t scheduled for enough hours to get by, so he tries to fill in the gaps with whatever odd jobs he can scrounge up. And yet they still frequently have to rely on a food pantry for their meals.
President Trump and his supporters love to crow about the state of the economy, particularly as the election draws closer. Compared to where it was 10 years ago, when we were in the midst of a slow recovery from the Great Recession, it’s doing very well. You’d have to reach back to the late 1960s to find unemployment rates that consistently hover below 4%. The stock market is humming along and home values are going up. What’s not to like?
Well, several things. Health care costs keep escalating, along with the cost of child care, a college education and other crucial items that can squeeze a household budget. The economy’s prosperity has not been equally shared: Wages have not budged or have declined for middle- and lower-income earners, but have rocketed skyward for the wealthiest among us.
The imbalance in the economy was brought home by a recently published analysis by the Brookings Institution. It found that 53 million American workers – a full 44% – earn only about $18,000 a year. According to federal guidelines, the poverty level is $25,750 for a household of four. Granted, a portion of these workers are students, retirees looking to supplement their incomes or are members of financially secure households. But the lion’s share are in their prime working years, and more than half work full time. Their ranks include people who labor in the retail sector, work at child care centers or hospitals or serve food in restaurants.
“We need to think not only about workers, but about the work they are doing,” according to Martha Ross and Nicole Bateman, two Brookings analysts. “What kinds of jobs are we generating, do they pay enough to live on, and to whom are they available?”
They continued, “Even with sunny job statistics, the nation’s economy is simply not working well for tens of millions of people.”
Brookings argues that this state of affairs can improve through, among other things, tax credits, a higher federal minimum wage and high-quality child care that is affordable.
To realize a fairer and more equitable economy, we need leaders who understand the predicament that millions of their fellow citizens are in and who are genuinely interested in arriving at solutions, not just engaging in hollow boasts about how we have never had it so good. Because, in the end, a lot of us aren’t doing so well, and that fact shouldn’t be ignored.