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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
For the majority of Americans, hard times have long been a way of life. Some work multiple low-wage jobs, others face the squeeze of stagnant wages and rising costs of living. Sociologist Celine-Marie Pascale talked with people across Appalachia, at the Standing Rock and Wind River reservations, and in the bustling city of Oakland, California. Their voices offer a wide range of experiences that complicate dominant national narratives about economic struggles.
Yet Living on the Edge is about more than individual experiences. It's about a nation in a deep economic and moral crisis. It’s about the long-standing collusion between government and corporations that prioritizes profits over people, over the environment, and over the nation's well-being. It's about how racism, sexism, violence, and the pandemic shape daily experience in struggling communities. And, ultimately, it's a book about hope that lays out a vision for the future as honest as it is ambitious.
Most people in the book are not progressives; none are radicals. They're hard-working people who know from experience that the current system is unsustainable. Across the country people described the need for a living wage, accessible health care, immigration reform, and free education. Their voices are worth listening to.
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Contents
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication page
Acknowledgements
Preface
1 The Lay of the Land
2 The Struggling Class
3 A Hazardous Life: The High Price of Being Poor
4 Sacrifice Zones: The Places We Call Home
5 Ordinary Things That Can Only Happen Here
6 The Burdens of Prejudice: Class and Race
7 The Burdens Women Face
8 The Face of a Movement?
9 The Myths We Live By
10 And Then, the Pandemic…
11 The Future We Want
Appendix A: Methods, Methodology, and Theory
Appendix B: Table of Interviewees
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 The Lay of the Land
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“Dr. Pascale writes with clarity, purpose, and a studied, personal understanding of the human condition. ‘The Struggling Class’ will be a term new to many, but it is, indeed, the way of life for too many others. The book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand, in a way that is both supremely accessible and thoroughly researched, how economic, racial, class, caste, geographical, environmental, and other factors converge to create systemic inequalities designed to hold down a diverse stratum of people – from the Native residents on the Standing Rock Nation, where I grew up, to those doing their level best to make life work every day in places like Appalachia, Wind River, and Oakland. It skillfully illustrates key connective tissues that demonstrate how, despite outward differences, we share in the same struggle. In order to reinvent a democracy that works for everyone, we need radical, systemic change that begins to address the financialized, extractive colonial mentality and other, deeply embedded, cultural wrongs. Only in this way can we begin to envision a fairer, healthier future for the next generations.”
Chase Iron Eyes, Lakota People’s Law Project Co-Director and Lead Counsel
“Is there support for a living wage, free education, and other egalitarian commitments within the low-income population? Yes! In a trenchant analysis, Celine-Marie Pascale shows that egalitarian sensibilities are alive and well among low-income workers, not because they necessarily subscribe to or care about conventional political parties or platforms but because their everyday lives expose a deeply unfair system. A brilliant account of ‘hard-knocks egalitarianism.’”
David B. Grusky, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality, Stanford University
“This often poignant and moving book presents a vision of America and Americans that is often missing from dominant narratives. One walks away from this book with a better sense of the diversity of average, struggling Americans, as well as what all those people have in common – the struggle. As the author says, ‘this is more than a collection of individual troubles; it is the story of a nation in a deep economic and moral crisis.’”
Allison L. Hurst, Associate Professor of Sociology, Oregon State University
“A rare book that combines a humane accounting of lives lived in hardship, attentive to race and gender, with a robust and data-driven critique of the policies that caused their dysfunction – a true bottom-up primer on American poverty with real-world applications for upturning the myths that surround inequality.”
Elizabeth Catte, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia
“This is an impressive book, wide and deep, with diverse people around the country struggling to live. A yarn; no, yarns – economic and much more – always real, face-to-face with the author: what their lives are, sometimes doing themselves no favors, but more often the effects of laws and attitudes both far away and near, government and corporations, and the hate of people. Why it’s hard to end poverty. Living on the Edge reaches in every direction. Personal, powerful: once you pick it up, you won’t put it down.”
Peter Edelman, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law and Public Policy and Faculty Director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality, Georgetown Law Center
“This thorough and penetrating book offers a convincing argument about why so many families are struggling to make ends meet and who they are as fully rounded people. The writing and narration are superb. I would call this a page turner, which is not my usual experience in reading books on this topic.”
Susan Greenbaum, Emerita Professor of Anthropology, University of South Florida
Living on the Edge
When Hard Times Become a Way of Life
Celine-Marie Pascale
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Celine-Marie Pascale 2021
The right of Celine-Marie Pascale to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4823-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4824-8(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pascale, Celine-Marie, 1956- author.
Title: Living on the edge : when hard times become a way of life / Celine-Marie Pascale.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “A portrait of struggling America and how it has been left behind”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021011270 (print) | LCCN 2021011271 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509548231 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509548248 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509548255 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Working poor--United States. | Poverty--United States. | Equality--United States. | United States--Economic conditions--2009- | United States--Social conditions--1980-
Classification: LCC HD8072.5 .P38 2021 (print) | LCC HD8072.5 (ebook) | DDC 305.5/620973--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011270
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011271
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Dedication
… the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.
– Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy
Acknowledgments
Researching and writing Living on the Edge was both harder and more rewarding than I ever could have imagined. As many readers will recognize, in challenging times the smallest amount of support has enormous impact, and so it has been for me in the years of writing this book. My efforts have been sustained by the inspiring work of others, small acts of kindness from complete strangers, and the sustenance of colleagues, friends, and family.
My first thanks must go to all of the people in struggling communities who talked with me both casually and in formal interviews. In the interviews people willingly risked a great deal. They trusted me with the details of their lives – often personal details for which they have been shamed. They took such risks because they believed in the importance of the project and they trusted my ability to see the dignity in their struggles, to use their own words in ways they had intended, and to protect their privacy. I am indebted to each of them and I hope this book repays their trust a hundred times over.
The College of Arts & Sciences at American University provided both a research fund and a Mellon Grant to support my research; this was a significant help in getting the project off of the ground. I owe special thanks to my colleague Angie Luvara for inspired and inspiring conversations about Appalachia and the people who live there. Steven Jones helped me to kick-off the project by piloting an interview with me. Riham Amin offered insights as an initial reader on several chapters, as did Chris Guilfry and Allan S. Pollock. Flora Ingenhousz provided invaluable support for the early stages of the project. Throughout the initial framing of the book, Josephine Ross was an invaluable sounding board and a generous reader. I also want to acknowledge the generosity of my colleagues Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Ernesto Castañeda, and Rachel Louise Snyder for their helpful advice. Carlos Barillo, Marie Garcia, and Mike Mullen – thank you for all of the ways large and small that you have supported me and my family through this project and through far more.
Over the years Bandana Purkayastha has threaded through my life as a cherished colleague. Bandana and I first crossed paths at a professional sociology meeting more than twenty years ago. At her invitation I presented a preliminary paper based on research for this book at the Eastern Sociological Society Presidential Panel in 2019. It was there that Bandana introduced me to Jonathan Skerrett, an editor at Polity, with whom she was working. From the start, Jonathan’s confidence in this book was matched by his editorial acumen. It was an opportunity of a lifetime to work with Jonathan, his thoughtful suggestions and guidance have shaped every chapter. I owe great thanks to the entire Polity team, from the cover designer Rob Lock, to Rachel Moore for keeping the trains on time, to Tim Clark for spectacular editing, and to John Thompson for his work behind the scenes. Each member of the Polity team brought their areas of expertise to bear on the manuscript to make Living on the Edge: When Hard Times Become A Way of Life the best possible version of itself. I owe gratitude as well to the five external reviewers who offered anonymous feedback on the manuscript. Their feedback was equally thoughtful and clarifying.
During the years that I spent researching and writing Living on the Edge, my spouse, Mercedes Santos, carried the heaviest burdens of my travel and writing time. Still, she was the one who kept the wheels on the bus and an espresso at easy reach. Her willingness to read everything, regardless of how much sense it made, or how many times she had seen it, was an incredible act of generosity. I am grateful for our many years together and our unending journey of “beginner’s mind.” There are not enough words. Thank goodness.
Preface
In Oakland, California, twenty-something Angel Perez tells me: “I see people that work two, three jobs just to be able to pay their rent, and sometimes they might not be able to make ends meet to provide food for the family. That’s a thing that frustrates me. There’s other people that have so much money and so much wealth.”
The strain Angel describes is common reality for low-wage workers, many of whom work more than full-time and still can’t make ends meet. Most people expect to work hard; they expect they will have to stretch financially from time to time. Yet working full-time is often not enough to pay basic bills, to provide regular access to adequate food, to obtain decent housing, or to cover all of the expenses that come with having children. And this was the case even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, during a period of low unemployment and strong economic growth. How is this possible? Part of the answer is that four decades of increased productivity have had almost zero impact on the average pay of millions of Americans.1 The other part of the answer is the proliferation of low-wage work.
The painful truth is that across the United States millions of families work multiple jobs in an effort to make ends meet. They try to pick up extra hours or skip meals to patch through every month on an income that is inadequate and often unreliable. For these families, there are no savings to cover even ordinary expenses – car repairs, a dental problem, or an illness. Faced with economic instability and risk, they often live with poor health, no health insurance, insecure or inadequate housing, and debt. This is not the “other America” that Michael Harrington described in 1962. This is the reality across the United States today. In 2018, national polls showed between 65% and 80% of the US population was living paycheck to paycheck.2 Before the pandemic of 2020, 43% of households – 50.8 million – were unable to afford a basic monthly budget for housing, food, transportation, child care, health care and a monthly smartphone bill.3 There are 353 counties in the United States with poverty rates that have been above 20% for three consecutive decades.4 The shocking reality of this level of economic distress is that it has not happened by accident. It has not happened in just one part of the country. And it has not happened because of one or two administrations. It is the result of decades of collusion between business and government to maximize corporate profits at the expense of workers.
In 2020 the federal poverty line for a single individual was an annual income of $12,760. As we will see throughout the book, given the costs of living, an income of $12,760 does not mark the beginning of poverty for anyone. Much of what we learn about wealth and poverty – about class – is skewed. Not only does the government’s unrealistic definition of poverty undercount the numbers of people who are struggling, it also makes their struggle more dire since the federal poverty line is used to determine eligibility for all forms of public support. The economy comes into sharper focus if we account for economic self-sufficiency based on the cost of living, rather than relying on the federal poverty line. This framework helps to explain why so many people are unable to afford a $400 emergency, and why in any given month one-in-five adults are unable to pay their bills in full.5 The economy is said to be strong when the stock market is doing well, but 84% of the market’s value is held by the richest 10% of the population.6 The nation misses working families every which way it looks.
Just what does the reality of economic struggle look like in the lives of ordinary people? I took a year to travel the country and talk with people who live in economically distressed communities. I listened to people in Appalachia, from southeastern Ohio to the coal fields of Eastern Kentucky and the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee. I listened to people living on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation that spans North and South Dakota, and to people living on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. I listened to people living in the poor communities of the bustling city of Oakland, California. I listened to anyone who would talk with me. In all, I talked with over a hundred people and conducted in-depth, recorded interviews with twenty-seven.7 They are Native American, Black, Latinx, and White working women and men who were generous enough to share some very precious time with me.
They appear in Living on the Edge with names they created for themselves to protect their privacy. I have taken care to protect them as well by not identifying specific workplaces or the names of towns whose populations are quite small. As I followed the stories of people living in struggling communities, I researched the larger contexts around them. For example, when someone told me they had to take out a medical loan to pay for dental work, I researched the terms of the loans offered by lenders in their area. When someone told me they relied on a dollar store for groceries, I researched dollar stores.
The voices included here complicate dominant national narratives about inequality by making visible not only the lives of ordinary people but also the corporations who profit from their struggles. The book, then, isn’t just about particular people or places. It is about how business practices and government policies create, normalize, and entrench economic struggles for many in order to produce extreme wealth for a few. It is not just that wages are insufficient, housing is unaffordable, and health care often out of reach – it is that we have a system that cares more for wealth accumulation than for the well-being of its people, for the environment or even for the country itself. Living on the Edge looks at government policies and business practices that produce enormous profit for some people by keeping working people submerged in economic quicksand.8 Ultimately it is a book about power that has been leveraged by government and corporations at the expense of ordinary people.
With that said, the experiences of the individuals featured in this book are both central to and rooted in the places in which they live. For example, some things happen on and around Native American reservations that just don’t happen anywhere else. The same can be said of Appalachian communities and the poor neighborhoods of Oakland. But despite these differences, there are also important similarities. From the coal fields of Appalachia, to fracking fields in the Midwest, to lead-contaminated neighborhoods in Oakland, people live in life-threatening conditions of environmental degradation that often leave them without access to clean water. Substance abuse also troubles every community that I visited, and it always falls hardest in the lives and communities that have the least. In different ways, prejudice and violence also figure centrally, often surprisingly, across all narratives.
Across the country people in struggling communities are forced to make impossible choices from among a range of bad options. They might be forced to choose between taking on debt that they can’t afford or becoming unemployed. Or between borrowing thousands of dollars to have their teeth fixed or borrowing hundreds of dollars to have them pulled. They ask themselves, do I pay the electric bill or the phone bill? If I buy shoes for my child, can I also buy enough groceries? How do I manage meals among the family when the food is about to run out? A seemingly small trouble, like a broken taillight or a bad case of the flu, can trigger a cascade of events that results in the loss of one’s job and subsequently one’s housing. No one should have to expect a level of economic struggle like this.
Wage gaps are tethered to wealth gaps. As of this writing in 2020, the richest 1% of American households owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% of households combined; the entire bottom half of America now owns just 1.3 percent of the wealth.9 As the rich have gotten richer, the poor have been amassing debt.10 Some people are getting very wealthy precisely because others have been made to endure low wages, high housing costs, underfunded education, systemic sexism and racism, and devastating levels of environmental contamination. As we will see, even the criminal justice system has been leveraged to support corporate profits. And then the pandemic hit.11
If there was an initial sentiment that Covid-19 would affect everyone, it soon became clear that the pandemic both highlighted and exacerbated existing inequalities. While the nation’s billionaires increased their collective wealth by more than $1 trillion between the onset of the pandemic and the close of 2020, millions of people who had been living paycheck to paycheck suddenly faced unemployment.12 Even as the Walton family that owns Walmart made over $21 billion in the early months of the pandemic, the company continued to pay wages so low that even its full-time workers continued to qualify for food stamps.
Among those who were already living paycheck to paycheck before the pandemic, the ability to stay home and socially isolate has been an inaccessible form of privilege. Low-wage workers who have been declared “essential” are forced to work – often in unsafe conditions and without the benefit of health insurance or sick leave. This is a virus that impacts everyone, but, like all disasters, it doesn’t impact everyone equally. For example, we know that people with preexisting health conditions, especially those with respiratory problems, are particularly vulnerable. Poor communities carry the heaviest burdens of pollution, which contributes to these conditions. Living on the Edge is about more than individual troubles; it is the story of a nation in a deep economic and moral crisis. Responding to this crisis requires more than a sense of duty to help others; it requires a moral obligation to ensure a self-sufficient life is possible for all. To fight inequality is to fight to change the system.
Systemic economic inequality is not the result of individual choices. It is the inevitable consequence of a government overtaken by corporate interests. This is not new. Fortunately, history has shown us over and again that when millions of Americans come to realize just how badly the deck is stacked against them, they will mobilize. In 2017, the coal company Blackjewel abruptly declared bankruptcy and said it was unable to pay what it owed to 1,700 miners in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia. The company might have imagined it would get away with this because there are no longer any unionized coal mines. But in Kentucky, miners and their families occupied railroad tracks in Harlan County to stop trains loaded with $1.4 million worth of coal from leaving.13 For thirty-eight days, they lived, slept, and ate in a blockade across the train tracks. The coal miners prevailed and Blackjewel eventually agreed to pay $5.7 million in back wages. So much for being broke.
While dramatic stories like that of the Blackjewel miners tend to be the exception, workers demonstrate over and again that they are resilient and determined. Living on the Edge is also the story of people who have a vision of the future in which everyone earns a living wage, has access to health care, education, and affordable housing; a world in which everyone enjoys communities free from environmental degradation. These are not the expensive dreams of idealists, or the radical dreams of an un-American few. They are the aspirations of working people who know that the system we have in place is unsustainable for most of the US population.
Notes
1
See, for example, https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap.
2
Polls done by Nielsen and Harris for the American Payroll Association and CareerBuilder, respectively, were widely reported in news media. See, for example, http://press.careerbuilder.com/2017-08-24-Living-Paycheck-to-Paycheck-is-a-Way-of-Life-for-Majority-of-U-S-Workers-According-to-New-CareerBuilder-Survey.
3
FOTTRELL, Q. 2018. 50 Million American Households Can’t Even Afford Basic Living Expenses.
Market Watch
, June 9.
4
See https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rural-poverty-well-being.
5
LOWREY, A. 2020. The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America.
The Atlantic
, Feb 7; BOARD OF GOVERNORS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM. 2019. Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2018.
6
WILE, R. 2017. The Richest 10% of Americans Now Own 84% of All Stocks.
Money
, Dec 19
.
7
Details of the interview process and interviewees are in the appendices.
8
Scholars refer to this as economic precarity. In this book, I write about precarity as people describe it: a state of perpetual vulnerability, high risk, and bad choices. See Appendix A for theories of precarity.
9
REICH, R. B. 2020.
The System: Who Rigged it, How We Fix It
, New York, Alfred Knopf, p. 15.
10
HART-LANDSBERG, M. 2018. Class, Race, and US Wealth Inequality.
Reports from the Economic Front
. At https://economicfront.wordpress.com/2018/01/03/class-race-and-us-wealth-inequality.
11
In the US, the response to, and impact of, the pandemic has been politicized by systemic disinformation campaigns that continue to declare the Covid-19 virus a hoax and claim that mask mandates are an infringement on personal freedom.
12
AMERICANS FOR TAX FAIRNESS. 2020. Net Worth of Billionaires Has Soared by $1 Trillion – to the total of $4 Trillion – Since the Pandemic Began. At
https://americansfortaxfairness.org/issue/net-worth-u-s-billionaires-soared-1-trillion-total-4-trillion-since-pandemic-began
; see also COLLINS, C. 2020. Updates: Billionaire Wealth, U.S. Job Losses and Pandemic Profiteers. At
https://inequality.org/great-divide/updates-billionaire-pandemic
.
13
Harlan County earned the nickname “Bloody Harlan” after a series of labor strikes in the 1930s were met with violent attacks initiated by coal corporations and law enforcement agencies.
1The Lay of the Land
When I began the research for this book, I had expected to hear stories of hard choices. I did indeed hear plenty of these. Many people talked about having hard conversations over the dining-room table about which bills to pay at the end of the month. Across the country I met working people who are forced to make impossible choices from a range of bad options. For example, in many communities it is impossible to hold a job if you don’t own a car. Consequently, more than one person faced the choice of either taking out a second loan to cover the payments on their car loan, or losing their job.
I talked with people who have watched their communities succumb to drug addiction and with some who battle addiction themselves. And, I learned there is a surprising amount of money to be made off of the backs of people who struggle to pay their bills – by driving people into poverty and then keeping them trapped there. The lives of the people I talked with unfolded in ways that seem both ordinary and heroic. I hope their stories “true the wheel” of the nation’s understanding of poverty: how it is created, lived, and lied about. I want to say from the start that I write this book with skin in the game.
The early part of my life was spent playing in woods, climbing apple trees, and catching salamanders in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Nearly everything we ate, my mother either grew or made from scratch. I was twelve before I learned that applesauce came in a jar and potato chips were sold in bags. I carried sugar and margarine sandwiches with me to school for lunch and reveled in bologna sandwiches, when we could afford them. We lived among farms and fields that were being sold off to real estate developers. The area steadily grew into a very wealthy suburban community. This development and my father’s health crisis forced us to move to a run-down, rented house on the edge of a middle-class suburb. As a child playing in dying orchards and new construction sites, I had not recognized that we lived in a segregated community. A few years after moving to the suburb, I understood that our new community was intentionally segregated. This was first made apparent by responses at school to my favorite book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and by my family’s discussion of a rumored local cross burning. My response was a fierce commitment to anti-racism before I had any realistic idea of what that would entail. It turns out that racist perspectives seep into the ordinariness of a child’s life – through everything from nursery rhymes to classroom lessons. My commitment to anti-racism has been forged through a lifetime of unlearning.
In our new home six of us shared a bathroom, and “going to the library” was the code we used when planning to take a while in there. I believe I am the only member of my family to actually use a public library. At my new school I met kids whose parents were professionals and took vacations in Europe. Yet my family consistently formed relationships with white people like us, people who lived on the economic margins. For much of my life, just keeping food on the table was an issue for our family. I remember helping my mother steal bags of potatoes from the grocery store. I remember the numbness that would overwhelm me when I found the kitchen cabinets and refrigerator all empty. And I remember that more than once my mother sold her blood to blood banks in order to buy groceries for us. We had informal resources: a butcher who gave my mother baloney butts and soup bones, a relative in a convent who gave us underwear, and other people who passed along clothes. The funny thing is that we told the world, and firmly believed, that we were middle class. We weren’t trying to deceive ourselves or others. There simply wasn’t a language for our experience that encompassed both the struggle and the dignity.
Things did get better for us – in part because more resources came in and in part because eventually there were fewer mouths to feed. By the time I was in high school, we no longer worried about food. Yet none of us had ever learned to think much about the future. My family’s expectations for me were simple: graduate from high school, get married, and have babies. Many of my friends followed that path, some dropped out of high school to get married, or left high school for vocational training, while two became pregnant in senior year. My brothers were expected to graduate from high school (fingers crossed on this one) and get a job through the want ads in the local paper. If that plan failed, joining the military was the only option. The mantra so often attributed to Steve Jobs, “Do what you love; love what you do,” has never been an option for everyone. The ability to choose a career because you find it personally rewarding is itself a form of socio-economic privilege.
With the help of someone who was attending college, to whom I will be forever grateful, I hatched what I thought of as an escape plan. It required that I keep my high school grades up while working two part-time jobs. As a result, I am first in my family to go to college. But a college degree isn’t necessarily a ticket out of poverty. If a crisis can plunge folks into desperate conditions very quickly, getting out of poverty is much harder. Escaping poverty requires having almost nothing go wrong for about twenty years.1 As I soon learned, there is no end to the things that can go wrong in twenty years. After graduating from college, sometimes I had a “good job” that didn’t pay enough; sometimes I scraped by on temporary work. At various times in my adult life I’ve stood in food bank lines and received food stamps.2 I have shared meals with too many good people who will never escape poverty, many of whom survive on commodity foods provided by the USDA. These are also referred to as “canned food products” and I can say from experience that canned meat, cheese, and butter only vaguely resemble food.
Social safety nets, weak as they may be, help many families get to more stable times. Food stamps were once essential to my ability to simply eat twice a day. Today, I buy groceries without keeping a running tab in my head of the cost of each item, and I no longer break into a sweat in the checkout line. I have learned to make a monthly budget, opened a retirement account, and weathered several family medical crises without facing eviction. Against the prevailing odds, I became one of 4.5% of people in the United States who hold a doctorate degree. And rarer yet is that fact that I am a first-generation student who is also a full professor. However, I don’t think of my story as one of class mobility so much as a strategic escape – one that comes with tremendous advantages, but which exacts a very high cost. For me, the price of admission into the upper middle class has been alienation in almost limitless forms. I have changed how I speak, the clothes I wear, the food I eat, what I do with my free time – I can’t think of any aspect of my life that has been left untouched. Not one. I have rarely been in environments that valued class differences. As kids, we grew up knowing that we were judged as being fundamentally lacking or deficient by wealthier others. We internalized those judgments in different ways, and defended ourselves against them with our own judgments about “people who put on airs” or “who had no common sense.” Class migration brings intense pressure to assimilate into the very cultures that judge poorer people. Consequently, even modest assimilation can feel like a profound betrayal of friends and family. On the other side, no amount of assimilation ever seems to bring real belonging.
My personal experience shaped my research for this book – from the questions I asked, to my ability to be a credible partner in the interviews themselves. My training as a sociologist gave me other resources – an understanding of structural issues, an appreciation of the importance of contexts, and the willingness to approach complete strangers. I know from both experience and training that wealth and poverty are structural issues that cannot be explained by personal characteristics – not by ambition or laziness, not by intelligence or ineptitude, not by substance abuse or mental health. I certainly encountered people with unresolved personal issues while on the road, but no more than I encounter among successful professionals. Personal characteristics contribute to one’s quality of life, but they do not create systemic poverty in a nation.
The Struggling Class
It’s common to hear people use the term “working class” as if it is synonymous with low-wage, unskilled work. But it hasn’t always been that way. Well into the 1970s, the term “working class” designated a kind of labor that required various levels of skill and which was physically demanding – so much so that it often placed workers’ health and well-being at risk. The blue-collar workers who held those jobs earned a middle-income wage that paid for a mortgage, a family car, often a boat or recreational vehicle, and sometimes a vacation home. Those jobs have largely disappeared. Today’s workplace is primarily divided between two kinds of jobs: high-skill, high-wage jobs and low-skill, low-wage jobs.3 Today the term “working class” is most often used as a euphemism for poor people, many of whom work in service sector jobs.
In contrast to working-class jobs, service sector employment is largely characterized by low pay, part-time hours, no benefits and general instability.4 Some people use terms like “the poor” or “the working poor” to describe people who work full-time yet struggle financially. Honestly, I have never met working people who used these terms to describe themselves. My family wasn’t alone in calling ourselves middle class, when we couldn’t even count on having adequate food. But when I was on the road, I heard something different. When I asked people how they saw themselves in terms of class, some declined to say. They told me they just don’t think about class. Many others described themselves as belonging to “the struggling class.” Two things about this term are really important to me: First, this isn’t a label or an understanding imposed on people from the outside. This is how people talked about themselves. Second, the term “the struggling class” addresses economic hardship in ways that I consider to be profound; it encompasses the danger, the dignity and the hope that characterize the lives of people I met. They are not getting ahead, but they have not given up. They struggle. They weigh how long they can go without treating a bad tooth or if they can afford to pay for groceries if they buy shoes for their child. Despite working one or two jobs, they know that a single unexpected event could force them deeper into financial troubles from which they might never emerge. People in the struggling class live paycheck to paycheck, doing the very best they can for themselves, their children, and often their extended families. They live in the hope that one day they will find themselves on a solid economic footing – a hope they hold against all the odds.
The term “the struggling class” seems more accurate than anything I have ever heard used to describe a group of people working hard to keep their heads above water. Belonging to the struggling class isn’t a single kind of experience. There are individual differences, of course, but more importantly class experience varies by race, gender and region. These differences will become apparent by the kinds of experiences people do or don’t encounter. No one featured in this book was asked to speak for anyone but themselves. Yet it is my hope that their voices will help to change how the nation thinks about the struggling class. It is impossible to fully understand the experiences of the struggling class without understanding some of the concepts that are used to identify economic hardship. The concepts may seem a bit technical, but they will help to bring some insight into things that generally don’t make sense: a booming economy that leaves most families living paycheck to paycheck, families who can’t afford basic living expenses but don’t qualify as poor enough for assistance, and the way politicians talk about folks being left behind. The rest of this chapter lays out three key frameworks that are often used when people talk about the economy: work, housing, and poverty.
Framework 1: Work – Unemployment and Underemployment
When we are told good news about unemployment, it can be tempting to personalize poverty: If the economy is good, then there must be something wrong with the people who are struggling to make it. In 2018, unemployment in the US stood at 3.9%.5 Fifty years ago, this figure would have meant that people were employed in jobs that paid well and that fewer families struggled. In the twenty-first century, however, the unemployment rate means something quite different. The US economy now has both low unemployment and high poverty. Nearly half of US workers are underemployed – even though they have jobs, they struggle to make a living.6 Despite full-time work, indeed despite working two or three jobs, many people have trouble making ends meet each month. Since there is more to the unemployment rate than meets the eye, it’s worth taking a moment to wade into the numbers.
When the media and politicians report on unemployment they use what is known as the U-3 rate, developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS surveys 60,000 randomly selected households regarding the employment status of each person in the household who is sixteen or older and gathers information about the number of people drawing unemployment benefits. To be counted in the unemployment rate, not only do you have to be unemployed, you must have actively looked for work in the past four weeks. The survey does not count people who have accepted part-time work but are looking for full-time work, people who are despondent after losing a job and not looking for another one, or people who looked for work and then gave up.
The U-3 rate is used so often that many folks don’t know there is another government measure of unemployment known as the U-6 rate. The U-6 rate is based on surveys that identify workers who have been looking for work in the past year as well as those who are considered to be underemployed because they have a part-time job but would like to work full-time. Economists and many other experts consider the U-6 rate to be a more reliable measure of unemployment. It captures a lot of what the U-3 rate misses. As a result, in December 2018, while the media was using the U-3 rate to tout a record low unemployment figure of 3.9%, the U-6 rate was 7.6%.7
A devil’s advocate might argue that if we always use the U-3 rate then we’re comparing apples to apples every year and so downward trends are always good news. The reality is more complicated. Factory layoffs in one state might be balanced by an increase of service jobs in another state, which will make the unemployment rate look stable even as the workers in both states suffer. Job growth in poorly paid sectors of the economy and a general lack of wage growth in other sectors can devastate people’s daily lives without disturbing the unemployment numbers. Finally, all unemployment rates go down when unemployed people stop looking for work. Increased hopelessness can produce “good” economic figures. The focus on unemployment provides an overly simplistic picture that completely misses important issues, while the government’s narrow definition of underemployment distorts the reality of the economic landscape.
Unlike government officials, many sociologists and economists would call you underemployed if you work full-time but live at or below the poverty line; if you have multiple part-time jobs; or, if you need to work a full-time job and perhaps one or two other part-time jobs to make ends meet. For the most part, underemployed people have taken jobs that don’t utilize their skills, experience, or training, because they are desperate to just cover their bills. They might work as many as sixty hours per week at part-time jobs and completely miss opportunities for health insurance, sick time, vacation time, and retirement plans. In the twenty-first-century economy, a growing segment of the US population has been relegated to work that does not provide a basic level of self-sufficiency. They are suffering from structural changes in the economy that have created chronic underemployment.
Low-wage work is the primary driver of underemployment and economic struggle. For example, the largest employer in the United States today is Walmart: 2.3 million people work for Walmart. Although it primarily hires part-time workers, even its full-time workers need (and qualify for) federal assistance provided by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).8 Full-time Walmart employees earn between $20,738 and $21,632 – less than the $25,149 the Walton family earns in dividends in a single minute.9 The Walton family gets $4 million richer every hour. By 2018 they had topped the list of the world’s richest families with $191 billion.10
The fact that Walmart pays its full-time workers an annual wage that places them at or below the federal poverty line is not an accident or an oversight. It is a business plan. A study by Americans for Tax Fairness found that Walmart’s low wages across the country cost taxpayers $13.5 billion in food assistance provided by SNAP in 2013 alone.11 By 2015, the business practice of underpaying workers had enabled the Walton family to amass more wealth than 42% of American families combined.12 The second and third largest employers in the nation, Amazon and Kroger are also less than worker friendly. Amazon recently increased its warehouse wage to $15 an hour but still demands unsustainable levels of productivity from workers (more on this in a moment). Meanwhile many of the workers at Kroger, the third largest employer, are paid so little they also are forced to rely on SNAP.13 Whole Foods, a subsidiary of Amazon, announced in 2018 that it would cut medical benefits for its entire part-time workforce – the annual saving produced by this was about equal to what Jeff Bezos makes in two hours.14 These are only three examples from a much longer list. But the bad news actually gets worse.
It seems like common sense that if a company pays workers so badly that they need SNAP benefits, or demands levels of worker productivity that consistently result in injury, then cities and states would shun them. Who wants to bring jobs like that to town? Apparently, a lot of highly paid government officials. In 2019, Amazon donated more than $1 million to the campaigns of city council members it judged to be compliant with its agenda.15 Thanks to deals local governments have negotiated with corporations, taxpayers not only subsidize these companies by providing food assistance to underpaid workers, we also subsidize them when local governments agree to provide them with huge tax breaks, fee waivers, and cash grants. As cities compete against each other to bring in Amazon, successful bids start at $1 billion (Atlanta) and go as high as $7 billion (Newark).16 Given the company’s explicit requests for economic enticements, you might believe that Amazon was a great employer. The question should be great for whom? Politicians point to the number of new jobs the company creates and the increased tax revenue. While Amazon recently raised its wage to $15 an hour, that increase has been offset by injuries to workers caused by a quota system that demands they scan more than 300 items per hour over the course of their ten-hour shifts.17 Conditions in Amazon warehouses have long been under scrutiny. Like all business, it does promise to generate valuable tax revenue, but that promise is undercut by billions of dollars in tax breaks. Maryland’s Montgomery County is reported to have offered Amazon $6.5 billion in tax incentives.18 This way of doing business is shocking and deserves a book-length analysis on its own. For now, I can only say that this kind of economy makes sense only to the super-rich who benefit from it. To bring these businesses to town, elected officials have to sell out workers – often the very people who voted for them.
When politicians boast of a strong economy and a low unemployment rate, they mask the reality of working people’s lives. A more accurate assessment of the quality of life experienced by millions of people needs to focus on self-sufficiency and underemployment. It would seem fairly basic to recognize that any person who has full-time work and does not earn enough to meet baseline living expenses is underemployed. I would also argue that they are underemployed if they don’t have the economic stability to cover unexpected expenses like car repairs. How well our families are doing depends not only on what we are earning but also on what we are spending – most especially on housing.
Framework 2: Housing – Fair Market Rent vs Affordable Housing
Across the country, the cost of housing is rising faster than wages. A study of US government data by the United Way Alice Project shows that 43% of all households “can’t afford a basic monthly budget for housing, food, transportation, childcare, health care and a monthly smartphone bill.”19 The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) considers anyone who pays more than 30% of their income on housing to be cost burdened.20 Yet HUD’s own figures show that millions of households spend between 50% and 70% of their income on housing. The widening gap between income and housing costs has created a crisis for families across the nation. Just fifty years ago, it would have been unimaginable that hundreds of thousands – by some counts millions – of people in the US would be unable to afford housing. Yet the rise of tent cities that began in the 1980s has become a living testimony to the pervasive lack of affordable housing. The cost of housing obviously compounds the problem of low wages.
In 1974 HUD developed the concept of Fair Market Rent (FMR) in order to determine standardized payments for their housing voucher program, known as Section 8 Housing, to support extremely low-income families. HUD determines FMR for an area and provides a rent subsidy so that families pay only 30% of their annual income on rent. That’s how it works in theory. In 2018, 3 million families were on voucher waitlists.21 In 2019 only seventeen states had any open waitlists at all. Yet HUD continues to conduct surveys to determine FMR, and since its numbers are widely used by other organizations concerned with rental costs, it is worth understanding what is meant by FMR.
HUD uses regional surveys of rent and designates rents falling in the 40th percentile as FMR. This means that 40% of rents are either at or less expensive than the FMR and 60% are more expensive.22 As bad as that might sound, even FMRs tend to be out of reach for many. For example, a survey by the National Low Income Housing Coalition found that on a minimum-wage salary, it is impossible to afford fair market rent for a one-bedroom apartment in all but twenty-two of the nation’s 3,000 counties.23 And there is no relief in sight. In 2019 the White House proposed to slash $8.8 billion from HUD’s most important programs and to loosen the caps on rents for landowners enrolled in the federal voucher program.24
The government, nonprofits, and businesses also use a term called “affordable housing” to describe housing for which the total cost of rent (or mortgage) plus utilities is no more than 30% of one’s pre-tax income. It makes sense that the government thinks in terms of money when considering what counts as affordable housing. That is the easiest calculation for affordability, but it isn’t exactly right. It doesn’t, for example, take into account things like the quality of the housing, neighborhood schools, public safety, and public transportation. A family might find housing they can afford but that requires a long commute for work. A long commute then increases the length of the workday, the cost of transportation, and the cost of childcare. In addition, living in one community and working in another adds more stressors, like not being able to get to the children’s school if there is an emergency. None of these factors fit neatly into the spreadsheets used to calculate affordable housing.
In an effort to provide affordable housing to residents, cities have tried two strategies: rent control and inclusionary housing. Rent control limits how much landlords can increase rent in any given year; yet, as of 2019, only five states25 had cities with some form of rent control. Rent control legislation varies with respect to evictions. For example, under California’s rental laws, owners can evict tenants without cause by providing a written notice. Once a unit is vacated, owners can increase the rent without restriction. Overall, rent control has proven to be of limited use because it applies only to older buildings and often provides a disincentive for owners to maintain the property.
According to the National League of Cities, about 800 cities have mandated “inclusionary housing” or “opportunity housing.”26 While the details vary by city, the general idea is that developers are required to set aside some percentage of new housing for rent at below the open market rent. Cities provide developers with tax credits for these set asides, which are generally 15% of the development.27 (Just as tax credits vary, so do the required set asides. In some areas developers might be required to set aside as little 5% or as much as 25% of the rental property.)28 Often inclusionary housing is more expensive than FMR. Price points are based on 40–60% of the area median income and rentals are allocated on a lottery system. For communities, inclusionary housing helps to break down economic segregation and can make good neighborhoods more accessible. However, cities’ efforts to find a way to balance local income and local housing costs leave many frustrated. Some developers argue that despite the tax breaks, inclusionary housing laws make it hard for them to recoup their investments. Renters face a lottery system in which hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people apply for a single unit. For many struggling families, in any case, the so-called affordable housing is completely unaffordable.
While government efforts to subsidize rentals (Section 8 housing vouchers, low-income housing tax credit, and public housing) are expensive, the federal government actually spends more on subsidies for homeowners than it does for renters.29 Housing subsidies for homeowners come in the form of deductions for mortgage interest, real estate tax, and tax exclusions on capital gains from sales and accelerated depreciation (for owners of rental apartments). In 2015, these deductions for homeowners were more than double the combined costs of all federal subsidized rentals. Long story short, families are left to shoulder the burden of rising rents.30 The US has yet to address the housing crisis that drives families into poverty and too often into homelessness. Throughout my year of travel, I did not meet anyone who paid FMR – everyone paid more for rent and everyone felt the burden of rent in different ways. For some it meant having to live in shared housing, for others it meant being hard pressed to manage monthly bills, and for still others it meant not being able to afford to retire. Yet HUD’s calculation of FMR is the only standard measure of market rents available and, as we will see in the next section, it is used for other budget calculations.
Framework 3: Poverty – The Federal Poverty Line vs Self-sufficiency Budget
As a nation, we use the federal poverty line to set a threshold, an economic floor, for living standards.31 The federal government uses this threshold in two ways: first to determine whether or not a person or family qualifies for assistance, and then again to calculate the number of people who live in poverty. In 2018, the federal threshold for poverty was a pre-tax income of $12,140 for an individual. For a family of two, the poverty line creeps up to $16,460; for a family of three it moves to $20,780; and for a family of four to $25,100. By this standard, nationwide about 40 million people live in poverty; of those, 18.5 million live in extreme poverty and 5.3 million live in conditions of absolute poverty that we associate with the developing world.32 This is shocking to think about. And the reality of lived poverty is even worse. Anyone living and working in the United States knows the federal poverty line sets an unrealistic definition of poverty. Clearly the government has to know this, too.
The federal poverty line was developed for the government by Mollie Orshansky in the 1960s, when a family’s food budget was thought to be one-third of their expenses. “Orshansky based her poverty thresholds on the economy food plan – the cheapest of four food plans developed by the Department of Agriculture.”33 She calculated the cost of groceries to meet those food plans and multiplied each of those costs by three to create the poverty line. Today the poverty line continues to be calculated the same way: as three times the cost of groceries for the cheapest food plan. There are at least three basic problems with this calculation. First, groceries have been a much smaller part of a family budget for decades. For many families, the costs of childcare, rent, and health care have outpaced groceries. In addition, expenses for transportation, phone, and internet are both substantial and indispensable. Second, as we just saw, most families spend considerably more than 30% of their income on housing. Third, national averages will always distort budget percentages. As incomes rise, wealthier households spend more money on food, but even so, the percentage of money spent on food is a smaller part of the household budget. Poor families spend less on food, but food costs are a larger part of their overall income.
The cost of food was never a good way to measure poverty; this calculation has clear problems with real consequences. Accurate measures of poverty are key to understanding the health of the economy.34 Yet the federal poverty line provides an unrealistically low definition of poverty that undercounts the number of people who are struggling to make ends meet and limits the ability of people to qualify for assistance. Millions of families disappear into the chasm created by this standard: they are not able to pay basic bills every month and yet they are not counted as poor. This reality is complicated by the fact that in the US people do not commonly refer to themselves as poor, even when they are unable to reliably meet basic needs.
To get a better sense of people’s experiences, let’s look at how much money it takes to simply pay the basic bills every month – what is known as economic self-sufficiency, or just self-sufficiency. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think-tank created in 1986 to help ensure that the needs of low- and middle-income workers are included in economic policy discussions. In addition to conducting cutting-edge research, EPI provides an online Family Budget Calculator that calculates economic self-sufficiency for regions across the country. These calculations appear throughout this book, in each case generated on the EPI website. The calculator primarily relies on government data to determine the costs of housing, food, childcare, transportation, health care, and other necessities, as well as taxes for specific locations across the country. For example, the budget for food comes from Official USDA Food Plans: Cost of Food at Home at Four Levels, a report published by the Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion.35
