The poor get poorer as economy sours
They are too poor to make the news
On Sunday June 14, 2009, the New York Times published an op-ed by Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of among others “Nickel and Dimed.” The op-ed – Too Poor to Make the News - is a must read. She notes that the general narrative has been to describe the current economic cirisis as “incremental descent from excess to frugality, from ease to austerity.”
Ms. Ehrenreich explains quickly why this does not work for America’s poor.
But the outlook is not so cozy when we look at the effects of the recession on a group generally omitted from all the vivid narratives of downward mobility – the already poor, the estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of the population who struggle to get by in the best of times. This demographic, the working poor, have already been living in an economic depression of their own. From their point of view “the economy,” as a shared condition, is a fiction.
In the article Ms. Ehrenreich interviews community organizers and shelter providers to describe how the new poor are ignored and left out of the news.
The organizers even expressed a certain impatience with the Nouveau Poor, once I introduced the phrase. If there’s a symbol for the recession in Los Angeles, Davin Corona of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy said, it’s “the policeman facing foreclosure in the suburbs.” The already poor, he said – the undocumented immigrants, the sweatshop workers, the janitors, maids and security guards – had all but “disappeared” from both the news media and public policy discussions.
Disappearing with them is what may be the most distinctive and compelling story of this recession. When I got back home, I started calling up experts, like Sharon Parrott, a policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who told me, “There’s rising unemployment among all demographic groups, but vastly more among the so-called unskilled.”
The recession of the ’80s transformed the working class into the working poor, as manufacturing jobs fled to the third world, forcing American workers into the low-paying service and retail sector. The current recession is knocking the working poor down another notch – from low-wage employment and inadequate housing toward erratic employment and no housing at all. Comfortable people have long imagined that American poverty is far more luxurious than the third world variety, but the difference is rapidly narrowing.
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Once you do please share your opinions with us about how the current economic crisis is impacting those who Too Poor to Make the News are in New Jersey.
