The View from Flyover Country

by Sarah Kendzior

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  The job you work increasingly reflects the money you already had.

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  The McDonald’s worker, the argument goes, deserves what she gets because she is a McDonald’s worker. The professional, it is said, deserves her success because she is a professional. But over the last decade, the barriers to entry for white-collar professions have dramatically increased while the pathways out of poverty have eroded. The job you work increasingly reflects the money you already had.

  Upward mobility was once the hallmark of the American Dream. Downward wages have made that dream unachievable for Americans born poor. One McDonald’s worker, Devonte Yates, is struggling to complete an associate’s degree in criminal justice—the path to a stable life through education so often recommended. But Yates can barely buy food on McDonald’s wages, much less pay his tuition.

  Education is a luxury the minimum wage worker cannot afford. This message is passed on to their children. “My son is about to graduate from kindergarten, and I don’t even have enough money to get his cap and gown, and that’s only $20,” says McDonald’s worker Carman Iverson.

  While many service workers live in poverty, well-off and well-educated professional workers increasingly find themselves working for poverty wages or for nothing at all. The Atlantic is one of many media outlets that covered the plight of the underpaid McDonald’s worker—while simultaneously refusing to pay many of their own writers. Young Americans seeking full-time employment tend to find their options limited to two paths: one of low-status, low-paying temp jobs emblematic of poverty; another of high-status, low-paying temp jobs emblematic of wealth. America is not only a nation of temporary employees—the Walmart worker on a fixed-day contract, the immigrant struggling for a day’s pay in a makeshift “temp town”—but of temporary jobs: intern, adjunct, fellow.

  Like their counterparts in the service industry, these short-term prestige positions frequently offer no benefits, no health care, and in the case of the intern, no salary. They require that you have the money to move to switch jobs year after year—impossible for many, but easy for those with cash to spare. In the end, college graduates who trained for white-collar professions often cannot afford to take them, and end up, instead, working at a place like McDonald’s.

  Post-recession America runs on a contingency economy based on prestige and privation. The great commonality is that few are paid enough to live instead of simply survive.

  Poverty Is Lost Potential

  On July 20, 2013, the journalist Helen Thomas died at age ninety-two. Thomas was a seminal Washington reporter who covered every president since John F. Kennedy, but she came from humble means. Her father, an immigrant from Lebanon, was illiterate, but he encouraged her to get an education. She earned a BA in English from Wayne State University in her native Detroit. She moved to Washington, D.C., and worked as a waitress—one could once afford to live in D.C. on a waitress’s salary—and then got a clerical job at the Washington Daily News, which led to a job with the United Press Service.

  Helen Thomas worked her way up from the bottom. She did not buy her opportunities, because exorbitant journalism schools and unpaid internships did not exist. Her time in the service industry was not perceived as indicative of her abilities or her future path.

  Today, a reporter of Thomas’s modest background is out of luck. Journalist David Dennis argues that requiring unpaid internships shuts out voices from poor communities by denying those who hail from them the ability to work: “Opinions or perspectives reflecting my own come few and far between. How many journalists can say they have firsthand knowledge of the mentality of someone from the inner-city? Many of these voices have been muted just because they simply can’t navigate the landscape of privilege that most modern journalism encourages.”

  Mistaking wealth for virtue is a cruelty of our time. By treating poverty as inevitable for parts of the population, and giving impoverished workers no means to rise out of it, America deprives not only them but society as a whole. Talented and hardworking people are denied the ability to contribute, and society is denied the benefits of their gifts. Poverty is not a character flaw. Poverty is not emblematic of intelligence. Poverty is lost potential, unheard contributions, silenced voices.

  Working at McDonald’s is not indicative of all a person can accomplish, nor should it be a sentence to limited opportunity. The service industry is increasingly where Americans end up, as pre-recession jobs are replaced with part-time, poverty-wage work. If temporary jobs are a permanent problem, we need to improve their conditions—along with those of the white-collar jobs to which many aspire but cannot afford to take.

  —Originally published July 22, 2013

  Zero-Opportunity Employers

  On September 1, 2013, Margaret Mary Vojtko, an eighty-three-year-old adjunct professor at Duquesne University, died in abject poverty. Professor Vojtko taught French at Duquesne for twenty-five years. She received up to $3,500 per course and made an annual salary of less than $10,000. This is standard pay for adjuncts, who comprise 76 percent of the teaching workforce of tertiary institutions in the United States (tenure and tenure-track professors make up a mere 24 percent) and receive an average $2,700 per course.

  Like most adjuncts, Professor Vojtko received no health care or benefits. When she was diagnosed with cancer, she could not pay her bills. She took a second job in a fast food restaurant and slept in her office until the university threw her out. In the spring of 2013, Duquesne fired her for no longer being “effective.”

  Living in poverty, dying of cancer, Professor Vojtko never missed a day of class. Vojtko’s story is unique neither to adjuncts, who shared their own stories of privation on Twitter under the hashtag IAmMargaretMary, nor to other American workers. In the post-employment economy, full-time jobs are parceled into low-wage contract labor, entry-level jobs turn into internships, salaries are paid in exposure, and dignity succumbs to desperation.

  On August 28, 2013, America celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Most Americans associate the march with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and call for racial harmony. They remember half of the targeted “twin evils” of racism and economic deprivation.

  They remember the freedom, and forget the jobs. But the two are inseparable.

  “If a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists,” King proclaimed in 1968. Economic opportunity, he argued, is essential to human rights.

  How far we have fallen today, when survival is sold as an aspiration to the poor. How facile our claims of “equal opportunity” when the content of one’s character is eclipsed by the content of one’s wallet. Citizens struggling to pull themselves up—through education, through hard work—sink back down, into debt from student loans, into desperation from appeasing the few and powerful who defaulted on their future. America has abandoned any pretense of social mobility. In 2012, the income gap between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of America passed the record set in 1927, at the onset of the Great Depression. Forty percent of Americans now make less than minimum wage workers did in 1968, the year King died.

  The Hidden Hand …

  The problem in America is not that there are no jobs. It is that jobs are not paying.

  America is becoming a nation of zero-opportunity employers, in which certain occupations are locked into a terrible pay rate for no valid reason, and certain groups—minorities, the poor, and increasingly, the middle class—are locked out of professions because they cannot buy their way in.

  * * *

  In the post-employment economy, full-time jobs are parceled into low-wage contract labor, entry-level jobs turn into internships, salaries are paid in exposure, and dignity succumbs to desperation.

  * * *

  Why was Margaret Mary Vojtko, an experienced teacher who did the same work as a tenured professor, making l
ess than $10,000? Because her university refused to pay her more than $10,000. Why is Deirdre Cunningham, a New York woman who works two jobs as a bank teller and a sales associate, living in a homeless shelter? Because her employers refuse to pay her enough to live anywhere else. Cunningham’s plight is common: 28 percent of homeless families include at least one working adult.

  During the recession, American companies found an effective new way to boost profits. It was called “not paying people.” “Not paying people” tends to be justified in two ways: a fake crisis (“Unfortunately, we can’t afford to pay you at this time…”) or a false promise (“Working for nearly nothing now will get you a good job later”).

  In reality, profits are soaring and poorly compensated labor tends to lead to more poorly compensated labor. Zero-opportunity employers are refusing to pay people because they can get away with it. The social contract does not apply to contract workers—and in 2013, that is increasingly what Americans are.

  One can see the truth of King’s equation of income and rights in the powerlessness of low-wage workers to change their situation. Wages are not corresponding to demand or credentials. In a post-employment economy, wages are both arbitrary and fixed.

  Institutionalized Exploitation

  People who justify poverty wages tend to make two claims. The first is that desirable jobs have a surplus of applicants so their pay is inherently less. In 2013, every job has a surplus of applicants, yet the pay for some jobs—Wall Street bankers—rises while the pay for other jobs stagnates or disappears.

  The second claim is that low-wage workers are easily replaceable and offer no benefit to society. This is the argument aimed at service workers, who are on strike because they make so little they cannot afford food or rent.

  Putting aside that anyone working full-time should be able to survive on their income, and that service workers deserve the same respect as any employee, this argument falls flat because educated professionals whose work offers tremendous benefit to society are also poorly paid.

  Teaching, nursing, social work, child care, and other “pink collar” professions do not pay poorly because, as Slate’s Hanna Rosin argues, women “flock to less prestigious jobs,” but because jobs are considered less prestigious when they are worked by women. The jobs are not worth less—but the people who work them are supposed to be.

  Although zero-opportunity employers disproportionately hurt women and minorities, everyone suffers in an economy that does not value workers. “I didn’t risk my life in Afghanistan so I could come back and watch people go hungry in America,” writes Jason Kirell, a thirty-five-year-old veteran who is on food stamps. “I certainly didn’t risk it so I could come back and go hungry.” He notes that it is common for military wives to subsist on food stamps while their husbands work overseas and for veterans to end up on food stamps upon their return.

  The Americans who serve their country the most are paid the least and treated the worst. As Kirell detailed his plight, House Republicans voted to cut the nation’s food stamp program by $40 billion.

  Into the Abyss

  In America, there is little chance at a reversal of fortune for those less fortunate. Poverty is a sentence for the crime of existing. Poverty is a denial of rights sold as a character flaw.

  There are two common responses to the plight of the low-wage worker. The first is “That’s just the way things are,” a response which serves both to derail empathy and deter people from imagining the way things could be.

  The second is “But it worked out for me.” This is the refrain of the tenured to the adjunct, the staffer to the freelancer, the rich to the poor: “But it worked out for me; the system is fine, it worked out for me.”

  The problem is that in an economy of falling wages and eroded safety nets, there is a very fine line between “you” and “me.”

  People not only fall through the cracks, they live in the cracks as a full-time occupation. The view from the cracks is a lot clearer than the view from above. When you look down on people, they stop being people. But when you watch from below, you see how easy it is to fall.

  Personal success does not excuse systematic exploitation. “That’s just the way things are” does not explain widespread suffering. Ask why things are the way they are, why things are not working out for working Americans.

  And when they do not give you an answer? Start demanding one.

  —Originally published September 23, 2013

  A Government Shutdown, a Social Breakdown

  In December 1995, the United States government shut down for twenty-one days, ending a year marked by violent fringe politics—the Oklahoma City bombings, the Unabomber manifesto—and the televised train wreck of the O. J. Simpson trial. In 1995, Americans watched fistfight talk shows and government conspiracy dramas and sitcoms about the pointlessness of living. The shutdown seemed of a piece with the era, idiocy ascended to a higher plane.

  We rolled our eyes and waited it out. Because in 1995, when the government shut down, odds seemed good it would come back.

  Americans tend to remember the 1990s through a soft flannel gauze—the peacetime complacency, the political correctness, the jobs—but they were garish, paranoid times. Today the 1990s feel like a dream only because the nightmare they created became ordinary. In the decade to come, the tabloid would become gospel, the social fabric sewn from the lunatic fringe. Radical polarization became rote. America went crazy and never went back.

  The political tabloidization of the 1990s—a decade-long parade of sex scandals filling time between the Cold War and the War on Terror—seems like the indulgence of a nation that, in the absence of an obvious crisis, made themselves their own.

  But a crisis was always there—only it was to be repackaged, not solved. Belying the vitriolic partisanship of the 1990s was a uniform agreement to gut social services to the sick and the poor. The impoverished were portrayed as a privileged class siphoning state resources at their leisure.

  This argument dates back to President Reagan’s denouncement of so-called “welfare queens”—and the bedrock for it was laid well before that—but it was the 1990s when it found mainstream appeal. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act—a reform that limited welfare benefits—to the approval of most Democrats and Republicans.

  It is easy to make public services seem optional when people feel like they have options. In the mid-1990s, when the economy was flourishing and unemployment was falling, you could tell someone to “go get a job” and it was possible they might actually find one.

  This advice did nothing to mend the structural inequalities that underlaid the plight of the poor. But it was an argument that seemed less callous, less obviously destructive, than it does today. Today the advice remains the same—but the options for ordinary Americans have dramatically changed.

  Abdicating the Imaginary Throne of the “Welfare Queen”

  American ideology has long tilted between individualism and Calvinism. What happened to you was either supposed to be in your control—the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” approach—or divinely arbitrated. You either jumped, or you were meant to fall.

  Claims you were pushed, or you were born so far down you could not climb up, were dismissed as excuses of the lazy. This is the way many saw their world before it collapsed.

  By the end of the 1990s, the U.S. unemployment rate had reached a twenty-five-year low of 3.8 percent, and a mere 6.1 percent of Americans relied on food stamps. Today a record 15 out of every 100 Americans need food stamps, and 45 percent of all infants born in the United States are served by the Women, Infants, and Children program (WIC), which provides formula and vouchers for healthy food.

  To be eligible for WIC, one’s income must be below 185 percent of the U.S. poverty income. A near majority of American households now meet this criterion, despite the unemployment rate hovering at 7.3 percent.

  The reason for this is that jobs have stopped paying. Ho
meless people are working two jobs. Walmart and McDonald’s employees frequently receive federal assistance. Military wives survive on food stamps, and their husbands survive on them when they come home. The number of Americans on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has risen 70 percent since 2008 and shows no sign of stopping.

  The reign of the “welfare queen” is finally over, because her true identity has been revealed. We are all the welfare queen, and we are abdicating her imaginary throne. The stigma of public assistance is slowly subsiding—not through a surge of compassion, but through an increase in desperation.

  People are more likely to condemn people on government assistance when they do not know any of them personally. It is becoming less and less likely that this is the case.

  The New American Dream

  Americans are not as divided as they seem. We agree on guns—90 percent of Americans support expanded background checks on gun owners—and we largely agree on health care. Only one-third of Americans support repealing, defunding, or delaying President Obama’s health care law. These numbers decrease when the law is called by its name, the Affordable Care Act, instead of Obamacare. Seventy-two percent of Americans agree that there should not be a government shutdown.

  But our opinion does not matter. We are passive subjects, held hostage to a vindictive minority divorced from public will.

  Political scientist Daniel Drezner has noted that the government shutdown has no real precedent in American history. “The material interests on the GOP side appear to have zero influence over their party,” he writes, noting the failure of the long-standing American tradition of pluralism. “Now it’s the ideological interests that are ascendant—and this poses enormous challenges to the American body politic.”