Our Country's Broken Social Compact
August 16, 2001
Our economic system used to be
set up so that if people worked full-time jobs, they would earn enough to
support themselves. No more.
Author Barbara Ehrenreich
proved that in her new book Nickel
and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. As she described her
findings in a recent article:
I spent a total of three
months, in three different cities, attempting to support myself on the
wages I could earn as an entry-level worker - as a waitress, a hotel
housekeeper, a maid with a housecleaning service, a nursing-home aide and
a Wal-Mart floor clerk. I could not make ends meet, not with one job
anyway. I averaged $7 an hour, an amount that fell tragically short of my
bare-bones expenses - gas, food and, above all, rent.
If someone is trying to
support a family, forget about it. Even with both parents
working. Even with both parents working more than one job -- which by
itself wrecks havoc with the family and one's own personal health.
While Ehrenreich is a saint
for doing this research, it's amazing to me that it was even
necessary. No college-level calculus is necessary to figure out that
$7/hour doesn't cut it. It's the deliberately thick-skulled,
closed-eye nature of too many Americans that necessitates research like
Ehrenreich's.
How have we allowed an
economic structure to be created that violates a most basic tenet of the
social compact? Again Ehrenreich:
Almost everyone - 94
percent of Americans, according to a 2000 poll conducted by Jobs for the
Future, a Boston-based employment research firm - agrees that "people
who work full-time should be able to earn enough to keep their families
out of poverty." When that proposition no longer holds true, then the
social contract, at least as I always understood it, is no longer in
force. And it is hard to imagine a more serious abrogation of
"America's core moral values" than that.
Revolution, anyone? |
