Corporations
Target Takes Food Stamps
Published September 21, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
So many Americans are now using food stamps that more and more chain stores have begun accepting them, rather than lose these customers to economic hardship. New or expanded recipients include Target, CVS, 7-11, Costco, BJ's and Sam's Club.
Food stamp use was up 22% this summer from 2008, with more than 35M Americans using them. Food stamps now come on a card identical to a debit or credit card, offering discretion and privacy for Americans self-conscious about relying on public assistance. For businesses, Costco finds that food stamp users spend an additional $50 or so on purchases not covered by the benefit.
There's a message in here about economic hardship becoming mainstream, becoming normal. I'm trying to generalize it to an ideal world where one is not punished for being poor, where a low-income parent can stand in line at the grocery store without a sense of shame - that she's even at the better grocery store rather than an overpriced bodega or food bank is an accomplishment. (Of course, see the original link above to understand transportation issues.)
Expanded food stamp acceptance at more stores is one of these situational responses that becomes permanent. From the sound of it, businesses have to invest in some degree of technological or process change to accept these cards. These are likely not upgrades that will be rolled back once the recession really lifts. As anti-poverty activists, we should be thinking about emergency services and about long-term changes we can push through during moments of crisis. Yes, we've got to expand eligibility for food stamps so all the many million more bellies don't go hungry, but if there was ever a moment to update the poverty measure to reflect the costs of housing, health care or decline in wages - It's Now.
Truthout Unionizes Virtually
Published September 19, 2009 @ 10:28AM PT
With little fanfare, at the end of August Truthout became the first online-only news organization to unionize, with employees joining the Newspaper Guild/Communication Workers of America. Organizers worked 80 hours/week for months to organize workers after card check signaled employees were interested in joining a union. Skype and Google Docs were essential tools in organizing the virtual company. "'We've certainly represented wire services for years that were far-flung, but we've never done any organizing where the group never saw each other or the organizers face to face,' [NG/CWA President Bernie] Lunzer said."
This is a really exciting development for today's workers and unions, as one of the major arguments against unionization now is that it's an outmoded form of workers' rights in an era of telecommuting, globalized companies, a service-based economy, and more flexible work arrangements. The desire for and success of unionization at Truthout reveals the flaws in these arguments - workers at on-line organizations, or workers in more flexible jobs, need the power to control their work hours, work-life balance and ability to negotiate with management just as much as workers centrally gathered on a shop floor or in a corporate office. In some cases, more so, as virtual work arrangements erase the solidarity possible in water-cooler chats or on company softball teams.
Organizers at Truthout credit their "progressive" Board of Directors for committing to card check as the single step needed for unionization. Congrats to the workers at Truthout, for their hard work and success, and for modeling for workers in the 21st century economy that unionization can work.
For those of you interested in learning more about the Employee Free Choice Act, the story is worth reading, as it breaks down very clearly the political struggle in Congress over card check.
(Photo of today's organizing tools by Peter Kaminski)
Bush Years Lost Economic Decade
Published September 17, 2009 @ 11:00AM PT
There's been a great deal of coverage of the latest census data on the increase in poverty in 2008. The bottom line? Bush stole all your money, and your health insurance is short-lived.
Fortunately, there's a growing push to modernize the poverty measure, which is based on 1955 data on the cost of food, calculated in haste in the 1960s. Back in the day, food costs were a third of a family's budget. Now they're one-seventh. Exactly - you don't even know how much that is, but it's relatively nominal compared to the expense of housing, medicine, clothing, etc.
Here's a quick round-up of coverage - the infuriating and the promising - you don't want to miss.
Norma Rae Inspiration Dies
Published September 15, 2009 @ 10:27AM PT
Crystal Lee Sutton, the workers' rights and union activist who inspired the Academy Award-winning movie Norma Rae, died yesterday of brain cancer. She was 68.
She was a 33 year old mother of 3 earning $2.65 an hour folding towels at the J.P. Stevens textile manufacturing plant in North Carolina in 1973. "Low pay and poor working conditions had impelled her to take a leading role in efforts to unionize the plant. She was met with threats, she said." She was eventually fired for her organizing work.
Her final act of rebellion was enshrined in Norma Rae, played by Sallie Field - before cops ushered her out of the building, "“I took a piece of cardboard and wrote the word ‘union’ on it in big letters, got up on my worktable, and slowly turned it around,” she said... “The workers started cutting their machines off and giving me the victory sign. All of a sudden the plant was very quiet.”
In less than a year 3,000 workers were unionized at 7 plants, including J.P. Stevens, in NC. Ms. Sutton went on to work as a union organizer.
In the final years of her life, she battled with her insurance company to receive the necessary cancer medications. Ms. Sutton asks to be remembered as a fighter for the working poor, and hopes she'll inspire her children and grandchildren to take up the cause in her honor:
"Stand up for what you believe in, not matter how hard it makes life for you," she said. "Do not give up and always say what you believe."
..."It is not necessary I be remembered as anything, but I would like to be remembered as a woman who deeply cared for the working poor and the poor people of the U.S. and the world," she said. "That my family and children and children like mine will have a fair share and equality."
Words for us all to live by.
R.I.P., Crystal Lee Sutton.
Remembering 9/11's Low-Wage Victims
Published September 11, 2009 @ 09:55AM PT
I came to my work in the post-Katrina Gulf Coast in part because I worked with survivors of the terrorist attacks in Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001. I worked for a non-profit, Seedco, that ran the Lower Manhattan Small Business Recovery Program - providing grants, loans and technical assistance to small businesses around Ground Zero. We were intimately and intensely involved with assisting commercial residents rebuild their livelihoods and their futures.
Frequently covered in the press since that horrific day 8 years ago are the families of the financial titans or workhorses who were killed in the building fires and collapse. Less frequently heard from are the survivors of the thousands of low-wage workers who supported the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) industry most associated with the World Trade Center. As we remember and grieve, I ask us to honor the restaurant workers, livery drivers, janitors and other low-wage workers who were disproportionately economically devastated by the terrorist attacks on 9/11.
Latin@s Most Likely To Die on Job
Published September 07, 2009 @ 06:47AM PT
That's a harsh title to jolt you out of your Labor Day holiday reprieve, I know. Courtesy of Poverty & Policy, I see that the National Council of La Raza has released a report on Latin@s in the low-wage job market. Like the National Employment Law Project study we covered last Wednesday, NCLR's research reveals a dangerous and highly unequal workplace for low-wage Latino workers, many of them immigrants. The report shows that smart, ethical immigration reform is the "first step" towards reducing worker exploitation and improving the job market for all low-wage workers.
1 in 5 Elderly are Poor
Published September 05, 2009 @ 10:38AM PT
When calculating poverty using the modernized measure from the National Academy of Sciences, the number of older adults living in poverty is nearly double the official rate. The whole article is worth reading for the ways current poverty numbers - among children, single mothers, in cities, etc. - would change if we updated the federal poverty measure.
Everyday that I blog I find more features, reports, news items, etc. than I can possibly cover here. But I don't want to let these stories slip by. So consider this your weekend afternoon news dump on poverty in the U.S.
