Last month, I started working at a non-profit group called CET - the Center for Employment Training. This organization provides job training to people who lack the skills or the opportunity to earn at least $10 an hour plus benefits.
Why is a program like this necessary? The minimum wage in this country is $5.15 an hour. Not long ago, Congress voted down an proposition to increase it to $7.25 an hour. What do those numbers mean? Simply this: that it is perfectly possible to be fully employed and still live in deep poverty, and that the lowness of the minimum wage combined with the lack of a comprehensive welfare system encourages people to stay out of the workforce.
Take, for example, somebody who earns $8 an hour - on the high end of the unskilled-jobs scale. Multiply $8 an hour by 40 hours a week by 50 weeks a year, and we get the paltry sum of $16,000 gross income. Clearly, such a person is one unexpected expense away from total insolvency. And this assumes a single person with no chronic costs such as children, a medical problem, or major insurance fees.
A couple of weeks ago, the secretary of HHS showed up at CET and announced new restictions on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) - what most people know as 'welfare'. This was part of the completely bogus 'Deficit Reduction Act' which sought reduce ever so slightly the gargantuan defecit Bush has accumulated by cutting the miniscule amount of money spent on social programs. It might've escaped his notice that when people are denied basic assistance they end up costing the government more, due to the icreased need for emergency services.
Reducing welfare benefits is supposed to encourage people to get off the welfare rolls and find work. The effect, however, is usually just the opposite. Receiving public assistance in the U.S. is such an exercise in humiliation that those who receive it find their will being methodically broken.
It is useless to tell them they should 'look for decent work'. There is no such work to be had, and everyone knows it. Even with a high school diploma - and 1/3 of Americans students drop out - the well-paying bluecollar union jobs of yesteryear are long gone.
The result of this is plain: the vast majority of people who are forced off of welfare are worse off once they are in work than when they were out of it.
In most - though not all - European countries with expansive welfare systems, unemployment is much higher. But there, unemployment is rightly taken as the natural outcome of economic factors and not as some kind of wrenching personal shame. I may be young and ignorant, but I am not so ignorant as to the think that American laborers could ever compete against Chinese laborers forced to work for 0.50 an hour twelve hours a day. That is one example among many.
If we are ever going to deal with unemployment in this country, we shold first admit that it is going to happen, and try to do what we can for those afflicted with it.
