This blog post was written by Donna Seymour for our 2018 PowHer The Vote campaign.
Voters should always put their own economic interests first when going to the polls. Nothing is more central to your success as a citizen than your ability to make ends meet, contribute to your community life, and have the time to enrich your life beyond your need for a paycheck. For decades now, voters have been told by self-serving politicians that the Culture Wars are more important than their own economic well-being. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Women can’t afford to ignore their economic security. The majority of women work in low wage jobs. Six in ten mothers are the primary or co-breadwinners for their families. Poverty is the central fact of life for too many New Yorkers and it is time candidates for political office recognized that fact and put forth realistic and concrete ideas to address this critical truth.
A recent Census Report looked at incomes, poverty rates, and access to health insurance. Overall, New York State ranks 35 out of 50 states. And things are getting worse for the most vulnerable families. Data from 2017 indicates that financial progress for low-income Americans came to a near halt during the first year of the Trump Administration.
Nearly half of Americans have difficulty paying their bills; more than one-third have struggled with hunger or having to forego needed medical treatment. The stark truth is that a minimum-wage worker can’t afford a 2-bedroom apartment anywhere in the United States. In fact, a one-bedroom is affordable for minimum-wage workers in only 22 counties in five states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington. These are all states with a higher minimum wages than the $7.25 federal wage.
The evidence of the struggles American families face is everywhere. Recently credit card defaults (the way too many people stretch too little wages over too much month) went up by 10 percent over a similar time last year. More people who borrowed to purchase an automobile have needed extra time to make their payments. And for too many in rural New York, public transportation does not exist and a personal car is the only way to get to work.
Getting to work is dependant upon affordable and available child care for most families with young children. They can’t afford to worry about the quality of child care when finding it and affording it can be nearly insurmountable problems. When it comes to high child care costs, New York is 48 out of 50 states in cost.
And those low-wage jobs that have taken the place of many of the previous jobs in the so-called “economic recovery” since the crash of 2008 are not the first step up the economic ladder. They are, in fact, dead ends that trap employees in an endless cycle of poverty.
“If you start in one of those low-wage occupations, you have a higher probability of becoming unemployed than moving up the career ladder,” said Todd Gabe, a co-author of the paper, titled “Can Low-Wage Workers Get Better Jobs?” In other words, a low-wage worker was three times more likely to stop working altogether than to move to a better job in a given year.
MIT economist Peter Temin argues that escaping poverty takes almost 20 years with nearly nothing going wrong. He agrees that education is the key, but for it to be a pathway, you have to start out in grade school and proceed through high school and college without any hiccups for you or your family. Not an easy objective for anyone but the very wealthy.
And it is not just the poorest Americans who suffer and fail to thrive. According to Alissa Quart, “Middle-class life is now 30% more expensive than it was 20 years ago.” She cites the costs of housing, education, health care and child care in particular in her book, Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America. She writes, “In some cases the cost of daily life over the last 20 years has doubled.”
There are good paying jobs right now, but more than half of them exist in the high-tech sector dominated by medical fields or computers. These are not fields the average person can walk into without years of training and specialized study. And the gender gap in the tech field is a barrier for too many women. Tech companies employ more than twice as many men as women.
The high paying jobs of the future will continue to be in these fields by all projections. How to ensure women are qualified for these gppd, high-wage jobs is an uphill battle. Even finding a female STEM role model is a challenge. According to a new study by the Geena Davis’s Institute on Gender in Media at Mount Saint Mary’s University, in California, the last decade has seen little progress in the way women are portrayed in science and technology roles in film and television. That study found that 62.9 percent of STEM professionals portrayed in media are men, outnumbering women STEM characters nearly two-to-one.
And as Professor Temin suggests about the pathway out of poverty, the way to build interest in STEM fields and the requisite jobs skills is a long-term prospect. It will take an investment in time, talent, education and vision to correct these deficits.
Political leadership is a critical component.
Before you go to the polls in 2018, spend some time exploring the issues the candidates are talking about. If they are focusing on Culture War issues, force them to talk about the issues that concern your economic future. Vote for your economic security on November 6.