Labor Day.To many, it means a day to sleep in, take the final trip to the beach, realize ruefully that another school year of half-consciously dragging ourselves to the bus stops at 6:30 in the morning begins the next day (Fairfax County still starts its schools the day after Labor Day, and ends them as July knocks on the door).
Symbolically, of course, it means a well-deserved day off for the huddled masses of workers, to celebrate the advancements labor has made. This year, however, this noble ideal has a few holes.
In the shadows of America lie families of the working poor, brought to life flickering on our television screens, stranded on the roofs of New Orleans, wading shellshocked in the filthy water. They totter on the bottom edge of the middle class, dangle precariously over the bottomless pit of outright poverty.
They are invisible in America, as profiled in Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Shipler.
They are not lazy bums on the streets on drugs, mooching off welfare (Ronald Reagan's fictitious welfare queen comes to mind.), they are hard workers striving for a slice of a nebulous concept, just barely out of reach in the sky. They see the American Dream, and reach, their outstretched hands denied.
They fight every day for the American Dream, toiling in jobs that pay the bare minimum. They work and pay taxes, but work has failed them. Their children go hungry. They live paycheck to paycheck, unable to send their kids to college, unable to pay the bills, trapped in debt.
They are trapped in wage stagnation, moving from dead-end job to dead-end job, being paid a minumum wage that hasn't been raised in over a decade.
They work, but cannot live. Hard work has failed America.
The working poor are swindled by unscrupulous banks, trapped by credit card companies, paying exorbitant interest rates on short-term loans and advances on their tax refunds. They either face a broken welfare system or are too proud to take advantage of it.
They are not, as the Wall Street Journal's editorial board likes to call them, "lucky duckies".
Shipler's book takes the reader through several case studies of the working poor, who languish in a system that cannot or refuses to help them.
They forgo an education, unable to afford it. They forgo health care and child care. Their families suffer, but it is invisible. In Africa, we see starving children, but in America, they lie in the shadows.
PSoTD points us to a simple, yet powerful list of injustices, happening right in our backyard, of what it means to be poor.
And yet, as a deafening silence engulfs the world on this issue, and hurricane victims, many of them working poor, unable to afford to leave New Orleans and paying for it with their lives, the Republican Party shamelessly shills for the elimination of the estate tax, in hopes of giving a tiny slice of the super-rich a couple extra million.
Priorities, priorities.
Labor Day is a celebration of work. Let's make work pay again. An employee who works 40 hours a week ought to earn enough to make a living. The minimum wage must be raised, if only because inflation has rendered it less and less over the past decade.
The working poor can work their way into the middle class if work pays.
