Chart of the day

In the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic, every story, every piece of information, reveals the degree to which our current economic and social institutions have failed us.

The data show us both how widespread the effects of the COVID crisis are and how uneven those effects are. At each turn, they represent a profound critique of U.S. capitalism.

Consider, for example, the information contained in the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Surveys, which were initiated in late April of this year.

Based on the latest survey, which was conducted between 18 and 23 June 2020, we can see in the chart at the top of the post that almost half (48.1 percent) of U.S. households experienced a loss of employment income since mid-March. The members of those households had either lost their jobs, saw their working hours shortened, or had their pay cut.

But the loss didn’t affect all households equally. For the seventy percent of U.S. households earning less than $100 thousand a year, more than 52 percent had suffered a loss of income. In contrast, about 38 percent of Americans earning more than that experienced a loss of income. And, of course, their large employers have received massive bailouts from the federal government.

A similarly unequal story emerges from the breakdown of the data according to race and ethnicity in the chart above. While 43.5 percent of White households experienced a loss of income since 13 March of this year, both Black and Hispanic households suffered much more—54.2 percent and 60 percent, respectively.

Both pieces of information challenge the idea that “we’re all in this together.” We never have been, and we certainly aren’t as the consequences of the COVID crisis force Americans to confront how they’ve been abandoned to their own unequal fates by the economic and political elites of their country.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Chart of the day

Tens of of American workers have been assaulted by the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with mass layoffs, furloughs, shortened hours, and pay cuts. As a result, food insecurity has risen dramatically in the United States. In a national survey with responses from late April, 28 percent of households reported they worried about food running out before they had money to buy more, while 22 percent of households said the food they bought didn’t last and they didn’t have enough money to get more.

It should come as no surprise that, in the United States, the rates of job losses and food insecurity differ according to race and ethnicity.

Black and Latino workers, for example, experienced larger employment declines than white workers between February and April. A Washington Post-Ipsos national poll from late April and early May found that 20 percent of Hispanic adults and 16 percent of Black adults reported being laid off or furloughed during the pandemic, compared to 11 percent of white adults and 12 percent of adults of other races and ethnicities.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, similar differences can be seen in the degree of food insecurity. While 22 percent of households said the food they bought didn’t last and they didn’t have enough money to get more, the rate was substantially higher for Black (29 percent) and Hispanic respondents (34 percent) and lower for whites (18 percent).

From almshouses to nursing homes—pandemic edition

I’ve often read that people who wash their hands in innocence do so in blood-stained basins. And their hands bear the traces.

— Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage

The first time care for elderly and chronically ill Americans was radically transformed was during the first Great Depression, as almshouses were overwhelmed and public support grew to replace old-style charitable “indoor relief” with new-style government-funded “outdoor relief,” based on cash payments to people to support themselves in the community. According to Sidney D. Watson (pdf), “The Social Security Act of 1935 embodied this new approach to American social welfare, creating cash benefit programs to provide the elderly and needy with the money to support themselves at home rather than in institutions.”*

Later, the Social Security Amendments of 1950, 1956, 1960, and 1965 (which created Medicaid), a combination of federal and state payments fueled the growth of nursing homes by expanding eligibility and authorizing states to make vendor payments directly to for-profit care institutions. The existing nursing home industry fought to get Medicaid funding and, through its lobbying efforts, to keep and expand based on Medicaid funding.** It then used those funds to warehouse the elderly and infirm, in the care of workers who earn low wages, most of whom are women of color, a large portion of whom are immigrant workers.  

Now, those same nursing homes, like the almshouses of the 1930s, have been overwhelmed by a “tidal wave of human need”—but for a very different reason: they have become one of the key sites of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

According to a recent investigation by the New York Times, about one-third of all U.S. coronavirus deaths are nursing-home residents or workers. At least 25,600 residents and workers have died from the coronavirus at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities for older adults in the United States, which has infected more than 143,000 people at some 7,500 facilities. Moreover, in about a dozen states, the number of residents and workers who have died accounts for more than half of all deaths from the virus.***

For example, in Massachusetts, more than half the state’s deaths, 2,922, come from long-term care facilities that have become major sources of infection. As of this past Saturday, 336 long-term care centers in the state had reported at least one COVID-19 case and some 15,965 residents and health care workers have been sickened.

Unfortunately, the existing data can’t for the most part distinguish between patients and workers. What we do know is that most nursing-home patients (60 percent) are supported by Medicaid, and therefore are (or are made) poor or near-poor. Across the country, they are being infected by and dying from COVID-19 at rates that are much higher than for the general population.

As for the more than 3 million nursing-home workers in the United States, they earn a median wage of $12.15 an hour, for a median annual wage of only $25,280.**** The chart above demonstrates that, while the typical nursing-home worker earns more than retail cashiers, their wages and annual pay put them substantially below the national average as well as many other occupations, from bus drivers to chief executives.

We also know that, thanks to a recent study (pdf) by PHI (formerly the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute), a great deal about the demographic makeup of the nursing-home workforce (which, for their purposes, include, in addition to home health and personal care aides, nursing assistants). It is predominantly (86 percent) female, a majority (59 percent) people of color (including 30 percent who are Black and 18 percent Latinx), and about one in four (26 percent) born outside the United States. Because of their low wages, about 1 in 7 nursing-home workers live in poverty, almost half (44 percent) are low-income (defined as below twice the poverty line), and 2 in 5  (42 percent) require some form of public assistance.

Taken together, these data reveal a workforce that is collectively marginalized in the labor market.

Unfortunately, it should come as no surprise, given the obscene levels of inequality in the United States and the nature of long-term care for the elderly and infirm, that both residents and workers in nursing homes occupy a marginalized position in American society. As a result, both groups are living and working—and, increasingly, dying—in one of the veritable hellholes of the current pandemic.

For a century now, the United States has not had to rely on charity and poorhouses to care for the elderly and infirm. But if we didn’t know before, then surely the effects of the novel coronavirus pandemic have demonstrated how much their replacement—the nursing-home industry—like many other capitalist institutions, has failed to protect both those who have been placed in its care and those who have worked so diligently, under impossible conditions, to provide that care. Today, the nursing-home industry requires a transformation that is as at least radical as the one that was started during the first Great Depression.

In the meantime, the industry needs to be pushed by individual states and the federal government, by any means necessary, to rescue its residents and workers from their pandemic-induced nightmare.

 

*Watson argues that

The Social Security Act was an epochal event in American social welfare. It reflected a belief that public assistance recipients should, and could, be trusted to spend their benefits as they saw fit and that use of “in-kind” benefits was unnecessary, demeaning, and stigmatizing. The disabled would continue to be cared for through “indoor relief” in a variety of institutions including mental asylums, tuberculosis sanitariums, public hospitals, and schools for the deaf.

**As Watson explains,

By making nursing home care free for all senior citizens without assets, nearly half of the elderly in 1975, Medicaid provided a powerful incentive to families to institutionalize parents, who might previously have moved in with grown children or sought the part-time care of a home health aide. By offering states a federally funded alternative to state psychiatric hospitals, nursing homes also became the place to institutionalize those with developmental disabilities and long-term mental illness.

***The BBC recently reported that one-third of all coronavirus deaths in England and Wales are now happening in “care homes”—an ominous feature of the Anglo-American response to the pandemic.

****Bureau of Labor Statistics earnings data are for 3,161,500 Home Health and Personal Care Aides (2018 SOC occupations 31-1121 Home Health Aides and 31-1122 Personal Care Aides and the 2010 SOC occupations 31-1011 Home Health Aides and 39-9021 Personal Care Aides) for May 2019.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

  

Places of desperation

American workers, as I have argued many times (e.g., here and here), find themselves in increasingly desperate circumstances.

But of course, different segments of the American working-class experience that desperation in different ways, according to the circumstances in which they find themselves.

A new study by the Brookings Institution [ht: db] reveals that the degree of optimism, worry, and pain experienced by poor whites, blacks, and Hispanics varies according to where they live.

Some of the results are not all surprising, given what else we know about the condition of the working-class in different places within the United States. Thus, for example, the best places in terms of optimism for poor minorities are Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee (the Southern cluster of states), while the most desperate states for poor non-Hispanic whites are the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Wisconsin, Missouri, West Virginia, and Kentucky (which correspond, roughly, to the opioid and suicide belts in the heartland). A similar pattern follows for both worry and pain.

But there are some unexpected findings, at least for me, in the study. For example, the worst places for poor minorities (in terms of optimism, worry, and/or pain) include blue states like Washington, California, New York, and Massachusetts. And, as it turns out, for poor whites, the situation is desperate in New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin.

The authors of the study admit that,

We cannot answer many questions at this point. What is it about the state of Washington, for example, that is so bad for minorities across the board? Why is Florida so much better for poor whites than it is for poor minorities? Why is Nevada “good” for poor white optimism but terrible for worry for the same group?

Politically, it is important to pay attention to and analyze the causes of these different placed-based levels of desperation for the various groups that make up the American working-class.

But it is also the case that overall, as I argued last November, the deteriorating condition of the U.S. working-class includes but goes beyond the obscene (and still-growing) inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth.

As both a condition and consequence of those inequalities, working-class Americans have suffered from mass unemployment (reaching 1 in 10 workers, according to the official rate, in October 2009, and much higher if we include discouraged workers and those who have underemployed), real wages that have been flat or falling for decades (now below what they were in the mid-1970s) along with declining benefits, a precipitous decline in unions (from one quarter in the 1970s to about ten percent today), an increase in the number of hours worked (both the length of the workweek and the average number of weeks worked per year), a significant rise in the incidence of “alternative work arrangements” (such as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers), and most people think good jobs are difficult to find where they live (by a factor of 2 to 1)—not to mention increasing mortality (for the first time since the 1950s), an increase in differences in life expectancy between those at the top and everyone else, high levels of infant mortality, a spectacular growth in the rate of incarceration, and increasing indebtedness (especially for student and auto loans).

Creating new economic institutions that actually lead to improvements in those circumstances will benefit all members of the American working-class—white, black, and Hispanic.

Then and only then will American workers feel more optimistic, have fewer worries, and experience less pain, regardless of where they live.

Bread and roses

Mainstream economists and politicians have answers for everything.

Lose your job? Well, that’s just globalization and technology at work. Not much that can be done about that.

And if you still want a job? Then just move to where the jobs are—and make sure your children go to college in order to prepare themselves for the jobs that will be available in the future.

The fact is, they’re not particularly good answers. And people know it. That’s why working-class voters are questioning business as usual and registering their protest by supporting—in the case of Brexit, the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the 2017 snap election in Britain, and so on—alternative positions and politicians.

On the first point, it’s not simply globalization and technology. Large corporations, which employ most people, are the ones that decide—in the context of a global economy and by developing and adopting new technologies—when and where some jobs will be destroyed and new ones created. They use the surplus they appropriate from their existing workers and utilize it to determine the pattern of job destruction and creation, in order to get even more surplus.

Thus, in April 2017 (according to the data in the chart at the top of the post), employers eliminated 1.6 million jobs in the United States. In January 2009, things were even worse: corporations destroyed 2.6 million jobs across the U.S. economy. Of course, they also create new jobs—often in different companies, industries, regions, and countries. That leaves individual workers with the sole decision of whether or not to chase those jobs, since as a group they have absolutely no say in when or where old jobs are destroyed and new ones created.

What about their children and the advice to go to college? We already know the idea that higher education successfully levels the playing field across students with different backgrounds is a myth (and sending more kids to college doesn’t do much, if anything, to lower inequality).

Now we’re learning that, when states suffer a widespread loss of jobs, the damage extends to the next generation, where college attendance drops among the poorest students.

That’s the conclusion of new research Elizabeth O. Ananat and her coauthors, just published in Science (unfortunately behind a paywall). What they found is that

local job losses can both worsen adolescent mental health and lower academic performance and, thus, can increase income inequality in college attendance, particularly among African-American students and those from the poorest families.

Their argument is that macro-level job losses are best understood as “community-level traumas” that negatively affect the learning ability and the mental health not only of young people who experience job loss within their own families, but also of the other children in states where the destruction of jobs is widespread.

So, the problem can’t be solved by forcing individual workers to have the freedom to chase after jobs and send their children to college. Nor is the predicament confined to the white working-class. In fact, the effects of job losses are similar, but even worse, among African-American youth.

That’s why Ananat argues that

white working class people and African-American working class people are in the same boat due to job destruction. Imagine the policies we could have if folks found common ground over that.

And, I would add, those policies need to go beyond the “active labor market policies”—such as “rigorous job training and active matching of worker skills to employer needs”—the authors, along with mainstream economists and politicians, put forward.*

We also need to reconsider the fact that, within existing economic institutions, employers are the only ones who get to decide when and where jobs are destroyed and created. Giving workers the ability to participate as a group in the decisions about jobs—within existing enterprises and by assisting them to form their own enterprises, would improve their own mental health and that of the members of the wider community.

Such a change would also transform young people’s decisions about whether or not to go to college. It’s not just about jobs in the new economy. It would allow them to demand, as women in Lawrence, Massachusetts did over a century ago, both “bread and roses.”

 

*Policies to help “disadvantaged workers, especially African Americans, Hispanics and rural residents,” also need to go beyond encouraging the Fed to keep interest-rates low. That still leaves job decisions in the hands of employers.

Original sin?

No one ever accused American conservatives of being particularly original. They started with a story about the failure of government programs and they stick with it, against all evidence.

Originally, conservatives targeted African Americans, who (so the story goes, e.g., in the Moynihan Report) were mired in a culture of poverty and increasingly dependent on government hand-outs. In order for blacks to regain America’s founding virtues (so the story continues)—especially marriage and industriousness—well-meaning but ultimately destructive government programs should be abolished so that they would once again be able to enjoy the security of marriage and dignity of work.

That exact same story has now been transferred to the white working-class. Anyone who’s read Charles Murray and J. D. Vance will recognize the “the pejorative Moynihan report on the black family in white face.”

The latest version of that story was penned by the American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks, who cites Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty as the original sin, which “deprived generations of Americans of their fundamental sense of dignity.” According to Brooks, “rural and exurban whites” have been left behind “every bit as much as the urban poor” because they’ve come to “depend on the state instead of creating value for themselves and others.” Real dignity, argues Brooks (echoing a long line of conservative thinkers), stems from people being “authentically, objectively necessary.” And that means working—or at least looking for work.

That’s why Brooks cites the declining labor-force participation rate in the United States beginning with the War on Poverty.

The first problem is, the participation rate has been declining since the mid-1950s, long before Johnson’s program was enacted. As readers can see in the chart at the top of the post, the labor-force participation rate for white men (the red line), which stood at 87.4 percent in 1955, had fallen to 84.2 percent by 1964 and then dropped to 76.6 percent in 2007 (on the eve of the latest crash). If we calculate the change by decades, it dropped by 3.2 percent points in the first decade and then by less then 2 percent points in each succeeding decade.

It makes as much sense to blame the declining labor-force participation rate on Chuck Berry as the War on Poverty.

But notice also that, from the mid-1950s onward, the labor-force participation rate of white women soared—beginning at 33.4 percent (in 1955), rising to 37.3 percent (in 1964), and peaking at 60.2 percent (in 2007). In the terms set forth by Brooks, that increase in dignity more than makes up for the falling rate for men. And much of the increase for women comes after the War on Poverty is enacted.

Instead of mourning the fall in men’s participation, why isn’t the increase for women deemed a great success by Brooks and other conservatives?

The only possible answer is American conservatives hold a nostalgia—an extremely selective nostalgia—for a particular moment in U.S. history. They envision a white working-class made up of men most of whom are forced to have the freedom to sell their ability to work outside the home, with wives who for the most part stay at home, care for their husbands, and raise future workers. At the same time, conservatives forget about the unions that made it possible for workers to earn a family wage—not to mention the Jim Crow laws and bracero programs that created barriers for black and Hispanic workers to compete for the jobs white working-class men were able to find.

So, no, there never was a Garden of Eden—and, thus, no original sin.