I don’t think that there’s any way for the country to succeed without wage growth and job growth, long term. Unions are simply a way that people get to share in the success, so that it all doesn’t end up among shareholders and executives. – Andy Stern

The Exit Interview – read the whole thing in the Washington Post. 

When Mayor Bloomberg proposed to test reducing poverty by paying for “good behavior”, we thought it was such a bad idea that I went on FOX NEWS to explain our concerns. It seems we had good instincts about this one. 

Back in 2007, we urged the Mayor to instead use his power and influence to improve the local economy by making bad jobs into better jobs, arguing that this would be a more likely way to reduce poverty and benefit the whole community at the same time.

Plus, we noted that this approach would avoid the downside potential of reinforcing the widely held perception that poor behavior is the primary cause of poverty — rather than recognizing the impact of jobs that don’t pay enough and don’t provide benefits, not even paid time off.

Finally, we cheered testing new ideas and taking risks, especially when you engage one of the world’s best research firms to monitor results.

This week, the very qualified and distinguished people at MDRC released the first report on the outcomes of the Mayor’s initiative. 

To his credit, the mayor was careful to announce the mixed (at best) results without blaming the residents of NYC. Instead, he and his staff noted that it’s important to take risks on new strategies. 

“If you never fail, I can tell you, you’ve never tried new, innovative things,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

 Good point.

Back in 2007, we encouraged the mayor to test other ideas — like guaranteeing time off to all workers, as other cities have done.

Strengthening the local labor market by improving jobs would be worth trying now.

Our official research arm – the GAO – just released a new report about access to driving and license suspension. Thanks to Representatives Pete Stark, Jim McDermott, and Gwen Moore for their interest in the impact of state policy and practice on local economic conditions and economic license suspensions!

Mobility Agenda readers know that we encourage policy-maker focus on access to driving and the impact of license suspension on communities, employers, and workers. We’ve hosted a national roundtable and published our research on economic license suspensions. Read more about this topic here.

We’re pleased to see this interest in Congress. Read the report to learn more about promising alternatives to suspension in some places. 

Low-wage workers with access to a reliable car are more likely to work, earn more, and work more hours. So, lack of a driver’s license is a barrier to work. In addition, some jobs – especially in construction and health care – require a license of all applicants. For workers without a license, jobs may be inaccessible because a license is a prerequisite, or because a car is the only means of access to a job far from home. The most common reasons for license suspension and revocation are for non-driving offenses, as states have moved to use the license as a means to enforce other goals and raise revenue. The Mobility Agenda studies strategies to reduce the impact of license loss for economic reasons.

Dear Beth, 

We miss you already.

As others have written in the last few days (see here and here), you had a remarkable impact on labor market policy advocacy.  Your work is especially important because it’s so accessible to a broad audience. 

Of even more benefit – you’ve left so many of us with lessons in making time for the joy.

Our friend E.J. Dionne introduced us at one of his off-the-record, intimate “Friday lunches” at the Brookings Institution. I’d already read your book and the lunch was one of those thrilling DC-life moments for me – the chance to meet and talk with a person whose work I greatly admired.

Not only did you prove to be super smart, but also lovely and so NICE!!!  

Only later – when I’d left my job at Brookings – did I come to realize just how much you could offer to the struggling policy entrepreneur. Most important to my colleagues at The Mobility Agenda and me: you really truly understood and supported our effort to change the conversation about poverty and low-wage work. This support made such a difference to us —- especially when you agreed to moderate one of our most visible events: Lessons from the UK and US: Developing Goals for Economic Mobility, Social Inclusion, and Employment.

Your encouragement of the staff and friends of The Mobility Agenda meant so much to us. We loved having you join our planning sessions and we benefitted enormously from your strategic thinking about policy and politics.

We’ll always remember the encouragement and enthusiasm you offered so generously and so often.

But, my favorite memories are not those of our shared vision for the work.

No – instead I’m moved most by your suggestion to take time off to hear the music.

One week, you told me that we needed to hear the National Symphony on a Friday afternoon. So, on a gorgeous sunny day, we met for lunch outside the Kennedy Center and then went to listen to some glorious music.

You were so right – it was an important thing to do.

Beth, I want to do my best to honor both your commitment to the work and to taking the time for the music in life. Thank you for sharing these gifts with us all. Inspired by you and the difficult reminder that time is so precious, I will take an afternoon soon and often for music, dance, theatre, storytelling, galleries…joy.

Gratefully, your admirer, 

Margy Waller
Executive Director
The Mobility Agenda

Precious, the movie, has been getting a lot of attention – and some of my friends recommend it highly. But, I’ve been resisting. A.O. Scott, in his commentary Two Movies, Two Routes From Poverty, confirms my inclination to avoid. I waited years to see Pursuit of Happyness for the same reason. That film made me cry, but it also made me mad. Scott points out the problem of movies about poverty: they usually focus (by necessity) on the story of the individual and thereby obscure the systemic issues. I just mostly get annoyed seeing movies that reinforce the problematic, widespread assumption that a little more charity and/or personal responsibility will solve the problem. Where do people get those ideas? From….uh, the movies!!

Raina Kelley, in an essay in Newsweek, took a more ambivalent, less incendiary view, noting that the movie’s intense focus on an individual’s terrible story blunted its potential to make a larger statement. “I wish I could agree with those who say ‘Precious’ is just one more movie that feeds our vision of ourselves as victims,” she wrote. “Even that would have been better than what lies underneath: the fact that black people have begun to accept as unchangeable the lot of those stuck in the ghetto.”

And this is a critique that might extend to “The Blind Side” as well. Both movies tell stories that suggest a way out of poverty, brutality and domestic calamity for certain lucky individuals while saying very little about how those conditions might be changed. For all their differences, they ultimately occupy a common ground that is both optimistic and, at the same time, curiously defeatist. Both locate the problems facing their main characters in the failure of families — of mothers in particular — and find solutions in better families, substitute mothers (Ms. Rain and Leigh Anne), whose selflessness and loyalty exorcise the biological monsters who have been left behind. The fact that “The Blind Side” is based on a true story lends credibility to this sentimental idea.

Left or right, black or white, Americans love happy endings. Overcoming adversity is our national pastime, especially when it can also be a spectator sport. And we love stories of heroic educators, coaches and moms — Michelle Pfeiffer in “Dangerous Minds,” Edward James Olmos in “Stand and Deliver” — who change the lives of poor, marginalized children by teaching them hard work and self esteem. Let me be clear: I’m not disparaging either “Precious” or “The Blind Side,” even though I think “Precious” is a much better movie. They are both sincere and serious, and if they serendipitously share a premise, they also share a blind spot, which is hardly theirs alone.

At the end of “Precious” the heroine shoulders her burden and sets off to make her way in the world, a conclusion that may be objectively bleak — Precious is an H.I.V.-positive teenage mother who has only recently learned to read and write — but that fills the audience with a sense of hard-won redemption. We believe she will be all right because we would rather believe that than confront the failures of institutions, programs and collective will that leave so many other Preciouses unrescued.

John Edwards “says his explicit framing of poverty was never intended as a winning campaign tactic.”

In this review of the recent history of policital talk about poverty for American Prospect magazine, Alec MacGillis talks to John Edwards and many others (including – full disclosure – your blogger).

Many of those interviewed seem to think that unless we use the word “poverty”, we aren’t really talking about it. I’m left wondering what the policy and think tank mafia will make of the history.

Click here to download the full report

In good times and bad, workers at the front lines of many of today’s firms bear the brunt of fluctuations in demand for services and products through reductions in hours. Even before the current recession, today’s employers faced strong pressure to contain, if not minimize, labor costs, especially in industries, such as the service sector, where labor is a principal expenditure. Local communities suffer when residents’ jobs are unstable and their earnings unpredictable. In this report, Susan J. Lambert and Julia R. Henly of the University of Chicago highlight several targets for intervention—ranging from improving employer scheduling practices to enacting new legislation—which could enhance the quality of jobs for hourly workers and, in turn, the quality of life in local communities. 

Click here to download the full report

by Research Associate Jonny Finity

As the US economy slips further into recession and more workers – with collars of every color – are faced with unemployment, many political leaders and media outlets are falling deeper into the quicksand of poverty rhetoric. Some policymakers read from their well-worn scripts, helpless in the face of economic decline, while the news media sprints to keep up with breaking stories of employers scaling back hours and pay, or hard-working families losing their jobs and falling through “the safety net.” But then, this is what happens during a recession, isn’t it? Spending is down, prices are up, and there’s little that anyone can do about it. In a souring economy, employers have no choice but to cut back their workers’ hours and wages…right?

On the contrary, say Eileen Appelbaum and Tsedeye Gebreselassie in a recent article in the New Jersey Star Ledger, raising wages – specifically, the minimum wage – is a key policy tool for helping low-wage workers, as well as the overall economy, to bounce back from just such a recession. They highlighted a recommendation coming out of New Jersey, where the current minimum wage is just $7.15 per hour, or $14,782 a year:

The state’s minimum wage advisory commission, chaired by Gov. Corzine’s labor commissioner…called on the legislature to restore New Jersey’s minimum wage to $8.50 – closer to its value before it started to slide – and to guarantee annual cost-of-living increases to prevent the minimum wage from falling each year.

We have already seen good evidence that the minimum wage doesn’t have the adverse economic effects its critics claim, and can actually have positive effects on the labor market, workers, and the overall economy. In fact, since the minimum wage acts as a floor for overall wages, raising it could go a long way in improving our long-term prospects for economic recovery. Over 40 million jobs – or about 1 in 3 – pay low wages of $11 or less, and this has been the case since even before the recession started. With an economy that’s so reliant on low-wage workers who often lack benefits, it’s no wonder that our economic success was so fragile. Raising the minimum wage would be sending a signal to the rest of the world that we are committed to turning things around. As the article’s authors say,

A strong minimum wage is not only crucial for helping low-income families make ends meet, it is one of the best ways to stimulate the consumer spending that drives the state’s economy.  A minimum wage increase goes directly to those New Jerseyans who will spend it immediately – because they have to – on basic necessities like food, fuel, rent, clothing and transportation.  A recent study by Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago economists confirmed that minimum wage increases boost consumer spending substantially more than tax cuts do.  This is spending that goes directly into local businesses and the local economy.  

So while low-wage workers may seem to be the ones benefiting from any increase in the minimum wage, the effects are far-reaching. Raising the minimum wage is good for our communities and local economies.

In fact, the minimum wage’s twin functions as cushion for working families and fiscal stimulus have been recognized from the beginning.  As the nation struggled through the Great Depression in 1938, Franklin Roosevelt called for adoption of the first federal minimum wage as “an essential part of economic recovery.”  By increasing the purchasing power of those workers “who have the least of it today,” he explained, “the purchasing power of the Nation as a whole – can be still further increased, (and) other happy results will flow from such an increase.”

We, especially our politicians and media outlets, should not look at a minimum wage increase as merely a job support for low-wage workers.  It’s an effective policy lever that can help rebuild the economy from the ground up – the economy in which we all live and work. It is a policy that affects all of us.

In a new report released by The Mobility Agenda, the authors, Martha Ross, Sarah Sattelmeyer, and Margy Waller, find that national decisionmakers should promote worker moves into opportunity neighborhoods.

Click here to see the full report 

“The U.S. economy, workplace, workforce, and labor market have changed radically in the last 50 years, yet public and private policies have not kept up with the changes, contributing to a spatial mismatch between the location of jobs and the neighborhoods and communities in which workers reside. As our nation’s spatial layout continues to change, so must policies and practices in order to strengthen our economy,” say the co-authors of this report.

“State and local leaders can support and pursue federal recommendations in order to provide greater access to opportunity neighborhoods for their area’s workers,” explained Margy Waller, executive director of The Mobility Agenda. “These policies would support workers making voluntary moves and encourage others to make such moves,” she added.

The authors of Employment and Housing Mobility: Promising Practices for the Twenty-First Century Economy examine housing assistance and mobility initiatives as well as illustrate practices and policies that hold promise of success for low-wage workers moving to opportunity neighborhoods. The authors offer examples of successful mobility initiatives and provide recommendations for federal, state, and local policies.