Jessica Goodheart
In the shadow of downtown, in a maze of busy offices, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) is gearing up for a fight or five. Today, it’s focusing the spotlight on the county’s poor by delving into the U.S. Census’s annual poverty survey. Jessica Goodheart, looking a little frazzled the day before the group’s report would be issued, took time out to walk us through it.
--Rebecca Schoenkopf
L.A. CityBeat: Give us a little bit of background on your group.
Jessica Goodheart: We’re a nonprofit organization, and we do research and advocacy on issues that affect low-wage workers and the working poor. This is a report we do annually on the census data.
So they release this information every year, not with the 10-year census. What’s their protocol?
Yes, this is an annual survey, a household survey. In other surveys, the sample size is too small to tell us about L.A. County and L.A. city.
Was there anything in the census data that shocked you, or are you beyond being shocked?
What shocked me is that almost one-third of full-time workers earn less than $25 thousand a year, and we have so many living here who are not able to meet basic needs. We use the federal government’s measure of poverty, which is $20,650 for a family of four.
The federal poverty line is the same whether you live in Arkansas or L.A., right? They don’t take into account cost of living? I mean, you could probably live a lot better on $20 thousand there than here.
Right. The cost of living in Los Angeles is 49 percent higher than in the rest of the country. And it hasn’t been updated to take into account the growing cost of health care, childcare ... .
Food ...
Yes, especially recently, food. Workers in the U.S. have not seen the benefits of economic growth. Since ’95, we’ve become extremely productive, the economy has, but workers have not realized those gains, and in fact of all industrialized nations, the U.S. has the highest levels of inequality. In Los Angeles, inequality is even higher. The poverty rates are higher. Individuals in poverty – this is 2006 data, but if you look at individuals in poverty, it’s 15 percent in Los Angeles.
What’s the national rate?
Nationally, in 2006, it was 13 percent. We use twice the federal poverty threshold as a more accurate measure of poverty. If you use that measure, about 38 percent of county residents don’t make enough to meet their basic needs: food, clothes, housing, health care.
Lack of health care reaches up into the middle class too, though.
A huge part of the problem is jobs don’t pay enough in Los Angeles, and the solution to the problem of high rates of poverty is also about rebuilding the middle class, and involves solving the problem of health care.
Wasn’t the poverty rate 20 percent here under Clinton? Is it falling? Or was that 20 percent for children in poverty?
One in five children are living under what I’d call extreme poverty in L.A. County.
So that number remains static.
Yes.
Does the media show any interest in your reports?
This report has a particular hook because the Census is reporting the data, so newspapers will cover it, but I think the issue of poverty is under-covered in the media. We estimate there are about 3.7 million county residents who can’t meet their basic needs.
I also think there’s some positive developments: Because the problem is so severe, we’ve seen a lot of excellent programs. For example, the security officers, who are largely African American, won a contract that improves their compensation rates roughly 40 percent. There are campaigns to improve standards for truck drivers, hotel workers, airline service workers; the city itself has innovated by passing policies like the living wage ordinance ... .
But I was at an action at the airport, where workers are covered by the living wage ordinance, but it hasn’t been raised or updated, so once again they can’t get by.
Much more needs to be done. We’ve made a start ... .
What about the dichotomy in services between neighborhoods? My mom used to teach at 61st Street School, and right in front of the building was a dog that had been torn apart by other dogs. It sat there for something like three days, and they couldn’t get the city to come pick it up.
When you’re working several jobs, struggling to put food on the table, it’s harder to organize and demand the kind of services other neighborhoods have. But there are a lot of groups that are organizing, and making a difference!
When people see it’s the janitor from their building, or the food service worker who serves their food every day, and they see how they’re being exploited, they’re outraged. That explains the success of Justice for Janitors, for example.
Well, that, and it was very well-organized!
To go back to the statistics, the U.S. is the most unequal among industrialized nations; coincidentally, it also has the lowest levels of people covered by collective bargaining. That percolates through society.
Published: 08/27/2008
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great great great great article. good questions! good answers!
brava!