UNION WEEK: ALL THE LOW-WAGE JOBS

Okay, here's "Union Week" Installment One... sorry it took so long, but I've been digging up some numbers for you.

Take a look at this chart of Cuyahoga County workers in occupations with median wages of less than $9 an hour. (The data is from the state's Labor Market Information website.)

If you're not statistically inclined, remember than the "median wage" is the midpoint for its category -- half of all the workers in that occupation make less than that amount, and half make more. So the chart tells us (for example) that at the beginning of 2003 Cuyahoga County had 21,030 people working as cashiers, and that half of them -- 10,515 -- earned $7.22 an hour or less.

The occupations listed all had more than a thousand workers. They included about 121,000 of the county's 625,000 employed persons -- about one-fifth of our local jobs. Another 4,000 people worked in fifteen smaller low-median-wage occupations, ranging from veterinary assistants ($7.07) to movie projectionists ($8.21), barbers ($8.40) and sewing machine operators ($8.98).

A "full time job" generally means between 35 and 40 paid hours a week, or 1,820 to 2,080 paid hours annually. So the median annual pay of the 125,000 Cuyahoga County workers in these occupations ranged from $11,700 to $18,700, assuming full-time year-round work.

Why have I picked "below $9 an hour" as a rough equivalent for "low-wage" employment? Of course it's somewhat arbitrary, but here are three reasons:

1) The gross pay of someone working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, for $9 an hour is less than the 2004 Federal poverty guideline of $18,850 for a family of four. (That's why Cleveland's Fair Employment Wage is currently set at $9.66).

2) $9 an hour ($18,360 a year) is also a less than half of the average pay for all persons employed in Cuyahoga County ($39,498 in 2003, according to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics). So $9 an hour is a pretty good dividing line for the bottom quarter of the county's wage structure -- in fact, it's probably closer to the bottom fifth.

3) Finally, and most important here, I think $9 to $10 an hour is the lowest hourly wage that allows a Cleveland family with two full-time earners and a couple of kids to have a thrifty but functional lifestyle without going into debt. In other words, a hardworking two-parent family in this city needs to make $35,000 to $40,000 a year ($9-10 an hour for two fulltime earners) just to get to the "takeoff point" for significant personal savings. And the wage needed by a single parent to get to this same point is even higher -- close to $15 an hour.

(Adjusting for inflation, this is very similar to the Economic Policy Institute's 1999 "basic family budget" calculation for the Cleveland area.)

Am I saying that lower-wage workers can never save money? Of course not. Many Clevelanders manage to put something aside while making beds, ringing cash registers and waiting tables for a living -- through heroic household management, second and third jobs, grandparental support, etc. But it's a very difficult trick to pull off... and not one that we can reasonably expect from the majority of households in this situation.

So why does it matter? I'll get to that in my next installment.

One more thing:

According to ODJFS projections, four out of the five occupations with the most annual job openings in the Cleveland SMSA from now through 2010 are on the low-wage list:

Cashiers
Retail salespersons
Combined food preparation & serving workers, including fast food
Waiters and waitresses

In fact, the combined 5,995 annual openings in these four occupations represent one out of every seven jobs projected for the Cleveland-Lorain region.

And please note: they're in two industries -- retail and restaurants -- whose growth is most dominated by national chains, and whose managers are most averse to unions.

CITY CLUB "NEW LEADERS" DEBATE: "Unions in Northeast Ohio: Fueling the Economy or Applying the Brakes?"

John Ryan of the Cleveland AFL-CIO versus Richard Leukart of Baker and Hostetler on "the relevance and role of unions in the future of Northeast Ohio's economy"... next Wednesday, February 2.

Leukart's profile at the Baker and Hostetler website features his expertise in "union avoidance" and says:

He has substantial experience in concession and cost reduction bargaining and has managed strikes and concurrent negotiations including temporary and permanent replacement of employees and the creation of non-union departments from unionized sub-departments.

So it's Cleveland's #1 union booster, in the ring with a proud pinstriped union buster. This should be one of the City Club season's hot tickets ($20 for non-members... get your reservation in now!)

But can we expect any light on the subject -- or just flamethrowers and advocacy-group statistics at twenty paces?

Maybe a little prior discussion would help.

People who read this blog know that I think Cleveland needs more unionization... especially in the sectors which employ the most low-income, undereducated Cleveland residents, like big-box retail, hotels, food service, building maintenance and security services. I think we need unions, not just for reasons of economic and legal fairness -- though those are perfectly good reasons -- but to advance the more fashionable goals of wealth creation and resurgent entrepreneurism.

The City Club debate is a good excuse to spend a few entries on why I hold this strange opinion. So, from now till next Wednesday, it's "Union Week" at Cleveland Diary.

Let me start with two simple propositions:

1. In general, a community gains wealth to the extent that a) its members create economic value, and b) the economic value created by its members becomes their income.

2. The cure for poverty is not more work (as any slave can tell you), but more wealth.

Continued tomorrow.

NEW OHIO JOB WATCH FROM POLICY MATTERS:

Ohio did not gain jobs in 2004, and employment now is lower than at any point since the 1990s. According to the latest seasonally adjusted payroll numbers issued Jan. 21 by the Ohio Department of Job & Family Services, the state has lost 200 jobs since December, 2004. Gains reported earlier in 2004 have been wiped out by job losses since then.

INTERESTING NEW BLOG from Toledo City Councilman Frank Szollosi -- at szollositoledo.blogspot.com.

Did you know there's a website devoted to dead shopping malls?

SOCIAL SECURITY -- THERE IS NO CRISIS.

Locally, "Advocates at work to keep Social Security unchanged".

WAL-MART'S EFFECT ON LOCAL POVERTY: The next reporter to interview Mayor Campbell, Economic Development Director Greg Huth, or any member of the Cleveland City Planning Commission really should ask them if they read this recent study from Penn State before signing off on a Steelyard Commons plan that's almost certain to include a Wal-Mart Supercenter:

Wal-Mart and County-Wide Poverty
by Stephan Goetz and Hema Swaminathan, Penn State University, October 2004

The presence of a Wal-Mart store hinders a community's ability to move families out of poverty, according to this study. After controlling for other factors that influence poverty rates, the researchers found that those U.S. counties in which new Wal-Mart stores were built between 1987 and 1998 experienced a significantly smaller reduction in their poverty rates than those counties that did not add new Wal-Mart stores.

(Abstract from Hometown Advantage.)

MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY: It's now almost thirty-seven years since King was assassinated in Memphis. He was there to support a strike against the city by AFSCME Local 1733, a union of African-American sanitation workers seeking recognition and better pay.

A year earlier, King said this to members of Hospital Workers Local 1199 in New York:

When there is massive unemployment in the black community, it is called a social problem. But when there is massive unemployment in the white community, it is called a Depression.

We look around every day and we see thousands and millions of people making inadequate wages. Not only do they work in our hospitals, they work in our hotels, they work in our laundries, they work in domestic service, they find themselves underemployed. You see, no labor is really menial unless you're not getting adequate wages.

Now there's a text to preach on today in Cleveland... thirty-seven years later.

BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S MAJOR ATTACK ON COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT FINALLY ARRIVES: After four years of incremental pressure on Federal programs that fund community development in cities like Cleveland, the Bush White House has apparently decided it's time for a major assault. From a story in yesterday's Washington Post (free registration required):

The White House will seek to drastically shrink the Department of Housing and Urban Development's $8 billion community branch, purging dozens of economic development projects, scrapping a rural housing program and folding high-profile anti-poverty efforts into the Labor and Commerce departments, administration officials said yesterday.

... Congressional housing aides say the $4.7 billion Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program -- the bulk of the community planning budget -- could be cut as much as 50 percent. Cities have become dependent on HUD's development programs, especially the CDBG, which has existed for 30 years, city officials said.

The Community Development Block Grant has been the financial cornerstone of neighborhood revitalization in Cleveland since the mayoralty of Ralph Perk. Our recent City budgets include nearly $30 million a year in CDBG funds, as well as $7 or $8 million in "HOME" funds for housing development and additional HUD grants for programs for the homeless and victims of AIDS. CDBG money pays the bills for the whole Community Development Department (including building and housing inspectors), most of our community development corporations, many community-based social service programs (senior centers, crime watch, community gardens, community arts, even some computer centers), and a piece of virtually every grassroots housing or commercial development initiative.

In short, the proposed gutting of HUD and CDBG is a very big threat to Cleveland's future.

If you care at all about community revitalization in Cleveland -- or Toledo, or Columbus, or Akron, or Dayton, or Cincinnati, or Lorain, or any other city of any size anywhere in the U.S. -- now is the time for a scream of indignation in the direction of Senators Voinovich and DeWine. I mean right now, today. And tell your friends to do the same. This baby must die in the cradle!

Contact info for Voinovich is here. DeWine's is here.

"Senator, where do you stand on the Bush Administration's reported plan to take community development programs away from HUD and make major reductions in CDBG funding to Ohio communities?"

Please, do it now. And if you get a reply, please let me know.

Update... A reader wrote back that she had trouble using the email forms on Senator Voinovich's and DeWine's website contact pages, which are linked above. If you have the same problem, you can try these regular email addresses:

senator_voinovich@voinovich.senate.gov
senator_dewine@dewine.senate.gov
I'm sure everything ends up in the same staff routing system.

SBC TV = DIGITAL REDLINING?

If you saw Chris Seper's story in the PD Friday about SBC's plan to start offering TV-over-internet ("IPTV"), you should also take a look at this:

Ministers Denounce SBC Internet-Cable TV Push as 'Digital Redlining'

SBC's announced $6 billion program to deliver high-speed Internet and cable TV over fiber-optic phone lines will target affluent customers, amounting to redlining of disadvantaged communities, the Ministerial Alliance Against the Digital Divide (MAADD) charged today.

"This is another discriminatory scheme disguised as technological progress by SBC," said Reverend James L. Demus III, co-director of MAADD. "These so- called investment proposals by SBC come with one fat string attached: no franchise agreement, and thus no requirement to invest in an entire community versus only the wealthy parts."

"This is nothing short of digital redlining. SBC is planning to deprive poorer customers of access to $6 billion in vital new technology," continued Demus. "We urge municipalities to stand firm and demand that SBC sign contracts that require it not to cherry-pick customers."

The $6 billion in investment by SBC is sure to almost completely bypass poor and minority neighborhoods -- SBC's own briefings to investors and analysts show the company intends to bring its new services to only five percent of what it calls "low-value customers" while targeting 90 percent of high-spending customers.

The ministers' group cannot have been reassured by the Reuters story on SBC's initiative:

Not yet clear is the issue of regulation, and whether municipalities will seek to force franchise agreements on SBC for its local service as they do with cable companies.

... And the issue is already on the mind of the regulator-in-chief, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell.

Powell said IPTV posed challenges for U.S. regulators who are used to regulating new technologies in distinct categories, whereas IPTV blurs boundaries between television, Internet and cable.

"If you are SBC and you deploy IPTV are you a cable company? Are you a telephone company? Are you a satellite company?" he said in a question-and-answer session at the show.

If that's what's on Michael Powell's mind, there's going to be a problem for municipalities -- and that problem will show up almost immediately on the doorstep of Cleveland City Hall. One of the Powell FCC's abiding interests has been to reduce local communities' cable franchising powers. Cleveland, still one of SBC's major markets and with our cable franchise with Adelphia up for review next year, may well become a test market for FCC/industry initiatives aimed at taking local government out of the "converged media" game completely.

TUBBS-JONES HAS SENATE SUPPORT FOR CHALLENGE ON OHIO ELECTORAL VOTE TODAY: According to Keith Olbermann's blog at MSNBC...

Nothing is in writing and daybreak is a long way away, but it appeared all but certain in early evening Wednesday that House Democrats had secured the support of up to half a dozen Senators to formally challenge the Electoral College slate from Ohio, when the votes are opened before a joint session of Congress tomorrow.

Congressional sources tell this reporter that the house half of the written objection — which has the declared support of more than a dozen Representatives — is expected to be signed by Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio...

As it is, a written challenge would require the joint session to suspend for several hours, during which the Senate and the House would meet separately and debate the merits of the objection.

The ad hoc group formed by Representative John Conyers of Michigan has also today published its staff report, concluding that before, during, and after the election in Ohio, many state laws may have been broken, in every area ranging from the allocation of voting machines, election day "anomalies," and the recount. It recommended a formal Congressional inquiry, and additional legislation to reform voting laws.

The full Conyers report (House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff, Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio) is available as a pdf file here.

Update: Representative Tubbs-Jones has a letter in the PD today in which she says, among other things:

... this objection does not have at its root the hope or even the hint of overturning or challenging the victory of the president, but it is a necessary, timely and appropriate opportunity to review and remedy the most precious process in our democracy.

You have to scroll down from the link to find Tubbs-Jones' letter. While you're at it, be sure to read the first and third letters, from (respectively) Geoff Beckman and Judy Gallo. Here's Geoff's, with a link added:

Tuesday's editorial screed ("Please, let it go") about "beating a dead horse" omits one critical fact: There is absolutely no point at which voting authorities in the state of Ohio - or The Plain Dealer - considered the horse to be alive.

For four solid months prior to the election, nonpartisan voter registration groups in almost every county expressed concern about the boards of elections' visible lack of preparation for what would obviously be an extremely high turnout. But reports of 120-day delays in processing registrations, voters being improperly removed from the election rolls, unreturned phone calls, unmailed postcards and lack of response to questions about preparations were brushed aside. Words like "alarmist," "unnecessary" and "premature" were employed, because the horse had not been born yet.

The day after the election, the Ohio secretary of state and this newspaper announced that statewide voting had gone smoothly, with no major errors. The horse, we were informed, had died a peaceful, natural death.

Would The Plain Dealer be kind enough to inform citizens who have concerns about how voting is handled in Ohio exactly when they may be permitted to air their concerns without being scolded?

I second that emotion.

USA TODAY: "BELLS DIG IN TO DOMINATE HIGH-SPEED INTERNET REALM"

It's the dark side of the fiber story.

The regional Bell companies have made much of their billion-dollar plans to run broadband networks across the USA. Yet they're also quietly trying to erect hurdles that would make it hard — or expensive — for anyone to compete with them.

Besides municipalities... the Bells are going after their phone rivals, Internet carriers and major metro areas — anyone with an interest in building services that might compete with the Bells.

Critics say the Bells' efforts are an attack on competition and that consumers could be the big losers.

"If municipal governments and others are blocked from entering this market, the vast majority of Americans are going to wind up on the wrong side of the digital divide, because they will be unable to afford high-speed services," says Gene Kimmelman of Consumers Union.

More from Esme Vos at MuniWireless...

ROLDO WANTS ROKAKIS TO RUN: Roldo Bartimole has an interesting column in today's Cool Cleveland urging County Treasurer Jim Rokakis to run for Mayor even if his polling shows he can't win.

With all respect to Roldo, it's not the greatest career move to run a citywide campaign you're pretty sure you can't win, just to have a platform. And Roldo's concluding challenge to Rokakis, "What else do you have to do as you reach your 50th year?", has an obvious answer: Keep being a good County Treasurer. The pay's good, you're in a position to make good things happen, and 50 ain't that old.

But I have to admit, listening to Rokakis explain his hospital "payment in lieu of taxes" proposal on WCPN the other day, I was thinking the same thing -- and had a pang of disappointment when he said he'd decided not to run. Lucid, sensible, unrhetorical discussion of complex issues is a scarce commodity in Cleveland politics at any level these days. Rokakis does have a talent for it... and a knack for finding actual policy innovations to talk about.

In a rational world, his fellow Democrats would be looking for ways to promote and develop this talent as a strength for the party. But in the screwed-up world we have, elected Democrats mostly see each other as competitors -- so the only way a Rokakis can get new ideas or approaches taken seriously outside his own own fiefdom is to run for another office.

I assume Rokakis' information and judgment about his chances are better than Roldo's or mine. I don't think I would waste my time and money running for a job I don't think I can win. But hey, I know where Roldo's coming from.

WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE? I went to the Cleveland School Board meeting tonight to watch them take the first step in the campaign to pass an operating levy in May, i.e. they passed a resolution listing the next round of cuts that will happen if a tax increase doesn't. Among the highlights:

... fourteen schools closed next year
... $10 million in security cuts
... $8 million worth of additional layoffs
... more cuts in arts, transportation, college counseling, extracurriculars and
... cuts in varsity sports (so long Tarblooders?)

So there we were in the School District Board room, with big decisions being made about the financial future of a critical public system, a crowd of citizens worried about it, and lots of speechmaking that could only be called political. Democracy in action, right?

Except... there wasn't a single elected official in the room.

"IT'S HARD TO OVERSTATE HOW GRIM THINGS LOOK FOR THE CLEVELAND SCHOOLS THIS YEAR."

Plain Dealer education columnist Chris Sheridan had a sharp, scary piece yesterday in which she said some things out loud that insiders have been saying very quietly up to now:

Barbara Byrd-Bennett will soon be gone.

The levy defeat in November showed that Byrd-Bennett has already lost a lot of her political luster, leaving the school system without effective public leadership. (Sheridan doesn't mention that BBB's big slide has been with African-American voters, whose support in Wards 1 through 10 fell from over 80% in the 2001 bond levy vote to only 55% this time.)

"The downward spiral started more than a year ago, when city leaders squandered the prime electoral opportunity posed by the November 2003 ballot... Rather than capitalizing on the chance to secure the district's finances, leaders allowed dithering over a convention center to stall all other progress."

Sheridan doesn't name the "city leaders" responsible, probably because the list is too long. Cleveland Tomorrow, the Growth Association, the County Commissioners, labor leaders, and her own newspaper would all be near the top. But the Mayor is on there, too... and so are Byrd-Bennett and the mayor-appointed School Board, if only through their complicit silence.

In not naming these names, Sheridan's otherwise dead-on analysis obscures a crucial point: The schools' political failure in 2003-04, and the "controversy, confrontation and, ultimately, chaos" they face in 2005 as their leadership and finances continue to shred, represent the failure of a system, not just a few individuals. We're now experiencing the first big test of the governance model known as "mayoral control" -- the "reform" system that was supposed to centralize accountability, eliminate petty politics, and empower professional management of the schools.

And mayoral control (which I personally voted to continue two years ago, along with 72% of my fellow voters) appears to be flunking that test.