BlogWood: MT Archives

Working class squeeze

Here in Tampa, home of the comically Orwellian Victory Lofts, city living at its finest: dwell in the familiar environment of a Disneyfied urban reality stage set, surrounded by people who look and act just like yourself. Walk to Hooter’s and revel in the big city lifestyle that will make you the envy of all your friends back in Polk County, or Hooterville, or wherever, and rejoice in the fact that you can count yourself as a member of the elite, for, Not Many Can Afford Downtown Housing.

Developer Frank DeBose heads a Hillsborough County board intended to encourage affordable housing, but he doesn't include that type of housing at the Pinnacle Place twin condominium towers he plans downtown.

Requiring developers to include lower-priced homes could discourage them from building in Tampa, said DeBose, chairman of the county's housing finance authority.

Instead, DeBose said, incentives such as tax breaks or other taxpayer-financed subsidies would be a better way to encourage construction of affordable housing.

That pretty much sums up Tampa’s problems: the developers write and enforce the rules. Frank is happy to do the right thing, and take full credit for it, but only if his largesse is financed by taxpayers.

In Miami, an effort for affordable housing is being renewed.

Affordable housing remains elusive for low- and even moderate-wage earners across the country, including South Florida, as monthly rents continue to outpace salaries.

According to a recently released national report, Florida is the 13th least affordable state for rental housing.

Locally, housing advocates vow to resume a six-year push to require builders of new developments to set aside a percentage of units for low-income workers.

If successful, that push could create more mixed-income communities and add needed homes for lower-income families, said John Ise, former director of the South Florida Community Development Coalition.

''We don't need to create exclusively low-income communities, but a good mix,'' Ise said. ``Wealthier communities need to open up and start accepting affordable housing.''

A report released Dec. 20 by the Washington, D.C.-based National Low Income Housing Coalition notes that a Florida worker must earn $15.37 an hour to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment. Even when the state minimum wage jumps to $6.15 an hour this year, that threshold will be about 2 ½ times the new wage.

Meanwhile, the American worker continues to be squeezed.

Teresa Geerling is living the future of life in the middle of the American workforce.

After years cleaning the insides of airplanes and polishing their outsides, Geerling was laid off from American Airlines last year. The job was physically taxing for Geerling, 50, but the nearly $32,000 annual pay and health-care coverage helped provide a typical middle-class life in this small midwestern community.

Now, she works the overnight shift at a local hospital as a nurse's aide while completing course work to be certified as a medical assistant. That would seem to be a smart move, because unlike airlines, which are contracting, health care is one of the industries that many economists believe could generate millions more jobs in the decades to come.

Yet rarely has Geerling's work life been so precarious.

If she can't stay on her husband's health plan, her costs for health insurance offered by the hospital will be $200 a month, more than five times as much as at the airline. There are no pension benefits beyond the option for a 401(k) savings plan and few job protections. She makes $2 an hour less than before; to have a chance at higher pay, she will need to continually train herself in new areas.

Geerling is at the leading edge of changes that herald a new era for millions of people earning around the national average, $17 an hour.

This new era requires that workers shoulder more responsibility and risk on the way to financial security, economists say. It also demands that they be nimble in an increasingly fluid job market. Those who don't obtain some combination of specialized skills, higher education and professional status that can be constantly adapted will be in danger of sliding down the economic ladder to low-paying service jobs, usually without benefits.

Meanwhile, those who secure the middle-class jobs of the 21st century will have to make $17 an hour stretch further than ever as they pay more for health care or risk doing without insurance and assume much or all of the burden for their retirement.
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Over the past two decades, companies have moved en masse away from traditional pensions in which employers pay the cost and employees get a set amount after retiring. Employer-based health care coverage has fallen as well, not just for workers in low-wage jobs, but increasingly for those in middle-class jobs. One analysis estimates that there were 5 million fewer jobs providing health insurance in 2004 than there were just three years earlier. Overall, nearly 1 in 5 full-time workers today goes without health insurance; among part-time workers, it's 1 in 4.

Those who manage to keep their benefits often must pick up their share of the higher cost. Employee contributions for family coverage were 49 percent higher in 2004 than they were in 2001, and contributions for individual coverage were 57 percent higher, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Jobs that provide both a middle-class wage and benefits, even for workers without advanced degrees, still exist, often in union environments. But they're getting harder to find.

The trend of shifting risk and responsibility to the worker is confirmed by a LA Times study.

A broad array of protections that families once depended on to shield them from economic turmoil - stable jobs, widely available health coverage, guaranteed pensions, short unemployment spells, long-lasting unemployment benefits and well-funded job training programs - have been scaled back or have vanished altogether.

"Working Americans are on a financial tightrope," said Yale University political scientist Jacob S. Hacker, who is writing a book called "The Great Risk Shift." "Business and government used to see it as their duty to provide safety nets against the worst economic threats we face. But more and more, they're yanking them away."

And things aren’t like ly to get better any time soon, as the NLRB lists ever rightward.

The Republican-dominated board has made it more difficult for temporary workers to unionize and for unions to obtain financial information from companies during contract talks. It has ruled that graduate students working as teaching assistants do not have the right to unionize at private universities, and it has given companies greater flexibility to use a powerful antiunion weapon - locking out workers - in labor disputes.

And in a decision that will affect 87 percent of American workers, the board has denied nonunion employees the right to have a co-worker present when managers call them in for investigative or disciplinary meetings.

The party-line decisions have been applauded by the Republican Party's business base, which sees them as bringing balance after rulings that favored labor during the Clinton administration. But some academic experts on labor relations say the recent rulings are so hostile to unions and to collective bargaining that they run counter to the goals of the National Labor Relations Act, the 1935 law that gave Americans the right to form unions.