Baltimore Sun

Elijah Cummings: PBS’ Documentary ‘Waging A Living’ Another Wake-Up Call on Plight of Working Poor

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

I will never forget a lesson that my parents once taught me about growing up black and poor in this country. "Work hard, Elijah," they counseled, "and you can get ahead, despite all of the hardship and prejudice that you will face."

Hard work and faith in this promise carried my parents and their seven children on a journey from the fields of America's South to a measure of security and success. Fifty years later, however, many Americans must be asking whether our national belief in the power of work remains true.

As I leave my home early each morning, headed toward my job in Washington, I often see neighbors who are waiting for the buses that will carry them to work. When I have a few moments to spare, I stop, and we talk about their lives.

These neighbors seldom complain. All too often, however, there is something haunted and searching in their eyes. They are desperately searching for a way to pay for the food, housing, health care, and better education that their families need.

Along with the other 30 million Americans who work hard every day -- but are losing ground -- the promise that hard work will bring my neighbors economic security is being challenged, all too often, by harsh reality.

Economists call them America's "working poor." Caught between high prices and low wages, they often work two or even three jobs because their employment does not pay them enough to cover the basic necessities that their families need.

A deep chasm has been torn in the social fabric of American society, a rendering of our national character revealed in the recent PBS documentary, "Waging a Living."

The film tells the stories of some everyday American heroes: Jean Reynolds, who must care for a daughter with cancer; Jerry Longoria and the trials that he has faced after losing his job as a security guard; Barbara Brooks and her fight with the very government agencies that were created to help Americans in her circumstances, and Mary Venittelli, whose divorce threatened to throw her children into poverty.

When hard-working people are working two or even three jobs just to keep food on the family table -- and still cannot afford the decent housing and health insurance that their families need -- there is something desperately wrong.

As a nation, we must ask ourselves whether we still value the power and promise of hard work. Will the social contract that has kept Americans united and moving forward since the time of the Great Depression and the New Deal be honored in the years to come?

I recognize that the answers to a number of these challenges do not rest solely in the sphere of government. For example, faith-based organizations are playing a significant role in encouraging greater commitment by parents to the support of their children.

Still, in this election year, we do well to focus our national attention upon those aspects of "Waging a Living" that require more far-sighted and effective public policies.

During the last six years, the growing disparities in American wages and the deepening shortage of well-paying jobs that offer workers health care and pension guarantees have been ignored by the Bush administration and its Republican allies in the Congress.

House Republicans have fought our efforts to increase the minimum wage since 1997 -- when the actual debate should be about how best to assure a true living wage for all working families.

Congressional Republicans have short-changed the job training, childcare, housing assistance and other public investments that could make a positive difference in so many American lives.

These failings are not only amoral. They are unwise.

As the respected economist Jared Bernstein, has observed, "One of the key lessons we learned from welfare reform ... is that if you have a generous set of work supports that helps smooth and facilitate the path from poverty into work and if you raise that path with [policies that enhance workers' skill levels], most people will respond, and most people's living standards will rise."

The time for a principled, practical and focused national conversation about the value that this nation is willing to place on hard work is long overdue. America needs a serious debate about our commitment to creating good jobs that pay a living wage and offer benefits, about universal access to high quality health care and affordable housing. I am convinced that most Americans are ready for this conversation.

As the late Sen. Paul Wellstone once counseled, "People yearn for a 'politics of the center' -- not for 'the center' so widely discussed by politicians and pundits in Washington -- but rather a politics that speaks to the center of people's lives: affordable child care, good education for children, health security, living-wage jobs that will support families, respect for the environment and human rights, and clean elections and clean campaigns."

America's working poor are our promise, not our problem. Both our national self-interest and our morality demand that we make their dreams our own.

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Congressman Elijah E. Cummings represents Maryland's Seventh Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives. He is the immediate past chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus.