Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

It is encouraging that the people who saw the worst losses in the years since the Great Recession—specifically African Americans and Hispanics—saw the biggest earnings gains for the second consecutive year. Real median incomes increased 5.7 percent to $39,490 among African Americans and 4.3 percent to $47,675 among Hispanics. But the racial income gap is still stark—the median income among non-Hispanic whites stands at $65,041.

Source: Economic Policy Institute.

The racial wage gap also persists as black men earned 71 cents for every dollar earned by white men in 2016, and Hispanic men earn 66 cents on the dollar. Among women, it has actually grown worse since 2007: Black women now earn 79 cents for every dollar earned by white women, and Hispanic women earn 69 cents on the dollar.

It is therefore not surprising that although poverty rates for all groups were down, they remain highest among African Americans (22 percent) and Hispanics (19.4 percent), compared with whites (8.8 percent). African American and Hispanic children continue to face the highest poverty rates at nearly 31 percent and 27 percent, respectively. African American children are three times more likely to be in poverty than white children.

Source: Economic Policy Institute.

While the Census releases new data every September, it is notable that the solutions remain the same every year: People need investments in quality training and good jobs in their communities; they need a safety net that protects our basic living standards for food, housing, health care, retirement (Social Security); they need access to good schools and higher education; they need child care that doesn’t cost more than a year of college tuition; and they need a minimum wage that isn’t a poverty wage.

Many of the key policies that helped people in poverty achieve some gains are at stake in upcoming congressional debates on the budget. Conservatives will continue to go after the investments that cut poverty in half year-in and year-out, such as Medicaid and affordable health care. They will call for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, even though the wealthiest 5 percent already captured 22.5 percent of all income last year. Nowhere on the agenda is there discussion of a just minimum wage and a real jobs plan that would target those who continue to struggle at the economic margins—disproportionately people of color—doing low-wage or unpaid work.

Recent gains need to be protected in the current political environment, but we also need to stay focused on a vision of how every man, woman, and child has the opportunity to fully participate in our economy and thrive.

Although the explicitly discriminatory policies and practices that created these disparities are now illegal—thanks in part to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed employment and pay discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin—the inequities persist. That’s because many of the channels through which opportunity is passed, like social networks, are shaped by biases based on race and gender. Regardless of whether these biases are conscious or subconscious, patterns of old-fashioned segregation stand in the way of eradicating them.

Recently, I gained some profound insight into this phenomenon from a most unlikely place: a second-grade music class.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

The fact that it was a music class in a racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse elementary school offered a powerful symbolism. Here were kids from two different classrooms, with distinct cultures, family backgrounds, and personalities blending their voices together in harmony. Yet, even with the freedom to sit almost anywhere they chose, the students self-segregated by race and gender to a large degree. This seemed innocent enough at first. After all, it’s human nature to gravitate toward those we share more in common with or with whom we feel most comfortable. However, the broader implications of this tendency became more evident as the class went on.

Halfway through the period, the kids began an exercise in which one student would bounce a ball to the rhythm of the song the class was singing. Each time they finished a verse, that student would pass the ball on to someone else to continue the song. After a few rounds, one of the girls in the class spoke up about the fact that the boys were only passing the ball to other boys. When the teacher asked if other people had noticed the same thing, every girl and even a few boys in the class agreed. After enlisting the students to come up with a solution to make the game fairer to those who had been excluded, the exercise resumed under the new rules. Shortly after, another student mentioned that only students from one classroom were getting the ball. By the time they worked through that problem, time had run out for them to complete the exercise.

There were at least three important takeaways from this simple example that can be applied to the way we perceive and address race and gender inequities in this country.

• The costs of inequality and discrimination may be more heavily born by those who have been discriminated against, but they are problems that belong to all of us—as such, individuals in leadership have a responsibility to listen to, acknowledge, and pursue solutions to these problems. For example, due to racial and gender biases, industries and jobs with a higher concentration of women and people of color tend to have lower pay—often minimum wage. As a result, these workers are more likely to earn poverty-level wages and need to turn to public assistance, which means that American taxpayers essentially subsidize the employers who pay inadequate wages. But policymakers can take action to rectify some of this. According to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute, raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020 would not only lift wages for 35 million workers, many of whom are people of color, but it would also save $17 billion in public assistance spending annually.

• Ending discrimination requires moving beyond a basic acknowledgement of the problem to honest, inclusive, and constructive engagement on the causes and solutions. For example, in order to target enforcement of equal pay laws and gain better insight into discriminatory pay practices, the Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently announced a proposal to annually collect summary pay data by gender, race, and ethnicity from businesses with 100 or more employees. If implemented, this would be an important first step towards identifying bad actors and holding them accountable.

• Segregation exists in nearly every area of American life, including in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and places of worship. Regardless of intent, the result is often exclusion and marginalization of people outside our immediate social circles. In the end, this limits the full range of what could be available to all of us. Historian Richard Rothstein has painstakingly documented the history of racially explicit federal, state and local policies that have segregated African Americans into isolated slums across the country. These policies have created a legacy of racial injustice that has garnered national attention in cities like Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago and Flint.

I was heartened to see a second-grade teacher address biases within her classroom. Now it’s time for more of our political and business leaders to follow suit.

Thanks for reading and sharing.

Jared Bernstein’s Top 10 to Address Economic Inequality

Melissa Boteach and Rebecca Vallas: Top 10 Policy Solutions for Tackling Income Inequality and Reducing Poverty in America

Olivia Golden: Policies to Reduce Income Inequality

Kali Grant and Indivar Dutta-Gupta: Ten Ways to Fight Income Inequality

Erica Williams: What States Can Do to Address Inequality

Valerie Wilson: Top 10 Ways to Address Income Inequality

Jared Bernstein’s Top 10 to Address Economic Inequality

(Author’s note: many of these ideas fall under the heading of achieving full-employment in the job market, such that the matchup between the number of jobs and job-seekers is very tight. This is an essential intervention for both real wage stagnation and inequality.)

1. If the private market fails to provide enough jobs to achieve full employment, the government must become the employer of last resort.
2. When growth is below capacity and the job market is slack, apply fiscal and monetary policies aggressively to achieve full employment. Right now, this means not raising interest rates pre-emptively at the Fed and investing in public infrastructure.
3. Take actions against countries that manage their currencies to subsidize their exports to us and tax our exports to them. Such actions can include revoking trade privileges, allowing for reciprocal currency interventions, and levying duties on subsidized goods.
4. Support sectoral training, apprenticeships, and earn-while-you-learn programs.
5. Implement universal pre-K, with subsidies that phase out as incomes rise.
6. Raise the minimum wage to $12/hour by 2020 and raise the overtime salary threshold (beneath which all workers get overtime pay) from $455/week to $970/week and index it to inflation.
7. Provide better oversight of financial markets: mandate adequate capital buffers, enforce a strong Volcker Rule against proprietary trading in FDIC-insured banks, strengthen the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and encourage vigilant oversight of systemic risk in the banking system by the Federal Reserve.
8. Level the playing field for union elections to bolster collective bargaining while avoiding, at the state-level, anti-union, so-called “right-to-work” laws.
9. Maintain and strengthen safety net programs like the EITC and CTC, SNAP, and Medicaid.
10. In order to generate needed revenue and boost tax fairness: reduce the rate at which high-income taxpayers can take tax deductions, impose a small tax of financial market transactions, increase IRS funding to close the “tax gap” (the difference between what’s owed and what’s paid), and repeal “step-up basis” (a tax break for wealthy inheritors).

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Melissa Boteach and Rebecca Vallas: Top 10 Policy Solutions for Tackling Income Inequality and Reducing Poverty in America

1. Create jobs by investing in infrastructure, developing renewable energy sources, renovating abandoned housing and significantly increasing affordable housing investments, and making other commonsense investments to revitalize neighborhoods.
2. Improve job quality and strengthen families by raising the minimum wage to $12/hour by 2020; ensuring pay equity by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act; strengthening collective bargaining; and enacting basic labor standards such as fairer overtime rules, paid sick and family leave, and right to request flexible and predictable schedules.
3. Make the tax code work better for low-wage working families by making permanent the 2009 Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit improvements and expanding the EITC for childless workers and noncustodial parents.
4. Invest in human capital by expanding access to high-quality and affordable childcare and early education; creating pathways to good jobs such as apprenticeships, national service opportunities, and a national subsidized jobs program; and implementing College for All to ensure that any student attending public college or university does not need to pay any tuition and fees during enrollment.
5. Ensure that workers with disabilities have a fair shot at employment and economic security.
6. Reform the criminal justice system to end mass incarceration and remove barriers to economic security and mobility for the one in three Americans with criminal records.
7. Enact comprehensive immigration reform that provides a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
8. Expand Medicaid and ensure that all Americans can access high-quality, affordable health coverage.
9. Close tax loopholes that benefit the wealthy and special interests and raise taxes on capital income.
10. Protect and strengthen investments in basic living standards such as nutrition, health, and income insurance. This includes reforming counterproductive asset limits, and ensuring that programs such as unemployment insurance are there for more workers if they lose their job.

Olivia Golden: Policies to Reduce Income Inequality

1. Make work pay for all workers, including childless adults, by raising the minimum wage and strengthening the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit.
2. Ensure stability for workers and their families through access to paid leave and predictable job schedules. Pass federal bills such as the FAMILY Act, Schedules That Work Act, and Healthy Families Act that mirror strong state and local laws.
3. Identify and tear down the systemic barriers that people face because of race, ethnicity, language, and immigration status, for example by making college prep courses equally available in high schools attended mostly by students of color or by providing work authorization and a path to citizenship for immigrant parents.
4. Ensure that every working family can afford high-quality child care through significant investments in the Child Care and Development Block Grant, Head Start and Early Head Start, and preschool for all three- and four-year-olds.
5. Give children and their parents a simultaneous boost through two-generational policies and investments, including home visiting, support for parental mental health, and support for parents’ career development coupled with high-quality early care and education for children.
6. Help low-income youth and adults access employment and training opportunities that lead to economic success by fully funding the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) as well as subsidized and summer jobs programs.
7. Fully fund Pell Grants to help low-income students access higher education and develop the skills needed to compete in a competitive job market.
8. Ensure that everyone, including low-wage working families and single adults, has access to basic health and nutrition by expanding Medicaid in every state and increasing SNAP benefits.
9. Strengthen capacity of states to employ more streamlined and integrated approaches to delivering key public work supports (such as health coverage, nutrition benefits, and child care subsidies) so low-income working families can stabilize their lives and advance their career
10. Rebuild unemployment insurance and cash assistance to ensure a strong safety net that supports poor and low-income children, families, and individuals when they need it.

Kali Grant and Indivar Dutta-Gupta: Ten Ways to Fight Income Inequality

1. Correct political imbalances—strengthen and protect the Voting Rights Act, level the playing field for political contributions, and limit the influence of corporate lobbyists.
2. Ensure that the wealthiest people and profitable corporations that benefit the most from our political and economic system contribute their fair share: reform “upside-down” tax expenditures (spending through the tax code that disproportionately benefits those with higher incomes), limit corporate welfare, and enact a robust inheritance tax.
3. Amplify workers’ bargaining power by increasing fines for illegal anti-union behavior, encouraging minority unions, and reversing state laws that undermine unions and prevent them from collecting dues for benefits they provide workers at unionized workplaces.
4. Update labor standards—raise the national minimum wage to $12 and index it to wage growth, require fair scheduling for workers, target employee-contractor misclassification and wage theft, and enact the Paycheck Fairness Act.
5. Modernize the safety net—update Unemployment Insurance to reflect the changing nature of work; increase Social Security benefits and raise the cap on income subject to taxes; expand Medicaid in every state; and address flaws in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) to refocus it on employment and child well-being outcomes.
6. Provide families tools to manage their many responsibilities—provide at least 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, universal early learning and care, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a child allowance, and comprehensive family planning services.
7. Expand opportunities for current and future workers—invest in infrastructure and other nationally needed jobs; enact income-based loan repayment to increase higher education accessibility and affordability; and pursue full employment.
8. Increase affordable housing and bolster consumer financial protection rules—promote fair and accessible banking, savings, and other financial vehicles and services for those excluded or abused by the current system.
9. Attack racial and other discrimination across the board and enact comprehensive immigration reform, normalizing the status of more children and workers to increase their educational and work opportunities.
10. Reduce the over-incarceration and over-criminalization by every level of government that restricts millions of Americans’ ability to support themselves and their families—especially among communities of color and high poverty areas.

Erica Williams: What States Can Do to Address Inequality

1. Make state tax systems less regressive. State tax systems tend to ask the most from those with the least because they rely heavily on sales taxes and user fees, which hit low-income households especially hard. States can move their tax systems in a more progressive direction by strengthening their income taxes, adopting state earned income tax credits (or other low-income tax credits) to boost after-tax incomes at the bottom, and rejecting tax cuts that disproportionately benefit higher-income families and profitable corporations.
2. Expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
3. Raise the minimum wage and index it to inflation. States can raise wages for workers at the bottom of the pay scale by enacting a higher state minimum wage and indexing it so that it keeps up with rising living costs.
4. Protect workers’ rights. States can raise wages by protecting workers’ right to bargain collectively and by strengthening and enforcing laws and regulations to prevent abusive employer practices that deprive workers of wages they are legally owed.
5. Improve unemployment insurance.Unemployment Insurance helps workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own to avoid falling into poverty and to stay connected to the labor market. States that have cut benefits should restore those cuts; others should build on recent efforts to fix outmoded rules that bar many workers from accessing benefits.
6. Establish subsidized employment programs for low-income parents and youth that provide temporary jobs of last resort (mostly in the private sector), such as those many states created in 2009 and 2010 through the TANF block grant.  These programs proved popular with participating businesses, families, and state officials of both parties.
7. Improve the safety net. States can streamline the process for enrolling in child care assistance and other work supports. They also can boost the prospects of poor children by raising the amount of temporary cash assistance available to the neediest families, improving access to food stamps, and helping low-income families afford to rent a home in neighborhoods near good jobs.
8. Spend less on prisons, more on schools.In recent decades, states imposed extremely harsh corrections policies that greatly increased both the number of prisoners and their average sentence, at great cost to state budgets.  By making these policies more rational, states could shift funding from prison to more productive investments, without harming public safety.
9. Improve school funding formulas.  K-12 schools in low-income neighborhoods are often poorly funded because the local property tax base is so weak.  As a result, children from these neighborhoods begin their education without the resources and supports they need to succeed.  States can help by adopting funding formulas that give extra support to low-income districts.  Many state funding formulas don’t push back very much against these inequities; some even worsen them.
10. Expand early education.States can help families work and kids learn by investing in quality, affordable early care and education programs, as well as after-school programs.

Valerie Wilson: Top 10 Ways to Address Income Inequality

(Author’s note: Given that the primary source of income for most Americans is the pay they receive from their jobs, wages seem like a logical place to start addressing inequality. These ideas are drawn from EPI’s Agenda to Raise America’s Pay.)

1. Raise the minimum wage: Raising the minimum wage to $12 by 2020 would benefit about a third of the workforce directly and indirectly.
2. Update overtime rules: Moving the overtime threshold to the value it held in 1975—roughly $51,000 today—would provide overtime protections to 6.1 million workers and provide those workers with higher pay.
3. Strengthen and protect workers: Strengthen collective bargaining rights to help give workers the leverage they need to bargain for better wages and benefits and to set high labor standards for all workers, and support strong enforcement of labor standards to protect workers.
4. Regularize undocumented workers to lift not only their wages but also the wages of all workers in the same fields of work.
5. Provide earned sick leave and paid family leave, which would not only raise workers’ pay but also give them more economic security.
6. End discriminatory practices that contribute to race and gender inequalities through consistently strong enforcement of antidiscrimination laws in the hiring, promotion, and pay of women and minority workers.
7. Prioritize very low rates of unemployment when making monetary policy: Policymakers should not seek to slow the economy until growth of nominal wages is running comfortably above 3.5 percent.
8. Create jobs through targeted employment programs and public investments in infrastructure.
9. Reduce our trade deficit by stopping destructive currency manipulation.
10. Use the tax code to restrain top 1 percent incomes.

Worth celebrating, right?

Hardly. While the reduction in poverty might be significant from a statistical perspective, it’s not from a people’s perspective: 15 percent of Americans lived in poverty in 2012; 14.5 percent in 2013—more than 45 million Americans lived in poverty in each of those years.  Further, historic levels of income inequality remain unchanged, with incomes flat for low- and middle-income Americans.

What is most frustrating, tragic, infuriating—pick your adjective—about this status quo that wastes so much human potential, is the fact that we know the kinds of policies and actions that would not only reduce poverty, but reduce it dramatically.

TalkPoverty.org asked a group of scholars and activists what we need to do to achieve Census numbers that we can truly get excited about.  Their responses reveal some of the rigorous research that should inform our priorities and policy choices, and also widespread activism that isn’t waiting on an anti-poverty movement, it’s building one.

Hilary Hoynes: “Remember the successes and get behind policies that work.”
Sarita Gupta: ‘What are you doing in this movement and can you do more?’
Dr. Deborah Frank: How Poverty Affects Children’s Health
Deepak Bhargava: Change this Broken System
Valerie Wilson: ‘Policymakers have been slow to use data to inform their agenda’
Sally Steenland: ‘Infusing grassroots protests and political advocacy with righteous indignation’
Alice O’Connor: Half the Battle
Deirdra Reed: ‘This is not your grandma’s skid-row poverty’

Hilary Hoynes: “Remember the successes and get behind policies that work.”

The Census poverty release this week contained some good news – particularly notable is that poverty rates fell significantly for children – but overall poverty rates remain high relative to their levels prior to the Great Recession.

Looking over the longer term, poverty can be best described as remaining stubbornly high over the past decades. Some conclude that this lack of progress in our fight against poverty implies a failure of our safety net. However, this misses the important countervailing force of stagnant or declining wages; in this light, the lack of a rise in poverty over the past 20 years represents (sadly) somewhat of an achievement for public policy. We have the data to know “what works” against poverty and inequality—and that our policies truly matter. A federal minimum wage increase to $10.10 would lift 4.6 million people out of poverty. The Earned Income Tax Credit, together with the Child Tax Credit, lifts roughly 4.7 million children or 9 million persons above the poverty line annually; SNAP raises 2.2 million children or 5 million persons above poverty. Increasing incomes for these families leads to improvements in health and children’s well-being.

We need to remember the successes and get behind policies that work.

Hilary Hoynes is a Professor of Public Policy and Economics and holds the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at the Goldman School of Public Policy at University of California, Berkeley.

Sarita Gupta: ‘What are you doing in this movement and can you do more?’

The fight against poverty is already here, it’s happening, and it can work if we challenge ourselves to focus on the real and immediate solutions that help everyday working people create a pathway to economic stability.

The good news is, we’ve already begun to do that in cities and states across the country. In Massachusetts, we passed a domestic workers bill of rights designed to protect home care workers against poverty wages and working conditions. In San Francisco, we’re working to pass a retail workers bill of rights aimed at tackling the erratic, on-call scheduling practices that keep hourly and shift workers in a constant cycle of financial unpredictability. In Illinois, Connecticut and Oregon, we’re piloting a fair-share fee legislation that requires businesses that cheat their workers out of wages to pay a fee to offset their role in keeping employees in poverty.

So we’re making strides, but there’s still so much work to be done if we are to create more good jobs that pay good wages, invest in our communities, and strengthen the voice that every day people have in our democracy.  We need you, the reader, to ask yourself what you are doing in this movement and can you do more?  That’s how we’ll achieve the change we seek.

Sarita Gupta is the executive director of Jobs With Justice, an organization leading the fight for workers’ rights and an economy that benefits everyone.

Dr. Deborah Frank: How Poverty Affects Children’s Health

To me, a pediatrician for 38 years, I know the 2013 poverty numbers represent names and faces, including the poorest Americans – infants and toddlers and their families. Doctors know that poverty stacks the odds against children in the womb with poor nutrition and high levels of stress hormones, altering the intrauterine environment and leading to early deliveries and low birth weight.

Poverty’s toxicity does not end at birth. At Children’s HealthWatch, my pediatric and public health colleagues and I have conducted extensive research since 1998 on children up to their fourth birthday in five urban hospitals across the country.  We and other researchers showed that children in families who experience the most basic level of material hardships associated with poverty — not enough nutritious food, inadequate or inconsistent access to lighting, heating or cooling, and unstable housing — suffer negative health and development effects, which constrain the next generation’s opportunities to live healthy lives as successful participants in education and the workforce.

Children in poverty cannot wait for the slow recovery from the 2009 recession to finally arrive. We need to expand and protect programs to keep all our children nourished, warm and safely housed. It is not the federal deficit I worry about, but the preventable and treatable deficits in the bodies and brains of America’s young children.

Dr. Deborah Frank is the Founder and Principal Investigator at Children’s HealthWatch, and professor of Child Health and Well-being in the Department of Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine.

Deepak Bhargava: Change this Broken System

It is outrageous that in the richest country in the history of the world, the vast majority of people are never more than a degree away from poverty.  New data shows that a good job has the power to move that needle in the right direction for children.

On Tuesday, the Census Bureau released data showing the child poverty rate has decreased for the first time since 2000. In 2013, enough parents were able to find full-time, year-round work to help 1.4 million children escape poverty.

At the Center for Community Change, the communities we work with know that the best anti-poverty program is a job that pays enough to allow families to make ends meet. Unfortunately, our broken labor market delivers too few jobs and unfair pay in exchange for hard work. We live in a system where no matter how much money people’s work brings into their company, they get paid as little as the CEO can get away with, and when they work harder, the increased wealth they produce goes right into the CEO’s pocket or company coffers.

Some of the people we are working with to change this broken system include carwashers in New York City; the formerly incarcerated in Texas; unemployed people in Washington, DC; and retail workers in Minnesota.  The Center for Community Change is working with grassroots groups fighting for access to good jobs and good wages in over 20 states.

People work in order to make the future brighter for their kids and more secure for their families.  America needs jobs that pay enough for people to earn a decent living and to have a decent life.

Deepak Bhargava is Executive Director of the Center for Community Change.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

We know that nearly 70 percent of the income of Americans in the bottom fifth is tied to work, either in the form of wages, employer-provided benefits, or tax credits that are dependent on work (such as the Earned Income Tax Credit).  We also know that in the past year, real hourly wages declined for all workers except those in the bottom 10 percent of the wage distribution, and that the increase for these low-wage workers was due to the states that raised their minimum wages.

This week’s Census report provides an update of our nation’s progress toward greater racial economic equality.  On the positive side, between 2012 and 2013, Latinos experienced a larger decline in poverty and a larger increase in median household income than any other group.  Much of the decline in poverty occurred among children – the poverty rate for Latino children is down 3.4 percentage points to 30.3 percent.  But the rate of poverty among Latino children is still 2.8 times higher than that of whites.  Still,  that isn’t the worst news from the Census.  While child poverty declined for nearly all groups of children, it stands at an astounding 38.3 percent for African American children – 3.6 times the rate for white children.

Reducing child poverty is as much about increasing employment and wages as anything else.  Unfortunately, progress toward greater racial equity in either of these areas has been painfully slow during the recovery, and policymakers have been slow to use data to inform their agenda.

Valerie Wilson is director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy (PREE), a nationally recognized source for expert reports and policy analyses on the economic condition of America’s people of color.

Sally Steenland: ‘Infusing grassroots protests and political advocacy with righteous indignation’

The new poverty numbers released by the government show no statistical change in the number of Americans living in poverty: 45.3 million. That number is way too high. And, although it’s been stuck there for several years, we know how to reduce poverty in this country—with policies that make a measurable difference in people’s lives, like raising the minimum wage, providing paid leave and paid sick days, expanding Medicaid, and investing in child care and pre-K programs.

Another thing many of us know:  faith advocacy organizations are on the front lines working to reduce poverty. Faith communities see the human suffering that comes from living in poverty, along with the economic and social injustices that lead to being poor.  That is why faith-based groups are infusing grassroots protests and political advocacy with righteous indignation across the country.

Moral Mondays is fighting for a living wage, fair labor practices, Medicaid expansion, and other policies that recognize human dignity and the importance of family. Interfaith Worker Justice is leading the charge against wage theft and setting up worker centers across the country to fight for workers’ rights.

Along with PICO, NETWORK, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and others, faith-based advocates give each of us an opportunity to help reduce poverty. Whether we get involved on an individual, community, state, or national level, each of us can do our part and put our values into practice.

Sally Steenland is Director of the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress

Alice O’Connor: Half the Battle

This week’s release of the predictably dire annual poverty statistics has provided yet another occasion to gin up the narrative of “big government failure” that blames “trillions” in social spending for fostering the behavior that makes and keeps people poor.  Liberal advocates have done a good job of countering that narrative, with evidence of just how much higher—roughly double—measured poverty would be without the legacy of increased social spending the War on Poverty helped to launch.

But today’s anti-poverty activists have also lost sight of the most powerful weapons unleashed by the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA), signed 50 years ago in August 1964.  One was macroeconomic policy.  The Council of Economic Advisers linked fighting poverty to its number one policy priority of pushing the economy to its full-employment growth potential—down from the unacceptably high 5.5% to 4% unemployment—which, when combined with robust anti-discrimination, minimum wage, and labor standards, would put workers in better position to combat poverty wages, and everyone in a better position to get a decent paying job.

The other was participatory democracy, embedded in the EOA’s mandate to assure “maximum feasible participation” among the poor in local community action agencies, but more importantly realized in the legacy of grassroots organizing and institution-building that empowered poor people to demand access to the educational and job opportunities, social and legal services, and political representation more affluent Americans had come to expect.

The War on Poverty certainly didn’t get everything right.  But the view it offers of the battlefield, then and now, does tell us where and how much more broadly—beyond defending the safety net and raising the minimum wage—we need to set the sights of an economic justice agenda.

Author of Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S. History, Alice O’Connor is professor of history at the University of California Santa Barbara.


Deirdra Reed: ‘This is not your grandma’s skid-row poverty’

One in every seven women lives in poverty. This is not and cannot be thought of as your grandma’s “skid row” poverty. This is post-recession, soccer mom poverty. Look at your Facebook friends list and count.  Every seventh (or every one) of those women may be working full-time and still struggling to make ends meet.

I am a woman of color, a working mother (and self-declared Southern Belle). As working women, we should take the U.S. Census Bureau report as confirmation that the economic pressure we feel is real; and we should hold our elected officials accountable for their part in job creation and passing policies that support family-sustaining wages.

As a Senior Organizer with the Center for Community Change, I have been working with community-based groups all year to empower women like myself to band together as we fight for good jobs with good wages, the end of income inequality, and the chance to have a secure retirement future.

At North Carolina Fair Share, a group of women who are recently retired or close-to-retirement are organizing to protect and expand Social Security, with a new credit just for caregivers.

In Atlanta, 9 to 5 and the Racial Justice Action Center’s Women on the Rise program are organizing working-age women, most of whom are heads of households, around the way that poverty is criminalized. For example, for a service industry worker who’s stretching to make it to the end of the month, a parking ticket can turn into thousands of dollars in fines and an arrest warrant.   Someone with means would just pay the ticket. Someone without means could lose everything.

In Alabama, members of the Federation of Childcare Providers of Alabama (FOCAL), most of whom are women who provide childcare in their homes, are organizing to expand Medicaid to help the families that they serve.

I hope next year, our work will have had a big impact in reducing the poverty numbers.  And I hope you will join us.

Deirdra Reed is a Senior Organizer with the Center for Community Change.