December 5-6, 1997
Keynote Address of Peter Edelman
Peter Edelman, Keynote Speaker
Thank you so much, Maya. I'm really glad to be here,
and I'm really glad to have Maya introduce me. She's a pretty
special person.
There's a lot of reasons for that. I didn't even get her
to go to Georgetown law School, so I know I'm not . . .
Maya
Georgetown didn't give me enough money.
Peter Edelman
We could keep on with that -- I can get myself in deeper, right?
So, it's really really nice of Maya, thank you so so much. And john powell and Marguerite Spencer. What a great conference you're putting on.
It is so important, with all of this stuff going on out there, to be positive, to figure out what we're going to do to move ahead, not just lament what did happen. I was kind of pleased that there were people who thought I should have resigned sooner. That proved to me that there's somebody out there who's to the left of me and more active and feels strongly -- that was good.
And of course, it's really important that not only are we having a conversation about a systemic approach to welfare reform but that we're having it under the sponsorship of an entity who's called the 'Institute on Race and Poverty' because we need to bring out into the open that this conversation about welfare is so much a conversation about race. We know what we hear above the surface about the characterizations, the stereotypes, but the fact is it is a conversation obviously about poverty, and you can't talk about poverty in this country if you don't talk about race. Why is it that African-American people, that Latinos, that Asian-Americans, Native Americans, are poorer at so much higher rates than the white Americans? There's something going on that we're not confronting. It's so disappointing that the President is having the national conversation about race and he can't bring himself to mention the word 'poverty'. Where is it? It's such a sterile discussion to say that the question about race is that it's terribly courageous for a white man to say to the President of the United States that he saw a black man walking down the street and he got scared -- that's the racial discussion in this country. What is that about? Indeed, what it is about that the President says to this man 'you are courageous to mention that'? What he might have gotten into the subject a little bit, what that was about. So this is really important and in every respect.
Funny time for me to keynote this conference on the second day, but then I apologize -- I couldn't get here yesterday morning. I did have a chance to hear yesterday afternoon, when I sort of snuck in at the end, the framing of the issue. That was great. It helped me so much. You had a great discussion yesterday. It helped me so much in thinking about what I was going to say this morning.
We are talking about the biggest change that's happened in public policy for low-income people in our country since the Social Security Act of 1935 was enacted. And, of course, it's the one, as everybody in this room knows without my saying, with the biggest negative potential of any change in social policy that we've had in America ever -- ever in our history. This is a time when the states, to whom the responsibility has been devolved, can do real damage -- are put in a position of being able to do real damage for people, to make things worse than they already are, which wasn't too great to start with, and too many of our states in this country are headed in that negative direction. Yet the fact is that this legislation -- well, I hope I will never be heard calling it 'welfare reform', because it is not -- does without any safety net, without any guarantees, make real welfare reform possible if a state will do it. That's an invitation for advocates. It makes that possible if the states will put in money, if the politics and the advocacy are there, but of course, the other problem, or the problem is that it also makes possible, as Jason Karel of the New York Times has written, a policy where a state will simply give people, literally as he says, a bus ticket out of town and be perfectly in compliance with the law. Real welfare reform means real help to people, to get jobs, jobs that get them out of poverty, real protection for children, and real prevention of the need to go on welfare in the first place. That sort of welfare reform we needed and still need. Instead, we've had a turning of the limited safety net that we had into a Bob Graham construction of the safety net for children, and instead of really promoting work, we have the invitation anyway accepted in too many places to do not real efforts to help people find work but to do a bumper sticker, policy being 'get a job', and that's our jobs policy. And of course all of this is not just about welfare. You've had already some very very important papable conversation about what this law and others have done to immigrants in our country, the backlashes that's happening against immigrants in our country, what this law did to food stamps, childhood disability, to what other legal changes have done, to SSI for people who have problems with alcohol, with drugs, what budget cuts have done to housing and a whole lot of other programs. And then, of course, I cannot fail to mention in addition to a war on the poor that's going on in this country, we have a war going on on lawyers for the poor. So we've had cuts, deep deep cuts in the federal budget for the legal services corporation and in the kinds of cases that the legal services lawyers can take on, and that's, of course, very very deliberate because if we're going to say to poor people, 'you have to behave exactly the way we want,' the last thing we want is for them to be able to get a lawyer and get some help in complaining back. We need to shut that off at the same time if we're going to be successful in our negative response to poor people.
And so, one of the challenges to just put on the table -- I won't come back to it, but just while I'm talking about that war on lawyers -- is to figure out ways to get state money into legal services -- very very important, happening in a number of states. In the state of New York, for example, there is pending right now in the legislature, endorsed by the bar association of the City of New York, endorsed by the Democrats in the legislature, a $40 million -- of course, New York's a much bigger state than Minnesota -- nonetheless, a $40 million appropriation out of civil filing fees to pay for legal services for poor people. If that goes through, they will end up with these federal budget cuts, nonetheless with more money in legal services for the poor than they had before. Not enough, but more than they had before. This is the kind of creative thing that we need to be talking about. And we need to be getting the private bar and that's a whole separate speech, and in fact I will come back to that later on with an example that I like that's going on right here in Minneapolis. But we need to get the private bar in as well.
Well, I said we have to be positive, we really have to look to the future. This is a fortuitously -- wholly fortuitously, nobody could have predicted it -- this is a fortunate time to have this challenge, to have this backlash going on, if we have to suffer the backlash, because, of course, you pick up the paper and you see yesterday the news that our unemployment as a country is down to 4.6%. So, at least, even though there is a lot of mismatch that you've been talking about that you know about that I'm going to talk about a little bit, between where people are and where jobs are. The fact is right now is a time when a person who's told to get a job at least has a chance of finding a job. If we're having this conversation five-six years ago and they had done the same thing, it would be a lot more difficult. So that's at least fortunate. It gives us an opportunity. Of course, you know, 4.6% unemployment, there are people in corporate boardrooms all over the country who are saying, 'that's too low, we've got to stop that, we need to get that unemployment up, it's bad for our stock on Wall Street, we're having trouble finding "workers" --
From the floor
We might have to raise wages.
Peter Edelman
We might have to raise wages, all of that, that's right.
So chime in, all of you. It helps. That's right.
It's just a good time to have this challenge. Another thing that this means is that the states actually have money to spend, in two ways. One is welfare rolls have gone down a lot. That means they have extra 'TANF' money -- everybody knows TANF, right, by value -- I hate the very notion 'temp', 'temporary assistance' to these families, like you're only going to need it for a little while, you'll be fine, or at least we'll legislate that you're TANF. Anyway, there is extra TANF money around in just about every state that we should be looking at to see what's being done with it because the rolls are down. Just in general, the states are running surpluses. They really don't have any excuse to be mean, at least no fiscal excuse. They don't have any excuse not to do it right. There's no excuse that they can say 'we can't afford it'.
Well, here's what's happening. There's sort of three categories of things that are happening around the country. The smallest category are the states that are doing it right. But there are some. Maine and Vermont, for example, are doing a pretty good job. The basic thing, if you go into the welfare office in Maine and Vermont, is at least what the Commissioner wants them to say -- and I think it's reaching the line workers -- is 'how can we help you?' Now that's a pretty unusual question for the welfare office. 'How can we help you find a job? How can we help you get the things that you need to be able to keep that job?' They are pushing people to go to work, and in fact, I think that's a good thing for people who are in a position to work. Work in a household, you know, we want it to be work that pays enough to get you out of poverty and everything that goes with that, so it's not just a kind of a 'work at all costs' sort of thing. But I think it's good for children growing up. I think people feel better about themselves usually when they're out working. All of that sort of thing. But not everybody's in a position to do that, and so in Maine and Vermont they're also trying to deal with people as individuals.
Then you have Idaho. Idaho has a two-year lifetime time limit. Two years -- you know that federal thing says five, but since you're permitted to do a bus ticket out of town, you're permitted to do less than five if you want, and Idaho says two with very few exceptions. They have some exceptions, but very few, and no exceptions if you can't find a job. That's not one of them. And they say if you don't cooperate -- by the third time you don't cooperate in the way they want you to, the sanction is a lifetime ban from benefits for you're whole family. And they've got a little list of all the different 'you do this, you get that' -- you can't find the father within a year and it's no fault of the state, half you're benefits are cut -- that's Idaho. That's at the other extreme.
Most of the states are somewhere in between. An awful lot of states, in fact, haven't done very much, which is good news and bad news, that is to say they really haven't made things that much worse than they were in terms of the sanctions, except now there's a time limit. Most of them aren't consciousing[?] to put their own money, state money, in after the time limit. Well, what that means is that in those terrible states and in those mediocre states, we're looking at a big crunch coming here not very far down the road for either of two reasons: either because a recession comes, and I don't think we have recession-proofed our country yet, but we might, but I don't think so. So either there's going to be a recession in which case there's going to be a much bigger rush of people who need assistance, and/or people will run into the time limit, and if the serious effort hasn't been made, if the public policy hasn't been there to help people get ready to work, to help them find jobs, to help them become truly self-sufficient or at least in a job with some incoming supplementation, then when the time limit comes, we're in trouble. That's what we're headed for. And who's in trouble the most, of course, is children. Children are then not protected, and that's what it means when we say that we've destroyed the safety net. That is the bigger picture of what we're looking at.
It's the responsibility, of course, of everybody here -- that's why we're here -- to do everything we can to change all that, and it's a complicated responsibility. You already identified that yesterday. Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich was standing up here when I walked into the room with all those sheets of paper that john powell had to come up and hold. Everything she had on that list are things that we have to do. So we need to see the whole picture. We need to understand that the issues are not just welfare. That's not just the implementation of this law in the best possible way. The issue is poverty, and it's preventing people going on welfare in the first place, that's one way to stop the swell of poverty. The perspective is not just operational at the community level. It isn't even just capacity-building to be operational at the community level. Those things are all vitally important. I want to talk more about them. But it's becoming an advocate for policy at all levels of policy change -- national, state, local. One of the things devolution does is it changes the places that you've got to go and multiplies them. It makes the advocate's life much much harder in some ways even though the state legislator is more accessible than the Congressperson. It's about politics. It's about organizing. It's about, ultimately, building a movement. It's all of that, if we're going to change what's going on here.
Let me start with the so-called 'welfare reform' itself. The first thing that I need to talk about is -- you all know this, standing up here, what am I telling you that you don't know? -- the hype. Don't you love the hype? It's all over, you know, this thing is working, it's beautiful. The President goes to St. Louis and he says, 'Oh, it's great. A year later and I've solved the problem. It's all gone.' Just so we know the facts: we had 10.8 million people on AFDC, moms and kids and dads, in the late '80s, in about 1989. And then we had, as everyone remembers, a recession, and the welfare rolls went up in the early '90s. Maybe there was a little bit of -- what should I say? -- bureaucratic laxity. The welfare rolls went up a lot. They went up to 14.3 million people by 1993. Essentially, all that's happened is that that bubble is gone. We're now down, actually, a little below where we were in '89. Finally we're down into the low 10 millions somewhere. The latest number I saw was 10.3 million, I think. So that's about a little over a million adults who've gone off. What you need to remember, not only have we just gotten that kind of 'bubble' out, but this law expects that there are going to be -- there are still about somewhere close to 4 million/3.5 million adults who are still -- moms with kids, basically -- who are still on cash public assistance. Of those 3-4 million adults, this law expects that 80% of those are going to be gone from the rolls by five years after the law was enacted. That's the way it works. So that means there's something like 3 million more adults -- now who are those people? We all know that the million that are gone -- and it's great that they're gone if they got jobs. We don't really know, nobody actually knows what happened, nobody really knows. But most of them did get jobs. We also don't know whether they got out of poverty, but that's a different question that people don't want to ask. At least a lot of them got jobs, but those are people who go off them and on and off anyway. People go on and off welfare. There some people who stay too long and that's one of the causes of this big public policy debate. Well, these 3 million that are supposed to get jobs are people who, a lot of them, don't have a lot of work experience, they don't have high school education, they have personal problems of one kind or another. That's much harder, that next 3 million. One million down, 3 million to go, just in and of itself isn't all that encouraging, but that's much harder, that next 3 million. So, we need to understand, to keep saying over and over again, in every way we can, that the heavy lifting hasn't even started here. The hard effort hasn't even begun, here. It lies ahead. We've been sold a bill of goods about this thing -- our country has, not people in this room.
Did they fix the law earlier this year? Somebody was talking about that they were going to change this. I think everybody in this room knows they did not. That's another piece of hype. The President signed that bill and he said, 'Well, I'm going to fix it.' You wanted to say, 'Well, what did you sign it for if you were going to fix it?', but never mind. If you listen carefully, he never did say he was going to fix the welfare part. All he ever said in the fine print -- he's so good at that, you know, it sounds so nice and then you look at the fine print -- was that he was going to do something about the immigration and maybe the food stamps part. Well, all they did do in the Congress this year -- and this is great for every individual person of health, I don't make light of it -- is that they continued SSI eligibility for immigrants who were in this country as of the day the law was passed. That's great if you were an immigrant who was in this country in the time that the law was passed, you know, like the old joke about the pig and the chicken. For those people, it's life-saving. You don't know the joke about the pig and the chicken? For those people, it's life-saving. That's really huge. But if you're an immigrant who comes to this country after that, you never get SSI still. You're an immigrant no matter when you come, you never get food stamps -- they're gone for illegal immigrants. So, did they fix it? Well, they fixed it in a time incremental way. If you want to know it in numerical terms, they put back in about 30% of the budget cuts that were in the 1996 law. Well, that means that 70% is still cut, and it's still true that that $54 billion over five or six years that they cut in the 1996 law was the only multi-year budget cut that the Congress did. After all of the back and forth about how we were going to balance the budget, and Speaker Gingrich went down the back steps of the plane, they shut down the government, and so on. The only people in the end who got their budget cut on them were poor people. The defense contractors didn't take a cut. The highway people didn't take a cut. Just the poor people.
From the floor
Corporate welfare didn't take a cut.
Peter Edelman
Corporate welfare didn't take a cut. Fine, the team's getting bigger here. That's absolutely right. So, no, it hasn't been fixed. Then the poverty numbers come out in September -- the poverty numbers come out every September for the year before -- and we find that for the year 1996, with this huge prosperity that we all know is out there, the poverty needle didn't move. It went down by .1%, not really even statistically significant. So it's 13.7% -- no movement. More important than that, the number of people who are trying to survive with incomes below half the poverty line -- below about $6500 for a family of three is half the poverty line -- went up, from 13.9 million to 14.4 million. It went up in the middle of all this prosperity by half a million people, and that is statistically significant, very much so. This is 40% of the poor in this country are actually double poor, are actually trying to survive at that extremely low income. Well, did we read about that? Did we hear about that? No. Buried in the reports -- and of course if it's buried in the reports, nobody asks why it is that people are getting jobs and yet the economy is doing so well and what about how it's sticking to the fingers of the people at the top? What about people getting jobs but they're so predominantly low-wage jobs that they can't get out of poverty? Those are the real issues. So we have to keep pointing all of that out. Really, everybody should be writing op-eds and getting your pastor or your rabbi or person in the mosque to talk about it in sermons and educate the public in every way we can.
Jobs. This is supposed to be about jobs. Great idea, right? We want people to work. I know you ask yourself when you pick up the paper and you see that 4.6% unemployment and you know people in your neighborhood. The employer says, 'We can't find anybody to take these jobs.' They say this over and over and over again. Well, you say, 'I know somebody.' But where is the job located? Is it geographically accessible? In many cases is it a job that's really relevant to people where they are in terms of their needs and the kind of job that they're prepared to do? The fact is that we have never had enough jobs in this country for all the people who want to work. We still don't. The fact is that in every major city in this country and in every isolated rural area in this country there is still a spatial mismatch right now.
I got into an argument on television with Governor Tommy Thompson. Well, don't clap until you hear whether I won. I thought I did. But let me tell you about it. Who better to decide -- this is a good audience, right? I said there was a study done by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukeee that showed that for every low-wage job in Wisconsin there were about two people who wanted those jobs. He interrupted. He said, 'That's a bogus study.' So I said, 'Oh, no, it's not, its based on very conservative assumptions, and I've looked at it very very carefully.' Well, that was sort of true. I got a letter about two weeks later from somebody who had the sister-center at the University of Northern Illinois who said, 'Not only are you right, but we have some new numbers. We've updated that study. We do these things in conjunction with one another across a consortium of these centers.' The real numbers in Wisconsin are, state-wide, there are 2-3 job-seekers for every low-income job. In Milwaukee County it is 7 to 1. In Chicago it's 6 to 1. State-wide in Illinois 3 to 1. In East St. Louis it's 8 to 1. I was in Ohio a couple of weeks ago and Ohio state-wide is 3 to 1. These studies have been done and it just confirms your experience. It's just common sense. There was a piece by Rachel Zwines[?], a wonderful young reporter for the New York Times -- August 31 if you want to pull it down off the internet or look it up. She looked at a job club in the Bronx and she looked at fourteen women who had gone out and looked for jobs. Remember, this is the creaming time, this is the easiest folks, right? So of these fourteen people in this job club, one of them had a bachelor's degree, two of them had two-year associate degrees, and only one of them hadn't graduated from high school. There were pictures and there was a little nice racial thing in there. The New York Times wanted to make sure you understood that white people had problems, too, so there was a very very well-groomed white woman who had her picture on the front page. How many of the fourteen women had gotten jobs with all of the effort that they were making? Three. Indeed, the Goodwill Industries that was running this job club, their contract with the city was a performance contract and it said they would get paid if they found jobs for three out of the fourteen. They understood -- the city understood in the first place that that was the problem. That's just a really, I think, powerful -- first of all, it's a great piece of journalism -- powerful snapshot of what's going on, what this is really like. These were women who really wanted to work, really were going out and trying. There isn't any question about that. They were, as I said, the easiest part of the cream . . . Still, only three out of the fourteen. That's what we've got to get out there and what people just don't understand.
Well, what's the effect of all of this? Have too many people seeking too few jobs? It depresses wages. And so we need to be talking about -- we need to really -- I kind of always hate it when I come to this part of, or a lot of parts like this in this talk, because what I'm really asking of all of you is that -- you're all out there doing what you do about 25 hours a day already and now I'm going to add a whole bunch of stuff to the list of what we have to do. You want to say, 'Who's we?' And yet, we should be talking about a living wage for everybody. One of the things that has happened here is that they -- you know who 'they' is -- they have set up a very destructive politics here. Essentially, by doing nothing or very little -- we do have the earned income tax credit which has been made better, and I need to acknowledge that, that's really really important. And the minimum wage has been raised a little bit. But basically, there are people who went out there and who played by society's rules and got jobs that aren't getting out of poverty, don't have health coverage, struggle about their child-care -- child-care breaks down all the time, they really can't afford the child-care -- and as they saw it, people sitting home and not working. And now they see those people who were, as they saw it sitting home and not working, being given all this "help". But anyway, all this help to go out and find jobs. That makes them angry. That creates a very nasty, very destructive politics that we should not have. It is understandable -- whatever we think and know that is right about people who are on welfare and the struggles that they have and how hard it is -- we should understand that that anger is quite real. It's been fomented but it's quite real. It's just like what George Wallace did and all the other politicians did in the South before and during the time of the '60s, to some extent up until this day -- dividing low-income whites from African-Americans and taking their attention off where the real problems were. Well, this is exactly the same thing.
We really need to be looking at -- there's a fundamental politics of fairness in that. This is really a step because the question of the income struggle that people have of making ends meet -- that goes way up the ladder. Here in Minnesota, and it's true across the country, half the jobs in the state of Minnesota pay below $21,000. You can't make ends meet and be even arguably middle-class as just a regular person without having two earners in the family. That's what's happened to our economy. That's the disparity between that $21,000 and $33-34,000 that's the family median income. I think there's a politics in that. In fact, it's a mystery to me why we've really never had a serious politics about all of that. There's this sort of false consciousness that developed. Of course, living wage campaigns are starting now around the country. They're taking place in lots of places about what local government pays, about what contractors with local governments pay, about in some places what people who get tax abatements from local governments will pay the people that they hire. That's all terrific. That needs to proliferated and multiplied.
Really, if you're talking about living wage, we should be thinking about all the components of that: child-care help that people get so that they can make it, that's real income, that should be included, that should be for people who are already working as well as those coming in; health coverage. We could say to each other that we can still believe and work for the day when we have what we ought to have, which is national health insurance. That's all part of a living wage strategy. We need to be looking at, still on the question of jobs -- if there aren't going to be enough jobs for people, we need to be looking at a real jobs program. Now that's very hard to talk about in the middle of the current prosperity. It's just a real consciousness-buster to go out and say to the American public, when there's 4.6% unemployment, that we need a real jobs program. But, there isn't going to be 4.6% unemployment in perpetuity. What we do have in many places -- in too many places for people who are on welfare supposedly as a transition to going to work -- is workfare. Workfare is not a real jobs program. Workfare is 'you go out and do something that makes us feel better -- you go out and do something that makes the rest of us feel better, work off your welfare or whatever it is, six months, a year, two years, and at the end of that time, what? Adios.' It just delays the day of reckoning. You're just back there where you were when you started. That's workfare. In fact, in many places you're out doing things and they don't provide you basic safety equipment -- they had to have a lawsuit in New York City to get basic safety equipment for people who were out doing things. They say, 'Oh, well,' it's an interesting little inconsistency here, because they say, 'You've got to go out there and work. Everybody has to go out there and work.' And then they say, 'But, this workfare, it's actually not a real job, so we don't want to pay the minimum wage, so we don't want the earned income tax credit to attach, we don't want OSHA to attach, we don't want workmans' compensation to attach, because it's not a real job. But we want you to go out there and work, so you've got to come and go out.' We've got to figure that out.
The real way to figure that out is to articulate what a real jobs program is that helps people get on into permanent work or is something that we want done that didn't keep on doing. That's part of it. It's just using the public dollar to get things done that we want done. So, that's just the beginning of the conversation. We have to go through the whole list, and you've been talking about this, of what is necessary to help people keep those jobs once they get them. Although it starts with the idea that the job should somehow have enough income in it from earnings, some supplementation -- if you do have earnings disregards in your Minnesota welfare program, where you keep some of your welfare when you go to work, that's good. We have the national studies that make Minnesota a model and all of that. Of course, the point about earnings disregards and income supplementation is that if you do them with the federal five-year time limit ticking, it's counterproductive because it's not at all clear that the end of that time you're going to be earning enough, and meanwhile you've used up your lifetime eligibility. That's not good. We should be talking about earnings disregards, income supplementation -- you can keep some of your welfare -- but we should be talking about it as a policy, a policy that's there that is part of a living wage policy. That's not being done anywhere, so far as I know.
Then we go on to how do we help people keep jobs. Child-care is absolutely fundamental. Child-care, it seems to me, is -- one of the things to say about it is that it's part of a larger point that I want to make particularly for those of you who are out working in neighborhoods, really are working at the community level. One of the potentials in all this that we really haven't put together out there in communities around the country is the connection -- and it's one of the major reasons why I know you did this conference, because Margarete and I talked about it on the phone -- is the potential for people who are doing community building out in neighborhoods to be working on creating jobs and creating enterprises that are particularly responsive to the needs and potential of people who are on hold. Who is going to create that child-care? Big question. The state legislatures -- Minnesota has made a commitment, as I understand it, to end waiting lists for child-care across not just people coming off welfare but also people who are out working -- that's great, one of the few states that's done that. Illinois has done it. California, surprisingly, has made a big commitment to child-care. But that doesn't mean that the child-care is going to come into existence. That's over here. That's money on a piece of paper. To actually get good child-care to come into existence in the ways that we need it is a tall order. In Milwaukee -- we hear so much about Wisconsin Works -- Superior right next door, you've probably heard even more so-called 'W-2', and Governor Thompson's commitment of child-care up to 165% of the poverty -- well, the Milwaukee Journal and the Sentinel did a series about whether child-care was actually available in Milwaukee and one of the things that they found --and it happens to be the headline anecdote -- they found a woman out there in the neighborhoods certified by the county -- they have a euphemism, they call this 'provisionally licensed child-care', certified by the county to take care of kids -- she had 34 kids in her house. She'd been certified for three and she was getting paid by the county for every one of the 34 kids. That's the kind of thing that can happen here, and it needs a bottom-up part. It needs a grassroots or community-building part. People, it seems to me, who were in the community-development business who want to get new enterprises started should be thinking about child-care as a business and with everything that goes with it. You've got all the problems if you do it right, of incorporation. It implies the need for community development corporations to have new partnerships with lawyers and bankers and other people who need to be enlisted to help out, provide the expertise, to get it going, new partnerships with people in the universities and elsewhere who would do the training. All of that has to happen, but it's possible, it's there. One thing that is there is there's money out there to pay for it, which wasn't the case in the past and indeed we're heading into a time where next year the Children's Defense Fund and others are going to be pursuing a major national effort to try to rationalize and improve the child-care fragmentary systems that we have -- previews of coming attractions. Please, everybody should be involved in that. I know you will be. It's very very important.
Two ideas that I'm saying: one is child-care per se. Laws typically around the country say that mom has to go to work when the child is twelve weeks old. Well, how much infant and toddler-care is there out there? Almost none. Women who are getting jobs very often are getting the lowest-rung jobs that nobody else wants, midnight to eight. That's swing shift. How much so-called 'odd hour child-care' is there out there? What happens when the child gets sick? How much child-care somehow specific for the child who is sick? It's not there. All of these things have to be there. It's not some frill. If you want everybody out there working, it's not some frill. It's absolutely vital and it just illustrates that the challenge is much more than getting enough money into all of that.
The list of things that we need to have to make this work goes on and on. All of these are potential activities for community-based organizations to be involved in. The question of transportation, which we all talk about over and over again, can be the basis of an enterprise. In southwestern Virginia -- Virginia, not a state that I would point to as being great overall, they have a two year time limit -- but in southwestern Virginia a couple counties there experimented and they've done two things. One is they've gotten surplus state cars and they've reconditioned them and sold them at bargain basement prices to people so that they can get to work. But more importantly, they've gotten some vans and they've turned-keyed them to some local women and gotten them into a micro-enterprise where they are running the transportation for other women to get to work. Neat idea. If we're going to be positive about this, if we want to make this happen in the best possible way even as we struggle to change it, that's the kind of thing that we need to be looking at.
Coaching. It's so important. What do I mean by 'coaching'? You take somebody who hasn't had a lot of work experience, who doesn't have a lot of confidence, and we know that what happens is that she is going to tend to bomb out of that first job. Toby Herm[?] many of you know about, who works at Cabrini Green public housing project in Chicago, started some years ago with a group of women who really wanted to get out and work. 71% of them lost their first job by the end of the first year. But they had this effort project matched which really stayed there and really said, 'you can do it'. But also, in addition to being supportive, would give a little nudge. It was also pushing a little bit. I wouldn't call it a stick, but it wasn't simply blowing kisses. Anyway, by the end of five years, 54% of those women are working all year long. That takes an investment of money, that TANF surplus that I was talking about that you invest in things like that. But it also takes 'who can do this best?' People out in the community can do this best, people from the neighborhood, people who have that sort of understanding. But it's got to get organized. Somebody's got to make the contract with the county to undertake that effort. I think it would be done better by a non-profit than it would be by the county itself. So people out in the community need to be looking at that as something that needs to be done, advocate that it be done, and then be ready to do it. A long list of things like that. The whole question of how you -- you'll never get enough, with the best community development you'll never get enough jobs inside the neighborhood for everybody in the neighborhood -- how do we connect people to jobs outside, not just the transportation but everything that goes into it -- building those bridges, helping find the jobs, and so on. Again, this is an effort that organizations in the community can take on. I have a feeling -- I don't know what you all do. I suspect that probably people who work on community economic development are a minority in this room -- but I have a feeling that community development corporations have neglected the connection that they could have and should have so this human resource world, this human services world, and that if we could reach them with the abilities that they do have in terms of starting small businesses and working on low-income housing, and say to them, 'Welfare reform is an opportunity and a responsibility for you,' that this could be very very constructive. These are some examples of what would be involved.
Well, as I said, the list goes on. The question of health coverage is vital is you're going to go to work. Minnesota has been a leader in getting health coverage for all children. Indeed, Minnesota was a model for the Congress and $48 million that was enacted this year in Congress for over the next ten years for child health coverage nationally. So we need to make sure that that's done right here and across the country. Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich talked yesterday about the number of women who've been forced out of community college around the country who are on welfare. We're doing what we wanted them to do -- to make things better for themselves and the welfare officials have come along and said, 'Well, that doesn't count for work participation. You have to quit college and come do something else.' And she said that was malicious and illegal. Well, it's malicious all right, but it's not illegal. The problem is that's a perfect illustration of what's wrong with there being a block grant. It's a perfect illustration of the advocacy challenge of people to rise up locally and say, 'What are you talking about? This is absolutely perverse.' Seven thousand women in the city of New York have been forced out of City College by the city of New York, people who were working to improve themselves, who were doing everything that we as a society want them to do, and were told, 'No, no, no, no, that doesn't count as work participation. You have to go pull weeds in the city park.'
From the floor
Half of the women in community colleges in Massachusetts.
Peter Edelman
Half the women in community colleges in Massachusetts . . .[?] on purpose, and the same thing has happened in the city of Chicago, so it's real. Substance abuse and mental health services have to be there. The list goes on and on. I don't have to tell you that we need to treat people as people in this process, that there is going on in all of this the mythology that one size fits all and everybody can get out there. Some moms are home taking care of chronically disabled children -- they're doing real work. They're taking care of elderly and infirm parents -- they're doing real work. Just to be put in cost-benefit terms, it costs more for that child or that elderly parent to be in a public institution. And, let's be real, we're talking about people who have an accumulation of personal problems of one kind or another. We're talking about severe incidents of violence against women. These need to be handled in a very personal and very very sensitive way. We're talking about a whole lot of depression that's out there that may not qualify somebody to be on SSI but sure makes it tough for them to just get up and go out and work. We're talking about an incidence of learning disability which is surprisingly high, which by the way is also surprisingly high in our prisons and in our juvenile institutions, unremediated, unidentified, creating a lifetime of frustration, anger and so on, and then we're saying, 'You're instantly ready to go to work'. Not so. Not that the person couldn't go to work. Sometimes they desperately would like to. I was out in Seattle while I was still in the government and taught in Seattle they really in Washington state they've tried to identify, they've studied this question and they've got in a couple of counties efforts to really help women specifically who've been identified as learning disabled to remediate that. So I talked to a couple of women who were in that effort. They had not been able to hold jobs in their life. It was mysterious to them as to why. They desperately wanted to work. They were doing everything that anybody asked, but it's not something that simply happens automatically overnight, and you have to invest the effort to make it happen. So we really have to get out there and do everything we can to give people who don't -- you know, the dope between all of you in this room, you know it better than I do, between all of us in this room and you know, everybody else is out there about all of this, they have such simple notions about all of this. They just think that this is so easy and it just can happen like that. Any of us who say 'It's harder,' their instant response is 'Oh, you're defending laziness. You're defending the old system.' I had a student, very ernest student came up to me after a speech I gave in Cleveland a couple weeks ago after I did a little shorter version of this, and she said 'So, you mean you're in favor of somebody being on -- able to stay on welfare for their whole life?' And I though to myself, 'I've really got to learn to communicate better'. But that's what people hear when you try to say to them, 'Look, we want people to go out and work, but it's harder than you think, and there's all this stuff that you have to do, and you can't just do it by bumper stickers, and you have to invest, and there's some people who are not in a position to go to work --', their eyes glaze over. It's a challenge to us to keep on talking, to educate.
And then, of course, the bigger picture. I'm trying to get this away from body counts of the people who've gone off welfare and really change the effort, to get back into the conversation the things that aren't on the table. You want to do something about poverty in this country, better talk about what's happened to the distribution of income. Twenty years ago Arthur Okin[?], who was a wonderful economist at Brookings, wrote an essay called 'The Leaky Bucket'. He pointed out to his shock in doing the research for that essay that he had found that the income of the top 1% of Americans equaled the income of the bottom 20%. That was twenty years ago. Now, you know what that number is now? Now the income of the top 1%, the top 2.6 million people, equals the income of the bottom 35%. 88 million people have the same income as 2.6 million. Is this democracy, is that a democratic result? Surely economics -- this is much a matter of democracy as politics. We should be talking about economic justice, racial justice, social justice, all of that is part of a democracy. Then we have, they said, 4.6% unemployment yesterday, 'Oh my God, it's time to raise interest rates!' Greenspan is like Jaws, you know. He's quiet for a few months, and just when you think it's safe to go back in the water, there he is. I don't mean to say that we can get on national television like Greenspan -- that's a tough one. We even got to the point where Clinton put a man called Allen Vinder[?] -- he's a fine economist from Princeton -- on the Federal Reserve Board, the vice-chairman for a while. Alan Vinder stood up and he said, 'Excuse me, do you know that it's part of our statute that we're supposed to take the effects of employment into account when we make changes in monetary policy.' It was like he had advocated dropping the nuclear bomb. It just came down on him. 'What are you talking about? We can't have this.' That gets in the way -- that sure does get in the way of pro-employment policy when they want to raise interest rates when there isn't even a speck of inflation on the horizon. The budget -- and I told you, this is a long list, because it's partly our responsibility when Congress gives the President $12 billion for defense that he didn't even ask for -- and now we have, and this really is something where we've got to figure out how to have our voices be heard -- now we have this new situation. You read about it in the papers, see it on television -- we have a surplus. That should be an opportunity. It certainly means the excuses I said earlier -- that the excuse that we don't have money isn't there -- and they're all lining up, they're talking about cutting taxes, Clinton's starting to talk about cutting taxes even -- they're talking about reducing the national debt, they're talking about increasing defense -- 'we've got a surplus, we can increase defense!' -- fixing the national infrastructure -- if they want to rebuild the crumbling schools, that's OK with me. I'd put some money into that. But there are people out there. We should be investing in people and children and families.
Well, that little list that I just gave you, who do you think is last in line? That's a challenge. And we have to get the issues about race back into the discussion as I said in the beginning and gender and then, this whole thing is, we're going to put women to work. I think it's great to put women to work under the proper premises, but you think about, nobody talks about young men anymore. I've been doing some reading for a book that I'm trying to write about the '60s -- very nostalgic -- so you get Robert Kennedy and other people in the context of the civil rebellion, the uprisings, the unrest of the 1960s and they stand up and they say, 'Well, you know, it's kind of not too hard to figure out. There's no jobs out there for these young people.' In fact, with the eyes of 1997 you look at it, it's actually sexist because they talk about young men, they don't talk about young women and that was wrong, too. But now it's like we've given up on young -- we have a policy for young men, and you all know what it is, it's called prison. It's called prison. So we have 1.5 million people, mostly men, under lock and key and you know what's happened to African-American men. Almost a third of African-American men between the ages of 18 and 34 who are either locked up or they're on probation or parole or they're awaiting trial. That is unacceptable. It's a national tragedy. It is wrong. So we need to be talking about men and we need to put all of this in the context of community. What is community responsibility? We can get all the money -- that's a challenge in and of itself -- we have to have public resources. This isn't either/or. We've got to have public money in this. But if we don't have the strength and the capacity and the confidence and the ability to spend the money wisely in the community, we don't got nothing. So community is really a word that has to get back in our vocabulary in a serious concrete way, about all of this -- about how we restructure the schools so that we get the best teachers into the worst schools instead of the worst teachers, so we deal with people so that we have placed-based policies so that we deal with people where they live -- you know what's happened to concentrated poverty in this country. The number of people with incomes that are poor who live in census tracts with over 40% poverty has quadrupled between 1970 and 1990. So the concentrated poverty is a particular problem in all of this. We need safe place-based policies. We need to be looking at what to do about the violence that's out there, about the housing problem, new community institutions, special attention to young people coming up is very very important, and we really need to be strategic. We really need to figure out how we're going to get these things done, how to be effective.
Building a movement. Really building a movement. Changing the political equation. I know there are people here who are organizers. I think that what you are doing is the most fundamental thing that anybody can be doing right now, is changing the equation at the base, getting people who are not active to be active, to see that it can make a difference, changing the attitudes of some people who are voting. What's happening in the trade unions with John Sweeney at the AFL-CIO is encouraging. What's happening in so many congregations and coalitions of congregations around this country is encouraging. I talk about SPEAC -- those of you who are from SPEAC, you should know that I talk about SPEAC -- and the Inter-Faith Action Group in Minneapolis wherever I go around this country. Partly I talk about it because I say that you can do a great acronym if you get into this business. I know that SPEAC stands for the 'St. Paul Ecumenical Alliance of Congregations', and I know that you've got working together with your Minneapolis counterpart $68 million from the legislature to clean up brownfields. 2200 jobs, I know that. Right, isn't that true? That's the kind of thing we can do around this country. We have to have passion and we have to have conviction. We shouldn't be ashamed to feel strongly and let people know that. You know, Yeats wrote 'the best lack all conviction'. We need to be out there saying that we do believe and that it makes a difference and that it's important. So let me just stop with a quote from Frederic Douglass that most of you know, but it speaks to us so strongly. From 1857, speaking in [?] down to this moment. 'There's no struggle,' Frederic Douglass said, 'there is no progress . . .'
From the floor
. . . at the age of six weeks, I mean twelve weeks. That's one point. Can I have another one after we respond to that? Let me ask you both at the same time. How can we move the discussion forward about what we must and should be doing as a community, whether it's local community or the United States community, when there are forces pushing the discussion and getting us away from, towards privatizing the very institutions that we must be putting our efforts towards. To me this is just shattering the . . .
Peter Edelman
Well, these are two very important questions. On the first one, and you probably won't believe it, but I actually threw away a whole bunch of my speech, I was having such a good time up here that I [?]. That actually is something that I'm glad you asked for that reason as well. We are coming to what may be a total inconsistency in the public conversation where we're essentially saying to middle-class women or anybody who's not poor, 'Golly, you ought to be staying home with your kids.' And of course, in that there's a -- it's not just, when I say anybody who's not poor, we're actually talking about a divide at some other economic point because it's totally oblivious to the income needs of everybody, of anybody who's struggling. But we're saying, 'You better stay home and bond with you're kids, and, you know, we have all this new information which is so powerful about brain development and so on and bonding,' and then we're saying to poor women, 'Go out and work.' You really shouldn't have that one both ways, and so we just need to watch that and try to point out the inconsistency. There's no question that one of the reasons -- although there's a long list of other reasons -- one of the reasons why the attitude toward poor women changed between the late '60s and the late '90s is because so many other women did go out and start working during that period of time, and that has really made changed the women the degree of sympathy that there was there for low-income women, and so to come on back around and find people saying, 'Oh, well, actually you should be staying home. All that stuff of the last 30 years we didn't really mean that.' To everybody except poor women, that's not right.
On the second point about privatizing, that's absolutely one of the things that we should be worried about. Now careful what we mean by 'privatizing', Barbara, because there probably are people here, indeed I know there are people here because they're old old kind of privatizing in a good sense which is Catholic Charities and all the religiously-based social services -- I mean everybody needs to be accountable and everybody can approve what they do. There is new kind of privatizing. Every non-profit in the room here that gets government money is an example of privatization. So we have to be careful what we mean and what we really mean is profit-making organizations, and I would even add something to that, because I'm personally not even opposed to profit-making organizations being involved, if there's accountability. What we're seeing is a willingness to hand this over without really caring what people will do. I've seen some figures from Milwaukee County where they have privatized the administration of welfare to six different groups, five of which are non-profit one of which is profit-making. Without taking too much time about how the Wisconsin system works, when you come into the welfare office in Wisconsin, they tell you whether you're job-ready or not, and if they say you're job ready, and you're really not or if it's hard for you to find a job, you end up without cash help, until they decide that they're ready to give it to you. That's dangerous. The profit-making Maximus has six time the rate of classifying people in that limbo thing of all the non-profits. That's the kind of danger that we're talking about. Or in Texas, where they want to give out not only the welfare but the food stamps and the Medicaid completely over, including eligibility determination, to somebody who would come in and bid on it. That's dangerous. So we need to be aware of that, it's a real real problem, but I would calibrate my . . .
From the floor
What does that mean further for the weakening of public institutions such as public schools?
Peter Edelman
A broader conversation is that anything that fragments, especially things that let people lock themselves into gated communities and hire their own private security forces and so on, that's a part of the picture as well, you're absolutely right. That's the bigger sweep of the picture and you're absolutely right. We're losing, in many ways as a country, and I'm not just talking about low-income people, we're losing the public institutions that kind of bind us all together. Absolutely right. Ann?
From the floor
A couple of quick comments and then a question. One is if we don't say, call the bill 'welfare reform', let's not call paid employment 'work'. There's lots of kind of work. It's hard to talk about women on welfare going into paid employment and not use the term 'working'. I think it's just really healthy.
Peter Edelman
Right. I did a little bit when I talked about . . .
From the floor
Right, exactly. I just think we all have to -- we all do it. I also think that -- the reason I came to this conference is because I want a movement and I've never seen a really good movement in this country that wasn't led by a driven and passioned by the struggle for racial justice and again racial injustice. That's where our best in American history have come from and that's why I think we need to build the movement out of the conscious awareness -- not trying to avoid it because it's a touchy subject -- and I think that's what's wonderful at this conference and it's what I think you were saying, I just wanted to [?]. And that's actually been the weakness of the labor movement, is that when it avoided that, it wasn't as good a movement.
The question I have for you is about politics at the -- I wouldn't say higher level -- but the politics of all these people who run for office and tell us they're our leaders. I think we can't only build a movement without more Paul Wellstones and more people who get elected who speak a certain kind of truth. What do you see as, is there any positive stuff you see in that? How do we -- without trying to spend all our time on this electoral stuff which makes me nervous which is why I want to build a movement -- how do we, where do you see the hope there? What do you think we should be doing there?
Peter Edelman
I certainly think that in -- everybody has got this sort of, what should I say, suspend disbelief, when we start talking about a movement. In other words, everybody's essentially got to believe that the classic President Kennedy statement of the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, because to say that you can envision from sitting here this movement is a leap. If it comes, it going to come really from what so many people in this room are already doing and trying to find ways to hook it together and so on. So the first thing is the day to day stuff. That's why I say that. Before you ever get to talking about electoral politics, the issue support has to be there and the development of the generalized consciousness about policy and about issues and framed around things that have electoral appeal. I'm really talking -- the fundamental thing that I'm advocating here is a politics that, well, it has importantly a commitment to racial justice about it, and justice for every group of color, so it's not just racial justice. I'm talking about women, I'm talking about gays and lesbians, you know, a long list. It really is fundamentally an economic-based politics, a politics that says that there's over 51% of the people in this country who really have been not getting a fair shake and that they should be reachable. Bob Reich has talked about it a lot, a lot of people but certainly not [?]. Then you start talking elections. Well, elections, you start talking at all levels. You talk about who runs for city council, who runs for the school board, who runs for the state legislature, and we did that, and we still do it some, and I think you may do it more in Minnesota than a lot of other places, but we've got to do it again.
You can get change in three ways. You can get change by getting lucky and having a fabulous charismatic responsible principled progressive leader come along, but don't hold your breath. You can get -- here in Minnesota you've got Paul Wellstone, so it's a little easier. And you can talk about it by having a horrible crisis take place. We don't want that -- war and depression and so on. There's only one other way you can do it, what we're trying.
OK, take these two questions. Brief answers. I managed to fritter away an entire hour and a half. But I had a good time.
From the floor
Just one last comment from you, hopefully, about the children. I hope that the work that [?] are going to do around child-care will, with a lot of other people, work around getting day-care providers living wage to take care of our children, who want to work. We should make care of our children something that the community does, and if that has to be paid at a living wage, and workers can't do that at current wages, then it has to be subsidized.
Peter Edelman
Well, right now child-care providers are losing workers to other places just because of that.
From the floor
Exactly, and that ruins the . . .[?]
Peter Edelman
Right. Thank you. That doesn't require an answer except to say I completely agree.
From the floor
Hi. Lynn Shellenberger, Sister-to-Sister and a former AFDC recipient. A couple of comments. As to the breast-feeding, I breast-fed a child -- I hate to admit she's three and she still thinks she breast-feeds -- but, I had to get the breast pump. It was a fight. It was a fight. Every time the bill came in -- the bills came, they didn't want to pay it. It was medical assistance. Every time we go -- AFDC recipients -- go someplace, it's a fight. It's a full-time job to fight for the medical care, to fight the social service agencies, on the needy, the worthy, all of that. So that's got to stop. Because it is possible. The breast pumps are there and they're rentable and it is possible to put a child in day-care. The other thing is on your earned income credits, the line I like to use -- and nobody's marketing it -- is do you want to net more than you gross? At certain wage levels you can actually take home more than you can gross, and for some reason we've convinced women to wait for that big check in March or April that they get to use once when you can have an extra $50 in your pocket every two weeks. So we need to do a better marketing plan on that. Thank you.
Peter Edelman
Thank you.
Well, thank you so much. It's absolutely wonderful to be with you. Again, my congratulations. I look forward to talking to you a lot of you individually in the course of the day. Thank you.