The Tribune 07.28.05

Millions of Americans live in households with one or more full-time wage earners and yet they cannot make basic ends meet. These are the working poor, and according to official government statistics, there are thirty-six million of them.

Five years ago, the Charlottesville City Council adopted, for the first time, a Living Wage for its employees, drafting a budget in which no city worker earned less than $8/hour. At the same time, demonstrators were picketing the Marriott Courtyard, and faculty and student activists were picketing the University of Virginia, demanding an $8 Living Wage for their employees.

Public institutions should lead by example in reforming the inequities and social injustices that exist in our society, and the city has made historic strides in doing so. Nevertheless, it is appalling just how far the Living Wage is from the actual cost of self-sufficiency in American households, and just how far we have to go before we achieve these goals.

A major study sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Family Fund, Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Normal Foundation surveyed the costs of everything from owning and operating a car (including insurance, taxes, registration, gas, maintenance), to purchasing basic food (no take-out or fast foods), to rental costs, child care, health care, taxes and other basic needs (not including clothes). The study (which can be found on-line at www.sixstrategies.org ) reports the cost of self-sufficiency in every state, city and county in the nation.

For a Charlottesville family in 2002, the cost of self-sufficiency far exceeded what $8/hour would provide. For example, one adult with an infant and preschooler would have to earn $16.90 an hour, or $35,695 annually, to cover basic needs. Add a second adult, and each adult must earn $9.91, or an annual household income of $41,862, to make ends meet. A needed income of $21.67 per hour, $45,765 per year, tops the scale for one adult with an infant, preschooler and schoolage child.

During the same year (2002), the federal poverty line was calculated to be $15,000 for a family of one adult, one preschooler and one schoolage child. It doesn’t take a UVA professor to calculate the discrepancy between the federally-defined poverty standard used to calibrate the Living Wage, and the stark, day-to-day reality of poverty. For many families in Charlottesville, poverty is any income less than $35 - $45,000!

Two years before this study was conducted, the U.S. Census recorded 773 Charlottesville families with children under 18 (19.2 percent) living below the federal poverty line. Given what we know now about the actual costs of basic needs, how many Charlottesville families would be classified as being poor, if we re-calibrated this number to match reality? The answer is that there are many more working poor than we have been willing to believe. We will not “win” the War on Poverty until we put poverty back on the national agenda and address low wages for America’s working families. $8/hour (even $10) is not a Living Wage.