Saturday, June 25, 2011
Working in the Warehouse
I'm in Oklahoma right now (and have been for the past few days) volunteering at the Oklahoma Regional Food Bank on a mission trip with my old church in Waco (7th and James). It is great to see some of my old friends, and wonderful to learn about the food bank, which distributes about 40 million pounds of food a year, and feeds 77,000 Oklahomans.
It is a little odd, though, to work on a project where we do not meet the people we are helping (by building a church or a home, for example). This is doing good at wholesale, not retail. In a way, it reflects the shift in my own work over the past decade, as I have moved from individual cases to focusing on policy issues.
Oklahoma is a tremendously stratified state economically, and a very conservative one-- Every district went for McCain in the last election. I am torn by something at the heart of this mammoth operation.
It is clear that wealthy people here have made great efforts to fund this amazing facility, but I wonder about the social conditions that cause so much ongoing poverty in the first place: Educational disparities, for one thing, and differing expectations.
As I sort out the food in the warehouse, I think about those underlying conditions and what can be done, and endless complexities emerge. For example, there used to be a lot of good jobs for people with a high school education (or less) in the building trades and roofing, but much of that work is now done by illegal aliens. Is part of eliminating the endemic poverty in a place like this closing down the employers of those aliens, and insisting that legal residents and citizens get those jobs? If so, are we shutting out people that we want in this country?
With every bag of almonds I pack, my rote actions seem simpler and the answers more complex. My hand dips into the box and removes the almonds, but my mind is racing.
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I often wondered how can there be poor people in modern America? America the super power where everybody is offered at least one opportunity along the way. Why are high school graduates unemployed and poor? Why are the roofing jobs and building trades done by illegal aliens? Why is it that Americans with less education than high school forgo the rough jobs offered for that skill level and all the ditch digging and strawberry picking is also done by illegal aliens? Because the wages are miserable for all those jobs. And miserable as they are these wages end up amounting to an income that would put that high school graduate or poorly educated American [desperate enough to take them] above the “poverty line” by literally just a hair and in another financial realm altogether, worse than poverty: the “in between” misery. The system problem I see is that the “in between” trap is too wide and unfortunately most people choose to forgo the roofing jobs, ditch digging and strawberry picking misery and choose the poverty line handouts.
What I noticed looking at the Oklahoma Food Bank map - they do not distribute to the east and northeast of the state where there are Indian Reservations.
Interesting.
Thanks for your good work this week.
Interesting.
Thanks for your good work this week.
Christine-- I think that there is another food bank in Tulsa that covers the eastern part of the state.
I don't buy that illegal immigrants are taking these jobs and that is why unemployment and poverty are rising. I think it is a distraction from the fact that manufacturing jobs that were the backbone of the middle class are no longer in this country. Our economic and trade policies have helped the top 1% accumulate record levels of wealth while pushing our country farther down the rabbit hole.
The underlying irony is not that migrant workers -legal and illegal- work in these professions, it is that a large part of the American public no longer has the work ethic to do that type of physically demanding laborin the jobs that are still here. Just look to the regions of the country that have tried to have an aggressive deportation policy: no one fills those jobs once the migrant workers are gone, corporate farmers and the like complain to the right people, and the policies are quickly changed. It's too bad, because many of those professions -roofing, concrete, meat packing, etc.- do pay a livable wage and you don't need much education to do them.
The flip side of the entire debate is that the way demographics are shifting in this country following the baby boomers into retirement, we need a higher rate of population growth to fill the huge oncoming personnel gap in our more skilled workforce. We also need a larger tax base to prop up entitlements for the huge number of boomers about to get old and sick, and a more generous immigration policy would be a wise move. Granted, we need to educate these people to fill the skilled positions we will have, and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much extra dough floating around these days.
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The underlying irony is not that migrant workers -legal and illegal- work in these professions, it is that a large part of the American public no longer has the work ethic to do that type of physically demanding laborin the jobs that are still here. Just look to the regions of the country that have tried to have an aggressive deportation policy: no one fills those jobs once the migrant workers are gone, corporate farmers and the like complain to the right people, and the policies are quickly changed. It's too bad, because many of those professions -roofing, concrete, meat packing, etc.- do pay a livable wage and you don't need much education to do them.
The flip side of the entire debate is that the way demographics are shifting in this country following the baby boomers into retirement, we need a higher rate of population growth to fill the huge oncoming personnel gap in our more skilled workforce. We also need a larger tax base to prop up entitlements for the huge number of boomers about to get old and sick, and a more generous immigration policy would be a wise move. Granted, we need to educate these people to fill the skilled positions we will have, and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much extra dough floating around these days.
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