`Get a job!”
A generation ago it was the challenge shouted by hard-hats at anti-war protesters.
Now it’s the order that welfare reformers want to give the 5 million American families living on public aid.
President Clinton chimed in last week, unveiling a welfare reform package whose centerpiece is a cutoff of payments after two years for young heads of households who fail to get a job or enroll in a government-sponsored work/training program.
“Get a job!”
As if taking a job-any job-will put an end to the problems of welfare recipients, or ours as taxpayers.
It won’t.
Not in low-wage America, where you can hire somebody for as little as $4.25 an hour ($8,840 a year) and not offer health insurance.
Not in low-wage America, where more than half of those living below the poverty line-about 20 million people-live in households where at least one person already works.
These Americans have jobs and are still poor, earning less than the $13,091 a year a family of four needed in 1992 to stay above the poverty level, according to the Census Bureau.
Recently the bureau reported that the percentage of full-time workers earning wages below poverty level grew an astounding 50 percent from 1979 to 1992.
Things are especially bad for men with low education levels. The bureau found that 32 percent of male full-timers without high school degrees earned less than a poverty wage, up from 15 percent in 1979.
I’m not arguing that people are better off on welfare.
Life on the dole is spiritual suicide, crippling recipients just as surely as it maddens and makes cynical those of us who haul ourselves out of bed five days a week to feed our families and meet the mortgage payments.
Strictly in dollar terms, though, welfare can be a better deal than a job in low-wage America.
The standard AFDC payment of $380 a month for a mother of two might not sound like much. But add Medicaid coverage and other needs-tested benefits and you’d be crazy not to think twice before taking a $736-a-month minimum-wage job with no benefits and expenses-from clothing to transportation to day care-that you don’t have if you stay home.
Yet that’s the prospect under the Clinton plan for welfare recipients born after 1971, who will be given two years to get a job, any job.
Of course, it won’t be presented that way. The reform legislation, when it’s passed by Congress next year or the year after, will be dressed up with tuition subsidies, job training, day-care programs and other bells and whistles.
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But who’s kidding whom? Most former welfare recipients aren’t going to be taking jobs as computer programmers or airline pilots. They will become store clerks and fast-food cooks, car washers and domestics.
In other words, they’ll trade the poverty of welfare for the poverty of low-wage America.
Unless, of course, we muster the political courage to attack low-wage America the way we’re about to attack welfare dependency.
Congress could start by doing two things: Raise the minimum wage to $6 an hour for everyone over 21 and require all employers to offer health insurance and to pay 80 percent of its cost.
This will require courage, because the kingpins of low-wage America-the big retail and fast-food chains-will scream bloody murder, claiming they can’t be “competitive” if forced to provide a decent wage plus health insurance.
Free-market economists from business-funded think tanks will crank out “studies” claiming that thousands of small businesses will go under, putting millions of people out of work. Minimum-wage companies that have the option will threaten to leave the country.
To which we must learn to say: “Good riddance!”
Americans are fed up with welfare, but we’re also beginning to lose our patience with poor-mouthing employers who make taxpayers pay the shifted cost of health care for their workers, just as we pay for all the food stamps and tax credits it takes to make up the difference between what these free riders pay their workers and what it takes for those workers to live a decent life.
Sure, we’ll end up paying more for a cheeseburger or a car wash.
Doing away with low-wage America will be worth the price.