Work First, People Last

By Preston Quesenberry

Vol. 18, No. 1, 1996 p. 7

In the name of “independence,” and “responsibility,” states around the nation have been implementing “Work First” programs designed to force welfare recipients into the workforce. While such programs are supported by their proponents as “giving families the help they need to become self-sufficient,” they effectively entail using public dollars to coerce welfare recipients into the private sector’s lowest-paying and least desirable occupations, with little hope of advancing from them. While welfare recipients are obviously not forced at gunpoint to engage in society’s most-exploitative jobs, the time-limits and strict sanctions which accompany Work First legislation effectively coerce them with the threat of starvation.

The federally-mandated Job Opportunity and Basic Skills (JOBS) programs had at least partially emphasized long-term training for work which really could provide participants with a modicum of independence and self-sufficiency. Thanks to federal waivers, however, the Southern states of Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Virginia have been revamping the JOBS programs and shifting the emphasis to getting welfare recipients into the workforce immediately. This fact is boldly proclaimed in government press releases boasting about the new programs, as in this statement from the office of North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt: “County departments of social services across North Carolina began shifting their welfare families from JOBS, a program that emphasized long-term training, to Work First, which emphasizes short-term training, work, and personal responsibility.”

Commenting on Virginia’s Work First program, Virginia Poverty Law Center attorney Steve Myers pointed out the basic problems with this model, a model he said has “become the vogue and spread like wildfire among state governors.” “According to the Work First model, education and training doesn’t work; what works is work,” Myers said. “The problem with this strategy is that half of AFDC recipients don’t even have a high school education. How they are going to support themselves at the end of the time limit without further education or training is hard to understand.”

Practically, most Work First participants can’t support themselves at the end of the time limit. Finding jobs as cashiers at fast food restaurants or retail stores,earning five to six dollars an hour at part time work, former AFDC recipients–most of whom are mothers with children–cannot be expected to support themselves without government subsidized child care (while they are working), Medicaid (because most of these low-wage employers don’t provide health insurance), and other benefits just to get by. In Cobb County, Georgia, for example, the average salary for Work First participants is just $727 a month before taxes–hardly enough to allow a mother of two to become “independent” and “self-sufficient.”

Following a philosophy that all work–no matter how low paying, routinized, exploitative, or monotonous–has intrinsic value, proponents of Work First boast of the programs’ effectiveness in getting welfare-recipients employed while ignoring what kind of employment is being obtained. In press releases, Georgia brags of putting five thousand welfare recipients to work, North Carolina of placing 9,239 participants (twice as many as JOBS did in the same period a year earlier) , but neither boasts of the average salary or nature of the jobs being acquired.

So valued is work as an end in itself, that state governments are willing to subsidize the supply of human resources to low-wage employers not only indirectly through publicly funded medical insurance and child care, but also directly by paying employers to hire welfare recipients. Both Mississippi and Virginia, for example, divert AFDC and Food Stamp benefits to pay employers one dollar for every hour that a former welfare recipient works for them.

Instead of subsidizing private employers, perhaps states should guarantee a minimum standard of living. Instead of forcing “responsibility” on welfare recipients, perhaps they should force responsibility on private employers to provide a decent wage, health insurance, and reasonably attractive work. Furthermore, instead of taking the insufficiencies of the current JOBS program as proof that “education and training don’t work,” perhaps state governors and legislators should see them as proof that education and training programs require more funds and resources. This would be the true road to independence and self-sufficiency.

Preston Quesenberry is a graduate student at Emory University’s Institute of Liberal Arts.

The Disposable Olympics Meets the City of Hype

By Preston Quesenberry

Vol. 18, No. 2, 1996 pp. 3-14

Not since the height of the Civil Rights movement have the Southern states, and Atlanta in particular, received as much extended media coverage as they are due to receive in the next month. The 1996 Centennial Olympic Games will draw not only fifteen thousand members of the press covering the athletic events, but also an anticipated live to ten thousand additional national and international journalists looking to use the Olympics as a backdrop for human interest stories and feature articles on Atlanta, Georgia, and the South.

Anticipating this incoming media wave, the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, along with other trade and tour-ism organizations, has established a press information center at the site of a former bus station in the middle of downtown Atlanta to assist international reporters re-searching, among other things, “Southern lifestyle and culture.” The world’s journalists are not likely to settle for a South viewed through the Chamber’s lens, but those who drop by the center will receive press kits presenting two central images. One is an “Old South” of “genteel Southern plantations,” “Southern hospitality,” “nostalgic, charming towns,” and “tastes of the region like sweet tea, cornbread, black-eyed peas, barbecue, and peach pie.” This evocation of a “region rich in tradition” is then juxtaposed with depictions of a forward looking, rapidly progressing, economically booming “New South.”

Of course, pre-packaged images of Southern traditions iron out all of the diversity between different regions of the section of the United States known as the South, while denying or harmonizing historical and existing tensions which exist among the different populations who live across this broad geography. Appalachia is not the Delta is not the Carolina Piedmont is not the Gulf Coast, and so on. Nor can Atlanta stand in for the diverse historical realities of any old or new Souths. And as for generalized depictions of an “economic boom,” such talk obviously ignores a great many people who have not shared in the supposedly ubiquitous prosperity.

Questioning the oversimplified portrayals of Atlanta and the South leads us to voices other than those of business and tourist promotion or of the Atlanta Commit-tee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) and its list of proud sponsors. Atlanta, rather than the South at large, is the subject of this essay which seeks to locate some realities underneath the city’s current image-making and asks what we can learn about this Olympic city from local activists, advocates for the homeless, and public scholars who have been dealing with and thinking about the coming of the Games for many months.

While the Chamber of Commerce may boast that Atlanta was voted number two in Fortune’s 1995 “Best Cities for Business” list, the city also ranks number two in the nation in income disparity between blacks and whites, number two in the percentage of the population living in public housing, number two in violent dimes per capita, number two in total crimes per capita, and number nine in the rate of poverty. While the voices for business say that the Atlanta metropolitan area leads the nation in in-migration because of its “unmatched quality of life,” the population living in the city itself (now generously estimated at 424,300) has been shrinking for more than twenty years. An estimated fifteen to twenty thousand people in this urban-core population can’t rind any place to live, much less a place “unmatched in quality,” and an additional fifty thousand live in public housing with seven thousand qualified applicants waiting to move in.

The world of journalists descending on Atlanta for the Olympics will find it particularly difficult to ignore this poverty because so much of it is concentrated in and around what is known as the Olympic Ring — a three-mile wide circular area in Atlanta’s downtown core which contains nine major venues holding sixteen of the thirty sporting events. According to data collected in 1990, ninety-two percent of the 52,000 people living in the Olympic Ring neighborhoods are African-American, and most of them are poor. The median household income in these neighborhoods is just $8,621, the median per-capita income is $5,702, and labor participation rates are no higher than seventy percent and as low as thirty-five percent. Does ACOG expect journalists not to address this obvious poverty in their descriptions of the city? As Reverend Austin Ford, who works in the neighborhood surrounding the new Olympic stadium, puts it, “The Olympic stadium is in a very depressed community, and

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I don’t know that the journalists will need for that to be pointed out to them. They might say, `Well, I can see!”‘

Not Again: Resistance to the Olympic Stadium

Father Ford heads Emmaus House, a community center located just south of the stadium. He says he first came to work in the area in 1967 because of problems created by the 1965-66 construction of Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, home of the Atlanta Braves. While the Braves stadium was touted as an economic benefit to the area, the neighborhoods surrounding the stadium– Summerhill, Mechanicsville, and Peoplestown–declined dramatically after its construction. The initial erection of the structure required the destruction of thousands of households and the displacement of 5,500 residents. By 1990, Summerhill’s population had dwindled from 16,000 to 2,746 and Mechanicsville’s had plummeted from about 15,600 to 3,900. As of 1992, unemployment in Summerhill was sixty-six percent and the median household income was $7,670. In Mechanicsville and Peoplestown, the median household income as of 1990 was $5,598 and $11,563, respectively.

Given the adverse impact of the Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, the proposed construction of a $209 million, 85,000-seat Olympic stadium on the old stadium’s south parking attracted immediate and vehement opposition from Father Ford and other community activists in the Summerhill, Peoplestown, and Mechanicsville neighbor-hoods. ACOG–the “non-profit,” exclusively private organization supposedly responsible for all aspects of financing and staging the $1.7 billion Olympic spectacle, including all venue construction–promised these activists that the new stadium would serve the best interests of surrounding residents and set up an Olympic Stadium Neighborhood Task Force to give local community leaders a role “in planning an Olympic stadium in your neighborhood.” Father Ford refused to join, telling the local newspaper, “I’m not planning on an Olympic stadium–I’m hoping against hope they don’t put it down here. I just think they’ve got to keep it straight: We can’t be co-opted.”

So far, Father Ford says that, despite ACOG’s promises, he has “really seen no positive impact on the people who live around here. Their lives haven’t been improved but actually quite the reverse because rents have gone up. One week we had seven evictions because the rents have gone up so. The owners are fixing up these old houses, you see, to rent them out to people who want to be around here during the Olympics. A lot of people have been moved. There’s also been a lot of demolition around here–mostly in Mechanicsville to make room for parking. They considered the structures they demolished to be bedraggled and run down, but people were living in those places.”

Summerhill residents currently have no legal recourse against these evictions because Atlanta, according to former Atlanta Tenants Rights Association President David Bass, has “one of the worst renters’ rights situations of any major city in America.” Landlords can raise rents to whatever amount they like and as often as they like, they can set the security deposits to whatever amount they want, and they can force tenants to sublease their apartments. Despite the attempts of Bass’s and other organizations to push for legislation to remedy this situation, all three of the proposed bills (including a temporary anti-rent gouging bill which would have capped rent increases at ten percent up until August of 1996) died in the state legislature.

Although the Olympics have brought rent gouging, housing demolition, and other negative consequences to the neighborhoods surrounding the new stadium, Father Ford says the effects could have been worse if not for the work of Ethel Mae Mathews, president of a residents’ rights group based in Peoplestown called Atlanta Neighbors United for Fairness (ANUFF).

Having first learned of the Braves’ stadium site thirty years ago when her landlord evicted her from her Summerhill apartment, Mathews immediately mobilized ANUFF after seeing a story about the proposed Olympic stadium site on the television news (a source she was forced to rely on, she says, because city and ACOG officials never notified residents in the surrounding neighborhoods about the site of the new stadium or attempted to include them in the planning process).

ANUFF’s repeated letters, phone calls, public meetings, and protest marches at city hall, at the new stadium site, at ACOG’s headquarters, and even at ACOG President Billy Payne’s home in suburban Dunwoody were all intended to make sure “they couldn’t build that second stadium with ease,” Mathews says. “We held the stadium up for six months. And that accomplished a lot.”

ANUFF won several concessions in the revised stadium deal between ACOG, the city of Atlanta, Fulton County, and Ted Turner’s Braves: the stadium was moved slightly so that housing for the elderly could be saved; the number of parking spaces was reduced by 1,100, saving additional housing; and the Braves agreed to put 8.5 percent of the team’s revenues made from parking into a community fund.

Although proud of what ANUFF accomplished and proud that her organization was able to remain “free of ACOG’s control,” Mathews says she believes the group could have won more concessions if all the people who

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had first worked with ANUFF had “stuck together.” “When we first started out, we had a lot of support from all of the neighborhoods that were going to be hardest hit by the stadium. But after we got into it, and we got strong, someone from ACOG came into the neighborhood, waving dollar bills, promising money, saying ‘Don’t fight us, come over to our side, and we’ll make it worth your while.’ Then over half of the people who started out with us sold us down the drain.”

A “big part of the sell out,” continues Mathews, was Summerhill Neighborhood, Inc., a non-profit community organization based in Summerhill and founded by former State Representative Douglas Dean in 1989. Instead of adamantly opposing the location of the new stadium, as did Ford and ANUFF, Dean and SNI sought to form a partnership with the Olympic organizers that Dean said would “speed along the rebeautification” of Summerhill and make it a “showplace by the time the first caravan of athletes rolls into town.”

Father Ford, too, dismisses the work of Dean and the SNI as a “sell-out” that divided the grass-roots opposition to ACOG by voicing support for the stadium project. “Douglas Dean and the SNI were one hundred percent behind the Olympics from the very beginning,” Father Ford says. “They were no help at all. I think if we could have gotten Summerhill, which was the neighborhood most immediately affected, to join with the rest of us in trying to get some concessions for the community, we could have had a better deal. But Dean and the others had signed on so completely, that that wasn’t possible. The business community simply adored Douglas Dean, because he was going along with everything they wanted.”

Dean says that he understands the “fears and frustrations” of Father Ford, Mathews, and other community leaders who are concerned about the Olympic stadium in light of the adverse affects of the Brave stadium, but he insists that this time around the result will be different. Because the Summerhill community was organized enough to take advantage of the situation Dean believes that the siting of the new stadium near th neighborhood is now bringing real benefits to the area–a refurbished commercial district, street improvement; renovated recreational facilities, and, most importantly, new houses. Instead of reacting against the location of the Olympic stadium, Dean says SNI had been “proactive” by developing its own comprehensive plan for the neighborhood even before it was announced that the Olympics would be coming to Atlanta. Developing a concrete, long-range plan was the key to SNI’s success, Dean says, largely because it “made the environment better” for a partnership with the business community.

In particular, Dean argues that the creation of a comprehensive plan encouraged the banks to loan money for mortgages and for the construction of new houses in Summerhill. “Out of all we proposed,” Dean says, “one of our real issues was getting the banks to reinvest in the neighborhood. And we’ve done that. That’s so important to revitalization because unless somebody’s loaning money for mortgages, you’re not really going to revitalize your community.”

The money from the banks, as well as money from the federal government and private foundations, enabled the construction of 190 new homes in Summerhill, the first new houses to be built in the neighborhood for fifty years. Located directly across from the Braves stadium, easily in view of the Olympic visitors, are the seventy-six new townhomes of Greenlea Commons, which sell from $100,000 to $139,000. In the celebratory prose of the local newspaper, these townhomes are meant to transform Summerhill “from a poor, predominantly black enclave to

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an economically stable, multicultural community.” Further away from the stadium, scattered throughout the neighborhood, will also be seventy-nine, 35,000 homes with no-interest nun gages set at $250 a month.

The disparity in the prices of the new houses will encourage the growth of a mixed-income community, which is “essential for revitalization, Dean says. In the case of Summerhill. Dean insists “revitalization” into a mixed-income community does not mean gentrification into a community with no place for low-income populations to live. SN1’s strategy involves both turning the current low-income “renters into stakeholders” and attracting previous residents of Summerhill back into the neighborhood with new housing.

Dean’s claims aside, the benefits to the Summerhill community have been “minimal,” says Rev. Tim McDonald, former head of the local activist group, the Concerned Black Clergy, and minister at the First Iconium Church, located a few miles north of the new stadium. “Summerhill,” continues Rev. McDonald, “is the only community that has gotten minimal benefits from the Olympics. That’s unfortunate. I think our city missed a great opportunity for enhancing the communities. Summerhill was the only affected neighborhood with an organization in place to try and get dollars. Mechanicsville and Peoplestown probably needed money even worse, but they didn’t have any viable organization. To Doug Dean’s credit, he got the mechanism in place, but it could have been just as easy for ACOG to assist the other neighborhoods to put those mechanisms in place.”

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The “Revitalization” of Techwood/Clark Howell

For Rev. McDonald, the struggle in the Olympic stadium neighborhoods did not represent the “biggest fight of the whole Olympics.” Rather, the real battles were waged north of Summerhill and west of the central business district, in another hub of Olympic-related activity. Here sits the Georgia Dome, a stadium built for the city’s professional football team on land cleared in the 1960s for low- and moderate-income housing. Also in this area west of the central business district lies the just-built, fifty million dollar, twenty-two acre Centennial Olympic Park, the proposed “gathering place” for Olympic visitors. Al-

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though the state of Georgia will pay for its maintenance after the Olympics, the actual construction of Centennial Park was financed solely through private funds–but at the expense of turning in the park into a large advertisement. In return for payment of tens of millions of dollars, ATT will be allowed to construct an Olympic Global Village in the park, Swatch an eighteen-foot high clock tower, General MotorsMoters [sic] a “Century of Motion” complex, and Anheuser Busch a hi-tech beer garden. Bordering the park’s northern edge will be Coca-Cola’s own $30 million, twelve acre “Coca-Cola City” amusement park.

The low-income mixed-use area which was plowed under for these parks/advertisements was labeled a “cancer” by the former head of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. It included three homeless shelters (which housed ten percent of the city’s shelter beds), one large single occupancy hotel, and day care centers, as well as housing which has not been replaced, and small business which had nowhere to relocate.

Just north of Centennial Park, between the world headquarters of Coca-Cola and Georgia Tech, is the just-built $169 million Olympic Village, the dormitories for the Olympic athletes. The village rests on the former site of 114 low-income units of Techwood/Clark-Howell Homes, the first public housing project in the nation In addition to the destruction of these units, the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) has approved a plan to replace the remaining 1,193 units of Techwood/Clark Howell with a nine-hundred unit mixed-income development–with forty percent market rate housing, twenty percent low income, and forty percent public housing. Essentially, then, this $42 million, federally-funded “revitalization” (in the words of AHA officials) will result in the loss of almost eight-hundred public housing units.

Rev. McDonald feels that the “Techwood fight” was the most heated battle of the Olympics and that the final plan to replace Techwood with a mixed-income development is a “hoax” generated by Atlanta’s business commu-

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nity to get the kind of development they want in that area. ‘There are business folks who always wanted that area because of its proximity to downtown,” McDonald says. “They used the Olympics as a catalyst to get that area. Now they have it, and all those folks who lived there are going to be displaced. All the business community wants is out of sight, out of mind. I admit that some of those displaced folks may find a better place with Section 8 vouchers, but I would challenge them to produce ten of those families who have been relocated. There was no tracking, there were no real attempts to relocate them. They just wanted to get those folks out so they could on with their business.”

Another church leader and community activist, Joe Beasley of Antioch Baptist Church North, agrees with Rev. McDonald that the loss of Techwood was perhaps the worst of the Olympics’ “tremendous negative impact on poor people.” “You drive down through that area,” observes Beasley, “and you see all of these public housing units being torn down, and you ask, `Where have all the poor people gone?’ Frankly, I don’t know.”

Techwood/Clark Howell Homes are only one of several of what AHA has designated “Olympic Legacy Communities”–public housing units (most of which border Olympic venues) that will be demolished and “revitalized” into “mixed-income housing.” According to a consultant with AHA, Rick White, AHA has aimed to “leverage the excitement around the Olympics to gain the political and community support that was needed” to demolish not only Techwood/Clark Howell, but also John Hope Homes near Clark Atlanta University, John Eagen Homes near the Georgia Dome, and East Lake Meadows in southeast Atlanta.

According to Beasley, the destruction of public housing around Olympic venues represents only part of a larger attempt on the part of the “Olympic People to get the world to believe a big lie–that Atlanta has no poor people.”

“They’re hiding the homeless, chasing them away, and locking them up because they’re afraid people are going to see,” he says. “They’ve put together ordinances to sweep the downtown corridor.”

Southern Inhospitality: A Sanitized Downtown

The ordinances Beasley mentions were passed by the Atlanta City Council in July of 1991, less than a year after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that Atlanta would be the site of the 1996 games. The ordinances make it illegal for “suspicious-looking” people to remain in a parking lot if they don’t have a car in the lot (thirty-five percent of downtown Atlanta’s acreage is devoted to parking lots), to beg in an “aggressive” manner, and to enter vacant buildings.

Equally concerned about what they call the 1991 “Anti-Homeless Ordinances” are the members of the Open Door Community, a residential Christian center of thirty men and women who help assist some of Atlanta’s estimated 15,000 to 20,000 homeless. Located just north of the Olympic Ring on Ponce De Leon Avenue, Open Door’s kitchens prepare thousands of meals each month for the city’s hungry. Its facilities offer the homeless restrooms and a place to shower. Its front and back yards provide a safe haven. According to Murphy Davis, who founded Open Door in 1981 along with her husband Ed Loring, this haven has become even more necessary in the growing “atmosphere of hostility” toward the homeless and poor created by the Olympics.

One of the most recently exposed incidences of overt hostility against the homeless is Fulton County’s Homeward Bound program, which offers one-way tickets out of town to those homeless persons who sign a statement promising never to return and who can show they had a job or family waiting on the other end. Murphy Davis, however, began noticing “really strange things” even before Atlanta’s selection as host city, when Billy Payne’s group was still attempting to sell the city to the IOC.

“We serve breakfast every morning downtown to about 250 people,” says Davis, “and one morning we got down there and there were only ninety-five people. This happened several times. We couldn’t figure out what was going on. Then we learned that the IOC had been in town looking at Atlanta. The police had obviously just gone through and swept the streets. They just picked up everybody, and soon as the IOC and its limousines would leave, they’d let them loose again.”

It is relatively easy for Atlanta’s police to “sweep” the streets in preparation for the Olympics, Davis says, both because most homeless people cannot effectively resist if they are detained illegally and because the police are now armed with a slew of ordinances that enable them to legally arrest the homeless whenever they want to. The enforcement of an older ordinance against public urination particularly irks Davis because the homeless have no legal place to pee. For over a decade, she and other homeless advocates have been campaigning to get the city to use the money it spends arresting people for urinating in public to purchase public toilets. Although the Atlanta City Council promised to provide these facilities downtown in 1993, the city reneged on this promise.

In addition, Davis says she has learned ACOG plans not to set up any portable toilets outside of the venues during the Olympics but is simply encouraging restaurant owners (who routinely deny the homeless access to

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their facilities) to open their restrooms to the millions of Olympic visitors. “One of the almost funny things about this,” Davis says, “is that by trying to make the city inhospitable to certain of its citizens, it’s making it inhospitable to our visitors as well.”

Shortly after Davis spoke, a wealthy, Atlanta-based businessman, J. B. Fuqua, also realized how inhospitable the central city would be to Olympic visitors due to the absence of toilets, drinking fountains, and shade structures. Fearing that the lack of such accommodations between venues would “not only be a great inconvenience, but would have made a bad impression,” Fuqua donated $1.5 million to ACOG to provide the necessary facilities. The toilets, shade, and drinking stations, however, will all be portable and removed after the Games are through.

To fight for permanent restroom facilities for the city’s homeless, Davis and other members of the Open Door Community participated in a “Pee For Free with Dignity” rally in the city’s Woodruff Park, a site which adds to the sense that much-needed funds (from both public sources and private foundations) are being misused to remove the homeless from downtown rather than to help their situation. Woodruff Park has recently undergone a year-long, five million dollar redesign, which includes such expensive amenities as a thirty-foot decorative fountain and a seventeen-foot cascading waterfall. The new design also includes facilities specifically engineered to discourage homeless people from using the park–such as benches all facing in the same direction, with arm rests that make it impossible to lie down. Left out are any facilities than might attract the homeless, such as bathrooms, drinking fountains, or the older, wrap-around-bench tree planters that encouraged face-to-face conversation. For Davis, the park represents “precisely what the powers-that-be say they want: a ‘sanitized zone,”vagrant free,’ and deserted enough to appear safe.”

“Devoid of the color of a rich, urban culture whose life has never been celebrated,” Davis continues, “we see in this new Woodruff Park a city that is boring, antiseptic, colorless, cold, and heartless.”

The construction of inhospitable spaces, the passing of ordinances which have the effect of targeting the homeless, and the pervasive sense that enforcement of these ordinances is on the increase as the Olympics approach are not the only forces creating a hostile atmosphere for the homeless in downtown Atlanta. Central Atlanta Progress, an association of large downtown businesses and property holders, has just spent two million dollars to post its own force of fifty private security guards (or “goodwill ambassadors,” as CAP prefers to call them) around the central business district.

Adding to the sense of “security,” ACOG has announced that Centennial Park will be surrounded by a fence to “control the crowds and keep out the riffraff.” During the actual three weeks of the Olympics, 25,000 federal, state, and local law enforcement officers and military personnel will be assigned to security downtown. “If the people who come here follow instructions,” assured ACOG’s A. D. Frazier in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, shortly after FBI statistics showed Atlanta to be the second most violent city in America, “they’ll be in the most secure place on Earth.”

While “secure” for middle and upper class visitors who “follow instructions,” Murphy Davis thinks that the homeless will feel threatened by this environment and stay out of the Olympic Ring during the games. “Things are really going to be hot,” she says, “and I think homeless people know they had better just disappear during this time. There are people who have been positioning themselves for years to make a lot of money off this event, and they don’t mean to be inconvenienced by any poor people. And homeless people are not the only ones who’d better stay out of the way. Young African American people, especially in groups, and all people who are poor or in any other way unlike the button-down business crowd had better watch out.”

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Davis sees the Olympics as a “trial run” to achieve what the downtown business community has long desired: the permanent removal of the homeless from the city center.

Open Door partners are also concerned that the Olympics could leave an equally troublesome legacy: more homeless people. Open Door’s Todd Cioffi says he has noticed a lot of “new faces” in their facilities, breakfast lines, and soup lines and wonders whether all of these new arrivals will stay in Atlanta after the Olympics and remain homeless. Cioffi says some of these new faces are people who have lost their homes due to the destruction of housing facilities (such as former Techwood residents). Some are among the thousands who have been forced out of apartments because rents have escalated. But most of the new homeless Cioffi says he has talked with have come from out of town searching for work.

Typically these new arrivals find no jobs at all or they find only temporary work with the sixty labor pools in the metropolitan Atlanta area–labor pools which all Olympic venue construction companies use for at least some of their workers. Making anywhere from $4.25 to $6.00 an hour and taking home as little as $27 for a full day’s work after all deductions are made (for transportation fees, lunch, equipment rentals, and state and federal taxes), labor pool workers most often do not make enough to afford even the cheapest rental housing. “Money’s being made off the backs of these people,” says Cioffi, pointing out that labor pools perpetuate homelessness by paying only day-to-day subsistence.

Along with condemning the exploitation of labor pool workers by private construction companies, Cioffi and Davis further denounce the use of scarce public resources on these Olympic projects. Although the Olympics are supposedly a completely privately-financed business venture (a “fact” the private, “non-profit” entity ACOG repeatedly points out when it is asked to help redevelop poor neighborhoods or to make its completely closed decision-making process more public and democratic), public investment in the Games is considerable. So far, the city has spent $327 million on projects being executed specifically for the Olympics. Virtually all of the projects are aimed at making the city more amenable or attractive to Olympic visitors rather than helping the economic situation of the city’s poor residents in any direct way.

The city has spent $250 million of these funds on renovating Hartsfield International Airport for the influx of tourists. Just recently, the airport’s newly built, plush atrium–replete with upscale shops and fast-food eateries, sofas and chairs, and personal computer hook-ups–has become a campground for the city’s homeless, perhaps driven here by the hostile atmosphere downtown. While the homeless say they need a place to go and are not hurting anyone, airport administrators and shop managers are furious. “We’ve had an element of predators discover the airport as a very warm and comfortable place to prey on other people,” Hartsfield Aviation General Manager Angela Gittens told the Atlanta Constitution.

Come July, however, the homeless most likely will be “swept” from the airport as well. Although the airport is a public facility owned by the city of Atlanta, the city’s loitering ordinances prohibit people from occupying any public places if they’re not there to “do business.” Armed with these ordinances, police have been telling all of those homeless who can not produce a plane ticket to take the MARTA train out of Hartsfield (although they do not waive the $1.50 cost of the ride).

In addition to the $250 million airport renovation, another $32 million in city funds has gone to the Corporation for Olympic Development in Atlanta (CODA) for streetscapes, park improvements, and public art. Those parts of CODA’s $220 million plan for the Olympic Ring neighborhoods aimed more directly at economic redevelopment were left unfinanced. Along with the city, the state of Georgia has spent $235.4 million on the Olympics and the federal government has spent $248.3 million, bringing the total amount of public funds directly involved in the Games to more than $810 million.

While homeless advocates such as Cioffi and Davis tend to wage most of their battles over the use of public funds within the shrinking city of Atlanta, Steve Suitts, former executive director of the Southern Regional Council, warns against looking no farther than City Hall and downtown business associations to “find the enemy.” Such an approach, Suitts says, ignores both the limited options available to a financially-strapped municipality and the suburbanization of the Atlanta metropolitan area that has left the residents inside the city limits city to deal with a disproportionate amount of poverty.

“The irony,” maintains Suitts, “is that the people at City Hall are probably the most sympathetic of all. They’re the only ones among all the metropolitan region’s elected officials who are willing to do anything for the homeless. They’re the only ones who are ever asked to do anything, and they’re the only ones who are criticized for not doing enough. Is it only the city of Atlanta’s responsibility because homeless people collect themselves in the most numbers in the central city? Does that mean that folks who run away to the suburbs of Gwinnett and Cobb counties shouldn’t have to address these issues?

“Assuming the territory of responsibility is only where the homeless happen to find themselves camping out at night,” Suitts continues, “is an awfully limited notion of responsibility and does not respect in any way the metro-

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politan economic situation which has caused this situation.”

Regarding the Olympics in particular, Suitts also points out that getting the Games to Atlanta was not primarily a project of City Hall but rather of Billy Payne, a real estate lawyer who was not a core member of the city’s power structure but who did have the crucial support of Andrew Young–former US Ambassador to the United Nations, former mayor of Atlanta, and former lieutenant to Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Billy Payne wasn’t selected by either City Hall, by the state government, by the downtown business leadership, or by the international corporation leadership here,” Suitts notes. “No one truly foresaw that Billy Payne, with the help of Andy Young and others, would, in fact, succeed, so ACOG wasn’t mounted by anybody’s coalition. Everybody gave it their approval but nobody really thought seriously enough of it that they invested anything substantial in the beginning or got concessions or terms by which things would run afterwards. Nobody controlled Payne’s group before Atlanta got the opportunity of hosting the Olympics and therefore ACOG has had the opportunity of creating new relationships for the purposes of running the Games.”

Always Constructing the Image

When ACOG was created in January of 1991 by an agreement signed between Billy Payne and then-Mayor Maynard Jackson, Payne was appointed as the new body’s president and chief executive officer. He proceeded to assemble around him an upper-management cohort of people similar to himself–white, male, middle-aged lawyers and businessmen. As Clark Atlanta University’s Bob Holmes notes, “Among the policy makers of ACOG, in the inner circle of about ten folks, you’ve only got one African-American: Shirley Franklin, who was appointed in 1993 as ACOG’s chief senior policy advisor and who was Andrew Young’s former chief of staff. On the next level, you’ve also got only one African-American: Morris Dillard, who’s the director of transportation and security.”

A state representative and the director of Clark Atlanta University’s Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy, Bob Holmes has co-authored a 1995 study entitled “The 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics and Their Impact on African Americans,” which analyzes ACOG’s employment patterns, among other issues. In the study, Holmes notes that if you look at all of ACOG’s employees and not just those of upper management, the organization was “doing a good job” in hiring African Americans up until 1993, when more than one-third of ACOG’s employees were African-American. By the end of 1994, however, the relative percentage of blacks had slipped to 26.4 percent, and Holmes said he intends to see if this downward trend continued in a follow-up study which will published after the Olympics.

Holmes also notes that ACOG has had a good track record in awarding contracts for merchandise and services to minority-owned business. Of ACOG’s total purchases of $114.23 million in 1994, $38 million, or thirty three percent, went to female- or minority-owned firms, with $35.20 million or 30.8 percent going to black businesses. ACOG had not, however, been collecting information from the contractors and vendors to see whether they have been in compliance with the Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action plan. Holmes says he will also have to wait until after the Olympics to collect this information.

For the most part, however, Olympic contracts and

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benefits will be enjoyed by a relatively affluent minority, and the “economically underprivileged majority” will get nothing at best, and see their situation decline at worst, Holmes says. “I don’t see the lives of the poorest in the African American community being improved at all,” he says. “There are major social and economic issues that have just not been addressed by public officials, and I hope the media will examine this and does not just focus on the glitz and glamour.”

Bob Holmes, too, decries the loss of thousands of public housing units without specific plans for adequate replacement and with an existing “five thousand plus” waiting list in the city. He also notes the apparent inability of residents in the Olympic Ring neighborhoods to get construction jobs on the projects disrupting their communities. Holmes says it is visibly obvious that very few local residents are getting construction jobs at the various sites. “This is just an impression, but you drive through the city, and I would say about eighty percent of those workers are Hispanic,” he says. “You know very few of those people are from the surrounding neighborhoods, because those neighborhoods are predominantly black.” Most of metro-Atlanta’s estimated Hispanic population of 197,300 is concentrated in the suburban counties of (in descending order of numbers) DeKalb, Gwinnett, Cobb, Fulton, and Clayton.

Tom Fisher, district director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, could not confirm Holmes’ eighty percent estimate, but he says contractors are certainly employing “a lot” of Hispanic workers. A year ago, Fisher and the INS apprehended thirty-seven, predominantly Hispanic, workers–the majority of whom were from Mexico–being employed illegally to work on the Olympic Village construction site. In addition, the INS arrested forty (also predominantly Hispanic) immigrants working illegally on the Martin Luther King Historic Site, which is being redeveloped for the Olympics.

Since these busts a year ago, Fisher says the INS has taken into custody more than five-hundred illegal immigrants from “twenty to forty different countries” who were working on construction projects. Fisher estimates a quarter to a third of these projects directly involve Olympic-related construction, but adds “it’s hard to define” exactly what counts as Olympic-related construction. “The Olympics have given construction in general such a boost, in essence you could say almost everything is Olympic related,” he says. Fisher believes lower wages motivate construction companies to hire illegal immigrants. “The employers use this rhetoric that these are jobs Americans wouldn’t take because they’re only paying six or seven dollars an hour. But, in my opinion, these are ten dollar per hour jobs they rolled down to seven bucks.”

Bonnie Berry Wilder, an attorney who represents injured workers, says Hispanics, whether employed legally or illegally, get paid less primarily because they are not unionized. “In eight years of representing Hispanics in workman’s comp, I have only had one client who was union member,” Wilder says. “I don’t know if they’ve been purposefully excluded or they just don’t know the

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system or process well enough to know how to go about getting into the union. My solution to foreign workers driving down wages would be to open up the union and get out and recruit some of these people.”

Low wages are not the only reason Wilder says construction contractors prefer to hire Hispanic workers, many of whom she says are skilled craftsmen. The many employers she has talked with say they “love to hire them because they work very hard, they don’t complain, and they don’t demand overtime.”

Employers also tend to take advantage of those Hispanic workers who do not know English or who are not familiar with their rights as workers. Particularly with illegal immigrants, contractors often lie to those workers who get hurt on the job to avoid having to report the injury (and hence the illegal employment) to the insurance companies.

The Atlanta Labor Council (ALC) has not had the resources to precisely monitor the number of non-unionized Hispanic workers or the number of labor pool workers being employed on Olympic-related projects. Each project can have up to fifty private contractors hiring their own employees, making careful documentation extremely difficult. Information could be collected on the Olympic stadium construction, however, because it was the only venue on which all of the work was covered under a union agreement governing wages and benefits. Constituting about half of all Olympic construction, the work on the Olympic stadium has been “eighty percent-plus union” and forty percent African American, according to ALC president Stewart Acuff.

In contrast, the construction of the Olympic Village–managed and largely financed by the Board of Regents of the State of Georgia–has been marred by an “atrocious labor policy,” Acuff says. At the Village, private contractors have hired non-unionized Hispanic workers “off the streets” or have out-sourced to temporary services, resulting in a work-force which is “eighty-five per-cent non-union,” according to Orlando Jones, representative of Carpenters Local 225.

Many Atlantas, Many Souths

The prevalence of unorganized Hispanic workers in the anti-union environment of the New South is a story unlikely to be featured in media portrayals of a harmonious “tradition.” Georgia State University historian Cliff Kuhn says journalists doing feature articles on “Atlanta” and “the South” can avoid flattening out such complexity if they learn one important point: “There is no monolithic South. There are a diversity of Souths. And, in fact, the greatest tension in the Atlanta region right now is the tension between traditional and modern forces. It’s a fast growing area of the country, and you have these tremendously disparate ways of doing things side by side. In the far-out Atlanta suburbs, you have chicken houses, next door to defense plants, next door to bulls raised by investment bankers, next door to new Asian immigrants.”

If media visitors choose to address the differences or tensions between various populations of the South at all, they will most likely do so by referring to the civil rights movement. Here Kuhn worries that the movement will be sanitized and oversimplified into the globally recognizable symbol of Martin Luther King. A historian who has worked on many public history projects, including an oral history of Atlanta, Kuhn is particularly worried about not losing the “grassroots quality” of the movement.

“It’s important to conceive of the civil rights movement as going beyond the icons of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks,” Kuhn says. “The movement involved thousands of people and hundreds of communities all over the South. It involved grassroots organizing. We’ve had a King-centrism, which, without denying the very real contributions King made, has blinded us to the grass-roots quality of the movement. This King-centrism has also made us only think of King in terms of his movement activity as an apostle of non-violence, and not really look closely at King’s evolution of thought–toward his anti-war statements and his critique of the American economy.”

Another historian of Atlanta, Ron Bayor from Georgia Tech also worries that the history of race relations in Atlanta will be distorted in mass media presentations. The author of Race and the Shaping of Twentieth Century Atlanta, Bayor is concerned that the media will perpetuate the image of the city as a racially tolerant place that has succeeded because it has avoided the racial prejudice of the rest of the South. “I think the Chamber of Commerce vision and the vision that’s portrayed by ACOG is that Atlanta got the Olympics because it has this reputation of racial moderation,” Bayor says. “But in almost every sense of the word except for violence, Atlanta was as bad and as segregated as every other city in the South. Atlanta is really not unique at all, and race played a major factor in the shaping of the city.”

As in most cities, Bayor observes, the strategic use of urban renewal is one way race has played a role in physically shaping the city. City officials used the construction of highways, stadiums, civic centers, hotels, and office buildings to clears slums and remove blacks from certain sections surrounding the central business district. “The city didn’t just grow haphazardly, there were plans, there was money put in certain directions and not in others, and so we wound up with the city we have today. Certain parts of the city were politically available for black use, certain parts weren’t. We see a white part of

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the city in the northeast, we see a black part of the city in the southwest and the southeast. That was created through earlier efforts to control blacks’ residential patterns. It was created by the very careful placement of black public housing in certain areas and not in others. No black housing was ever placed in the white northeast section, for example. Those are the type of things that created a city later on that is segregated, not officially, but segregated none the less.”

Despite the reality of de facto segregation, Atlanta developed an image of a racially tolerant city–of a “city too busy to hate,” as Atlanta Mayor William Hartsfield said in 1955–both through careful cultivation on the part of the political and business leaders of the city and by avoiding the outbursts of violence occurring in other Southern cities such as Birmingham and Little Rock. Admitting that the relative absence of violence was “certainly no small issue,” Bayor sees this absence resulting from a very well-organized black community and a white business community that was willing to form a political coalition with them, with “blacks as junior partners.” This coalition aimed to “work out disagreements peacefully and behind the scenes.”

Realizing that industries “ran away from Birmingham” and that Little Rock had “lost both population and industry after their 1957 fiasco of not admitting a few black children to their schools,” the white business community, Bayor says, wanted to “try to keep things cool racially to attract business.” Mayor Hartsfield–“an expert at public relations and getting the newspapers down here to see only what he wanted them to see”–heavily promoted the “image of a city that’s not trying to keep its black citizens down, that’s trying to be fair.”

“It was an image,” Bayor argues, “that was very cultivated, but it wasn’t the reality. The truth comes out in the 1960s because there are a lot of sit-in demonstrations here, there’s a lot of protest, indicating that much more has to be done in the city to reach any kind of equality. The really important aspects of the city, who controlled, who were the city department heads, who were r the people who made the decisions, that was kept in white hands, I would say up until Mayor Maynard Jackson comes in.”

Despite the ascendancy of a black mayor in the early 1970s, Bayor believes that the city s black political leaders have, for the most part, only been able to promote programs that help middle class blacks, such as affirmative action and the minority business enterprise program. They have been able to do very little for the black lower income groups in Atlanta, whose “quality of life in terms of economic well-being has not really improved.”

“It’s very difficult,” Bayor concludes, “to get anything done in this city that the economic elite does not approve of. The economics of Atlanta are still controlled by the whites. The banks are still white, the big corporations are still white. It’s difficult to be a mayor in the city and buck the business community–to instead of building, let’s say, a Centennial Park or a civic center, to pour money into housing or more jobs for lower income people.”

Rick Beard, the executive director of the Atlanta History Center, reverses Bayor’s focus on Atlanta’s similarities with other Southern cities by emphasizing difference. “There’s not enough attention paid to the fact that Atlanta has always been different. It really isn’t of the Old South. The city wasn’t founded until 1837 and it was nothing, in terms of population, until the twentieth century. So the idea that you’re going to come here and drink mint juleps on the verandah just isn’t true. It’s always been a city that’s been commercial in intent. It’s always been a city that has been able to put the past behind it very quickly. The reason that Atlanta is the hub-city of the South is that it got over the Civil War and was willing to take Yankee dollars.

“Atlanta does not honor its history,” Beard continues. “It is so constantly remaking, reshaping, and redefining itself, that I think it’s really hard for anything, including the Olympics, to have a lasting impact. Although the Olympics will be like a massive photo-op for Atlanta’s businesses, I don’t think the Games will have any lasting impact on the fabric of the city or the people who live here. Atlanta will just move on to the next big thing, whatever that will be.”

Sidebar: Gainesville’s Country Club Venue

Preston Quesenberry

Vol. 18, No. 2, 1996 p. 15

Although the Centennial Olympic Games will be the most compact in history, with competition venues for sixteen sports located within a 1.5-mile radius in downtown Atlanta called the Olympic Ring, almost half of the Olympic events will still be held well outside of Atlanta’s city limits throughout both Georgia and the South. Outlying venue cities include Columbus, Gainesville, Athens, and Savannah in Georgia, as well as Birmingham, Alabama; Miami, Florida; and the Ocoee River area in Tennessee.

These outlying cities are spending a combined eighteen million dollars in preparing Olympic-related projects, and questions about who is really benefiting from the use of public funds for the Olympic Games, and at whose expense, are therefore not limited to the city of Atlanta. One outlying city were the debates have been particularly heated is Gainesville, Georgia, where Olympic rowers will compete on Lake Lanier. Located about fifty-two miles northeast of Atlanta, the city of Gainesville is racially segregated by Highway 129, know as Jesse Jewel Parkway. The city’s African American community, which lives southeast of the dividing line in an area called Newtown, is currently up in arms about what it considers a gross misuse of desperately needed community development funds for Olympic-related projects. “The city of Gainesville,” says Rose Johnson, program director of the Georgia Project of the Center for Democratic Renewal, “for all practical purposes, is giving a higher-level and better treatment to people who are coming in from the international community than it has to people of color who actually live in that community.”

The city council of Gainesville has decided to use $2.4 million of state and federal development fund dollars to renovate the exclusive, private Chattahoochee Country Club, where the city’s business leaders will entertain Olympic visitors. Part of the funds will also go to building a rowing venue on Lake Lanier. The Newtown Florist Club, a organization formed more than forty year ago to care for Newtown’s sick but which has since tackled many issues of racial justice, has issued a proclamation to the city council denouncing the decision. The president of the Newtown Florist Club, Faye Bush, says this “fervent objection has a history and a context” that makes these particular uses of such funds particularly “unconscionable.”

For one Newtown has historically been the victim of what Bush calls “environmental racism.” The area, she says, has been called the city’s “industrial fallout zone” because of the numerous industrial developments that immediately envelop the African American communities. The resultant pollution in the area has been linked to unusually hight incidences of Lupus and cancer. Newtown residents have repeatedly asked the city council to help remedy this situation and have submitted proposals for redevelopment, but the council has so far refused to carry out any of these proposals, using “lack of funds” as the “most frequent excuse for inaction,” Bush says. “Just try to imagine our shock and outrage to discover that there are $2.5 million of state and federal ‘development funds’ dollars sitting in an account only to be doled out to the private country club and an Olympic venue!” Bush wrote in a memo addressed to the city council. “It is all but impossible to recall a time when African Americans have been admitted, much less welcomed, at a private country club! This particular use of public funds is obviously not for us to enjoy.”

The construction of a rowing venue was another “slap in the face,” Bush says, because the African American community has been trying in vain for years to get its own recreational facilities renovated. Rose Johnson agrees: “The city of Gainesville for the last twenty-five years has repeatedly insisted that there was no money for the renovation or the building of recreational facilities on Gainesville’s south side. Gainesville has fourteen or fifteen recreation sites. The ones that are in the worst shape and that will cost the most to repair are the ones in the black community, and except for the ones on the south side, Gainesville has top notch recreational facilities.”

Adding to the insult, the community development funds the city is using at the country club and the rowing venue in the north side came from model cities-urban renewal projects in the south side, Johnson says. Land in the south side was purchased, cleared, and sold, and the money from the sale went into the community development fund, she said. Bush says all of the black businesses were located in the area of the community that was cleared during the 1960s. “Because they were all wiped out during urban renewal, now we don’t have any black businesses,” Bush said. “So I don’t see how black folks can benefit from the Olympics.”–P. Q.

Preston Quesenberry is a graduate student in the Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University.

Private Interest Law: The Case Against Delta EPA

Preston Quesenberry

Vol. 18, No. 3-4, 1996 pp. 22-23

Challenging an institution as tricky to define in legal terms as a rural electric cooperative can prove a difficult task. An unsuccessful lawsuit filed in 1983 against the Delta Electric Power Association provides a vivid demonstration of some of these inherent complexities.

The plaintiffs in the case of Givens, et al. v. Delta Electric Power Association felt they had encountered a clear and egregious example of discrimination. Since 1967, the all-white Delta board of directors simply had been re-appointing itself at annual meetings without a quorum. Moreover, since the founding of the co-op in 1937, the board had never had a black member, despite the fact that forty-four to fifty-five percent of the co-op’s customer-members were estimated to be African American. Then in 1983, the board carried out a series of actions which seemed flagrantly designed to prevent the election of three African-American candidates.

For one, co-op officials refused to give the group of black Delta members supporting the challenge candidates a list of the names and addresses of cooperative members–a list necessary to mobilize black voters and secure proxy votes–until the day after the election. The co-op also changed the time of the annual meeting from 2 p.m. to 10 a.m., with the “apparent hope of dissuading members from attending,” in the candidates’ opinion.

Despite these obstacles, a record number of more than 100 African Americans (most of whom carried the three proxy votes allowed in the co-op’s bylaws) appeared at the April 12, 1983 meeting to vote their candidates into office. The incumbent board responded by announcing the absence of a quorum and abruptly adjourning the meeting without entertaining a motion made by the members, as required in the written bylaws.

After the incumbent board left the meeting, the assembled members continued the proceedings and elected eleven new board members, all of whom were African American. The incumbent board ignored this election, however, and called another special election for June 14, 1983. Meanwhile, the board continued to act in ways that black members interpreted as discriminatory. First, the directors amended the bylaws to allow each member to vote an unlimited number of proxies rather than three proxies, as was previously allowed. Then they printed and mailed out proxies to all of the members and ran an advertisement encouraging members to return their proxy–none of which had ever been done before. According to one of the challenge candidates, all of these actions had the effects of insuring “that the votes of black members, who are in the minority, will be diluted and cancelled out.”

At the June 14 meeting, no black Delta members and only forty white members showed up, but the all-white board used 7,587 proxy votes to declare a quorum and re-appoint themselves.

Justice Not Applicable

A federal class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of the co-op’s black members, in which the plaintiffs charged they were “deprived of their right, because of race, as members of the cooperative, to participate cooperative’s board of directors.”

In the ensuing four-year legal battle, however, federal district court judges ruled that many of the legal weapons commonly used by attorneys to fight racial discrimination in governmental elections were unavailable in the case of cooperative elections. For one, the attempted use of voting rights legislation was “frivolous.” one judge argued, because “Delta Electric is a private corporation and its corporate elections were limited to the cooperative’s members.” The use of constitutional amendments (in particular, the Fourteenth Amendment which ensures due process and equal protection) was also unfounded, the judge said, because “Delta Electric is a private corporation, which cannot be liable for a constitutional deprivation.”

Realizing they were dealing with a private and not a governmental entity, the plaintiffs’ attorneys believed their best weapon against the co-op was Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which states that federally-funded institutions cannot act in ways which intentionally discriminate or have discriminatory effects. Delta, like all co-ops, receives federal funds in the form of no- or low-interest loans from the Department of Agriculture.

However, the court ruled that there was no direct relationship between the federal funds Delta received and the way it allegedly discriminated. The judge argued

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that Delta did not use its loan funds to carry out elections but only to construct, operate, and upgrade its electrical distribution system. Therefore Title VI was only applicable, the judge said, if Delta somehow discriminated in providing electrical service to its customers. The plaintiffs tried to convince the court that Delta did discriminate against blacks in providing service, but the judge ruled the evidence in fact indicated “that predominantly black neighborhoods received better treatment.”

According to Paul Sonn of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, this reading of Title VI–which required a direct “nexus” between the federal funds used by a program and the specific manner in which the program discriminated–was common in the early- to mid-1980s. In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld this way of reading Title VI in Grove City College v. Bell.

But in 1988, the U.S. Congress decided that Title VI was meant to offer broader protection against racial discrimination in federally-funded institutions and passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act. The act states that an institution receiving federal funding cannot discriminate (either intentionally or effectively) in any of its activities. Because of this act, Sonn says a similar suit brought against Delta today could not be dismissed for the same reasons.

–P.Q.

Sidebar: Opportunity Comes to Roanoke Electric

What may be the only majority-black electric cooperative board in the nation resulted, in large part, from a consistently active majority-black membership.

Of the nine board of directors of Roanoke Electric Cooperative in Rich Square, North Carolina, five are African-American and four are white–proportion which roughly corresponds to the ratio of black to white co-op members (about 53 percent to 47 percent).

The black members–hundreds of who regularly turn out at annual meetings–first won representation in 1970, when two white incumbent board members died. The remaining board members tried to nominate another two white men at the 1970 annual meeting, but the black membership refused.

“They broke up the meeting, they wouldn’t let them have it,” remembers Matthew Grant, one of the two candidates elected in 1970 and now president of the co-op’s board. “So the directors felt like they had to put some blacks on the board. One of the areas that had been pushing had a black man that they wanted to put on. The put him on, and they also put me on.”

The board then proceeded to dilute the votes of its two new black members, charges Grant, by changing the bylaws to expand the number of board seats to eleven–a change which was overturned several years later.

In 1981, for the first time, a white incumbent board member was defeated in a democratic election by a black challenger. The black members, who as usual constituted the majority of members present a the meeting, nominated their own candidate form the floor and successfully elected him into office, bringing the number of black board members up to three. The next two black candidates elected to the board were not nominated by the customer-members from the floor but were appointed by the board.

According to Grant, a struggle among the board members occurred over the appointment of the fifth black member to the board. The white board members “really didn’t want us to have a majority, and they have fought it,” Grant says. “But we go tone of the white fellas to vote with us, so we were successful.”

Since the board became majority-black, Grant says he and fellow board members have finally been able to pursue an aggressive equal employment opportunity agenda. Before a majority was won, blacks were hired only for lower-level, manual labor positions, Grant says, but now the board has made sure that blacks are hired for administrative position.

Currently, forty percent of the co-op’s sixty-two employees are black, and an independent watchdog committee has been set up to monitor future hiring.

Deregulation: “Wheeling” Over Rural Customers

Preston Quesenberry

Vol. 18, No. 3-4, 1996 pp. 24-26

The proposed deregulation of electric utilities is emerging as yet another obstacle to rural electric cooperatives becoming a progressive force in their communities. Currently, electric co-ops at least have the potential to address a wide variety of social needs in their service areas: economic development, democratic involvement, environmental protection, energy conservation, and affordable service for all customers (including low-income or hard-to-serve customers). But in the competitive, laissez faire environment created by deregulation, this host of concerns could very likely fall victim to the sole priority of generating power at the cheapest cost for what commercial utilities consider their most attractive customers–large industrial users and high-density service areas. Even worse, deregulation could threaten the very existence of cooperatives by re-moving all barriers to multi-state mergers and corporate takeovers in the utility industry.

At the core of the policy debate over the deregulation of electric utilities is the concept of “retail wheeling.” In a retail wheeling system, electric customers would no longer be required to buy power from their local utilities. Rather, the customer could buy electricity from a host of competing suppliers who would be given the right to “wheel” their power across the transmission lines of local utilities.

The large industries that are spearheading an aggressive campaign on the federal and state levels to secure retail wheeling rights claim the ability to shop around for the lowest electricity rates will save their businesses billions of dollars. But those lobbying against retail wheeling–citizens’ and consumers groups, environmental organizations, electric industry labor unions, and the trade associations for cooperative, municipal, and investor-owned utilities–think big business’s savings will be made at the public’s expense.

“Industries want to be divorced from what they see as weird social programs that have been tacked onto the electric bill,” explains Greg Wortham, counsel for the co-ops’ trade and lobbying organization, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA). “These include renewable–solar or geothermal–energy use, programs to make sure that the elderly or poor who can’t pay their bills still can get some electricity to live, taxes to pay for the new trees that have to replace those knocked down for electric lines, taxes relating to staving off green-house effects, and others. Industries don’t want to pay for these things. They want to be able to buy power at or near the cost of generation from independent power producers who have no local obligations or ties to local communities. But the states and their citizens have made certain decisions that these programs are important, and the cost of them is either going to have to be thrown somewhere else or simply done away with.”

Costs of a “Free Market”

Nor do industries want to share in the costs of providing power to residents in remote or low-density population areas, Wortham argues. Although the large industrial proponents of retail wheeling champion competition and the free market as bringing benefits to all, Wortham contends that the free market’s benefits will be distributed unevenly–to the marked disadvantage of rural populations. That’s why the co-ops were started, he explains.

“By 1935, the free market had given us these huge monopolies that chose not to give any electricity to ninety percent of the farms in the country,” Wortham says. “That’s when Congress decided they had to enact the Rural Electrification Act to make up for that market failure.”

The basic premise of the co-ops established under REA, Wortham says, was and continues to be for “all of the consumers in the co-op area to pool their resources so it becomes not unduly burdensome on any one customer to be served, so that everyone can be served.” Wortham worries, however, that this cooperative model might not continue to work in a retail wheeling environment.

A co-op territory depends on “everybody pitching in,” he says, and if the “most attractive loads–those that use the most power and pay their bills the best–can be picked up by other suppliers and taken out, then only the worst customers are left.” According to Wortham, this “cherry picking” results in a situation where it “becomes cheaper and cheaper for the most attractive customers and more and more expensive for the `worst’ customers.”

“It’s a vicious spiral,” Wortham continues, “The co-op left serving the worst customers gets more and more uncompetitive, and it and its community become less and

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attractive to other business or residential development. Even if a factory can move to a rural area and get its power from another supplier, its workers are still going to have to live in an area with the highest electric rates.”

Wortham points out that deregulation has resulted in similarly uneven service in other industries. Airline deregulation, for example, has resulted in low airfares to high traffic destinations and much higher fares or even the complete loss of service to lower traffic destinations.

In addition to avoiding the costs of guaranteeing power to residents in remote areas, industries also want to avoid the “stranded costs” of utilities–primarily the nuclear and coal plants which utilities invested in during the 1970s that produce power at above market rates. The U.S. electric industry has about $135 billion in outstanding bills on these investments, which consumer groups fear will be passed on to the remaining residential customers once the big industries get power elsewhere. Indeed, Texas Perspectives, Inc., an Austin, Texas, economic analysis and public policy consulting firm has conducted a study of the potential economic impacts of retail wheeling in Louisiana which projects just how much of these stranded costs could be passed on to residents. According to their report, retail wheeling would lead to a 52 percent increase in the price of power for Louisiana residents and small businesses between 1996 and 2007, while large commercial rates and industrial rates would decrease 1.6 and 3.7 percent, respectively, over the same time period.

Monopoly Games

Another concern the NRECA and others have about deregulation is that it will intensify the mergers and takeovers already being proposed in the electric industry throughout most parts of the country (although the expected buyouts have not been as prevalent in the Southern states thus far). Deregulation would entail repealing key sections of the Public Utility Holding Company Act

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(PUHCA) of 1935. which limited the ability of multi-state firms to buy or sell energy businesses and split up the massive conglomerates that controlled most of the nation’s generation and transmission at the time. The repeal of the barriers imposed by the PUHCA combined with the more competitive environment of retail wheeling will doubtless lead to more utilities merging with one another. In addition, electric utilities unregulated by the statutes of PUHCA will be more attractive acquisitions for corporate conglomerates outside the electric industry.

The current system set up by the PUHCA–in which privately-owned utilities regulated by state utility commissions have a government-sanctioned monopoly to generate, transport, and sell electricity in a limited area–was already changed significantly by the 1992 Energy Policy Act (EPAct). The EPAct allowed for wheeling on the wholesale level. Wholesale wheeling means that distribution or retail companies (that is, traditional utilities) are authorized to buy directly from competing generators but still have a local franchise over retail customers. Wholesale wheeling has encouraged the growth of the independent power producers (producers free of any obligations to serve any particular community) which are now so vigorously lobbying for retail wheeling.

Although it authorized wholesale wheeling, the EPAct specifically banned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission from ordering retail wheeling. However, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire are all in the process of changing state laws to allow for retail wheeling, even though it’s not entirely certain they have the authority to do so. Other states such as North Carolina, Florida, Maryland, and New Mexico have looked into retail wheeling and decided it is not in the state’s best interest.

However, U.S. Rep. Dan Schaefer (R-Col.), chair of the Energy and Power Subcommittee of the House Commerce Committee, introduced a bill in July which would order all states to open their electricity market to retail competition by December of the year 2000. For now, NRECA counsel Wortham predicts the bill will not get one subcommittee vote. Schaefer himself has admitted his legislation is not likely to be enacted this year, but anticipates that it will be a top priority in 1997.

Globalization Drives Persistent Inequality The Climate for Workers in the U.S. 1997

By Preston Quesenberry

Vol. 19, No. 3-4, 1997 pp. 3-20

As we go to press with our fourth edition of the Southern Regional Council’s Climate for Workers survey, recent reports tell us the nation’s economy couldn’t be better. Unemployment is at generational lows. The stock market is still near record highs, despite recent volatility. Inflation is in check, and profits are rising. This, a business climate report might say, is as good as the “free market” gets.

But low unemployment rates have not given workers enough bargaining power to make any significant in-crease in wages–or even to fend off their real decline. The record numbers in the Dow have little relevance for the 71 percent of the population who own no stock or less than $2,000 worth (even in pension and mutual funds). And while most people like low inflation, the top one percent of the income scale (who make 40 percent of their income off investments) benefits far more than those at the middle and bottom.

Assessing the current U. S. economy from the perspective of a business climate report, high marks go to low inflation, stagnant (or falling) wages, low benefit costs, low union densities, strategies that maximize temporary and part-time work, “deregulatory” legislation, and regressive tax policies. The Climate for Workers, however, looks for states with stable employment, ad-equate pay checks, fair and safe workplaces, good places to live, and solid worker protections.

So far in the 1990s, state legislatures continue to erode statutory protection for workers, particularly unemployment and workers compensation. In 1996, the U.S. Congress passed and President Clinton signed a welfare “reform” act that will push millions of workers (often paid sub-minimum wages) into the low-wage labor market and put a downward pressure on wages for the bottom 30 percent of the income scale. The “balanced budget” agreement of 1997 gave about 50 percent of the plan’s tax cuts to the top 5 percent of the income scale.

Meanwhile, the much-advertised economic recovery of the 1990s has done nothing to lessen the country’s historically high rate of poverty and has brought the inequality of income and wealth to record highs. The real income of the median household–the household exactly in the middle of the income scale–has increased modestly over the last three years, but it still has not recovered from sharp declines in the early 1990s and remains almost $1,000 below its 1989 level. Even worse, the real median hourly wage has actually declined from $6.96 in 1989 to $6.37 in 1995 (in 1995 dollars) and declined another .9 percent between 1995 and 1996. During these years, the bottom 80 percent of men and 60 percent of women experienced some deterioration in wages. Workers have compensated for the decline in wages by working more hours, holding more jobs, or sending more household members into the workforce.

Part of the reason for falling wages has been trade agreements like GATT and NAFTA, which have increased the ease of international investment flows at the expense of domestic investment in manufacturing; helped exacerbate chronic trade deficits; enabled the outsourcing of intermediate production work to low-wage countries; and increased the leverage of employers with both workers and governments.

“Almost everybody agrees international trade has had a negative impact on the wages of low and middle income people,” says Ray Marshall, former Secretary of Labor and now professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. “To change this trend, we need to get international economic policy right, and that means having international labor standards as part of the trade agreements with all countries. We know that as global economies become integrated, there will be a convergence of wages between the U.S. and other countries. The real question is, Which way do you want the convergence to take place? My view is, we’d be a lot better off if we raise their wages rather than lower ours. But we’re going in the opposite direction with NAFTA.”

The “right direction” for the U.S. and the rest of the world, Marshall says, is to “stop competing with wages, and start competing with rising productivity and quality.” But if the U.S. is ever to begin pushing policies that raise the world’s living standards rather than corporate profits, it will need to put an end to the destructive “race to the bottom” that exists within our own borders–between the states.

States currently compete with each other for business investment by offering the lowest wages, the least protective labor laws, the lowest taxes, and the slackest

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environmental regulation. Currently, the states with the by the winter of 1997, it had fallen to below 5 percent. At best labor climates–mostly in New England, the Mid- the same time, employment has grown, but sluggishly. Atlantic, the Great Lakes, and the Far West regions–are Indeed, no post-war upturn in the economic cycle has often handicapped rather than rewarded for their higher seen slower job growth. The 11.6 million net new jobs standards. As the Climate for Workers shows, the states with the highest incomes, the best protection for workers, the strongest unions, and the best public provisions have not been among the high growth states. Indeed, many of them had fewer jobs in 1996 than they did in 1989.

As a result, even moderate legislators in these states and elsewhere are calling for “business-friendly” provisions to make their states more “competitive”–tax breaks for businesses, dramatic reductions in workers compensation and unemployment insurance benefits, “right-to-work” laws and other anti-union measures, the weakening of overtime and prevailing wage provisions, public spending cuts, and privatization.

The push to end this absurd “race to the bottom” must begin by setting national standards at least at the level of those states with the best climate for workers. This report highlights those states by looking at five general categories, each of which is composed of five to eleven indicators: labor market opportunity, earnings and income, workplace conditions, state protection of workers, and quality of life.

Labor Market Opportunity

Combining job-growth and unemployment statistics, “labor market opportunity” includes measures commonly used by business climate reports to gauge the health of a state’s economy. However, the business press and the financial community begin to worry when unemployment rates get too low and labor “shortages” begin to emerge, because this gives workers a better bargaining position and, theoretically, drives wages up. The Climate for Workers, how-ever, celebrates a tight labor market for these very reasons. If the overwhelming majority of people must be sellers on the labor market, better to have the advantage with the seller than the buyer. And the closer a society comes to gainfully employing all of its members in productive activity, the better.

Nationally, unemployment is lower than it has been in decades. The average annual unemployment rate for 1996 was 5.4 percent and by the winter of 1997, it had fallen to below 5 percent. At the same time, employment has grown, but sluggishly. Indeed, no post-war upturn in the economic cycle has seen slower job growth. The 11.6 million net new jobs

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added to the economy between 1989 and 1996 represent a growth rate of just 1.5 percent a year, compared to 2.6 percent a year between 1967-79 and 1.9 percent between 1979-89.

“Unemployment could and should have been lower sooner,” argues Jared Bernstein, a labor economist with the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). “But those who control macropolicy have consistently favored anti-inflationary policy over low-unemployment policy. That’s created a climate of slow employment growth where it’s difficult for workers to seek wage gains.”

Labor Market Opportunity

State	Region	Net Long-term Change in Employment (thousands)	Rank	Net Intermediate Change in Employment (thousands)	Rank	% Long-term Change in Employment 1979-1996 (thousands)	Rank	% Intermed Term Change in Employment	Rank	% Short-term Change in Employment 1995-1996	Rank	Unemployment Rate 1996	Rank	Youth Unemployment Rate 1994	Rank	Employed as % of Civilian Labor Force 1996	Rank	Age Rank	State Rank
Alabama	Se	462.5	23	223.3	23	34	25	13.9	29	1.2	40	5.1	23	22.7	49	60.30	42	31.9	40
Alaska	Pac	96.3	44	36.2	39	57.7	6	15.9	24	0.5	47	7.8	49	17	29	68.31	12	31.1	39
Arizona	SW	915.7	7	441.1	8	93.4	2	30.3	4	5.6	2	5.5	35	19.1	36	62.78	36	20.1	16
Arkansas	SE	336.2	29	192.2	24	44.9	16	21.5	10	1.5	33	5.4	33	17.9	33	61.25	40	29.1	32
California	Far W	3110.4	1	536.5	4	32.2	27	4.4	42	2.8	11	7.2	47	22.6	47	60.81	41	30.8	36
Colorado	Rockies	678.9	14	414.6	10	55.7	7	28	5	3.4	7	4.2	10	14.6	17	69.29	7	9.4	2
Connecticut	New Eng	184.8	37	-82.8	50	13.2	45	-5	50	1.4	37	5.7	38	10.6	7	64.30	28	35.8	43
D.C.	Mid Atl	10.5	51	-57.6	48	1.7	51	-8.5	51	-3.1	51	8.5	51	35.2	51	58.18	47	49.9	51
Delaware	Mid Atl	120.1	42	32.3	40	46.8	14	9.4	36	2.8	11	5.2	27	15.2	24	65.05	23	26.7	29
Florida	SE	2801.3	2	921.6	2	82.8	3	17.5	18	3.1	8	5.1	24	20.2	41	58.82	45	21.0	20
Georgia	SE	1400.8	4	587.2	3	65.8	5	20	12	3.7	5	4.6	16	20.8	43	64.70	25	15.4	7
Hawaii	Pac	135.3	40	23.8	43	34.3	23	4.7	41	-0.7	50	6.4	44	15.7	27	63.93	30	37.2	46
Idaho	Rockies	154.3	39	126.5	32	45.7	15	34.6	3	3.1	8	5.2	28	14.6	18	66.70	16	20.0	14
Illinois	Grt Lk	796	10	462.1	7	16.3	44	8.9	38	1.5	33	5.3	30	15.4	25	64.91	24	26.5	28
Indiana	Grt Lk	576.5	18	333.5	15	25.8	36	13.5	31	0.9	44	4.1	8	14	15	66.33	17	20.9/	19
Iowa	Plains	248.7	34	180.3	26	22	38	15	27	1.6	31	3.8	6	10.1	2	70.79	4	17.8	10
Kansas	Plains	281.4	31	164	30	29.7	32	15.4	26	2.5	16	4.5	15	12.3	11	66.89	15	20.6	17
Kentucky	SE	425.7	26	238.1	22	34.2	24	16.6	20	1.7	26	5.6	36	17.5	31	58.99	44	30.9	37
Louisiana	SE	293.3	30	272.2	16	19.3	41	17.7	17	2.2	19	6.7	46	20.9	44	57.91	48	35.5	42
Maine	New Eng	124.1	41	-1.8	45	29.8	31	-0.3	45	0.3	49	5.1	25	14.2	16	65.53	18	30.9	38
Maryland	Mid Atl	514.6	20	50.7	37	30.4	29	2.4	44	1.1	41	4.9	19	22.4	46	68.48	10	27.5	30
Massachusetts	New Eng	432.9	25	-72.2	49	16.6	43	-2.3	47	2	22	4.3	12	14.7	20	64.58	26	28.2	31
Michigan	Grt Lk	707.9	13	422.7	9	19.5	40	10.8	33	1.7	26	4.9	20	15	23	63.09	32	24.6	25
Minnesota	Plains	664.7	15	344.9	14	37.6	22	16.5	21	2.2	19	4	7	10.5	6	71.71	3	11.7	3
Mississippi	SE	252.1	33	170.9	28	30.1	30	18.6	13	1.5	33	6.1	41	22.6	48	58.52	46	35.8	43
Missouri	Plains	553.1	19	249.2	21	27.5	33	10.8	33	1.7	26	4.6	17	13.9	14	68.49	9	19.6	13
Montana	Rockies	75.2	46	68	36	26.5	34	23.4	7	2.3	18	5.3	31	16.4	28	63.04	34	29.7	33
Nebraska	Plains	203.2	36	126.4	33	32.2	27	17.9	15	2.2	19	2.9	1	7.2	1	71.97	2	13.7	5
Nevada	Far W	458.8	24	261.3	20	119.6	1	45	1	7.2	1	5.4	34	17.2	30	65.36	20	18.3	11
New Hampshire	New Eng	181.2	38	30.6	41	47.9	12	5.8	39	3.7	5	4.2	11	11.8	9	67.34	14	19.2	12
New Jersey	Mid Atl	612.8	17	-49.8	47	20.2	39	-1.3	46	1.1	41	6.2	42	18.4	34	63.05	33	37.4	47
New Mexico	SW	233	35	131.8	31	50.5	9	23.4	7	1.7	26	8.1	50	21.7	45	57.87	49	35.1	41
New York	Mid Atl	737.7	12	-329.7	51	10.3	48	-4	48	0.6	46	6.2	43	19.8	39	57.80	50	42.8	49
North Carolina	SE	1176.8	5	475.9	6	49.6	10	15.5	25	2.6	15	4.3	13	14.9	21	65.49	19	14.4	6
North Dakota	Plains	64.7	47	48.5	38	26.5	34	18.6	13	2.4	17	3.1	2	10.3	3	69.81	6	16.8	9
Ohio	Grt Lk	811.1	9	478.5	5	18.1	42	9.9	35	1.4	37	4.9	21	14.6	19	63.01	35	25.3	27
Oklahoma	SW	266.3	32	190.4	25	24.5	37	16.4	22	2.9	10	4.1	9	12.7	12	61.28	39	23.2	22
Oregon	Far w	418.7	27	268.9	17	39.6	20	22.3	9	4	4	5.9	39	12	10	65.18	21	20.7	18
Pennsylvania	Mid Atl	502.1	21	169.7	29	10.4	47	3.3	43	1	43	5.3	32	17.5	32	60.19	43	36.0	45
Rhode Island	New Eng	41.8	48	-20.1	46	10.5	46	-4.4	49	0.4	48	5.1	26	19.1	37	62.25	37	39.3	48
South Carolina	SE	500	22	176.3	27	42.5	19	11.8	32	1.8	24	6	40	15.6	26	61.49	38	30.6	35
South Dakota	Plains	107.5	43	72.9	35	44.5	17	26.4	6	1.6	31	3.2	3	10.6	8	69.94	5	15.5	8
Tennessee	SE	757.1	11	367.2	11	42.6	18	16.9	19	1.4	37	5.2	29	20	40	63.54	31	25.2	26
Texas	SW	2640.3	3	1402.1	1	47.1	13	20.5	11	2.7	14	5.6	37	20.7	42	65.16	22	20.0	14
Utah	Rockies	406.2	28	263.5	19	74.1	4	38.1	2	5.2	3	3.5	4	10.3	4	68.86	8	8.3	1
Vermont	New Eng	76.9	45	13	44	38.9	21	5	40	1.8	24	4.6	18	13.6	13	68.43	11	24.1	24
Virginia	SE	1015.3	6	268.4	18	48	11	9.4	36	2	22	4.4	14	18.9	35	64.30	28	21.2	21
Washington	Far W	830.6	8	365	13	52.5	8	17.8	16	2.8	11	6.5	45	19.5	38	64.37	27	23.8	23
West Virginia	SE	39.8	49	83.7	34	6	50	13.6	30	1.5	33	7.5	48	24.6	50	51.45	51	44.4	50
Wisconsin	Grt Lk	641.4	16	365.2	12	32.7	26	16.3	23	1.7	26	3.5	5	10.4	5	72.07	1	11.8	4
Wyoming	Rockies	20.7	50	28.6	42	10.3	48	14.8	28	0.9	44	5	22	14.9	22	67.49	13	30.3	34

Note: Average rank is computed using the individual ranks from each indicator. State rank shows overall ranking for the category.

A Reversal of Fortune

On a regional level, EPI’s most recent edition of The State of Working America (1997) shows that the labor market trends of the 1980s reversed themselves in the 1990s. In the 80s, the states in New England and the Mid-Atlantic had the lowest unemployment in the nation, as “growth accelerated and the service sector expanded.” Correspondingly, the Mid-Atlantic and New England ranked first and third in labor market opportunity in SRC’s 1990 Climate for Workers. California experienced good job growth and low unemployment as well, (it was ranked eighth in labor market opportunity in the 1990 report), but growth was decelerating there as in the rest of the West.

But “the Northeast suffered badly in the recession,” says Neil Upmeyer, the president of the Center for the Analysis of Public Issues in New Jersey. “The recession started earlier here,” argues Upmeyer. “It lasted longer here. And it was deeper here than anywhere else in the country. The job recovery rate was just extremely slow compared to everywhere else.”

By 1996, only five of the twelve states in the Mid-Atlantic and New England had even re-gained the number of jobs they had in 1989, and those five states had among the slowest growth rates in the country. In addition, the unemployment rates in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and D.C. were all well above the national average, not below it as they were in 1989. As a result, New England and the Mid-Atlantic rank seventh and ninth in labor market opportunity this year.

California also experienced a fall from grace, dropping from 8 to 32 in rank, primarily because it had the third worst unemployment rate in the nation in 1996, as well as the ninth slowest job growth rate between 1989 and 1996.

“Over the 1980s, the Northeast and California did pretty well,” Bernstein said. “But those patterns reversed in the 1990s. The coasts pretty

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much got slammed in the most recent recession and early recovery, while the middle of the country did a lot better.”

Rocky Mountain High

Indeed, eight of the top ten states in this year’s labor market opportunity rankings are in what one could call “the middle of the country.” The first and second ranked states–Utah and Colorado–are in the Rocky Mountain region. Both had very strong job growth as well as particularly tight labor markets. Utah added 263,500 jobs to its economy between 1989 and 1996, the second highest growth rate in the country (38.1 percent). At the same time, the state had a 1996 unemployment rate of 3.5 percent (fourth lowest) and a labor force participation rate of nearly 70 percent (eighth highest). By 1997, the unemployment rate was slightly below 3 percent in the urban areas and slightly above 3 percent in the rural.

Colorado had a slightly higher labor force participation rate, but a slightly higher unemployment rate as well (4.2 percent); its growth rate of 28 percent (414,600 jobs) between 1989 and 1996 was the fifth best in the nation. Two other Rocky Mountain states–Idaho and Montana–also had top-seven growth rates between 1989 and 1996, as well as below-average unemployment rates.

“The whole Rocky Mountain region has had relatively high growth,” notes Thayne Robson, professor with the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Utah. “This is largely a function of the low costs of doing business in the region. At least in the early part of the boom, wage rates and land prices were modest–although that’s changing significantly now. A vast array of small manufacturers moved into Utah from places on the west coast like California because they can operate here for 70 cents to a dollar-an-hour cheaper. Business services, bill paying centers, and telemarketing operations located here as well.”

“There’s been tremendous growth in the high tech industries in Colorado and the rest of the Rockies,” adds Nancy McCallin, an economist with the Colorado state legislature. “I would guess this is primarily because of the lower wage rate here than, say, technology centers like Silicon Valley or Massachusetts.” Indeed, the 1995 median hourly wage in California was $11.16, compared with $8.91 in Montana, $9.22 in Idaho, $9.41 in Utah, and $10.91 in Colorado.

Like the rest of the nation, most of the expansion in the Rocky Mountain states has been in the service sector. Nationally, the low-wage service industries (including low-wage retail, health, and temporary services) ac-counted for 83.3 percent of all new jobs between 1989 and 1995. Meanwhile, the U.S. lost more than 1.03 million (11.8 percent) of its goods producing jobs during these years, representing almost as many as it lost during all of the previous decade. By 2000, manufacturing work is expected to employ just 20 percent of the labor force (down from 35.9 percent in 1950), while the service industries now employ more than 70 percent of the over-all labor force, up from only 52 percent in 1950. Jobs in the service sector are disproportionately low-wage, no-benefit, and part-time.

If one ignores the relative tightness of the labor market and looks only at the job growth indicators (which, by themselves, say little about workers’ bargaining power), the Far West, Southwest, and Southeast actually perform better as regions than the Rocky Mountains. However, poor scores on the various unemployment indicators lowered many of these states’ composite scores considerably. Only North Carolina and Georgia remain in the top ten of the labor market opportunity composite, while Nevada, Oregon, Texas, Arizona, and Florida make the top twenty.

Help Wanted?: Labor “Shortages” on the Plains

The Rocky Mountain area’s spectacular job growth and relatively tight labor markets earned the region a second place ranking in the overall labor market opportunity composite. The number one region was the Plains. In general, the Plains states (as well as one Great Lakes state, Wisconsin) had slower job growth rates than the Rockies but even tighter labor markets.

Wisconsin received the number four ranking in labor market opportunity, employing nearly three-quarters of its adult population (the best in the nation) and leaving only 3.5 percent officially unemployed (the fourth lowest). Minnesota ranked third in the labor market category, with the third highest labor force participation rate and a four percent unemployment rate.

“The labor force participation rates are so high that there just can’t be many more people working out in Minnesota and Wisconsin,” says Greg Podczaski, an economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for the North Central East region. “You have some pockets, say in Madison (Wisconsin), where unemployment is basically zero.”

However, as one moves west into the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Iowa, the business press complaints about chronic labor “shortages” grow even more shrill. Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota rank one, two, and three in average annual unemployment with rates of 2.9, 3.1, and 3.2 percent, respectively. By August 1997, all three states had dipped well below 3 percent. In 1996, Iowa and Missouri followed close behind with rates of 3.8 and 4.6 percent–rates that had fallen to 2.7 and 3.5

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percent by August 1997. The Plains states also dominated the other unemployment-related indicators, including youth unemployment and labor force participation rates.

One reason labor markets are so tight in the Plains is that “people are not flocking into Iowa and the Dakotas looking for jobs,” notes Dave McDermott, regional economist with the BLS. “There has been relatively low labor force growth in these states,” McDermott says. “If you have reasonably strong employment growth and modest labor force growth, you’ve got a tight labor market.”

But low unemployment rates say nothing about whether the employment being obtained is paying families what they need to survive. Indeed, very high labor force participation rates and low youth unemployment rates can actually indicate that less-than-sustenance wages are forcing more people into the labor market.

To get at these qualitative issues of job creation and employment, groups in the Plains states and elsewhere are developing their own economic indicators. In Minnesota, for example, the members of JOBS Now–a coalition of sixty religious, labor, and community organizations concerned with the effect of public policy on low and moderate income groups–have developed what they call a “job gap” measure.

“Our members were concerned because they perceived an increase in the working poor that wasn’t really on the public policy screen,” explains JOBS Now Re-search Director Bruce Steuernagel. “We didn’t dispute that there were lots of jobs being created, but nobody was asking if they were paying enough to support families. So, we came up with a living wage for the average family and then went about seeing how many such jobs were available per job seeker.”

In their study of Minnesota’s labor market between 1990 and 1993, the coalition discovered that six job seekers existed for each livable wage job opening and thirty job seekers for each livable wage opening that required a year or less of training.

Another job gap study was done on a regional basis in the Midwest by the Office of Social Policy at the University of Northern Illinois. The study found that for every twenty-two job seekers in the Great Lakes states and Minnesota in 1997, only one job exists that pays at least poverty wages for a family of three. For a job that pays at least 150 percent of the poverty level, the ratio drops to one job for every sixty-four seekers. And for a job that pays what the study defines as a livable wage ($25,907 for a family of three) the ratio was one to ninety-seven.

Despite this apparent surplus of people looking for decent-paying jobs, “employers are begging for skilled people to come out here,” reports Patricia Funk, a consultant working on a job gap study with the Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest in Omaha, Nebraska.

Instead of putting resources into training, Paul Kleppner with the University of Northern Illinois reports that employers in Iowa have formed cooperatives and are sending head-hunters out to military bases in Texas to recruit discharged and retiring officers.

“What they’re not doing,” adds Funk, “is saying ‘O.K., we’ve got all of these people who are working real hard and still not making it. Let’s put some resources into training them.”

Supply and Demand Isn’t Enough

In classical economic “demand-supply” models, a tight labor market should mean that wages–or the price of labor–will go up. But between 1989 and 1995 the median hourly wages rose in only three of the seven Plains states–and only very modestly. South Dakota saw its hourly median wage rise from $8.03 to $8.49, while Nebraska saw an increase from $8.82 to $8.95. On the national level, the median hourly wage dropped from $10.61 to $10.13. “It’s only in the last year or so really that we’ve seen any notable wage growth at all, and it’s been pretty tepid,” says Jared Bernstein of EPI. “If you keep unemployment low long enough, you’ll see certain wage pressures, but not enough in my thinking to really shift the balance of power more evenly back to workers. There

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are a number of factors depressing workers’ bargaining power. Supply and demand by itself isn’t enough to return wage growth to where I think it ought to be–so that the fruits of productivity growth are more evenly distributed.

“You have to look beyond macroeconomic indicators and think about underlying power dynamics that have shifted against workers over the last couple of decades,” Bernstein adds. “Part of it is the decline in unions and that is related to the decline in manufacturing jobs and the increase in low-wage service work. Part of that story is related to increased and unbalanced trade. Also, a decline in the real minimum wage lowered pay at the bottom end of the wage scale and has opened the low road for employers to hire more low-wage labor. This, in tandem with policies that have kept unemployment high from a macro-perspective, have combined to create a climate where it is difficult for workers to seek wage gains.”

Income and Earnings

Although extremely tight labor markets may be causing the median wages of some Midwestern and Rocky Mountain residents to rise faster than the national average, the Northeast, at least for now, remains the income and earnings capital of the country–as has been the case in all of SRC’s past Climate for Workers reports. In the composite index for earnings and income, four Mid-Atlanticern States–New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and the District of Columbia–are in the top ten as well as three New England states–Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. New York just missed the top ten with a ranking of fourteen.

Minnesota and Colorado also make the top ten, but the rest of the Plains and Rocky Mountain states had among the nation’s lowest average annual pay, while two of the Great Lakes states with very tight labor markets–Wisconsin and Indiana–had among the nation’s lowest average annual pay in both the retail and service sectors. (Wisconsin and Indiana performed better in manufacturing pay, probably due to the relatively high union densities in this sector in those states.)

New Jersey, New York, Maryland, D.C., Delaware, Connecticut, and Massachusetts appear again and again in the top ten of almost all of the average annual pay and average per capita income indicators. But there are important caveats to make about these high rankings. For one, all of these states have relatively high costs of living, reducing the purchasing power of the higher incomes (see page 8 and 9). (Unfortunately, average incomes in each state can not be accurately deflated because cost of living indexes are not available on a state-by-state basis.) In addition, averages do not tell the whole story.

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Income and earnings

																								Composite Ranking
State	Region	Avg. Annual Pay Manufacturing 1996	Rank	Avg. Annual Pay Retail 1996	Rank	Avg.Annual Pay Service 1996	Rank	Avg. Annual Pay 1996 (dollars)	Rank	Change in Avg. Annual Pay 1995-1996	Rank	Per Capita Income 1996	Rank	Long-Term Change in Per Capita Income 1980-1996	Rank	Intermediate Change in Per Capita Income 1990-1996	Composite	Median Income 1995-1996	Rank	Income Inequality*	Rank	% of Persons in Poverty 1995-1996	Rank	Avg. Rank	State Rank
Alabama	SE	28705	46	13663	37	24319	26	25180	32	784	37	20055	40	5067	22	2114	24	28530	46	10.58	43	17.1	45	37.8	42
Alaska	Pac	29205	43	18325	2	25128	22	32461	6	-224	51	24558	20	-1175	51	-244	51	51074	1	7.96	14	7.7	2	19.1	15
Arizona	SW	37168	14	16075	12	24186	28	26387	27	1063	19	20989	37	3150	42	1494	40	31706	38	10.57	42	18.3	47	33.6	38
Arkansas	SE	24811	50	13828	34	20576	46	22294	47	704	42	18928	48	4534	30	2298	16	26850	49	8.3	19	16.1	38	38.8	46
California	Far W	39810	8	17276	5	31794	5	31773	7	1057	20	25144	13	2793	47	531	48	38457	12	11.62	49	16.8	42	23.7	24
Colorado	Rockies	37080	15	15528	17	27212	11	28520	15	1398	8	25084	14	4560	29	2457	11	41429	6	7.61	6	9.7	11	12.2	6
Connecticut	New Eng	47045	3	17806	3	32272	4	36579	3	1452	6	33189	2	9240	2	2676	6	41775	5	9.84	36	10.7	15	9.1	2
D.C.	Mid Atl	52970	1	16260	10	41075	1	44458	1	2005	1	34932	1	10240	1	5092	1	31811	36	adjusted	25	23.2	50	12.7	8
Delaware	Mid Atl	50692	2	14993	20	25963	17	30711	10	1591	3	27622	6	7301	6	3780	2	37634	16	7.86	12	9.5	7	9.5	3
Florida	SE	31946	29	15621	15	24961	23	25640	30	930	26	24104	21	5007	23	1597	38	30632	41	10.43	41	15.2	35	30.6	36
Georgia	SE	30595	35	14848	21	26970	13	27488	21	1185	13	22709	27	6278	9	2127	23	33801	31	9.64	34	13.5	34	25.5	27
Hawaii	Pac	29884	39	16849	8	26369	16	27363	22	386	50	25159	12	4358	33	274	50	42944	4	8.16	17	11.2	19	21.5	19
Idaho	Rockies	32274	27	13783	35	22261	37	23353	43	514	49	19539	44	3272	41	1218	45	34175	29	8.61	22	13.2	32	35.9	40
Illinois	Grt Lk	38343	11	15668	14	28447	9	31285	9	1186	12	26598	8	5487	18	2380	14	39375	11	9.87	38	12.3	30	16.9	10
Indiana	Grt Lk	36328	17	13394	39	22586	34	26477	26	906	31	22440	30	4561	28	2214	20	34759	26	8.84	28	8.6	5	24.9	26
Iowa	Plains	31707	31	12422	46	19988	47	23679	42	804	35	22560	29	4446	31	2465	10	34888	24	7.97	15	10.9	17	28.4	31
Kansas	Plains	32967	26	13396	38	22281	36	24609	33	900	32	23281	23	4272	34	2086	25	31911	35	8.65	23	11	18	28.4	32
Kentucky	SE	31631	32	13190	40	21881	41	24462	37	972	23	19687	43	4059	37	1949	31	31552	39	10.62	44	15.9	37	37.8	42
Louisiana	SE	35137	20	13168	41	22626	33	24528	35	634	45	19824	41	3121	44	2574	9	29518	44	13.89	51	20.1	48	39.4	46
Maine	New Eng	30521	36	14126	30	21970	39	23850	40	733	41	20826	38	4804	26	513	49	34777	25	7.73	8	11.2	19	30.1	34
Maryland	Mid Atl	38074	12	16365	9	29511	7	30293	11	1160	14	27221	7	6138	11	865	47	43123	3	8.53	21	10.3	13	13.1	9
Massachusetts	New Eng	42635	6	16853	7	32613	3	33940	5	1588	4	29439	4	8428	3	2704	5	39604	10	10.06	40	10.6	14	10.9	4
Michigan	Grt Lk	46739	4	14560	24	26866	14	31522	8	979	22	24810	17	5102	21	2830	4	38364	13	8.88	29	11.7	25	17.1	11
Minnesota	Plains	37250	13	14497	26	25282	21	28869	14	1486	5	25580	10	6093	12	2944	3	40022	8	8.07	16	9.5	7	11.9	5
Mississippi	SE	24334	51	12747	44	20978	43	21822	48	702	43	17471	51	4075	36	2285	17	27000	48	11.38	48	22.1	49	45.1	51
Missouri	Plains	34315	22	14243	28	24545	24	26608	25	939	25	22864	26	4875	25	1960	30	35059	22	8.22	18	9.5	7	21.9	20
Montana	Rockies	26856	47	12383	47	18999	50	21146	50	630	46	19047	47	2322	48	1376	41	28631	45	7.55	5	16.2	39	40.7	47
Nebraska	Plains	28857	45	12627	45	21964	40	23291	45	923	27	23047	25	5499	17	2158	22	33958	30	7.82	11	9.9	12	27.6	29
Nevada	Far W	31905	30	17574	4	25647	20	27788	18	1141	15	25451	11	3280	40	1239	44	37845	15	7.76	9	9.6	10	17.4	12
New Hampshire	New Eng	36378	16	15535	16	25911	18	27691	20	1089	17	26520	9	7250	7	2236	19	39868	9	7.88	13	5.9	1	12.3	7
New Jersey	Mid Atl	44126	5	18366	1	33082	2	35928	4	1394	9	31053	3	8199	4	2083	26	46345	2	9.52	33	8.5	4	8.7	1
New Mexico	SW	29630	41	13884	33	23907	29	23716	41	756	38	18770	49	3065	46	1693	35	25922	50	11.12	47	25.9	51	43.6	49
New York	Mid Atl	41843	7	16890	6	31555	6	36831	2	1893	2	28782	5	7411	5	2030	27	34707	27	13.01	50	16.6	41	18.9	14
North Carolina	SE	29110	44	14353	27	23743	30	25408	31	1006	21	22010	33	6249	10	2407	13	34262	28	9.18	31	12.4	31	28.3	30
North Dakota	Plains	26569	48	11859	51	19357	48	21242	49	750	39	20710	39	5685	16	2257	18	30709	40	7.03	2	11.5	22	32.8	37
Ohio	Grt Lk	38356	10	14126	30	24238	27	27775	19	908	30	23537	22	4660	27	2419	12	35022	23	8.81	27	12.1	27	23.3	23
Oklahoma	SW	29740	40	13012	42	20838	45	23329	44	658	44	19350	45	1605	49	1243	43	27263	47	9.86	37	16.9	43	43.4	48
Oregon	Far W	34870	21	15857	13	23608	31	27027	24	1194	11	22668	28	3660	39	2009	28	36470	20	7.78	10	11.5	22	21.9	21
Pennsylvania	Mid Atl	36328	17	14515	25	27083	12	28973	12	1069	18	24668	19	5368	20	2006	29	35221	21	9.06	30	11.9	26	21.1	18
Rhode Island	New Eng	31250	33	14665	23	25661	19	27194	23	819	34	24765	18	6049	13	1934	32	36695	18	9.45	32	10.8	16	23.0	22
South Carolina	SE	30085	38	13725	36	21811	42	24039	39	747	40	19775	42	4981	24	1642	37	32297	34	9.91	39	16.5	40	37.8	44
South Dakota	Plains	24882	49	11942	50	19303	49	20724	51	793	36	21516	35	6313	8	2654	7	29989	43	8.75	24	13.2	32	35.6	39
Tennessee	SE	30790	34	15018	19	24489	25	25963	29	917	29	21764	34	6009	14	2582	8	30331	42	9.68	35	15.7	36	30.1	34
Texas	SW	36163	19	15341	18	26662	15	28129	16	1229	10	22045	32	3135	43	1929	33	33029	33	11.11	46	17	44	30.0	33
Utah	Rockies	30196	37	14237	29	23091	32	24572	34	946	24	19156	46	3764	38	2207	21	37298	17	6.78	1	8.1	3	23.9	25
Vermont	New Eng	33019	25	13998	32	22225	38	24480	36	897	33	22124	31	5418	19	1254	42	33591	32	7.11	3	11.5	22	27.3	28
Virginia	SE	31999	28	14746	22	28602	8	28001	17	1107	16	24925	15	5713	15	1535	39	38252	14	8.42	20	11.3	21	18.9	13
Washington	Far W	39086	9	16083	11	28057	10	28881	13	1428	7	24838	16	4166	35	1749	34	36647	19	8.79	26	12.2	29	19.5	16
West Virginia	SE	33678	23	12295	49	20907	44	24075	38	586	47	18444	50	3069	45	1663	36	25431	51	10.84	45	17.6	46	44.0	50
Wisconsin	Grt Lk	33464	24	12916	43	22558	35	26021	28	922	28	23269	24	4360	32	2338	15	41082	7	7.26	4	8.7	6	19.7	17
Wyoming	Rockies	29486	42	12372	48	18048	51	22870	46	519	48	21245	36	-181	50	1039	46	31707	37	7.69	7	12.1	27	36.9	41

Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics; U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census; Employee Benefits Research Institute; Bureau of National Affairs; Center for Budget and Policy Priorities; U. S. Department of Labor; Citizens for Tax Justice; Institute on Taxation and

* Income ratio of top 20 percent to bottom 20 percent. A lower number indicates less disparity.

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“Average income and pay isn’t a great way to measure because it doesn’t deal with distribution,” notes Frank Mauro with the Fiscal Policy Institute in New York. “New York, for example, is very high and going up in average per capita income, but when you look at median household income, we have been going way down. What that means is that distribution is getting worse here. We’ve found we’re the worst in the nation in income inequality. We’re also one of the few states that is in the top ten in per capita income as well as poverty.”

The Southern Regional Council’s Climate for Workers has long included median household income in its composite earnings and income index, and New York has, indeed, fallen sharply since our 1990 report: from number ten in1988 to number 27 in 1996. To better gauge the extent of income distribution to those at the bottom of the wage scale, this edition of the Climate for Workers has added an income inequality measure (the ratio of the top 20 percent to bottom 20 percent) and poverty rates to its income and earnings composite. New York ranks 50th in income inequality and 41st in poverty rates.

D.C. falls even more precipitously when one looks at median household income and poverty rates. While it ranks number one in all of the average pay and income indicators except for retail, it drops to 36 in median household income (which is more than $3,000 below the national average) and 50 in poverty rates. (Based on figures from past years, D.C. would probably have the worst income inequality, as well, if recent measures were available.) The other Northeastern states with high average incomes and pay fare better in median household income and poverty rates, however. In particular, New Jersey (ranked number one in income and earnings overall) has the second highest median household income ($46,345) and the fourth lowest poverty rate (8.5 percent) in the nation.

“These numbers reflect the complete conversion of the state’s economy from a manufacturing base to a service economy,” argues Neil Upmeyer of the Center for Analysis of Public Issues in New Jersey. “We’ve got the worst part of that conversion out of our system, and our service economy, which is oriented toward telecommunications and the computer industry, has been doing quite well.”

“But the job and income growth has not been spread equally,” Upmeyer adds. “Most of it has occurred in suburban areas–particularly in the Northeastern counties around New York. With the exception of Jersey City, which has become a `back-office’ site for Wall Street, job growth has been non-existent in the old industrial cities with high minority populations, as well as in the three rural counties in the south of the state. Poverty and unemployment are still major issues in these areas and are much higher than the state average.”

Upmeyer further points out that New Jersey’s low poverty rates might understate actual poverty in the state because the Census Bureau uses only one poverty threshold to compute the rates ($7,995 for a single person and $12,516 for a family of three). The Census Bureau does not take differences in cost of living into account, and New Jersey, like most of the Northeastern states, is one of the most expensive places to live in the country (see pages 8 and 9).

As a result of its uneven growth, New Jersey does not rank high (33) in income inequality. Nor do many of the other Northeastern states in the top ten of the “income and earnings” category. Connecticut and Massachusetts rank 36th and 40th in income inequality. Delaware performs the best with a ranking of twelve, perhaps because the state has the most progressive state tax system in the nation, a very low tax burden for households, and very high state expenditures per person.

New Hampshire follows Delaware with a ranking of thirteen in income inequality. Ranked number seven in income and earnings overall, the state also has the lowest poverty rate in the nation and a median household income of about $40,000. But this is not the result of progressive public policy. “It’s difficult to be poor and live in New Hampshire,” argues Richard Mills, an economist with the University of New Hampshire. “If you’re on the low-income end, it’s much easier to live in Massachusetts. New Hampshire is basically suburbia without the urbia–unless you count Boston, which is the biggest labor market. Transportation is difficult. The state doesn’t put a lot of money into social services. And with no state sales or income taxes, property taxes are high, which makes renting or owning housing quite expensive.”

If one looks only at median household income, income inequality, and poverty rates, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Colorado, Utah, Minnesota, Alaska, and Nevada perform relatively well in all three categories (see chart on pages 8 and 9) . Wisconsin ranks seven in median household income ($41,082), four in income inequality, and six in poverty rates (8.7 percent). Alaska has the highest median wage ($51,074) and the lowest poverty rate (7.7 percent) in the nation. The state also has the second highest annual retail pay in the nation ($18,325). The maintenance of relatively high total union densities in Alaska, as well as in Nevada and Minnesota, probably contribute to the more equal distribution of income there.

Utah’s high labor force participation rate results in a median household income that is almost $2,000 higher than the national average, despite a median hourly wage that is about ten percent below average. The state also

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has the third lowest poverty rate and the least amount of income inequality in the nation. According to University of Utah economist Peter Phillips, one of the most important reasons for this lack of poverty and income inequality is the state’s relative racial homogeneity.

“This is a society that is overwhelmingly white, so the type of inequality that is associated with racial and ethnic differences is diminished here,” Phillips said. “The effects of racism are not as prevalent. We do not have a history of industries developing around a racial minority and taking advantage of the disadvantages that minority has.”

Nationally, the poverty rate is about three times higher for African-Americans and Hispanics than it is for non-Hispanic whites. In addition, the median household income for African-Americans and Hispanics is about a third lower. Not surprisingly, then, four of the five and six of ten states with the best income equality have African-American population densities of less than one percent; all of the top-ten states have African-American population densities that are well below average. Five of the eight states with the best income equality have similarly small populations of Hispanics (all less than 2.2 percent).

One section of the U.S. that does have a history of building industries around minorities–the South–ranks last in income inequality and poverty, as well as almost every other income and earnings indicator. In a composite of poverty rates, income inequality, and median household income, all four Southwestern states (Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma) rank in the bottom ten; another five of the bottom ten are Southeastern states (see chart on page 9). Even worse, Southeastern and Southwestern states represent fifteen of the bottom nineteen in a composite of the three distributional indicators. (Virginia is the only Southern state not in the bottom half.)

The correlation between severe income inequality and minority populations in the South is striking. Every Southeastern state except Kentucky and West Virginia has an above-average African-American population density. In Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, about a quarter to a third of the population is black. Three Southwestern states, on the other hand, have larger-than-average Hispanic populations–ranging from 20 percent in Arizona to 39 percent in New Mexico. Furthermore, many of the non-Southern states with the worst income inequality–New York, California, D.C., Illinois, New Jersey–have either African-American or Hispanic populations (or both) that are well above the national average.

While the Southeastern and Southwestern states do have the worst income inequality, the highest poverty rates, and the lowest incomes in the nation, they also have some of the lowest cost of living indexes in the nation (see page 9). In addition, the Census Bureau recently reported that only the South (which includes both the Southeastern and Southwestern states) experienced a significant change in real median household income between 1995 and 1996 ($31,422 to $32,422).

Workplace Conditions

Adding to the difficulties of working families in the Southeast and Southwest are the low percentages of the population insured by employers. Nationally, 63.8 percent of the non-elderly population is insured by employers, but no Southern state except Virginia and North Carolina reached or exceeded this national average. Only 45.6 percent of New Mexico’s population was insured by employers in 1995, while Louisiana ranked second to last with 50.2 percent. Other Southwestern and Southeastern states like Oklahoma, Mississippi, Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas all ranked in the bottom eleven, with percentages ranging from 55.3 to 60.3 percent. These low percentages in the South represent significant decreases from the late 1980s. Nationally, the percentage has decreased 5.4 percent since 1987, but the Southeastern and Southwestern states are decreasing even faster. New Mexico and Louisiana, for example, decreased 12.8 and 10.5 percent between 989 and 1995.

In contrast to the South, the percentage of the population with employer-based health insurance in the Great Lakes states ranges from 75.6 percent in Wisconsin to 70.4 percent in Ohio. Three New England states (New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Massachusetts) as well as Pennsylvania and New Jersey also have percentages greater than 70 percent and as high as 74.9. In the Great Lakes, the still-relatively-prevalent manufacturing sector doubtless contributes to the higher percentage of people with employer-based health insurance; 73.3 percent of workers in this sector receive insurance compared with only 52 percent in the service sector.

Safe Workplaces or Poor Enforcement?

Manufacturing jobs do have a downside, however: much higher incidences of occupational illness and injury. Workers in the “motor vehicles and car bodies” industry, for example, suffer almost four times the rate of injuries and illness as the average for private industry, ranking second only to workers in meat packing plants. As a result, Wisconsin and Michigan have the highest injury and illness incidence rates in the country, with 11.5 incidences per 100 workers in 1994. The only other Great Lakes state for which there is data, Indiana, has the second highest rate in the country (11.3).

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Workplace Conditions

																				Composite Ranking
State	Region	%with Employer Health Insurance	Rank	Fatality rate 1996 per 100000 workers	Rank	Nonfatal injury illness rate per 100 fulltime workers	Rank	%of Manufacturing Workers Unionized	Rank	%Change Manu. Workers Unionized	Rank	%of Total Workers Union Members	Rank	%Change Total Unionized 1983-1995	Rank	African Americans*	Rank	Women*	Rank	Avg. Rank	State Rank
Alabama	SE	63.1	33	7.72	42	9.2	31	19.5	17	-6.4	18	13.6	25	-3.3	17	25.5	45	31	49	28.8	34
Alaska	Pac	63.7	30	21.65	51	8.8	26	3.8	49	-19.5	49	23.1	4	-1.8	2	30.1	18	39.1	6	26.8	28
Arizona	SW	56.6	43	3.34	8	8.3	16	4.9	47	-2.9	5	8	41	-3.4	19	38.6	4	35.1	19	26.5	26
Arkansas	SE	60.3	41	7.53	40	9.4	35	14	28	-4.7	11	7.8	42	-3.2	14	22.4	51	32.2	38	33.6	44
California	Far W	55.5	47	4.14	15	8.1	15	12.1	31	-8.9	28	17.7	15	-4.2	26	38.9	3	37.2	12	21.7	15
Colorado	Rockies	68.9	14	4.47	16		adjusted	9.2	38	-3.9	7	9.9	33	-3.7	23	24.6	48	38	10	25.9	24
Connecticut	New Eng	74.8	3	2.16	4	8.5	18	14.4	26	-13.7	42	20.2	8	-2.5	8	29	21	38.5	7	16.3	7
D.C.	Mid Atl	54.8	49	49	7.63	41	adjusted	10.8	35	-6.8	19	15.1	22	-4.4	27	40.6	1	52.2	1	25.2	21
Delaware	Mid Atl	70.2	13	4.96	23	6.9	4	18.7	19	-8.6	27	13	26	-7.1	47	33.3	10	33.3	30	22.6	17
Florida	SE	56.1	45	5.06	25	8	14	5.8	46	-5.5	14	7.3	44	-2.9	12	30.8	15	34.2	24	30.4	38
Georgia	SE	63.3	31	5.95	34	8.6	20	8.7	41	-8.2	25	6.8	46	-5.1	35	27.9	23	34.3	23	34.0	46
Hawaii	Pac	66.3	23	4.88	22	8.7	23	11	34	-24.6	51	24.6	2	-4.6	30	27.5	adjusted	32.7	34	25.5	23
Idaho	Rockies	63.2	32	10.56	48		adjusted	11.6	32	-7.4	21	8.1	40	-4.4	27	27.5	adjusted	32.1	41	34.8	48
Illinois	Grt Lk	70.5	10	4.53	17		adjusted	23.5	8	-8.9	28	20.2	8	-4	25	33.5	8	35.3	17	14.0	3
Indiana	Grt Lk	72.3	5	4.86	21	11.3	49	29.9	3	-18.8	48	16.5	17	-8.4	49	25	47	31	49	27.9	31
Iowa	Plains	67.3	20	4.55	18	10.8	48	20.1	15	-20.2	50	12.1	29	-5.1	35	27.5	adjusted	33.4	28	28.7	33
Kansas	Plains	64.5	27	6.65	38	9.8	39	17.7	20	-7.8	22	10.2	31	-3.5	21	30.5	16	35.4	16	26.1	25
Kentucky	SE	62.4	36	8	43	10.6	46	22	10	-15.4	44	12.6	27	-5.3	37	25.5	45	31.6	43	33.3	43
Louisiana	SE	50.2	50	5.53	29	6.2	2	16.8	21	-8.1	24	7	45	-6.8	46	26.7	42	34.6	21	31.1	41
Maine	New Eng	67.5	19	3.62	10	10.5	45	21.9	11	-2.9	5	15.6	21	-5.4	38	27.5	adjusted	35.7	15	19.6	11
Maryland	Mid Atl	68.2	17	3.09	7	6.8	3	20.1	15	-9.1	30	14.9	23	-3.6	22	39	2	43.9	2	14.5	5
Massachusetts	New Eng	71.5	7	2.03	3	7.2	8	11.3	33	-15.4	44	16.2	19	-7.5	48	31.1	13	40.5	4	21.5	14
Michigan	Grt Lk	74.5	4	3.39	9	11.5	51	33.9	1	-12.3	38	23.7	3	-6.7	45	29.2	20	33.3	30	19.4	10
Minnesota	Plains	71.1	8	3.67	11	8.7	23	16.8	21	-5.5	14	20.3	7	-2.9	12	32.4	11	33.2	32	15.6	6
Mississippi	SE	55.9	46	8.69	46	9.8	39	9.8	36	-9.1	30	5.2	49	-4.7	31	22.6	50	30.4	51	42.1	51
Missouri	Plains	65.9	24	5.06	25	10.2	41	23.9	7	-12.7	39	14.6	24	-6.2	42	33.5	8	32.8	33	25.2	20
Montana	Rockies	56.7	42	11.82	50	9	29	15.6	24	-17.4	47	15.8	20	-2.5	8	27.5	adjusted	31.4	45	30.9	40
Nebraska	Plains	68.8	15	6.32	35	10.2	41	14.4	26	-4.7	11	9.1	38	-4.5	29	26	44	32.4	37	30.6	39
Nevada	Far W	66.8	22	6.52	36	9.3	33	8.5	42	-2.3	2	20.2	8	-2.2	4	23.1	49	31.1	48	26.6	27
New Hampshire	New Eng	74.9	2	1.84	2		adjusted	6.5	45	-4.1	9	12.6	27	1.1	1	27.5	adjusted	39.5	5	18.1	8
New Jersey	Mid Atl	70.5	10	2.56	6	6.9	4	20.5	14	-10.9	35	21.9	5	-5	33	37	5	38.1	9	12.8	1
New Mexico	SW	45.6	51	8.16	44	7.9	13	9.6	37	-2.3	2	9.4	35	-2.4	7	27.5	adjusted	36.5	14	27.5	30
New York	Mid Atl	62.8	34	3.91	14	5.5	1	22.5	9	-8.5	26	27.7	1	-4.8	32	32.3	12	36.9	13	14.3	4
North Carolina	SE	64	29	5.26	28	7.8	11	2.9	51	-4	8	4.2	50	-3.4	19	27.2	41	32.2	38	33.8	45
North Dakota	Plains	62.5	35	6.91	39		adjusted	19.5	17	-7.9	23	10	32	-3.2	14	27.5	adjusted	31.6	43	28.0	32
Ohio	Grt Lk	70.4	12	3.75	12		adjusted	28.9	5	-12	37	18.5	14	-6.6	44	30	19	32.5	36	20.5	12
Oklahoma	SW	55.3	48	5.75	31	8.8	26	14	28	-11.2	36	9.3	36	-2.2	4	28.6	22	33.6	26	30.0	36
Oregon	Far W	67.1	21	5.25	27	8.7	23	15.1	25	-13.6	41	20.1	11	-2.2	4	27.5	adjusted	33.9	25	21.3	13
Pennsylvania	Mid Atl	71	9	5.04	24	9.1	30	26.7	6	-15.6	46	18.9	13	-8.6	50	31	14	33.6	26	22.0	16
Rhode Island	New Eng	68.5	16	1.28	1	8.5	18	12.6	30	-4.3	10	19.4	12	-2.1	3	36.1	6	38.5	7	13.4	2
South Carolina	SE	61.7	37	5.81	32	6.9	4	2.9	51	-2.6	4	3.3	51	-2.6	10	26.5	43	31.3	47	34.4	47
South Dakota	Plains	64.3	28	8.49	45		adjusted	9.1	39	-9.9	32	7.7	43	-3.8	24	27.5	adjusted	31.4	45	37.6	50
Tennessee	SE	60.9	38	5.83	33	9.4	35	16.6	23	-4.8	13	9.5	34	-5.6	39	30.5	16	32.2	38	30.2	37
Texas	SW	56.4	44	5.59	30	7.1	8	8.9	40	-7.2	20	6.5	48	-3.2	14	27.7	24	35.3	17	31.2	42
Utah	Rockies	71.7	6	6.64	37	9.5	38	4.1	48	-10.8	33	9	39	-6.2	42	27.5	adjusted	34.9	20	35.0	49
Vermont	New Eng	68.1	18	2.26	5	9.3	33	7.2	44	-6.3	17	9.3	36	-3.3	17	27.5	adjusted	40.9	3	25.3	22
Virginia	SE	64.7	26	4.72	19	7.3	10	8.3	43	-12.9	40	6.7	47	-5	33	34.7	7	37.6	11	29.8	35
Washington	Far W	65	25	4.74	20	10.3	44	29.3	4	-6.2	16	21	6	-6.1	40	27.5	adjusted	34.6	21	18.6	9
West Virginia	SE	60.8	39	8.84	47		adjusted	30.5	2	-10.8	33	16.3	18	-9	51	27.5	adjusted	32.7	34	27.1	29
Wisconsin	Grt Lk	75.6	1	3.84	13	11.5	51	21.3	13	-14.7	43	17.7	15	-6.1	40	27.7	24	33.4	28	24.2	18
Wyoming	Rockies	60.8	39	11.43	49	8.6	20	21.9	11	7.3	1	11.2	30	-2.7	11	27.5	adjusted	31.7	42	24.4	19

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While the Southeast and Southwest have their share of dangerous industries–particularly in agricultural production and food processing (with rates of 9.9 and 13.0)–the regions, as a whole, actually ranked better on this indicator than almost any other. They were helped by particularly low incidence rates in Louisiana (6.2), South Carolina (6.9), Texas (7.1), and Virginia (7.3), all of which ranked in the top ten. North Carolina ranked eleventh with 7.8 and Florida ranked fourteenth with a rate of 8.

There are more than a few reasons to be cautious of the data collected by the Occupation Safety and Health Association (OSHA) and the BLS, however. These statistics are “notoriously incomplete,” says Howard Frumkin, chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at Emory University in Atlanta. In fact, states with particularly poor OSHA enforcement may actually score better on this indicator simply because employees do not report their injuries for a variety of reasons: because their protection from being fired for reporting the injury or safety violation is inadequate; because their chances of acquiring decent compensation are so low; or because they have not been sufficiently informed about the possible links between their work and various illnesses and injuries.

Until just a few years ago Florida agricultural workers were not given the right to know about the links between the pesticides they were using and health problems. Elaine Roberts with Florida Impact worked on a successful campaign to secure this “right to know” for agricultural workers.

“I think the reason for Florida’s relatively low incidence rate is poor enforcement,” Roberts said. “As we were working on that ‘right-to-know’ campaign trying to get hard numbers, we found that they are not really even monitoring occupational health in agriculture in this state.”

Agriculture is the number two industry in Florida. Tourism is number one–an industry that does have relatively low occupational injuries and illnesses.

Most Southeastern states have federal OSHA programs, which nationally have reduced the number of inspections from 43,377 to 24,024 over the last two years. In part, this reduction stems from a large push to get companies to police themselves through voluntary programs, a trend which is particularly pronounced in the Southern states, says Tom O’Conner with the North Carolina OSHA.

“The Southern federal OSHA region has really been giving companies a lot of leeway in governing them-selves,” O’Conner said. “It’s all a part of this `reinventing government idea’–creating partnerships between business and government. They somehow expect the employers to monitor themselves.”

With its present staffing, federal OSHA would take 167 years to inspect every workplace under its jurisdiction. In Southern states such as Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, the lower number of federal 1 OSHA inspectors means compliance inspections would take even longer.

Underreporting occupational fatalities is not as easy as underreporting injuries and illnesses, although “it can be done,” says Jim Ellenberger with the AFL-CIO’s Occupational Safety and Health Department. In the category of workplace deaths, the Southeastern states perform much more poorly. Only Virginia has a fatality rate that is better than the national average of 4.82 per 100,000 workers. Ten of twelve Southeastern states rank in the bottom half, and five–West Virginia, Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, and Arkansas–rank in the bottom twelve.

The Rocky Mountain region performs even worse, however, due to Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, which had three of the worst fatality rates in the nation in 1996. Averages run between 11.82 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers in Montana to 10.56 in Idaho. Wyoming AFL-CIO State President John Faunce and Montana AFL-CIO Executive Secretary Don Judge cited transportation incidents as the main source of fatalities in their respective states. Indeed, 41 percent of all occupational fatalities occur because of transportation incidents. Faunce and Judge surmised that worse road conditions and longer average drives in their states account for more transportation fatalities. Miners and loggers in these states are also at a higher risk of fatalities. In Alaska, which has a phenomenally high fatality rate of 21.65, state AFL-CIO vice-president Mike Gallagher cited transportation incidents and the fishing industry.

Alaska is also near the bottom (49) in the percent of its manufacturing workforce that is unionized; since 1983 the union density of the state’s manufacturing workforce has declined from 23.3 to 3.8 percent. But now the manufacturing sector is all but nonexistent, Gallagher said, and if one looks at the percent of the total workforce that is unionized (a new indicator in this edition of the Climate for Workers, Alaska now ranks number four at 23.1 percent.

As this example attests, manufacturing is no longer the bedrock of unionism. Nationally, union membership in manufacturing has fallen from 38.9 percent in 1973 to 27.8 percent in 1983 to 17.6 percent in 1995. In the private sector, both transportation and public utility workers (now at 27 percent) and construction workers (19 percent) now have higher union densities.

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With 37.7 percent of workers organized, the public sector has the highest proportion of union members by far. Indeed the explosion of unionism in the public sector in the 1960s and 70s (from 5 percent to 40 percent) and its maintenance during the 1980s, has at least somewhat cushioned unionized labor’s fall from a third of the workforce in 1955 to 14.5 percent in 1996. Only 10.2 percent of workers in private industry were unionized in 1996, about what it was in 1930.

All of the states in the top ten in total union membership had a highly organized public sector. The number one state, New York, had a union density of 73.0 percent among its government workers in 1996 (up from 66.5 percent in 1986). New Jersey (number five) and Connecticut (number eight) have also increased their public sector union densities since the 80s, and now have 61.1 and 62.2 percent unionized, respectively.

On a regional basis, the Pacific (Hawaii and Alaska) and Far West slates performed the best in total union membership. The state of Washington was the only Far West state to have high densities in both manufacturing (29.3 percent) and the total workforce (21 percent). Nevada, on the other hand, has a manufacturing union density of only 8.5 percent but a total union density of 20.2 percent, the eighth highest in the nation. What’s more, the state experienced only a 2.2 percent decline in total union membership between 1983 and 1995, the fourth lowest decrease in the nation.

Almost all of the unionization in Nevada has occurred in the metropolitan Las Vegas area. In that city, unions are strong not only in the public sector and the construction industry, but also in the service sector. Other cities in Nevada, such as Reno, are mostly non-union. As a result, kitchen workers in a union hotel earn $9.37 an hour and union bartenders earn $11.88 an hour in Las Vegas, while their non-union colleagues in Reno earn only $6.72 and $6.63, respectively, says Jeff Waddoups, associate professor of economics at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. The percent of hotel workers in Las Vegas that Waddoups classifies as working poor is about 25 percent less than in Reno. As a state, Nevada has the ninth lowest poverty rate and the tenth best income equality in the nation.

Las Vegas is one of about 100 cities in the nation that the AFL-CIO has designated a “Union City.” In early 1997, the AFL-CIO launched its Union Cities campaign, with the aim of “organizing for change, changing to organize, mobilizing against anti-union employers, building community and community coalitions . . . generating support for the right to organize, [and] making sure that union leadership mirrors the face of the membership.” The key agents of the Union Cities movement are the Central Labor Councils (CLCs), the federation of AFL-CIO unions at the local level. So far, the Las Vegas Central Labor Council is already serving as a model for other Union Cities because of its multi-union, multi-employer organizing drives that have successfully organized hotel and casino workers, hospital workers, and construction workers.

In addition to an increased focus on organization, the Union Cities program also emphasizes “mobilization” and “diversity,” says the head of another model CLC. “Organizing is how you build power, but mobilization is how you exercise power,” Atlanta Labor Council President Stewart Acuff says. “By mobilizing, I mean `street heat’–putting working people on the street in political campaigns, in militant demonstrations, and in rallies. The other point of Union Cities is diversity. The Atlanta Labor Council is one of the few on which white men are not a majority.”

Kirk Adams, the director of the AFL-CIO for the Southern region, also emphasized the growing importance of diversity. “Organizing is more diverse now in the South–it’s no longer just black and white” Adams said. “Historically, labor has seen immigration as a detriment because immigrants can be used to hurt wage rates. But there are also opportunities. If we reach out to the strong Hispanic and Asian communities, who now make up a significant portion of many industries in many parts of the South, we have the opportunity to build coalitions and critical masses. I would guess the poultry industry in the South, which stretches from Florida to Arkansas, is about 50 percent Hispanic.”

While the labor movement in the South may be trying to encourage diversity, the region’s professional specialty, managerial/administrative, technical, and craft jobs remain relatively closed to women and minorities. While some regional differences may be accounted for by fewer such jobs in the region, in most of the Southeast, a lower percentage of the African-American and female labor force possess jobs in these traditional white male occupations than in any other.

State Protection of Workers

Almost all of the Southeastern and Southwestern states are “right-to-work” states and almost none extend collective bargaining rights to state and local public employees. As a result, all but three of these states have union densities that are less than ten percent. North and South Carolina continue to spar for the lowest union membership in the nation (4.2 and 3.3 percent, respectively). This lack of union strength in the South not only hurts workers directly by leading to lower earnings (in 1996, the average union worker made 33 percent more

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State Protection of Workers

												Composite Ranking
State	Region	Insured Unemployed as % of Total Unemp*	Rank	Avg. Unemployment Benefit per Recipient 1996 in dollars**	Rank	State Minimum Wage of 10/1/97 in dollars	Rank	Max. Weekly Benefit for Permanent Total Disability in dollars	Rank	Statutory Protection of Workers+	Rank	Avg Rank	State Rank
Alabama	SE	31.9	32	1450	51	0.00	51	458	28	3.5	50	43.7	47
Alaska	Pac	57.1	2	2528	20	5.65	4	700	5	15.0	22	12.5	12
Arizona	SW	19.1	50	2142	32	0.00	51	323	48	6.0	47	45.8	48
Arkansas	SE	44.3	10	1942	40	5.15	9	348	46	11.5	32	28.2	32
California	Far W	40.5	19	2491	24	5.75	3	490	25	21.5	1	12.2	10
Colorado	Rockies	26.8	39	2498	23	5.15	9	468	27	14.0	25	24.7	27
Connecticut	New Eng	43.0	15	3343	11	5.18	8	678	6	21.0	2	7.3	2
D.C.	Mid Atl	39.6	20	4339	2	6.15	1	749	4	11.0	37	16.8	15
Delaware	Mid Atl	41.6	16	3625	8	5.15	9	372	43	16.5	15	17.7	18
Florida	SE	25.6	42	2514	21	0.00	51	479	26	11.0	37	35.7	42
Georgia	SE	23.3	45	1524	49	3.25	42	300	49	7.0	45	45.8	48
Hawaii	Pac	41.5	17	4634	1	5.25	5	501	20	16.0	19	13.5	13
Idaho	Rockies	44.4	9	2037	37	5.15	9	390	39	10.0	39	28.7	33
Illinois	Grt Lk	41.3	18	3654	7	5.15	9	781	2	18.5	10	9.9	3
Indiana	Grt Lk	27.2	38	2054	34	3.35	40	428	34	8.5	43	38.7	44
Iowa	Plains	34.0	26	2379	27	5.15	9	873	1	11.5	32	21.2	21
Kansas	Plains	26.2	40	2719	15	2.65	43	338	47	9.5	40	37.5	43
Kentucky	SE	30.2	35	1958	38	4.25	36	447	31	14.5	24	31.3	35
Louisiana	SE	20.2	48	1868	42	0.00	51	349	45	6.0	47	46.7	51
Maine	New Eng	44.3	10	2269	29	5.15	9	441	33	18.0	13	17.8	19
Maryland	Mid Atl	32.9	30	3067	13	5.15	9	553	11	16.5	15	15.5	14
Massachusetts	New Eng	52.1	5	4040	4	5.25	5	631	8	20.5	3	4.7	1
Michigan	Grt Lk	44.0	12	2484	26	5.15	9	553	11	19.0	6	11.7	9
Minnesota	Plains	36.4	23	3199	12	5.15	9	615	10	19.5	4	10.3	6
Mississippi	SE	30.6	34	1885	41	0.00	51	271	51	0.0	51	46.5	50
Missouri	Plains	33.4	28	1947	39	5.15	9	513	16	14.0	25	23.7	26
Montana	Rockies	43.9	13	2051	35	5.15	9	384	41	16.5	15	21.3	22
Nebraska	Plains	28.7	36	1801	44	5.15	9	427	35	12.5	29	30.3	34
Nevada	Far W	36.3	24	2629	18	5.15	9	492	23	12.0	30	22.3	25
New Hampshire	New Eng	22.1	46	1480	50	5.15	9	756	3	19.0	6	20.0	20
New Jersey	Mid Atl	43.2	14	4287	3	5.05	34	496	21	13.5	28	21.3	22
New Mexico	SW	19.0	51	2553	19	4.25	36	364	44	16.0	19	31.3	35
New York	Mid Atl	39.6	20	3669	5	4.25	36	400	37	16.5	15	21.3	22
North Carolina	SE	33.7	27	1721	46	5.15	9	512	17	12.0	30	26.5	30
North Dakota	Plains	38.8	22	2140	33	5.15	9	387	40	14.0	25	25.7	28
Ohio	Grt Lk	31.4	33	2712	16	4.25	36	521	14	11.5	32	27.2	31
Oklahoma	SW	23.4	44	2164	30	5.15	9	426	36	16.0	19	26.2	29
Oregon	Far W	44.8	8	2679	17	6.00	2	519	15	18.5	10	10.3	6
Pennsylvania	Mid Atl	55.6	3	3483	9	5.15	9	542	13	17.5	14	10.3	6
Rhode Island	New Eng	73.6	1	3439	10	5.15	9	503	19	18.5	10	9.8	5
South Carolina	SE	27.7	37	1756	45	0.00	51	451	30	5.0	49	43.5	46
South Dakota	Plains	19.7	49	1593	48	5.15	9	375	42	11.5	32	35.3	40
Tennessee	SE	34.4	25	1824	43	0.00	51	453	29	11.5	32	35.3	40
Texas	SW	23.6	43	2851	14	3.35	40	491	24	7.5	44	34.8	39
Utah	Rockies	25.7	41	2051	35	5.15	9	397	38	9.0	41	34.2	37
Vermont	New Eng	48.9	6	2309	28	5.25	5	674	7	19.0	6	9.7	4
Virginia	SE	20.3	47	1711	47	5.15	9	496	21	9.0	41	34.3	38
Washington	Far W	45.6	7	3659	6	4.90	35	627	9	15.0	22	16.8	15
West Virginia	SE	32.8	31	2500	22	5.15	9	445	32	19.5	5	17.0	17
Wisconsin	Grt Lk	54.5	4	2143	31	5.15	9	509	18	19.0	6	12.3	11
Wyoming	Rockies	33.3	29	2486	25	1.60	44	289	50	6.5	46	40.0	45

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than a non-union worker), but also diminishes the ability of workers to secure adequate legislative protection for themselves–and to avert the erosion of already-existing protection that’s occurring nationwide in state legislatures.

One protection that has seen significant deterioration is unemployment insurance (UI). In most state systems, prior earnings simultaneously determine whether employees are eligible for UI, how long they can receive it, and how much they can get in benefits. So, as the decline in worker’s earnings began in the 1970s and accelerated in the 80s, employees became increasingly less likely to be eligible for UI or to get their maximum benefits for the full 26 weeks.

To make matters worse, when benefit outlays increased during the recession of the early 1980s because of a prolonged period of high unemployment, a number of states, and most Southern states, reacted by making the ireligibility rules more restrictive. At the same time, the federal government enacted restrictive legislation. When unemployment insurance trust funds swelled in the 1990s, however, labor needed significant bargaining power to get benefits raised and eligibility restrictions loosened. “Instead of letting people back in the UI system, sixteen states, primarily in the South, had trust fund giveaways,” says Mark Baldwin, assistant director of public policy at the AFL-CIO. “Instead of giving more benefits to the unemployed, they gave the money to employers through tax breaks or moratoriums. In states where the labor movement and its allies had some sway, they worked to make sure at least some of the money went to the workers as benefit increases. In states where we didn’t have any strength, it was just a flat-out giveaway. That general story plays out particularly strongly in the Southern states, but, of course, this has dampened benefit increases in all states due to interstate competition. Nobody wants to be known in the business community as the state with the best UI system.”

If former employees leave a job for certain reasons or fail a drug test (which are being used more and more in UI systems, Baldwin says), states deny UI benefits for a certain number of weeks–a number that has been increasing. “Now in most of your Southern states, you have various durational penalties–penalties in which former employees are not eligible for the entire period of unemployment,” Baldwin said. “In states like Texas, all the penalties are durational, which is why people don’t get benefits there.”

Indeed, less than a quarter of the unemployed in Texas receive UI benefits, but several states in the Southwest and Southeast rank even lower. New Mexico and Arizona only had 19.0 and 19.1 percent of their unemployed insured in 1996. Louisiana, Virginia, and Georgia had between 20.2 and 23.3 percent.

What’s more, these low numbers measure only the percentage of the unemployed eligible for unemployment insurance in the average week, not the percentage that actually gets benefits. As a result, these numbers overestimate the actual number of people covered by anywhere from 10 to 15 percent–and probably more in states with severe penalties.

By contrast, 73.5 percent of the unemployed in Rhode Island received benefits in 1996. While this number is much higher than any other state (the second highest was 57.1 percent in Alaska), all but one state in both New England and the Far West have percentages greater than 40 percent, as do better than half the states in the Mid-Atlantic and the Great Lakes region. Nationally, only about one in three unemployed workers received unemployment insurance in 1996, down from three-quarters of workers in 1975 and half of them in 1992.

But even in those states where more of the unemployed are receiving UI, the benefits are not being evenly distributed among all workers, notes Maurice Emsellem, staff attorney with the National Employment Law Project in New York.

“The unemployment compensation system tends to leave out women and low-wage workers, so we have a big push to change laws in that area,” Emsellum explains. “Of course, lower wages increase the likelihood of being ineligible for UI, but low-wage and women workers are also disproportionately part-time workers, who are likewise more likely to be ineligible. Laws that exclude people who get fired when they miss work because of various family crises–say, a sick child–disproportionately affect women, too. “But now is a good time to change this,” Emsellem argues. “The trust funds are in good shape and the employers are trying to raid them. At the same time, a lot of women are being forced into the low-wage labor market due to welfare reform. It’s a good time to bring up the issue of fairness.”

Injured on the Job? Tough Luck

While workers in at least a few states appears to be on the offensive with unemployment compensation, it is on the defensive almost everywhere when it comes to compensation for workers injured on the job. Since the mid-1980s, state legislatures in twenty-eight states have reduced the amount of benefits injured workers can collect, while benefits have remained about the same in sixteen other states and D.C.–though not without vigilant battles on the part of the labor movement. Only six states have increased benefits.

As a result, between 1991 and 1994, workers compensation benefits paid to workers declined almost 25 percent nationally, representing the first time workers compensation benefit payments declined for three successive years since the 1930s.

“The downward trend of cutting back on workers’ compensation coverage began here in Texas a number of years ago, and it has now become a competing annual cycle where other states try to project themselves as business friendly by cutting benefits,” says Kirk Adams of the Southern regional office of the AFL-CIO. “Of course, it’s portrayed as `we’re trying to attract jobs,’ and this attracts moderates who are usually our allies against more explicitly anti-worker measures. The AFL-CIO has been paralyzed in most Southern states because we just don’t have the density across the legislative spectrum, and we can’t really form a coalition with moderates.”

North Carolina has the highest maximum weekly benefit for total permanent disability in the South (due in part to “Governor (Jim) Hunt saving us several times,” Adams said), but even its $512 weekly benefit is barely above the national average of $503.49. Every other Southern state is below this average, most well below. Mississippi’s $270-a-week benefits is the lowest in the country.

The workers’ compensation-cutting epidemic has infected not only the low-benefit states in the Southeast and Southwest. In New England, where four states are in the top ten, cuts are also rampant. New Hampshire, with the third-highest weekly benefits in the country ($756) has seen its workers compensation benefit outlays decrease 40 percent over the last four years. In Massachusetts, ranked eighth with maximum disability benefits of $631, a series of subtle and not-so-subtle provisions reduced the average size of a sum settlement down from $27,040 in 1991 to $18,860 in 1992.

Movements are stirring, however, to reverse this trend. In Massachusetts, several bills have been introduced in the state legislature to bring workers compensation benefits back to their pre-cut levels. In Ohio, unions and community activists blocked the implementation of a worker’s compensation bill that would have effectively gutted the state’s current system. By collecting more than 400,000 signatures and forcing a November referendum–the state’s first referendum in more than half a century–this coalition defeated the bill. In South Carolina, labor organizations succeeded in getting legislation passed to make employer participation in the state’s workers’ compensation system mandatory. (Previously, South Carolina was one of three states–including Texas and New Jersey–in which employer participation was voluntary.)

The Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment (CAFE)has been less successful in its fight to secure workers’ choice of doctor in South Carolina, an issue which state coordinator Charles Taylor says is “the real key to controlling the system.” Currently, workers in South Carolina must go to a doctor selected by the employer, and this doctor makes all of the decisions that affect compensation payments

Nationally, only twenty-four states ostensibly guarantee employees the right to choose their own doctor. But Jim Ellenberger, assistant director of the OSH department at the AFL-CIO, says the recent rush of most states into managed care renders this statutory protection practically irrelevant.

“If you mandate managed care for workers’ compensation, the worker has to go to the managed care organization chosen by the insurance company and employer anyway,” Ellenberger points out. “And the majority of employee-choice states are now also managed care states.”

Minimum Wage: Still Mighty Low

More positive developments have occurred on the minimum wage front. Before the U.S. Congress voted to increase the minimum wage to $5.15 an hour in 1997, the real value of the minimum wage was $4.12, compared with $5.97 in 1979 and about $6.50 in the late 1960s (all in 1995 dollars). Even though the purchasing power of the minimum wage is still far less than what it was twenty or thirty years ago, close to ten million workers are now enjoying the ninety-cent raise–an increase that has so far not caused the “disemployment effects” that its opponents predicted. The vast majority of beneficiaries are not middle class teenagers, but adults from families in the bottom two-fifths of the income scale. About three-fifths of the beneficiaries are women.

Still, the federal minimum wage does not cover all employees. There is a complicated list of exceptions that includes employees at certain amusement and recreational establishments, certain retail establishment employees, certain agricultural employees, and certain domestic workers, to name only a few. However, almost two-thirds of the states have passed their own minimum wage laws that meet or exceed the federal level. Eight states–D.C., Oregon, California, Alaska, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Connecticut–have passed minimum wages anywhere from three cents to a dollar higher than the federal minimum.

The remaining one-third of states, however, have either lower state minimum wages (ranging from $5.05 to $1.60) or no minimum wage at all. All of the states with no minimum wage are in the Southeast and Southwest.

No one would contend, though, that a person could support her or his family working full-time at even the

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Quality of Life

																									Composite Ranking
State	Region	Infant Mortality 1995	Rank	E/J ratio 1995*	Rank	Per Capita Expenditure 1995	Rank	Tax Burden on Middle 20% 1995**	Rank	Progessivity of State Tax 1995***	Rank	Revenue per Student 1993-1994	Rank	% of 18 to 25 year olds graduating high school 1994	Rank	Physicians per 10,000 1995	Rank	% without Health Insurance 1996	Rank	Crime Rate per 100,000 1995	Rank	Cost of Living 1997*	Rank	Avg. Rank	State Rank
Alabama	SE	9.8	48	227.1	47	976.02	47	9.1	18	2.4	42	3617.85	49	84.0	40	17	41	12.9	23	4848	25	100.1	21	37.21	49
Alaska	Pac	7.7	29	127.0	41	4258.28	1	2.8	1	3.0	45	8819.53	4	90.5	17	14.2	48	13.5	26	5754	37	123.6	44	25.14	22
Arizona	SW	7.5	25	173.7	44	1048.08	36	8.7	14	1.6	31	4966.11	37	84.0	40	18.2	30	24.1	50	8214	50	101.8	26	35.36	48
Arkansas	SW	7.5	25	173.7	44	1049.08	36	8.7	14	1.6	31	4966.11	37	84.0	40	18.2	30	24.1	50	8214	50	101.8	26	35.36	48
California	Far W	6.3	11	14.8	3	1328.34	18	8.9	17	1.0	6	5118.4	35	78.9	51	21.7	12	20.1	46	5831	38	116.7	41	26.43	30
Colorado	Rockies	6.5	12	16.7	5	1044.57	38	8.8	16	1.5	25	5289.68	29	88.4	24	20.6	16	16.6	38	5396	32	103.8	28	24.43	20
Connecticut	New Eng	7.2	19	25.7	9	2564.58	4	10.7	44	1.7	34	8227.71	5	94.7	2	29.5	5	11	11	4503	18	125.4	45	16.5	6
D.C.	Mid-Atl.	16.2	51	2.3	1	1189.7	adjusted	10.2	35	1.1	10	9314.55	2	87.7	29	53.6	1	14.8	30	12174	51	125.7	46	26.08	26
Delaware	Mid-Atl.	7.5	25	45.5	17	2149.23	5	6.7	5	0.8	1	6371.42	14	93.3	7	19.7	22	13.4	25	5159	28	108.9	39	18	10
Florida	SE	7.5	25	105.1	38	1005.79	40	7.7	8	3.9	48	5634.93	26	80.7	47	20.3	17	18.9	45	7702	49	108.6	38	34.07	44
Georgia	SE	9.4	44	62.1	21	1322.18	19	9.6	23	1.4	24	5206.19	31	80.3	49	18	32	17.8	43	6004	39	99.5	20	33.07	43
Hawaii	Pac	5.8	5	23.4	8	2669.76	2	10.1	33	1.2	13	6025.23	22	92.0	12	22.8	10	8.6	2	7199	48	182.8	adjusted	14.15	1
Idaho	Rockies	6.1	8	37.0	12	1090.28	32	9.3	19	1.0	2	3830.24	48	86.4	36	13.1	50	16.5	37	4402	15	100.5	24	26.86	33
Illinois	Grt Lk	9.4	44	69.7	25	1454.02	13	9.8	27	2.2	40	6031.18	21	86.7	35	22.1	11	11.3	13	5456	33	107.2	adjusted	26.15	27
Indiana	Grt Lk	8.4	38	91.6	35	1091.16	31	9.7	24	1.9	38	6040.91	19	88.5	23	16.6	42	10.6	10	4632	22	96.6	12	25.79	24
Iowa	Plains	8.2	35	76.7	28	1272.34	23	10.5	41	1.5	26	5192.02	32	93.2	9	15.1	45	11.6	18	4102	11	99.1	18	26.5	31
Kansas	Plains	7	17	76.0	27	1290.45	22	9.5	21	1.4	22	6032.54	20	90.9	15	18	32	11.4	14	4887	26	94.5	7	19.57	11
Kentucky	SE	7.6	28	89.2	34	1296.89	21	10.4	38	1.3	16	4911.2	38	83.4	44	18	32	15.4	34	3352	6	94.5	7	28.43	36
Louisiana	SE	9.8	48	636.9	50	1089.13	34	10.4	38	2.2	40	4197.73	44	80.5	48	20.3	17	20.9	47	6676	47	93.7	5	39.79	51
Maine	New Eng	6.5	12	63.3	23	1359.39	16	10.1	33	1.2	11	6198.01	16	92.9	10	18.2	30	12.1	20	3285	5	120	adjusted	17.23	7
Maryland	Mid-Atl.	8.9	41	57.4	20	1388.34	15	11.1	49	1.3	18	6862.24	11	93.6	5	29.9	4	11.4	14	6295	43	98.7	17	21.64	16
Massachusetts	New Eng.	5.2	1	15.6	4	2585.61	3	10.5	41	1.3	18	7132.73	7	92.5	11	33.2	2	12.4	21	4342	14	145.2	48	14.21	2
Michigan	Grt Lk	8.3	36	55.5	18	842.08	49	10.6	43	1.9	37	6923.34	9	88.7	22	19	27	8.9	3	5183	29	108.1	37	25.57	23
Minnesota	Plains	6.7	16	39.4	14	1866.59	7	10.9	46	1.0	5	6248.15	15	93.3	7	21.5	13	10.2	9	4497	17	100.4	23	15.14	3
Mississippi	SE	10.5	50	148.0	42	991.84	41	9.7	24	1.7	35	3190.15	51	83.9	42	13	51	18.5	44	4515	19	93.9	6	39.29	50
Missouri	Plains	7.4	23	94.6	36	988.17	43	9.8	27	1.5	27	5190.58	23	90.3	18	19.7	22	13.2	24	5121	27	98.4	16	26.86	33
Montana	Rockies	7	17	1852.8	51	1089.66	33	6.8	6	1.0	3	5159.27	34	89.8	19	17.1	40	13.6	29	5305	30	101.2	25	26.21	28
Nebraska	Plains	7.4	23	65.2	24	1028.1	39	9.9	30	1.2	13	5468.51	27	94.5	3	18.3	29	11.4	14	4545	20	91.5	2	20.57	14
Nevada	Far W	5.7	4	85.8	32	720.92	51	4.8	2	4.9	51	5344.44	28	81.9	46	14.6	47	15.6	35	6579	46	105.9	32	31.5	39
New Hampshire	New Eng	5.5	3	18.0	6	845.82	48	6.1	4	2.5	43	5884.21	23	86.9	33	19.8	21	9.5	4	2655	2	105.7	31	17.71	9
New Jersey	Mid-Atl.	6.6	15	21.8	7	1881.31	6	10.2	35	1.8	36	9830.14	1	91.8	13	24.9	7	16.7	39	4704	24	170.8	49	20.5	13
New Mexico	SW	6.2	10	397.1	48	1610.68	10	11	47	1.6	33	4309.12	43	82.4	44	18	32	22.3	49	6428	44	101.9	27	34.93	47
New York	Mid-Atl.	7.7	29	27.1	10	1841.59	8	14.3	51	1.3	17	9178.64	3	87.1	31	31.6	3	17	40	4560	21	233.1	51	24	18
North Carolina	SE	9.2	42	80.3	30	1394.58	14	9.3	19	1.1	9	4642.32	41	85.5	38	19.4	26	16	36	5640	35	100.1	21	30.72	38
North Dakota	Plains	7.2	19	56.3	19	981.28	46	7.9	9	1.6	32	4172.62	46	96.6	1	18.9	28	9.8	7	2866	3	98.2	15	21.21	15
Ohio	Grt Lk	8.7	39	85.5	31	1343.29	17	9.8	27	1.3	15	5840.18	24	88.4	24	20	20	11.5	17	4405	16	105	29	24.21	19
Oklahoma	SW	8.3	36	75.7	26	1048.2	37	9.5	21	1.4	23	4737	39	87.0	32	14.7	46	17	40	5597	34	91.6	3	32.29	40
Oregon	Far W	6.1	8	77.8	29	1061.13	35	9.9	30	1.1	8	6071.42	18	82.7	43	19.5	25	15.3	33	6564	45	107.1	34	26.21	28
Pennsylvania	Mid-Atl.	7.8	32	42.9	16	1303.18	20	10.2	35	2.2	39	7229.98	6	89.5	20	24.6	8	9.5	4	3365	7	127.1	47	19.71	12
Rhode Island	New Eng	7.2	19	30.1	11	1657.58	9	10.4	38	1.2	12	7047.65	8	89.4	21	26.7	6	9.9	8	4245	12	106.7	33	15.14	3
South Carolina	SE	9.6	47	116.9	40	1102.91	29	7.9	9	1.0	6	4714.63	40	88.0	28	17.6	37	17.1	42	6064	40	97.4	13	32.86	41
South Dakota	Plains	9.5	46	38.2	13	807.96	50	7.9	9	4.0	49	4382.34	42	91.5	14	15.7	44	9.5	4	3061	4	95.9	11	27	35
Tennessee	SE	9.3	43	163.0	43	984.4	45	7.6	7	3.4	47	3831.09	47	84.6	39	20.8	14	15.2	32	5363	31	94.8	9	34.21	45
Texas	SW	6.5	12	182.8	45	1102.33	30	8.6	12	3.1	46	5055.91	36	79.5	50	17.3	39	24.3	51	5684	36	93	4	32.86	41
Utah	Rockies	5.4	2	553.4	49	1199.9	25	11	47	1.5	29	3555.15	50	93.6	5	17.6	37	12	19	6091	41	105.1	30	28.93	37
Vermont	New Eng	6	7	11.4	2	1179.49	27	10	32	1.0	3	6699.04	12	88.1	27	24.2	9	11.1	12	3434	8	116.8	42	15.14	3
Virginia	SE	7.8	32	97.6	37	1131.76	28	8.7	14	1.4	21	5227.14	30	87.7	29	20.8	14	12.5	22	3989	10	97.5	14	23.93	17
Washington	Far W	5.9	6	63.1	22	1562.14	11	10.7	44	4.4	50	6126.79	17	85.7	37	20.2	19	13.5	26	6270	42	113.5	40	25.93	25
West Virginia	SE	7.9	34	193.4	46	1208.97	24	8.6	12	1.3	20	5838.35	25	86.8	34	17.9	36	14.9	31	2458	1	99.4	19	26.57	32
Wisconsin	Grt Lk	7.3	22	40.4	15	1527.82	12	12.6	50	1.6	30	6884.05	10	93.7	4	19.6	24	8.4	1	3886	9	107.6	36	17.57	8
Wyoming	Rockies	7.7	29	111.0	39	991.67	42	5.8	3	2.9	44	6597.88	13	90.8	16	13.9	49	13.5	26	4320	13	94.8	9	25.07	21

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Climate for Workers Overall Ranking

Minnesota	1
Massachusetts	2
Connecticut	3
New Hampshire	4
Delaware	5
Wisconsin	6
Maryland	7
New Jersey	8
Colorado	9
Illinois	10
Michigan	11
Rhode Island	12
Washington	13
Oregon	14
Vermont	15
Pennsylvania	16
Hawaii	17
New York	18
California	19
Nevada	20
Missouri	21
Alaska	22
Ohio	23
Maine	24
Virginia	25
Nebraska	26
Kansas	27
Iowa	28
D.C.	29
North Dakota	30
Utah	31
Indiana	32
North Carolina	33
Georgia	34
Texas	35
Idaho	36
Florida	37
South Dakota	38
Tennessee	39
Montana	40
Wyoming	41
Arizona	42
Kentucky	43
Oklahoma	44
West Virginia	45
Arkansas	46
South Carolina	47
Alabama	48
New Mexico	49
Louisiana	50
Mississippi	51

highest state minimum wage in the nation–$6.15 an hour in D.C. In response, the labor movement, in coalition with community and religious organizations, has been launching “living wage” campaigns in cities throughout the country, including Baltimore, Jersey City, New York, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Setting minimums in the $7 to $8 range, the living wage ordinances in existence usually apply only to the employees of the city and to city contractors, but the higher wages have been putting upward pressure on the entire low-wage market.

“With such a tight labor market, it’s a good time for these campaigns,” says Kirk Adams, who has seen a campaign in Houston fail, but is currently assisting another one in New Orleans. “People are willing to take chances because they know they can get a low wage job anywhere.”

The labor movement is also involved in the perennial fights against attempts to pass “right-to-work” laws–particularly heated this year in Colorado, Montana, and New Hampshire. The “Statutory Protection for Workers” indicator includes “Right-to-Work” as well as a host of other labor laws, including Anti-Discrimination, Equal Pay, Whistleblower Protection, Right-to-Know, Overtime, and Sexual Harassment laws. (See the appendix for details). The results: New England has the best statutory protection in the country by far. The region’s states make up four of the top six and five of the top ten states. Three Great Lakes states were also in the top ten, as well as Minnesota. Tow Far West states were in the top ten, and one, California, scored the highest of all the states, having sixteen of the seventeen laws on the books (and no “right-to work” law).

Eight Southeastern and Southwestern state are in the bottom eleven in the statutory protection indicator. Alabama had only three of the seventeen laws and Mississippi has no such laws; both have right-to-work laws.

Raising the Standards

Recently, the labor movement has grown increasingly interested in moving beyond the annual battles over legislative protections, wages, and benefits. Under the leadership of president John Sweeney, the central headquarters of the AFL-CIO has been telling its affiliates to actively defy the appellation of “special interest group” by mobilizing around a wider array of community issues that affect all working families. Central Labor Councils in the Union Cities are being encouraged to form a more extensive net work of coalitions with community and religious organizations working for a cleaner environment, a less regressive state and local tax system, higher quality education, more inclusive and comprehensive health care.

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This new direction for the labor movement, makes the “quality of life” category particularly appropriate. This category attempts to rank the quality of life in the states through a variety of indicators related to the environment, education, taxes, public spending, health care, crime rates, and the cost of living. Combining all of the indicators, New England does the best by far as a region: all six of the region’s states are in the top nine.

Similarly, New England ranks number one as a region in overall labor climate. Other states in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest with high quality of life scores–Wisconsin, Minnesota, Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland–also score well in overall labor climate.

The Southeast and Southwest, on the other hand, rank last and second-to-last as regions in quality of life, as they do in the overall rankings. Indeed, the bottom twelve in the quality of life composite and bottom ten in the overall labor climate composite are all Southeastern and Southwestern states. Another fast-growing region–the Rockies–ranks sixth (out of nine regions) in quality of life and seventh overall.

As it stands, however, the fast-growing states in the Southeast, Southwest, and Rockies are serving as the maximum thresholds to which the rest of the nation must fall. The results of this race to the bottom: between 1989 and 1995, the median family income in the high-wage Northeast decreased by almost three times the national average, so that by 1995 the median income was $4,618 dollars below its 1989 peak, when controlling for inflation. States in New England and the Mid-Atlantic, as well as those in the Far West and Pacific regions, also experienced some of the greatest increases in poverty rates between 1989 and 1994–increases of 2.5, 3 and 4 percent, respectively, compared to 1.7 percent nationally.

Instead of pressuring policy makers in the states of the Northeast, the Midwest, the Far West, and the Pacific to lower their relatively higher wage and benefits, weaken their stronger protections for workers, diminish the greater power of their employees to bargain with employers, and eliminate the social provisions that make for their higher quality of life, a society that truly worked in the interest of its members would hold these states up as minimum thresholds.

Preston Quesenberry, former editorial assistant for Southern Changes, is now a media analyst at McKinney McDowell Associates in Washington, tracking media cover-age of affirmative action. Kenneth Rose assisted with this research while a community development work fellow at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.