The start of a new year is a time for making resolutions. And in her New Year’s Day speech marking the beginning of her second term, Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren laid out a huge one for the community: attacking economic inequality.
The city’s poverty rate is one of the highest in the nation. And many Rochesterians are poor even though they are employed. They just don’t earn much money. Some are in double-standard jobs, earning less than other employees doing the same job in the same company. Others are in the kinds of jobs that don’t pay much, period.
It’s not news that the Rochester area has lost a lot of manufacturing jobs. Many of them paid good wages and didn’t require high-level skills. The jobs that have replaced them seem to be falling into two categories. Some pay very well but require advanced education and skills. Others require less education and few skills, but they don’t pay enough to lift the workers out of poverty.
A report published last summer by the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative, SEIU 1199, and the mayor’s Office of Innovation had disturbing news. Many of the low-paying jobs are in two employment sectors that have become the largest in the Rochester area. Educational services, which includes child-care workers, is one. Health care and social assistance (hospital workers, home health aides) is the other.
That’s where many of the working poor are employed. And many of them are women, people of color, and people with disabilities. People of color in particular are over-represented in those areas.
Educational level, obviously, is linked to salary level. But people with few skills used to be able to earn a decent living in the country’s factories. That’s no longer true.
In her inaugural speech, Warren quoted from Martin Luther King’s “Where Do We Go from Here” address. “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter,” King asked 50 years ago, “if he doesn’t have enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?”
King spent the last months of his life focused on economic justice, organizing the Poor People’s Campaign. The poverty in Rochester and many other cities shows how far we still have to go to fulfill King’s dream.
In her speech on Monday, Warren said she wants Rochester to continue King’s work. But as she said, she can’t pull that off by herself. Neither city nor county government can, although each can do things that help.
But if Rochester is to sharply reduce poverty, the private sector will have to help. And there, current leaders can follow the example of the late Xerox president Joe Wilson, whom Warren singled out in her inaugural speech. Wilson tried to improve employment opportunities for African Americans, at his own company and in the community.
Rochester needs that kind of leadership now, and Warren has met with the leaders of some local businesses and institutions to discuss their role in reducing poverty. These people can have a huge impact, not only on their own workforce but by changing the mindset of their peers. (A good place to start: Unshackle Upstate, a business effort that continues to object to the minimum wage increase, paid family leave, and other measures that can help the poor. Among its leaders: former Rochester Mayor Bob Duffy.)
Will Rochester do more than applaud Warren’s call for economic justice? Will we do more than just talk about economic inequality? More than form a committee to work on it? Our recent history doesn’t inspire hope. But this year is the 50th anniversary of the Poor People’s March on Washington and the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination. And the region will spend the year observing the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frederick Douglass.
It’s hard to think of a better year to try.
This article appears in Jan 3-9, 2018.
The jobs exist. The qualified applicants don’t. So who do you blame? The employers. Not to mention, piling on, to boot– The minimum wage just went up 70 cents per hr. About $1 when taxes are included.
Not one word about the very people who CAN eradicate poverty, and there’s 100,000 of them. The citizens of Rochester don’t need you to babysit them, Lovely. If you want to see the sad attitude in the city, just observe the students of RCSD on their way to school. They need to be inspired. They need to be uplifted.There is no one that can help someone more than that very person.
I heard a good quote the other day and I don’t recall who said it but-
“If you are helping someone more than they are helping themselves, you are not helping”
Dear Johnny, I somewhat agree with you, but we need to come up with the tools to motivate people, all of us.
For years I have been looking for ways to motivate myself, in the face, of discouragement and obstacles. Whenever I suggest some tools for motivation I get laughed at and ignored. But let me stick my neck out, once again, with some suggestions:
1) There are motivational organizations that present ideas we can use. For example, there is a group called, WHY TRY that focuses on resiliency. Another group is MINDSET WORKS which focuses on trying harder to learn more.
2) There are local people who can share motivational ideas. I, myself, am working on the use of simple ideas, and the use of simple devices, such as the Easy button, from Staples. It says, “That was easy” and sometimes an easy step gets us going.
(Sending this comment was easy, but I did not have to do it.
3) Finally, I think we need to push organizations like Rochester City Schools and RMAPI to open their doors to outside ideas and people. I have tried for over 20 years to share free advice with RCSD, with zero success. This has to stop, but when?
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when? (Hillel)
Happy 2018! http://www.SavingSchools.org
Johnny – There’s another good quote that sadly you’ve missed, “How can you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, if you dont have boots?”
I’m sorry the employers are to blame. I worked management at a sweat shop that I won’t name, but they paid barely above minimum wage and constantly complained about the lack of qualified applicants. Yet they ignored their low wages, and demotivating tactics like writing people up for being absent when they truly were sick.
You can’t expect Rochester to get motivated without something to get motivated about. When their parents failed, is that motivating them? When their brother went to jail for small drug charge and had his life ruined while a judge abuses the system after her DUI? When these jobs don’t pay you enough, especially if you have student debt?
In this current political environment where the wealthy and corporations get all the benefits at the expense of everyone else, its hard for me to stay motivated and I have a lot going for me. I have a decent job and good home and family. How do you expect someone less fortunate than me to be motivated? I don’t expect them to. What I do expect is society to change to become a fairer place where everyone has an equal chance. Then maybe we can expect some motivation.
Here’s what I’m thinking. Bring in this guy–Les Brown
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDIE_QPOPz…
Also, when reading articles like this, consider it satire. Why would anyone believe that doing the same thing as you have done for the past 50 years will be any different this year. Van White was just re-elected as president of the school board. Lovely Warren was just re-elected as Mayor. Do you ever hear the message you’re sending?
3 whole days without a homicide. Nothing ever changes. Why do city residents put up with this?
The previous homicide in Rochester occurred on Dec 25, 2017, so it would have actually been 9 days without a homicide. 365/9 = 40.6, which is a bit higher than the homicide rate for 2017 (29 per year), and a hair lower than 2016 (42 per year). But of course such comparisons are absurd given a single data point.
Sorry I wasn’t more specific. I was referring to 3 days into the new year. But let’s not quibble about that. I love Rochester, but there’s lots of problems, and they’re all interconnected. What’s being done to solve them?
I’m glad to see it only took four years for Warren to see that Rochester has a poverty problem. What the heck has she been doing the last four years?