Vote for Better Jobs and Better Wages on November 6

Voters should always put their own economic interests first when going to the polls. Nothing is more central to your success as a citizen than your ability to make ends meet, contribute to your community life, and have the time to enrich your life beyond your need for a paycheck. For decades now, voters have been told by self-serving politicians that the Culture Wars are more important than their own economic well-being. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Women can’t afford to ignore their economic security. The majority of women work in low wage jobs. Six in ten mothers are the primary or co-breadwinners for their families. Poverty is the central fact of life for too many New Yorkers and it is time candidates for political office recognized that fact and put forth realistic and concrete ideas to address this critical truth.

A recent Census Report looked at incomes, poverty rates, and access to health insurance. Overall, New York State ranks 35 out of 50 states. And things are getting worse for the most vulnerable families. Data from 2017 indicates that financial progress for low-income Americans came to a near halt during the first year of the Trump Administration.

Nearly half of Americans have difficulty paying their bills; more than one-third have struggled with hunger or having to forego needed medical treatment. The stark truth is that a minimum-wage worker can’t afford a 2-bedroom apartment anywhere in the United States. In fact, a one-bedroom is affordable for minimum-wage workers in only 22 counties in five states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington. These are all states with a higher minimum wages than the $7.25 federal wage.

The evidence of the struggles American families face is everywhere. Recently credit card defaults (the way too many people stretch too little wages over too much month) went up by 10 percent over a similar time last year. More people who borrowed to purchase an automobile have needed extra time to make their payments. And for too many in rural New York, public transportation does not exist and a personal car is the only way to get to work.

Getting to work is dependant upon affordable and available child care for most families with young children. They can’t afford to worry about the quality of child care when finding it and affording it can be nearly insurmountable problems. When it comes to high child care costs, New York is 48 out of 50 states in cost.

And those low-wage jobs that have taken the place of many of the previous jobs in the so-called “economic recovery” since the crash of 2008 are not the first step up the economic ladder. They are, in fact, dead ends that trap employees in an endless cycle of poverty.

"If you start in one of those low-wage occupations, you have a higher probability of becoming unemployed than moving up the career ladder," said Todd Gabe, a co-author of the paper, titled "Can Low-Wage Workers Get Better Jobs?" In other words, a low-wage worker was three times more likely to stop working altogether than to move to a better job in a given year.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/low-wage-work-really-is-a-dead-end-for-millions/

MIT economist Peter Temin argues that escaping poverty takes almost 20 years with nearly nothing going wrong. He agrees that education is the key, but for it to be a pathway, you have to start out in grade school and proceed through high school and college without any hiccups for you or your family. Not an easy objective for anyone but the very wealthy.

And it is not just the poorest Americans who suffer and fail to thrive. According to Alissa Quart, “Middle-class life is now 30% more expensive than it was 20 years ago.” She cites the costs of housing, education, health care and child care in particular in her book, Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America. She writes, “In some cases the cost of daily life over the last 20 years has doubled.”

There are good paying jobs right now, but more than half of them exist in the high-tech sector dominated by medical fields or computers. These are not fields the average person can walk into without years of training and specialized study. And the gender gap in the tech field is a barrier for too many women. Tech companies employ more than twice as many men as women.

The high paying jobs of the future will continue to be in these fields by all projections. How to ensure women are qualified for these good, high-wage jobs is an uphill battle. Even finding a female STEM role model is a challenge. According to a new study by the Geena Davis's Institute on Gender in Media at Mount Saint Mary's University, in California, the last decade has seen little progress in the way women are portrayed in science and technology roles in film and television. That study found that 62.9 percent of STEM professionals portrayed in media are men, outnumbering women STEM characters nearly two-to-one.

And as Professor Temin suggests about the pathway out of poverty, the way to build interest in STEM fields and the requisite jobs skills is a long-term prospect. It will take an investment in time, talent, education and vision to correct these deficits.

Political leadership is a critical component.

Before you go to the polls in 2018, spend some time exploring the issues the candidates are talking about. If they are focusing on Culture War issues, force them to talk about the issues that concern your economic future. Vote for your economic security on November 6.

#PowHerTheVote for Young Women in 2018

What are the issues that are (and should be) motivating young women to register to vote? Let us count some ways!

Elections are decided by the people who show up to vote. The current crop of politicians at every level – local, state and federal - is in power because the people who showed up to vote the last time around made those choices. If you don’t like the decisions they are making for you right now, register to vote and show up at the polls on November 6.

The political landscape in 2018 has been transformed by the #MeToo movement. Countless new-to-politics candidates have stepped forward. Many of them are openly talking about personally painful experiences and refusing to go along to get along any longer. The current debate in the US Senate over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States is a microcosm of how much hasn’t changed in the Senate. Many of the same men who refused to listen to Anita Hill a generation ago are still in power. Until the US Senate looks like the American people, that won’t change. Your vote this November is a step in the right direction.

Among the new candidates who have emerged in 2018 are people who understand they have something to lose if they forego political power. We’ve seen a surge by the powerless - women, minorities and LGBTQ candidates - running for political office in 2018. Will they all win? No, but if you don’t run, you can’t win. And if you don’t vote, you can’t ensure these people with new ideas and fresh enthusiasm for governing get a chance to open doors for people long-denied representation.

An enduring issue for women of all ages is reproductive health care. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, which is under attack at the federal level in Congress, women finally have a level playing field when it came to health care in terms of access, doing away with gender-based pricing, and access to contraception. All that equity and progress is at risk by the current Administration and Congress. Here in New York State we have some additional protections, but the ground is still boggy.

Young women in particular disapprove of recent Trump Administration rollbacks to contraception coverage. The best way to make that disapproval known is in the voting booth come November.

Where you live very much determines how you live and what access to care you receive. Worth noting is Wall Street Journal-NBC polling on abortion access. Voters are now more likely to vote for a political candidate who is pro-abortion rights than for one who opposes them. Especially dramatic change was recorded by the poll among independent voters, 76% of who said they opposed reversing the ruling, up from 64% who were opposed to its reversal in 2013.

In particular this year, who gets elected to the New York State Senate will determine if New York modernizes its pre-Roe V. Wade law to conform to current federal statue, putting it under Health law, where it properly belongs. Passage of the Reproductive Health Act has been held up in the state Senate for years now.

Mother Nature doesn’t get a vote – but you do, if the environment and climate change are important to you. One in every 10 voters cares about these issues and 80% of millennial voters (who will be the largest block of voters IF they exercise their political power at the polls) believe that climate change is no longer a threat to our future but is a present danger. They do not deny the evidence-based reality of their own eyes. How many of our current politicians can say the same?

Somewhere between 10 and 15 million environmental voters decide to stay home every election. The results of those choices have haunted us for the last two years, as decisions continue to be made to roll back environmental protections that have been in place since the 1970s. If you like dirty air, polluted water, and shrinking bio-diversity, you can choose to stay home in 2018. Or you can show up to vote and speak for all living creatures that don’t have a voice.

Many young people have been motivated to register to vote because of the gun violence they see in their public schools and colleges. Politicians have done little to challenge the power of the gun lobby to effect common-sense, reasonable gun laws and to look at gun violence as the public health crises it is. You can make a difference at the polls if you care about this issue by electing leaders who prioritize public safety and are willing to stand up to the NRA.

Rejecting party politics doesn’t mean you’re not political. There isn’t much about either major political party in the country that attracts young voters (or many of the rest of us either, anymore). In fact blank or unaffiliated voters in New York continue to gain ground in enrollment. The only thing being an unaffiliated voter means is you can’t vote in a NYS primary, which isn’t much of loss, given the byzantine voting rules still in place in this state.

If you care about modernizing and reforming New York’s electoral rules, voting in 2018 is important. Changes in who we send to Albany will give the forces of electoral reform additional voices in 2019. We won’t get early voting, expanded voting days, same-day registration, or the other election reforms that are driving up voter participation in other states if we send the same politicians back to Albany who have blocked those reforms in the past.

Elections are decided by the people who show up and vote. When you don’t show up, someone else is making critical decisions for you. Going along for the ride means you are often being taken for one.

Child Care Remains a Crisis for Rural New Yorkers

In a classic Catch-22, New York State ranks #10 with an overall score of 51.95 in the 2018 Best and Worst States for Working Moms survey. It is No. 1 with Best Day Care System but No. 48 with Highest Cost Day Care. But that survey doesn’t really capture the child care dilemma rural families find themselves in, day in and day out. Women make up almost half of the US workforce, but find themselves often behind the 8-ball when trying to find someone to care for their children.

Rural areas, which make a very large percentage by geography of the state, are often child care desserts, without even one registered or licensed day care in some townships. And as for affordability, too often in New York it is cheaper to send your child to college than it is to a high quality day care.

According to a report from Child Care Aware of America, the national average cost for child care is nearly $8,700 a year. Single parents pay nearly 36 percent of their income for child care expenses for one child, while married couples pay 10 percent. In New York State, that cost is $14,144 a year!

This conundrum is very well understood by American voters, who strongly support policies that improve access to affordable, high-quality child care and want – and expect – their leaders at both the federal and state level to get the need and to act.

On the one hand parents need to work, but when child care is not available, is too expensive or does not meet their needs (split shifts; after-hours needs, etc.), it can drive them further into poverty. And poverty is something rural New Yorkers are far too familiar with.

Proposed changes to the social safety net that are working through Congress right now will make an impossible situation worse. If low-income people with children have to meet strict work requirements to qualify for assistance, the lack of child care sets them up for failure. And it sets their children up for failure, as well.

In my large, rural county, one in four children lives in poverty. St. Lawrence County is the seventh most impoverished county in New York with more than 27 percent of kids living below the federally established poverty level, according to the state Department of Health. The most recent data available shows 19,107 or about 19.2 percent of St. Lawrence County’s trackable residents living below the poverty line. That’s significantly higher than the state and federal poverty rates, at around 16 percent.

Now, unless you subscribe the dictum of Ebenezer Scrooge, “Are there no prisons? No workhouses?” we can not blame these children for the situation they find themselves in. Additionally, St. Lawrence County ranks No. 4 of New York’s 62 counties where residents struggle with hunger, and 40% of all Americans struggle to pay for at least one basic need like food or rent.

And if you are a child care worker, you are much more likely to be at risk for poverty yourself:

Nationwide, 53 percent of child care workers were on at least one public assistance program between 2014 and 2016, the Early Workforce Index report states. In 2017, the median wage for U.S. child care workers was $10.72 per hour or $22.290 per year. Child care workers in the report include adults who work with infants and toddlers in child care centers and some home-based settings.

https://edsource.org/2018/low-pay-for-child-care-workers-puts-more-than-half-at-poverty-level/599790

How serious is the child care crises in America? Many folks are having fewer kids because of costs. "Child care is too expensive" was the top reason (64 percent), with "worried about the economy" at No. 3 (49 percent) and "can't afford more children" (44 percent) coming in fourth, showing that economic insecurities and financial concerns are causing many young Americans to skip or delay having kids.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/06/how-much-child-care-costs-in-every-state-in-america.html

If, as the Center for American Progress has surveyed, voters want child care as a front and center issue up for discussion - and action - by political leaders this year, it is incumbent on all of us to make sure we put child care on the radar screens of candidates running for state and federal officials this November. You can #PowHerTheVote by asking this question and demanding good answers to it!