Generation out of luck

Published in Socialist Worker, Truthout, and Alternet.

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
--Langston Hughes

COLLEGE GRADUATION is supposed to be a time of celebration--a time for graduates to look back on years of hard work and achievement, and forward to a bright future filled with promise.

Yet the class of 2013--the young women and men who were submitting college applications in the fall of 2008 as the world financial system came to the brink of Armageddon following the collapse of Lehman Brothers--are facing a future of further uncertainty and diminished prospects.

They are the latest entrants into what has been dubbed the "lost generation"--so-called because the high rates of unemployment and underemployment its members endure at the start of their working lives drag them down throughout their working lives, making it more and more difficult to maintain the standard of living of their parents.

Only half of recent graduates have been able to find a full-time job that makes use of their degree. Yet all are still left with the bill from college, with the average student loan burden nearing $30,000. With the number of new graduates expected to outstrip the number of new jobs requiring a degree over the next several years, this trend will only get worse.

If the current priorities of big business and the politicians who serve them continue to set the agenda, millions of young people will be robbed of their hopes for the future.

But this isn't inevitable. For most of the class of 2013, their best possibility for a decent future lies not in the rat race for ever-scarcer decent jobs, but joining together to fight to improve conditions in the jobs they do have and to demand a fundamental transformation of a system that treats them as expendable.

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A REPORT released last month by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), titled "The Class of 2013: Young graduates still face dim job prospects," paints a picture of a jobs crisis for youth that has multiple layers.

To begin with, nearly 9 percent of college graduates aged 21-24 who aren't in graduate school are unemployed, actively looking for work and unable to find it. This is more than double the rate for college graduates over age 25.

Those who have been able to find jobs are making less money. Average hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, for young college grads were $16.60 in 2012, the lowest they've been since 1997--when most recent grads were in elementary school--and just 25 cents greater than they were in 1989, before many were even born. Had wages kept up with the inflation-adjusted growth in the gross domestic product, which rose by 72 percent over this period, the hourly wage would be over $28 today.

Once student debt is factored in, there has plainly been an outright decline in living standards. The average recent graduate with $25,000 in debt pays between $200 to $300 a month, depending on their repayment plan--a huge burden given the stagnant or dropping income.

Recent grads are also much less likely than previous generations to find jobs with benefits. Just 31.1 percent of employed recent grads have employer-provided health insurance, compared with 60.1 percent in 1989. Just 27.2 percent have a pension.

An increasing number of college grads are working jobs that pay minimum wage. According to the Wall Street Journal, nearly 300,000 people with at least a bachelor's degree are making the minimum wage, double the number in 2007.

The lack of decent jobs with benefits makes it easier for employers to take advantage of young workers, who they know have few other options. Maria, a health care worker in Massachusetts in her early 20s, who earned her bachelor's degree while working full time, explains her situation:

I worked as a switchboard operator when I completed my associate's degree. I took a promotion to case manager, and my new supervisor assured me that I would get a raise after I got my degree. I took the job, and in my last semester, while completing my bachelor's, I was offered a job at another agency. It was better-paying, but I had to turn it down because I was pregnant and needed the paid maternity leave at my current job, which the new job didn't offer, and because I was promised a raise. It's been more than a year after I got my bachelor's, and I still haven't received a raise or found a job in my field.

Beyond joblessness, rising debt and falling wages, there's the issue of underemployment: those unable to find full-time work, and those working in jobs for which they are overqualified.

An increasing percentage of recent graduates qualify as "underemployed," which includes those who are unemployed, those working part-time but seeking full-time work, and those who looked for work in the past year but have given up. According to the EPI report on the Class of 2013, the rate of underemployment for recent college grads jumped from 11.2 percent in 2008, at the beginning of the Great Recession, to a peak of 19.8 percent in 2010, just after the official beginning of the "recovery." Underemployment was still at 18.3 percent in 2012.

As the EPI researchers point out, this "does not include "skills/education-based" underemployment (e.g., the young college graduate working as a barista)." College graduates working in jobs that don't require a college degree is not a new phenomenon, but has gotten worse in recent years, the EPI report found:

[I]n 2000--when jobs were plentiful and the unemployment rate was 4.0 percent--40 percent of employed college graduates under age 25 worked in jobs not requiring a college degree...[T]he share of young college graduates working in jobs not requiring a college degree increased over the 2000–2007 business cycle, increased further in the Great Recession, and has not yet begun to improve...

[I]n 2007, 47 percent of employed college graduates under age 25 were not working in jobs requiring a college degree, and...this share increased to 52 percent by 2012. This increase underscores that today's unemployment crisis among young workers did not arise because these young adults lack the right education or skills.

As the EPI researchers and other economists have shown, these effects will have a lasting, if not permanent, impact on the future prospects of recent graduates. "Research shows that entering the labor market in a severe downturn can lead to reduced earnings, greater earnings instability, and more spells of unemployment over the next 10 to 15 years," the study reports.

Less than half of recent grads are working in a full-time job that requires a degree. Even some of those who have a full-time job have had to take a second just to make ends meet. Gloria, who graduated from Rutgers last year with a journalism degree, finally found a full-time job in her field after nine months of searching, while working in retail and living with a relative:

I started applying for jobs in January of 2012, four months before graduation. By graduation, I was excited, but so stressed out...I had done everything right! Double major, minor, decent GPA, tons of extracurricular activities, study abroad, unpaid internship. I took advantage of everything that my school had offer: I wrote for the paper, volunteered at the radio station, worked for the television channel and even created my own website.

Now I finally have a job in my field, but it's only a temporary position, and I work a second job that I wouldn't have taken in high school, just to afford to live in a dorm-sized studio apartment with roaches. Honestly, it's hard. This past year has been the toughest one yet. All my dreams and all the stuff that I had believed growing up had collapsed...it's all a lie.

This doesn't mean that the alternative--not going to college--is any better. If young college graduates are facing a jobs crisis, young workers with only a high school diploma are facing a catastrophe.

For the 40 percent of high school graduates aged 17-20 not enrolled in higher education, official unemployment averaged 29.9 percent from March 2012 to February 2013, more than three times that of recent college graduates. Underemployment for young high school grads stands at a shocking 51.5 percent--which means more than half are unemployed, working part-time when they'd rather work full-time or have looked in the past year, but have since given up.

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THE JOBS and career crisis facing the class of 2013 begs several questions: What is causing this crisis? Is this a temporary blip or the "new normal"? What can be done to change it?

The most obvious cause of the crisis for young workers is the one afflicting working people of all ages. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, nearly four years into the official "recovery" from the Great Recession, there are still more than three people looking for work for each job opening:

[T]he economy has recovered only about 6.2 million of the 8.7 million jobs lost between the start of the recession in December 2007 and early 2010...employment was 1.9 percent (2.6 million jobs) lower in April 2013 than it was at the start of the recession.

According to the EPI's Heidi Shierholz, it would take more than 8 million jobs to replace those and keep up with population growth, which could take more than five years at current rate of monthly employment increases.

Recent graduates are at a disadvantage when competing for jobs since they lack the experience of older workers. And increasingly, older workers have been forced to look for jobs that were once considered entry level. A survey by Rutgers University found that of the 23 percent of respondents who suffered a layoff during the Great Recession, more than half of those who had found another job were making less than they were before.

As Brad Plumer illustrates at the Washington Post's Wonkblog, some 60 percent of the jobs lost during the Great Recession paid between $13.84 and $21.13 per hour, yet only 22 percent of the new jobs created since then fall into that category. The majority of the new jobs, some 58 percent, are low wage, paying less than $13.84 an hour.

So mid- and late-career workers are taking jobs that used to be entry-level positions for recent grads or jobs that don't even require a degree, placing them in greater competition with younger workers to the detriment of workers of all ages. As Sherry Wolf, an author and contributor to SocialistWorker.org, explains:

I graduated college in 1987, have worked since I'm 14 years old and am now a highly skilled writer, editor and copy editor, yet I've spent the last year receiving unemployment insurance for the first time in my life, supplemented by freelancing gigs. What's stunning to me about the current economy is not just the paucity of full-time jobs with benefits, but that neoliberal restructuring has meant that experienced white-collar workers like me are now being paid a piece rate on the level of recent college graduates, while 20-somethings are forced out of my field almost entirely, and compelled to find jobs as baristas.

If trends continue, things are only going to get worse for young college grads. A recent report by the Center for College Affordability shows that from 2010 to 2020, "The number of college graduates is expected to grow by 19 million, while the number of jobs requiring a bachelor's degree is expected to growth by fewer than 7 million. We are expected to create nearly three new college graduates for every new job requiring such an education."

Finally, it's important to keep in mind that not all college degrees are created equal--nor are outcomes anywhere near equal for all college graduates. Higher education, like the society as a whole, has become increasingly unequal in recent decades. Rather than a means of mobility between classes, colleges often function as a means to maintain class stratification and reproduce inequality.
As Thomas B. Edsall pointed out in a New York Times blog last year:

Seventy-four percent of those now attending colleges that are classified as "most competitive," a group that includes schools like Harvard, Emory, Stanford and Notre Dame, come from families with earnings in the top income quartile, while only three percent come from families in the bottom quartile...in the nation's 1,000-plus community colleges, almost 80 percent of the students came from low-income families.

The elite schools are a key place for the wealthy to develop social networks that they will use--in addition to family connections--to land high-paying jobs after college. And elite college alumni networks will aid them in obtaining employment throughout their careers.

Poor and working class graduates will find themselves locked out of these networks. Thus, they will need to take up the task of organizing with co-workers to fight for rights at jobs for which they are overqualified.

Just as it took the union drives of the 1930s to make industrial jobs "good jobs" with decent pay and benefits, and the struggles of the 1960s and '70s to do the same for public-sector jobs that provided a way out of poverty for many African Americans and women, the majority of today's working class college graduates will need to focus on collective struggle, rather than hope that individual striving will allow them to make it against the odds.

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ULTIMATELY, THE mismatch between the number of young graduates and the jobs that require degrees raises questions about the nature of higher education in society, our relationship to work, and whether education should be shaped by the needs of business or the collective social needs of the majority of people in society.

Businesses, although they complain that college students aren't qualified, benefit enormously from a situation where the supply of the commodity they need to purchase--in this case, the labor power of college-educated workers--exceeds the demand. This drives down the price of that commodity--the wages and benefits of workers.

And with students and their families shouldering an increasing burden of the cost of higher education while companies cut back on training programs, businesses are able to pass along the cost of training a new generation to be exploited onto workers themselves.

This state of affairs makes sense--and money--for employers, but is disastrous for the vast majority of people. With so many highly educated people underemployed, not only are they worse off, but society as a whole can't benefit from their wasted talents.

Meanwhile, in a society so wealthy that a fraction of the bloated military budget could make higher education free for all, there's no reason not to expand access to higher education--and to create the public-sector jobs that could provide people with the opportunity to use their education to serve those in need.

For example, average class size in public secondary schools is nearing 25 and is almost double that of private schools. Doubling the number of public school teachers would remove this disparity and create more than 3 million jobs, which would finish replacing the jobs lost during the recession and then some.

There are about 2.4 doctors for every 1,000 people in the U.S., among the lowest ratios in the industrialized world, trailing countries with much less wealth like Kazakhstan (3.8), Cuba (6.7) and Lebanon (3.5). Training an additional 400,000 doctors would put the U.S. in a comparable position with other advanced countries like Germany and France. It could easily be paid for with the savings from switching to single-payer health care.

Clearly, the need exists for more college-educated workers, not fewer. But creating opportunities for them to use their training and talents will require a major shift in social priorities--and achieving that will require mass struggle and organizing.

If the class of 2013 wants a future, they will have to fight for it.

The real disability myth

Published at Socialist Worker.

ARE FEDERAL disability benefits one big scam?

We're familiar with that claim coming from the right-wingers who make a career out of attacking "big government" programs. Back in the mid-1990s, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich declared that poor children were being coached by their parents to fake crippling diseases in order to qualify for the government's Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. Gingrich claimed kids were "punished for not getting what they call crazy money, or stupid money. We are literally having children suffering child abuse so they can get a check for their parents."

But that's par for the course from a reactionary hater of the poor like Gingrich. It's much more surprising to hear a version of this argument--dressed up in kinder language, but no less biased and deceptive--coming from National Public Radio's normally excellent show This American Life.

This American Life's episode was called "Trends with Benefits" and featured Chana Joffe-Walt, a journalist with NPR's "Planet Money" unit, on the rapid growth in government programs providing benefits for the disabled.

Over the course of an hour, Joffe-Walt implies that disability programs share the blame for everything from high unemployment (they keep the unemployed from finding a job) to low test scores in public schools (they discourage disabled children from trying hard).

The same basic story was repackaged for a series of reports on NPR's All Things Considered news show and for a website feature titled "Unfit for Work: The Startling Rise of Disability in America." (I'll concentrate on the website feature in order to quote directly from her writing.)
In all three places, Joffe-Walt's basic contention is that disability benefits have become "a hidden, increasingly expensive safety net" that has taken the place of welfare--in the wake of "welfare reform" passed under Bill Clinton in the 1990s--as a government program to be abused.

But the reality is quite different. Disability payments provide fairly meager help to some of the most vulnerable people in society--people born with disabilities, disabled veterans, people injured on the job, and older workers who have chronic conditions that make it impossible to continue in a job.

Though it comes from NPR, with its reputation for being "liberal," Joffe-Walt's reporting is part of an ideological campaign that seeks to justify the austerity agenda that dominates U.S. politics--and to provide cover for further cuts in what remains of the social safety net, from programs for the disabled to Social Security retirement benefits and the Medicare and Medicaid health care programs.

As is the case with these other targets of the budget-cutters, there's actually plenty of money to provide the aid that people need to cope with disabilities--if the government would tax the rich, switch off the Pentagon war machine and cancel the giveaways to Wall Street and Corporate America.

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JOFFE-WALT'S reports begin with Hale County, Ala., where just under one in four working-age people are on disability. According to Joffe-Walt, people with conditions such as chronic back pain, diabetes and high blood pressure have been declared disabled by a local doctor, while other people with the same affliction--ranging from a Hale County judge to Joffe-Walt's editor at NPR--aren't considered disabled.

The difference, as Joffe-Walt admits, is that for most people in Hale County--the judge aside--the only jobs available require manual labor that is difficult if not impossible to perform with a condition like high blood pressure. Joffe-Walt seems to accept this reality--yet she wonders if one particular doctor "was running some sort of disability scam, referring tons of people into the program."

Moving to the general picture, Joffe-Walt admits: "Part of the rise in the number of people on disability is simply driven by the fact that the workforce is getting older, and older people tend to have more health problems." But she then goes on to declare that

disability has also become a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills. But it wasn't supposed to serve this purpose; it's not a retraining program designed to get people back onto their feet. Once people go onto disability, they almost never go back to work. Fewer than 1 percent of those who were on the federal program for disabled workers at the beginning of 2011 have returned to the workforce since then, one economist told me.

The implication is that going on disability is a choice people make in order to drop out of the labor force. Joffe-Walt suggests that it's the existence of a social safety net--and not a persistent jobs crisis or, for that matter, the many hazards of today's society, ranging from war injuries to more dangerous workplaces--that keeps people out of work.

Joffe-Walt also--stunningly--takes aim at disability benefits for children, including cash benefits for the very poor in the form of Supplemental Security Income. In one of the many anecdotes that Joffe-Walt substitutes for facts, she reports, "People in Hale County told me that what you want is a kid who can 'pull a check.'"

She uses the case of Jahleel, a child with a learning disability, to argue that because his mother depends on SSI payments that are contingent upon Jahleel's disability status, the program discourages children from going to school, doing well in school and becoming independent adults.

Finally, Joffe-Walt goes after what she calls the "disability-industrial complex"--which she argues works to "push more people onto disability" while the government allegedly has nobody on its side to defend against cases of fraud.

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SEVERAL JOURNALISTS and policy analysts poked gaping holes in Joffe-Walt's reporting.
Writing at The Century Foundation website, Harold Pollack pointed out that NPR listeners:

might be surprised to discover that the final award rate for disability applications has averaged about 45 percent. Moreover, low employment rates among denied applicants suggest that disability assistance is not inducing otherwise-employable people out of the workforce. The misfortunes of people wrongly denied benefits, the problem of sick people bleeding money as the ponderous bureaucratic process moves along, the plight of disabled people stick on the Medicare waiting period--these matters were also left unexplored.

Pollack also documents that rise of children receiving SSI benefits--which Joffe-Walt made a big deal about in her reports--has been "dwarfed by the decline in the number of children receiving cash assistance after the 1996 welfare reform." According to Pollack, there is little evidence that disability payments have picked up the slack from millions of people being dropped from the welfare rolls.

According to Michelle Chen, writing at In These Times, most of the increase in disability rolls in recent decades is attributable to an aging workforce, the entrance of women into the workforce and the increase in the retirement age before seniors can receive full Social Security benefits. For those who do receive disability payments, this is the only thing standing between them and abject poverty.
As Chen concludes:

"The real story is that disability does pretty much what it's supposed to. Established during the growth era of the late 1950s as a stopgap for people forced out of work by long-term impairments, the program issues meager monthly benefits to workers and their families through the Social Security Administration, averaging $1,100. Some heavily disadvantaged people with disabilities receive additional Supplemental Security Income payments.

The roughly 9 million worker beneficiaries tend to skew older--their average age is 53--and are disproportionately African-American, reflecting underlying racial health disparities...As long as gaps in class and social mobility persist, then disability insurance helps blunt the sharpest edges of vicious economic inequities.

Hannah Groch-Begley, writing at the Media Matters website, also systematically debunked Joffe-Walt's reporting.

Among other facts, she points out that more children are receiving SSI today not because their parents are using them to "pull a check," but because child poverty has increased to shocking levels, from 11.6 million in 2000 to 15.5 million in 2009. At the most basic level, this means many more children now meet the income requirements to receive SSI benefits.

Groch-Begley also shows that rather than a system of largesse, disability benefits are highly restrictive: more than one-half of all claims are eventually denied, and just one in four children with disabilities qualify.

While the benefits are relatively meager, SSI is a vital resource, according to the Center for American Progress, which "reduces costly and harmful institutionalization of children with severe disabilities" and "reduces poverty and increases economic security."

With millions of people out of work, an aging population faced with an uncertain future in retirement and mounting health care costs, and millions of children in poverty, there's a need for a stronger social safety net. But the U.S. ruling class is pushing a different agenda: reduced living standards for the working class, which are intended to increase the competitiveness of U.S. corporations worldwide.

Reports like Chana Joffe-Walt's smear of disability programs fit perfectly with the ideological campaign required to justify cutting away what remains of the social safety net.

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A MORE honest look at disability would paint a very different picture. Life for the disabled and their families is far from easy. They are more likely to live in poverty and suffer from unemployment than the population at large.

In 2011, median household income for families that include a working age person with a disability was $36,700--meaning half of such households survived on less than that. This is more than $13,000 less than median household income for the country as a whole, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Poverty rates are much higher for disabled people--27.8 percent in 2011, nearly twice the overall rate of 15 percent. And these numbers understate the true poverty rate, since the official federal poverty line, which in 2011 was $11,484 for an individual and $23,021 for a family of four, is abysmally low.

Joblessness is also much higher among the disabled than the national average. According to the 2011 Disability Status Report, just one third of working-age people (aged 21 to 64) with disabilities were employed--and only one in five had full-time, full-year work.

Disabled people face multiple barriers to receiving the health care they need. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2009, 27.4 percent of disabled people reported that the cost of health care limited their access to treatments they needed. This is more than twice the percentage for non-disabled people.

Then there is the question of transportation, which many people take for granted. For the physically disabled, particularly those who rely on the use of a wheelchair, access to adequate transportation is a major problem. According to the National Organization on Disability, "Approximately 30 percent of Americans with disabilities deal with inadequate transportation, compared to only 10 percent of those without disabilities."

On top of all of that, applying for and receiving benefits is incredibly difficult. From 2001 to 2010, just 28 percent of initial disability benefit applicants were awarded benefits on average, according to the Social Security Administration. Even after reconsideration on appeal, disability claims were denied 53 percent of the time.

The benefits for those who do qualify are meager. In February of this year, Average monthly disability benefits were $978.52, and the average monthly SSI payment was just $526.41.

Theresa, who has Crohn's disease, lives in New York City on $730 per month in disability benefits. She described the process to get benefits as a bureaucratic nightmare:

It took three years and a hearing in front of a judge. It was a constant documentation of every hospital stay, every hospital I had ever been to, along with every doctor, every name and address, every medication, and every employer, my salaries and length of employment. It was a nightmare of paperwork that had to be re-filed after every denial. It was devastating to be denied, and I would never have been able to keep going without my mother and my rep's help. That is deliberate, and everyone in the process except the patients know it.

And yet the money is certainly there to make the lives of people like Theresa far more comfortable. In just three months last year, corporate profits totaled $1.75 trillion, more than twice the amount spent on Social Security benefits for the entire year and more than 10 times the amount spent on disability programs.

With corporate rates at a 40-year low, raising taxes on business and lifting the regressive income caps on payroll taxes could easily cover an increase in benefits so that the disabled don't live in poverty--as well as a jobs program to deal with the unemployment crisis.

In reality, it all comes down to priorities: What's more important, providing for the needs of the many or indulging the boundless greed of the few?