Grace Ross: Charity Fatigue

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Grace Ross, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

A lovely, bright-eyed two year old child whose name translates as Gift-from-God came to the attention of the early intervention programs in Worcester (two of the three are about to close, btw) not because she was per se in need of services, but because she and her mother are stuck in homelessness. Again, not because the mother is a drug addict or was not working before she had Gift-from-God and has not been looking for work, but because our shelter system for families has essentially been shuttered in this state.

Gift-from-God’s future is similarly dimmed by the danger of profound cuts in child nutrition programs and food stamps which are on the chopping block again at the federal level. Of course, most of the folks getting foodstamps are working the growing number of poverty wage jobs out there.

Contrary to the rhetoric of pundits and government officials, unemployment remains staggeringly high. Gift-from-God’s mother’s chance of getting a decent paying job that will keep a roof over their heads is much worse now than it had been seven years ago, but it was not her choice to be born in the last two years.

Similarly “shocking” is the fact that unemployment claims in this state are down following right on the heels of the new automated claims system and cutbacks on actual claims workers that folks can talk to.

This is particular galling because, of course, unemployment, like Social Security and Medicare is nothing about charity. These are wages that folks have already paid into the system in case of a downturn like this. Now because of administrative missteps and totally predictable problems with an untested computer system, the state has found new ways to immorally claim drops in unemployment like they have drops in family homelessness (shut’em out of the system and they just disappear apparently!)

The new unemployment computer system apparently not only doesn’t work, but reports to its overseer that it is working when it’s not! What am I talking about? Those folks who have seemed to have magically dropped off the unemployment list are reporting staggering individual experiences of not getting their checks, calling in, finally getting through the jammed phone lines to talk to a human being, and being told that their computer tells the costumer service person that they got the checks!

Well, that’s nice. Set up a computer system that is supposed to track whether people get paid and it gives you false positives (that people got paid when they didn’t). Then people cannot even get it fixed.

Or the even more horrifyingly, there are now any number of folks having their claims reports spit out that they owe four or five thousand dollars to the system which in fact they don’t owe. The really bad part, of course, is that the computer overrides the real history. Claims staff do not have a clue how to override the system or how to deal with the problems; some have now been caught telling someone to acknowledge the four or five thousand dollars debt so that they can start getting their checks again; if claimants deny the untruth that they owe that money, who knows when they will get payments again!

Of course, this advice tells you the claimant to agree to defrauding the government, that you were being paid money that you were not supposed to be paid and claiming it anyway. Lie that you are a criminal or do not get the unemployment that you previously paid into the system and now need to survive!

I won’t go on.

The point here is that many of the critical systems that our state depends upon are being gutted and they are being gutted without us knowing it. This economic downturn has been used to unravel much of the fabric of our communities. This is not about charity, it’s about having just and honest systems.

When the market crashed, a lot of the major corporations across the country took a small dip and then returned to even greater profits than they used to get. They used the downtown as an excuse to slash staff and how did they do it? By laying off their most experienced, highest paid, line staff. This meant that men, for instance, much more than women, lost their jobs. It was a corporate strategy of forcing down wages because, of course, women still make less than men.

So it becomes a long term lesson to all of us that you do not want wage differentials if you are a working person because they are likely to get used against you.

All of which is to say that fixing these problems is not about charity. In fact, all of these problems are about standing up for equal treatment so we are ALL protected.

Most of us are trying barely to hang on by our fingernails to our former standard of living – if we have not already had our fingers hopelessly pried away from the branch we’ve been trying to hold on to.

This is not about charity. None of us who work for a living are in a position to feel like we have a lot of extra money to invest in righting vast social problems. That is what government is there for.

And government is there not because we have a charity obligation to each other per se, but because it turns out that every time somebody else’s situation gets worse, the floor for our situation has been lowered as well. If instead, the people around us are doing better so are we and that safety net creates a floor for all of us.

If we fix, for instance, Gift-from-God’s situation by making sure that there are decent paying jobs for her mother, and the corresponding affordable daycare and affordable housing, it will be much cheaper for the state and all of us.

Not only is fixing our economy cheaper than the cost of long-term homelessness on a two year old in the rest of her life, but even a housing subsidy is cheaper than shelter. And when they finally fight their way into the incredibly limited family shelter system at this point, it will still be cheaper than hospital costs for trying to heal her from near death on the street by cold. The earlier the equalizing of the economics for all the children – the Gifts-from-God– and their parents out there, the more it saves for our society down the line.

But more importantly, who knows what talents Gift-from-God brought into the world with her? If those gifts are not nurtured alongside all of the other children around her who were born into this terrible economic situation, we will be paying costs not only of the loss of her gifts that were never brought to fruition, but we will be paying for the choices she makes instead when her options are closed to her and hope of a future seems dimmer than hope itself.