The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

by Sarah Kendzior

Qualities that should be encouraged in society—like empathy and the willingness to stand up for others—are devalued when ordinary people are told t...

What a relief it would be if every unpaid internship were an auction—if instead of a vague line about how the intern must “cover their own costs,” the organization would tally up those costs and see who is able to pay them. The rest of us could watch, from the sidelines, as bias long denied plays out in public, as wealth morphs into merit before our eyes. Let them do their bidding in the open, and show us what it costs to succeed.

The logic is that if people can literally survive on minimum wage—that is, not drop dead—then their wages are justified. Ignored in the plea for realism is the day-to-day reality of McDonald’s workers—not whether they can live, but how.

In one of the wealthiest countries in the world, privation should not come with the job description, and survival should not be an aspiration.

“Being wealthy in America today means not having to come across anyone who isn’t.”

“Most of the middle-class ‘liberal’ parents I know have allowed lifestyle decisions about what they wear, eat, and drive to entirely replace a more ambitious program for bettering society,” he writes. The plight of the McDonald’s worker, like McDonald’s itself, is seen as outside their purview.

This lapse in priorities—in which things we buy are thought to be morally superior to people who sell them—parallels a change in the American perception of employment and social status.

Mistaking wealth for virtue is a cruelty of our time. By treating poverty as inevitable for parts of the population, and giving impoverished workers no means to rise out of it, America deprives not only them but society as a whole. Talented and hardworking people are denied the ability to contribute, and society is denied the benefits of their gifts. Poverty is not a character flaw. Poverty is not emblematic of intelligence. Poverty is lost potential, unheard contributions, silenced voices.

In the post-employment economy, full-time jobs are parceled into low-wage contract labor, entry-level jobs turn into internships, salaries are paid in exposure, and dignity succumbs to desperation.

“If a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists,” King proclaimed in 1968. Economic opportunity, he argued, is essential to human rights.

How facile our claims of “equal opportunity” when the content of one’s character is eclipsed by the content of one’s wallet.

Forty percent of Americans now make less than minimum wage workers did in 1968, the year King died.

America is becoming a nation of zero-opportunity employers, in which certain occupations are locked into a terrible pay rate for no valid reason, and certain groups—minorities, the poor, and increasingly, the middle class—are locked out of professions because they cannot buy their way in.

People who justify poverty wages tend to make two claims. The first is that desirable jobs have a surplus of applicants so their pay is inherently less. In 2013, every job has a surplus of applicants, yet the pay for some jobs—Wall Street bankers—rises while the pay for other jobs stagnates or disappears. The second claim is that low-wage workers are easily replaceable and offer no benefit to society. This is the argument aimed at service workers, who are on strike because they make so little they cannot afford food or rent. Putting aside that anyone working full-time should be able to survive on their income, and that service workers deserve the same respect as any employee, this argument falls flat because educated professionals whose work offers tremendous benefit to society are also poorly paid. Teaching, nursing, social work, child care, and other “pink collar” professions do not pay poorly because, as Slate’s Hanna Rosin argues, women “flock to less prestigious jobs,” but because jobs are considered less prestigious when they are worked by women. The jobs are not worth less—but the people who work them are supposed to be.

Key arguments against poverty wages

People not only fall through the cracks, they live in the cracks as a full-time occupation. The view from the cracks is a lot clearer than the view from above. When you look down on people, they stop being people. But when you watch from below, you see how easy it is to fall.

Today the 1990s feel like a dream only because the nightmare they created became ordinary. In the decade to come, the tabloid would become gospel, the social fabric sewn from the lunatic fringe. Radical polarization became rote. America went crazy and never went back.

Belying the vitriolic partisanship of the 1990s was a uniform agreement to gut social services to the sick and the poor. The impoverished were portrayed as a privileged class siphoning state resources at their leisure.

American ideology has long tilted between individualism and Calvinism. What happened to you was either supposed to be in your control—the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” approach—or divinely arbitrated. You either jumped, or you were meant to fall.