Letters to the Editor
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‘Honoring the Obstructionists’
I was also surprised at the honors bestowed on Families United for Racial and Economic Equality because I had assumed that Chase Bank and the mayor might be more ideologically circumspect than to honor a well run, principled, and militant poor-people’s organization [Editorial, “Honoring the Obstructionists,” June27,2007].
But perhaps there’s another way of looking at this.
Philanthropies have long been a way for the elite to save themselves from their worst excesses and complete intellectual dishonesty. FUREE, which is independent and accountable to its members —unlike many nonprofit organizations — as you point out, opposes work based welfare reform, and tries to reduce the economic hardship imposed on welfare recipients who are made to jump through numerous bureaucratic hurdles in order to maintain their meager cash and housing assistance. If you do the math, you’ll find that the average welfare benefit comes out to $18.23 per day per family, for the modal family of three. That includes a housing allowance.
It would be interesting to see how many readers of the Sun could even contemplate living on this sum. It is just 40% of the federal poverty level — itself scaled far too low, based as it is on an assumption of low, and geographically invariant housing costs and 1950s household cost-structures.
For these benefits, welfare recipients are compelled to work. They are not legally defined as workers, and enjoy few of the rights enjoyed by regular workers, and many fewer rights than do the unionized workers alongside of whom many of them work in city agencies. Contrary to the claims of the champions of this so-called “workfare,” employment outcomes for welfare recipients are far more dependent on the general health of the local labor market than on work-first programs.
Whether measured in terms of yearly income or stability of employment, the outcomes for workfare programs have been less than the stunning success its bipartisan cheerleaders have claimed.
FUREE directs its activities toward creating a more equal system, one in which severe economic hardship is not cheered as motivational, but looked at squarely as what it is: cruel and demoralizing.
If only the Sun directed its fury at the inequality in a city whose homelessness rates have been rising — 40% of whose population is low-income — and where Wall Street bonuses totaled more than $23 billion last year.
Perhaps FUREE’s having been honored by the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, the New York Times Company, and Mayor Bloomberg is a way for the city’s elite to acknowledge what all but the most ideological economic libertarians recognize, namely, that the current situation has no justification at all.
JOHN KRINSKY
Associate Professor
The City College of New York
New York, N.Y.
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