When I was getting ready to write this book, I spent a good deal of time going through photo albums, reminiscing with Maya, and unpacking old boxes, including things my mother had saved. It’s been a blessing. I’ve had the chance to sit with good memories that don’t always make it to the front of my mind.
When we were growing up, our mother always made chiles rellenos around Christmas. After she died, I wanted so badly to find the recipe. I searched everywhere I could, including online, but nothing matched my mother’s version. I felt so defeated, as though I’d lost more than just the flavor of her cooking. And then, while I was digging through my cookbooks, I found a notebook, and as soon as I opened it, the recipe fell right out of the pages and onto the floor. I was transported just by reading my mother’s handwriting. It was like she was there with me, still responding to my needs.
I also found a couple of pot holders that Maya and I had woven on plastic looms. Any reader who grew up in the 1970s probably knows just what I mean. Our mother made sure our hands were never idle, especially in front of the television. That’s where I perfected my crochet shell stitch.
Our mother loved to talk with her hands, and she was always using her hands—to cook, to clean, to comfort. She was always busy. Work itself was something to value—hard work especially; and she made sure that we, her daughters, internalized that message and the importance of working with purpose.
She also showed us, in so many ways, how much she valued all work, not just her own. When something good would happen at the lab, my mother would come home with flowers for our babysitter.
“I wouldn’t have been able to do what I did if you didn’t do what you do,” she would say. “Thank you for everything.”
She saw the dignity in the work that society requires to function. She believed that everyone deserves respect for the work they do, and that hard effort should be rewarded and honored.
I’d hear the same thing at Rainbow Sign, where speakers would talk about Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign, about his belief that “all labor has dignity,” and his effort to make it so.
As part of that effort, Dr. King had gone to Memphis in 1968 to join black sanitation workers in their fight for basic decency. Day in and day out, these workers rode the trucks that hauled away the city’s garbage. The city didn’t provide uniforms; instead, workers were forced to befoul their own clothes on the job. They worked long hours without water to drink or a place to wash their hands. “Most of the tubs had holes in them,” one sanitation worker recounted. “Garbage leaking all over you.” He described how, when the workers got home in the evening, they’d remove their shoes and clothes at the door and maggots would fall out.
For this hard, indispensable work, they received little more than minimum wage. They didn’t get overtime pay. They had no sick leave. If they were injured at work and needed time to mend—as happened often—they were likely to be fired. And if bad weather made trash collection impossible, they were sent home without pay. Many needed government assistance to feed their families.
When the city refused to compensate the families of two sanitation workers who were crushed to death by their trash compactor, it became too much for the others to bear. With great courage, 1,300 Memphis sanitation workers went on strike, demanding safer conditions, better pay and benefits, and recognition of their union. They were on strike for their families, for their children, and for themselves. It was, above all else, a battle for dignity. The signs they held at marches said simply I AM A MAN.
When King arrived at Bishop Charles Mason Temple, in Memphis, on March 18, 1968, a crowd of 25,000 people had gathered to hear him speak.
“So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs,” he said. “But let me say to you tonight, that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity and it has worth.”
“We are tired,” King said to the audience in Memphis. “We are tired of our children having to attend overcrowded, inferior, quality-less schools. We are tired of having to live in dilapidated substandard housing conditions. . . . We are tired of walking the streets in search of jobs that do not exist . . . of working our hands off and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate to get the basic necessities of life.”
Sixteen days later, King returned to Memphis to march on behalf of the strikers—speaking again at Bishop Charles Mason Temple, where he declared, “I’ve been to the mountaintop.” The next evening, April 4, 1968, he was killed by an assassin. Two months after that, on June 5, Robert F. Kennedy was murdered as well. The nation’s clearest voices and strongest leaders in the fight for economic justice had been suddenly, irrevocably silenced.
That was half a century ago. In some ways, we have come so far since then. And in others, we have barely budged. I remind people that when you adjust for inflation, the federal minimum wage is actually lower now than when Dr. King spoke of “starvation wages” in 1968. What does that say about how our country values the sanctity and dignity of work?
Americans are a hardworking bunch. We pride ourselves on our work ethic. And for generations, most of us have been raised to believe that there are few things more honorable than putting in an honest day’s work to take care of our family. We grew up trusting that when we worked hard and did well, we would be rewarded for our effort. But the truth is, for most Americans, it hasn’t been that way for an awfully long time.
Whenever there is a major push to pressure Congress into doing the right thing, activists and elected leaders implore the American people to call and write their representatives. These days, the phone lines are overwhelmed by Americans engaged in an extraordinary thing: exercising democracy. And in a number of cases, it has really mattered. I believe that repeal of the Affordable Care Act failed in 2017 because congressional Republicans had taken a nonpartisan issue—access to affordable health care—and made it a partisan one, and the people just weren’t having it. It activated and energized folks to fight back, and because of the pressure they put on key senators, the people prevailed. That means that millions of people still have health coverage because individual Americans picked up the phone and wrote letters.
For me, reading these letters isn’t just about understanding where people stand on major policy issues. It’s about understanding what their lives are like, both the joys and the fears. When people write to me, it is often as a last resort. They are struggling, and in real trouble, but nothing else they’ve tried has worked. And so they turn to me and share with me the things that have upended their lives.
Dear Senator Harris,
My husband and I work full time jobs yet we still struggle every week to make ends meet. I get full [health care] coverage for my two-year-old son [for] which I thank God every day, but can’t figure out why my husband and I can’t get full coverage either?
. . . We can’t get help with daycare because we “make too much money” but yet we can’t even afford to pay $50 a month for daycare, so we depend on family, [but] they have their own problems, so there have been too many occasions [when] we lose money because we can’t get a babysitter for us to go to work.
. . . I am begging with my life that this needs to change!! Please for the love of God HELP!! This is just not ok! I am confused, angry, frustrated, and I feel so betrayed by our government! I don’t EVER ask for help unless I need it and I seriously need it!!
Every letter stands on its own. But together, they tell the same story. It is the story of Americans trapped in a cost-of-living crisis, where everything from housing and health care to child care and education is way more expensive than it used to be while wages remain as low as they’ve been for decades. The letters I receive consistently tell the story of the hollowing out of the middle class, and of an economic life defined by intense struggle.
When I wake up in the middle of the night with a thought on my mind, I remind myself that in countless households around the country, someone else is wide awake, too. Millions of someone elses. And I imagine that the majority of them are asking themselves questions about their greatest fears: Am I going to be able to provide a good life for my children? What if I can never make ends meet? How will I get through the month?
The American people have not given up on the American Dream. I know this to be true. But when you can’t sleep at night, how can you dream?
How can you dream when, on average, a year of child care for a baby or toddler is more expensive than a year of in-state public college tuition? How can you dream when the cost of higher education has gone up more than three times faster than wages since I was in school in the eighties? How can you dream when you are drowning in student loan debt?
How can you dream if you make minimum wage and work forty hours a week, knowing that, in 99 percent of U.S. counties, you can’t afford the market-rate rent on the average one-bedroom apartment?
How can you dream when your pay barely budges no matter how hard you work, while everything else keeps getting so much more expensive? How can you dream when your son is sick but you can’t afford your copay or deductible?
A middle-class life isn’t what it used to be. And right now it isn’t what it’s supposed to be. Being middle-class ought to mean having financial security and stability. But how is that possible when the cost of living is so high that you live one setback away from catastrophe? An injury. An illness. Nobody expects life to be easy, but it’s not supposed to be a life-altering crisis when your car’s transmission fails.
And yet for so many, it is. One setback and the savings account gets emptied. Another and the retirement account goes, too. Soon you’re carrying a bigger balance on your credit card than you know is safe, but what choice do you have? You have to get the car fixed if you’re going to keep your job. There is rent or a mortgage to pay.
According to one survey, 57 percent of Americans don’t have enough cash to cover a $500 unexpected expense. That’s one of the reasons I’ve introduced the LIFT the Middle Class Tax Act in the U.S. Senate, a bill that creates a major new middle-class tax credit that would provide eligible families up to $6,000 a year—the equivalent of $500 a month. Families would be able to receive the credit as a monthly stipend, rather than wait for a refund the following year. It’s a different kind of safety net, one that prevents hardworking people from falling out of the middle class, or gives them a fair shot at attaining it for their families. This is the kind of tax relief we can provide when we stop giving endless tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy.
I think of Mr. and Mrs. Shelton. She was a nursery school teacher and he was a construction worker, and on those incomes they were able to purchase a two-bedroom home that was everything they dreamed of, and everything they had worked for. But at the time of this writing, that house is listed on Zillow at $886,000, which would be impossible to purchase on the salaries of a teacher and a construction worker. I recognize that California has become extraordinarily expensive, but this is a problem in major metropolitan areas all across the country. According to a 2018 analysis by Redfin, in cities like Denver and Phoenix, less than 1 percent of the homes on the market were affordable on the average teacher’s salary.
In rural areas, housing affordability issues aren’t as severe, but communities have been devastated by a lack of jobs. According to a recent report, only 3 percent of job growth in the twenty-first century has come from rural areas. That has forced people to find work far away from home, which leaves them with an awful choice: endure an hours-long commute every day, or move away from the place where their family has lived for a generation, the place where their friends live, where their kids play little league baseball, where they have always gone to church.
I also think of the workers I’ve met along the way who are severely undervalued in this economy. Several years ago, I met a woman named Wendy through SEIU and got to spend the day with her, watching her work up close. She had changed jobs when her elderly mother got sick, becoming a home health care worker so she could be the one to take care of her day and night. That meant everything from lifting her mother out of her bed to dressing her, feeding her, assisting her in the bathroom, measuring and tracking her vitals, helping her into her wheelchair and taking her out for a walk, and keeping her cognitively engaged throughout. It was detailed and demanding work, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
And yet, in 2017, the average home health aide in the United States was earning too little to keep a four-person household above the poverty line. And because they are often contractors, they aren’t always eligible for employee benefits. That strikes me as outrageous. As the baby boomer generation continues to retire, we’re going to need more home health aides—1.2 million by 2026. And this is how we intend to treat them? What does this say about the value we place on caring for older Americans? What does this say about how we honor our elders?
The cost-of-living crisis is especially hard on women. Women are still paid, on average, eighty cents on the dollar compared with men—a gap that is even more punishing for black American women, who are paid only sixty-three cents for every dollar earned by white men. As the National Women’s Law Center points out, that means a black woman who works full time, year-round, comes up more than $21,000 behind her white male counterpart. That affects everyone in her home. It’s even worse for Latinas, who make just fifty-four cents on the dollar.
Politicians talk a big game about the value of hard work. But it’s time we speak some truth. The truth is that the economy stopped rewarding and valuing most hard work a long time ago. And we’ve got to acknowledge that if we’re going to change it.
Let’s start by reflecting on how we got here.
For several decades after the Second World War, workers got pay raises when companies did well. And the government gave people a hand up, offering free education through the GI Bill. The productivity gains necessary to grow the economy were remarkable. In the three decades after the war, productivity improved a staggering 97 percent. The difference then was that everyone shared in the bounty. During that same period, worker wages grew 90 percent. That’s how the United States was able to build the world’s largest middle class.
But in the 1970s and ’80s, corporate America decided to go its own way. Instead of spending their earnings on workers, the corporations decided that their only real obligation was to their shareholders. From big business’s perspective, it was those who owned a piece of the company who deserved the lion’s share of the riches, not the people who made the company run. So while productivity improved 74 percent between 1973 and 2013, worker compensation rose just 9 percent.
In the 1980s, President Reagan made that idea core to the Republican Party’s view of economics. Cut taxes for corporations. Cut taxes for shareholders. Oppose minimum wage increases. Oppose the very idea of a minimum wage. Dismantle organized labor, the most powerful force fighting for workers in Washington. Roll back government oversight. Ignore the collateral damage.
This was the ushering-in of a new era of selfishness and greed. And it was frighteningly effective. Corporate profits have soared, but American workers haven’t gotten a meaningful raise in forty years. And yet there is no shame, it seems, in CEOs making more than three hundred times the wage of their average worker.
The goal of economic growth has to be to grow the pie. But if all that’s left for workers are the crumbs, what kind of economy are we really building?
This was the context in which we entered the twenty-first century. The American people got sandwiched between forces beyond their control—on one side, outsourcing and offshoring that eviscerated the manufacturing sector, and on the other, the worst recession since the Great Depression. Suddenly, the jobs were gone. Communities turned into ghost towns.
I read so many letters that underscore the significance of the passage of time. A man, sixty-two, who lost everything in the Great Recession, who has nothing left for retirement and is running out of working years. A couple dealing with a family health crisis, who can’t afford to pay their medical bills and still cover the monthly rent. They need help right now; they can’t wait. Anyone stuck in a cycle of financial desperation will tell you it’s an emergency. That there is no time for delay. Dinner has to go on the table tonight. Gas has to go in the tank in the morning. The bills have to be paid tomorrow. The rent is due at the end of the week. There is truly no time to spare.
During this period there have also been a rash of corporate predators who have taken advantage of—and often ruined—vulnerable people. Among the worst examples of these predators are the for-profit colleges that became the darlings of Wall Street during this time. Generations of Americans have been told that their best shot at opportunity is to get a degree. And a lot of folks took that advice to heart and went for it, sometimes at great cost to themselves and their families.
Dear Senator Harris,
At one point, I considered getting two jobs to provide for my son and me. I concluded the best solution for me was to go back to school and continue to work my minimum wage job, so my son wouldn’t miss out on quality time with me. I decided I would struggle through poverty long enough to complete school. This is a reality for a lot of Americans.
The problem is that a lot of people signed up at for-profit colleges that promised them a great education and a great future, when, in truth, the degrees they were offering weren’t worth much of anything.
When I was attorney general of California, we took on Corinthian Colleges Inc., one of the largest for-profit college scams in the country. In order to get students and investors to sign up, Corinthian representatives lied incessantly. They told investors that more than 60 percent of their students were successfully placed in sustainable jobs. They charged the students enormous amounts for their degrees and told them that some programs had 100 percent job placement rates, even when there was no evidence that a single graduate had received a job. They advertised programs they didn’t offer and penalized their telemarketers if they revealed the truth to prospective students.
Even more venal was the way Corinthian went after vulnerable people. They targeted people living at the poverty line; people who had decided to go back to school and earn a degree so they could better take care of themselves and the people they loved; people who had lost jobs during the Great Recession and who believed their best chance in the job market was to acquire a new set of skills. Corinthian’s internal documents betrayed the company’s attitude toward its own students: they called their target demographic “isolated,” “impatient” men and women with “low self-esteem,” who have “few people in their lives who care about them” and who are “stuck” and “unable to see and plan well” for their own future. As far as I was concerned, this conduct was no different from the criminal predators I’ve known—purposely targeting those most in need.
Of course, most public companies don’t act in such a predatory way. But a central tenant of corporate governance—to create value for shareholders even if it’s to the detriment of workers—has created a great deal of harm of its own.
For example, to raise stock prices, executives engage in a concept called “buybacks,” in which a company buys its own stock off the market, often causing the stock price to jump. Putting aside whether or not buybacks are ever an appropriate tool, let’s acknowledge how extreme its use has become.
Between 2003 and 2012, S&P 500 companies spent 91 percent of their earnings on buybacks and dividends for shareholders. That leaves 9 percent to invest across the entire company, in everything from research and development to worker wages.
What’s the result of all this? It’s been great for the richest 1 percent of American households, who now own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, which adds up to roughly $40 trillion. But it’s been a financial nightmare for the middle class. According to research done by United Way, 43 percent of households can’t afford basic expenses: a roof over their head, food on the table, child care, health care, transportation, and a cell phone.
What are people supposed to think about a government that has left them behind? How are you supposed to feel when you’re drowning and no one is coming to your aid, and then you turn on the television and hear that the economy is doing great? Great for whom?
It’s not great for people who have had to move hours away from their job just to find an affordable place to live. It’s not great for people who are dropping out of the workforce because they can’t afford child care. It’s not great for the people who are giving up on their dream of going to college because they know they can’t afford it.
And yet with millions of Americans hanging by a thread, the White House reached for scissors. In 2017, the administration cut taxes for people who didn’t need it and raised taxes on people who can’t afford it. They sabotaged the Affordable Care Act, driving up premiums. They ignited a trade war that could lead to higher prices on things we all buy, from groceries to cars. They nominated judges intent on destroying organized labor. They canceled a pay raise for federal civil servants—everyone from transportation security officers to food inspectors, park rangers, medical personnel, and more. They even halted the debt relief policy that we put in place to help Corinthian Colleges’ victims. And for good measure, they did away with net neutrality, which will allow internet companies to charge a premium for popular websites for the first time, adding an unacceptable new bill to the stack.
Dear Senator Harris,
I’m a high school student and most of my school work depends on the internet and the tools it gives us. My school is small and doesn’t have much money, plus I come from a poor background and my parents struggle to make ends meet. If you take away Net Neutrality, you’re basically taking away all the tools the internet provides students like me to succeed in school and adding more problems to poor families all over the nation.
We are running out of time. That’s the hard truth. And not just in terms of dealing with what is so urgent right now. We are running out of time to deal with major changes to come. With the rise of artificial intelligence, we are likely to face an automation crisis in this country, with millions of jobs on the line.
Industries are changing. Self-driving trucks could cost 3.5 million truck drivers their jobs. The entire tax preparation business could disappear, too. The McKinsey Global Institute found that as many as 375 million people worldwide will need to switch jobs because of automation and predicts that 23 percent of current working hours could become automated by 2030. Another analysis suggests that automation could displace 2.5 million jobs a year in the near term. We have seen, already, the cost of displacement. But nothing has yet prepared us for what is to come.
We will also have to cope with the realities of climate change, which is as much an economic crisis as it is an environmental one. In 2017, extreme weather events in America—things like hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, and floods—killed more than 362 people, displaced more than one million, and caused more than $300 billion in damage. Experts predict that over time, things will get much worse. The economic toll will follow—hitting states in the South and the lower Midwest the hardest. After Hurricane Harvey hit the Gulf Coast in 2017, a study found that in Houston, three of every ten affected residents fell behind on their rent or mortgage; 25 percent had trouble paying for meals.
Climate change imperils industries, too. Temperature and current changes in the oceans are already hurting the fishing industry. The agriculture industry faces dangers on multiple fronts: a rise in invasive species, pests, fungus, and disease; changing weather patterns that will lower yields; and the constant fear of drought.
Put bluntly, we have work to do. Hard work. Indispensable work. We have everything we need—all of the raw ingredients—to build an economy for the twenty-first century that is fair and sturdy, an economy that rewards the work of those who sustain it. But we have to hurry. And we have to be willing to speak truth.
We need to acknowledge that the jobs of the future are going to require people to earn an education after high school, whether it’s a certification or a university degree. This isn’t optional anymore. If we want to be true to the principle that all Americans deserve access to public education, then we can’t stop funding it after high school. We need to invest in our workforce, now and in the future, and that means we’re going to have to invest in more post–high school education, too. It means, among other things, that we have to make debt-free college a reality.
Let’s speak truth about housing affordability. We can’t have a functioning society if people can’t afford to live in it. The housing crisis is not something we can just shrug off as if it is a fact of nature. We’ve got to make a major effort, from changing zoning laws to encourage new and affordable housing to giving relief to people who are struggling—right now—to pay their rent. For starters, I introduced a Senate bill that would give overburdened renters some relief. If someone is paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent and utilities, they would receive a new refundable tax credit to help defray their housing costs. But there’s much more to do.
Let’s speak truth about child care. If we don’t find a way to make it affordable, we’re not only subjugating people in financial crisis; we are also making it harder for women to stay in the workforce when they want to. This is one of the systemic barriers to women’s growth and success in the workplace. We need to tear it down.
And let’s speak truth about what we have to build up. To put people to work in well-paid jobs, and to prevent our economy from lagging, we should be investing in rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure. We have roads and bridges that need building and upgrading. We have broadband internet infrastructure to build in rural areas that still lack it. We have new wind farms and transmission lines that need installing. We have airports that need modernizing and subways in dire need of repair. If not for ourselves, shouldn’t we at least do this work for our children and grandchildren?
Let’s also speak truth about organized labor, which has been systematically dismantled by the Republican Party. Less than 7 percent of the private workforce is represented by unions today, and a 2018 Supreme Court ruling is likely to decimate public sector union membership as well. Many people have already written the obituary for the labor movement. But we can’t accept that. Unions are the ones lobbying in Washington exclusively on behalf of workers. They are the only ones who have given the power to the people in the workplace. In the midst of a Republican effort to hollow out the middle class, it is the unions that have successfully compelled management to pay better wages and provide better benefits. We need a rebirth of organized labor in America.
And let’s speak one final truth: big corporations and the richest people in the richest country in the world can afford to pay their fair share of taxes so that we can fix the economy. It’s necessary, it’s moral, and it’s wise.