Friday Interview: The Working Poor

Welcome to Carolina Journal Online’s Friday Interview. Today the John Locke Foundation’s Donna Martinez discusses with John Quinterno of the NC Justice Center and Michael Sanera of the John Locke Foundation a Justice Center report saying that low-income families are being left behind. The interview aired on Carolina Journal Radio (click here to find the station near you).

Martinez: Let’s start this first of all, John, by asking you to describe the North Carolina that your organization sees existing in 2006.

Quinterno: Well, the report that we released takes a very broad view and notes that over the past 40 to 50 years, North Carolina has undergone a remarkable economic transformation. We have become much richer, we have become much more prosperous. We have become a state of big cities and many of these changes have been good. We have become a very prosperous state. However, at the same time, prosperity has bypassed a portion of our state’s population. For us, we define that as low-income working families.

Martinez: In fact, as I read the report, you believe that a full one-third of the state’s families cannot really function in today’s economy without additional government help.

Quinterno: Well, what we say is that one-third of the state’s working families — which we define as families that work at least 39 weeks of the year — and that one-third of the state’s working families earn less than twice the federal poverty line, which is roughly for a family of four, $37,000. So these are families that either are actually officially poor, as the federal poverty line definition, or families that would fall into that sort of working-poor category — making too much to be officially poor, but yet still too little to actually be self-sufficient.

Martinez: And is it fair to say, John, that your organization is suggesting that these families in North Carolina — that in order to survive — need to have additional governmental support from the state?

Quinterno: Well, that is not what we are talking about in this report. Rather, what this report is trying to focus on is the state’s workforce development system — that combination of education and training programs that, for example, are offered through the community college system, economic development policies, and in certain situations work supports — how all of those things can combine to help families access opportunities and improve their skills and position themselves to do better and to succeed better in the economy and become more prosperous themselves.

Martinez: Michael Sanera, your reaction to John’s description of the report as you have read it?

Sanera: Well, I am not going to talk about the details of the data that has been produced in the report. So, I am taking that for granted, and that it is accurate. I do want to look at the recommendations. There are 34 recommendations in the report covering a vast variety of areas. After reviewing those, my opinion is that in totality, two things become very clear. One is that the report will not help low-income working families in the state. In fact, I think if they were implemented entirely, the condition of low-income working families would go from bad to worse, primarily because the report ignores basic economics and also targets the wrong problems. Second, because of that, I think that the real beneficiaries of the program are not the low-income working families, but this sort of connection between welfare groups, government bureaucrats and agencies that thrive off of these programs. In this case, the community college system and the politicians in the General Assembly that are pushing the programs. In other words, I have in Washington, D.C., a person who is an expert in this area, and he calls it the “poverty pentagon.” The real beneficiaries of these programs are the agencies in the government and on the outside, and the politicians who push the programs.

Martinez: John Quinterno, your reaction to Michael’s concerns?

Quinterno: Well, I guess on his second point, starting there, I think that the report is not necessarily looking to serve the interest of a particular bureaucratic group or community. Rather, what we are trying to look at is, if we have this problem of low-income working families, and as the report points out, one of the biggest barriers facing — oftentimes — families is low educational attainment. We are also trying to look at how the system that the state already has — particularly the post secondary education system — the community colleges can better serve and target adults in such families to help them learn more and hopefully be able to overcome those educational deficiencies and be better positioned to succeed in the work force. I do not think that we are looking at, in any way, shape, or form — to give people anything. What we are trying to do is to make sure that they can take advantage of the education and training and the investment that the state already makes in a very extensive and very comprehensive workforce development system.

Martinez: Michael?

Sanera: Well, I would agree that there is a major problem in education in the state, but I think that the focus should be where the major responsibility is, and it is the state’s responsibility to educate kids at the K-through-12 levels. The high schools, I think, are doing a very miserable job because they have a high dropout rate, SAT scores and ACT scores are below the national average and, therefore, I think it would be better to direct the attention to the basic function of government which is at the high school level to correct that problem. I do not see anything in the report that really goes into that, and I think until you can fix that problem, the other educational areas are going to fail. I think that the focus on job training and job skills is misguided. I do not know of any federal job program — maybe there is one at the state — but any federal job program that has had any success. I mean it has been year after year that billions of dollars have been spent on this. The current federal job-training program spends five billion dollars a year, so these programs in the state are on top of many similar programs at the federal level. And at the federal level, they have not produced results.

Martinez: John, what about that? Michael makes an interesting point about the layers of programs. Do you believe it is a fair or an unfair criticism that the programs are already in place, and it is just an issue with people not accessing the opportunities that are already there?

Quinterno: I think that we do have a very good — in North Carolina at least, on the state level — we have a community college system that is considered in many ways a model for many parts of the country. Our system was comprehensively designed back in the early ‘60s to be a workforce development system. The system was designed, at least originally conceived, to help provide people with access to education and training and to access opportunities that are linked very tightly to their local labor markets. So, in many ways, community colleges can be very responsive to the needs of actual communities and what the job opportunities are there.

Martinez: But you believe that it needs to be beefed up even more?

Quinterno: There, definitely, we would make the argument that in many ways we have allowed our commitment to that system to wane to a certain degree in recent years, and that there are certain issues that need to be re-addressed. Affordability of the system is one. Access to adequate resources so, for example, in some of the training programs that help prepare people for much more lucrative occupations in say building trades or the health sciences, the community college system does not necessarily even have access to capital funding anymore to buy equipment to help train people to move into jobs that actually pay a very good family-supporting wage.

Martinez: As we wind down here, Michael, any last comment on John’s perspective on this?

Sanera: Well, we do not have time to comment on the minimum wage, but I think that increase that is recommended in the report is something that will definitely put the very people who he is trying to help, out of work.

Martinez: It is an interesting debate and I am sure it is not over now. John, if people want to read your report, what is your website address?

Quinterno: You can access the report at www.ncjustice.org.

Martinez: All right, and you can read about the John Locke Foundation’s perspective on these issues at JohnLocke.org.