Governor Mitt Romney's quick reversal of millions of dollars in budget cuts on Friday exposed the deceit at the heart of his "emergency" action last month: There was no emergency. Just as the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation predicted, healthy tax receipts made Romney's drastic cuts to services for psychiatric patients and special education students, to rent subsidies for the poor, and to pay hikes for direct care workers as needless as they were cynical.
The lame-duck governor is off to Asia in an equally transparent attempt to buff up his nonexistent foreign policy credentials, so he will be unavailable tomorrow to walk down Beacon Hill to the Cathedral of Saint Paul to hear just why it is so unconscionable to play politics with the wages of low-income workers. Governor-elect Deval Patrick and Andrea Silbert, Patrick's economic development adviser, ought to make this meeting of community activists and labor organizers a spontaneous stop on an otherwise orchestrated listening tour of Massachusetts.
The coalition, known as Community Labor United, has just completed research outlining the daily economic challenges of working people in Greater Boston who do not have access to decent wages, affordable housing or health care, quality education, or reliable transportation. Increasingly, researchers found, the local economy resembles an hourglass, with a professional class at the top and low-wage workers on the bottom, with precious few jobs in the middle.
The economic divide is not new, but it is widening. A typical Massachusetts household earns less now, after adjusting for inflation, than a comparable family did 25 years ago. The coalition's calculations said a family in the top 20 percent of wage earners in Greater Boston in the early 1980s had roughly the income of five poor families. Today that same family has the income of seven poor families.
We all know manufacturing jobs in Massachusetts have declined in the last 25 years, but how many of us suspected that fewer than one in 10 people now work in an industry that employed one in five in the early 1980s? The service work that replaced those jobs does not provide the same wages, security, or benefits.
Black and Latino residents are disproportionately affected by the changing economy, Community Labor United has documented. Seventy-eight percent of black students and 90 percent of Latinos attending Boston public schools qualified for free or reduced price lunches. While 6.7 percent of Massachusetts residents live in poverty, 15.9 of immigrants do. Almost 40 percent of those who use food banks are employed but earn too little to pay for food and other daily necessities. The cost of transportation eats up 17 percent of the average household income, no surprise when bus and subway fares are increasing faster than the price of gas.
Reading this 65-page report can seem overwhelming -- high dropout rates for black and Latino high school students, long waiting lists for English classes for non-native-speakers -- but there are plenty of proposed solutions. Ideas range from streamlining zoning regulations -- not just to accommodate the interests of developers, but also to advance the interests of the community -- to demanding that policy makers fight for a living wage, not just a minimum wage.
Mayor Thomas G. Ambrosino of Revere earned plaudits in this report for personally negotiating with municipal unions and for supporting a Living Wage Ordinance in his city.
Romney, though, is off to Asia after delivering half of a paltry pay raise to men and women who earn subsistence wages from the state for taking care of our most vulnerable neighbors. He'll be back in plenty of time to light the State House Christmas tree.
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