Local Opinion: Poverty isn't as simple as we like to think it is

The Tucson City Council voted April 19 to create a task force with the county to consider issues of poverty. One of the first things the task force should consider is that as a society, we get poverty wrong. We tend to see poverty as individual failure — a failure of people to work hard enough, to get enough education, to have enough ambition, to make good decisions, to avoid addiction to alcohol or drugs and for other similar reasons.

Consequently, we see getting out of poverty as the responsibility of each individual. We are confirmed in this belief because we know people who have risen from poverty to prosperity through education and hard work. Or perhaps we have succeeded that way ourselves.

Thus, caring people often look to education as the solution — to teach skills that are in demand in the workforce and to instill values and attitudes that lead to success. However, education is only part of the answer. There also is a structural component to poverty that is unrelated to education, hard work, individual responsibility or individual failure.

To understand this structural component, you only need to look at the number of low-wage jobs in Pima County. Here, half the jobs are low-wage jobs, according to the Brookings Institution. What this means is that for half the men and women in the workforce in Pima County, low-wage jobs are the only jobs available to them.

This fact cannot be overemphasized. If low-wage jobs are the only jobs available to half the workforce, then unless the workers have multiple jobs or other sources of financial support, half the workforce is going to live in poverty or near-poverty and not be able to provide food and shelter for themselves and their families.

Education may help individuals move up the income ladder, but it does nothing to change the number of low-wage jobs. Moreover, proponents who see education and hard work as the solution may not be considering that these low-wage jobs are essential to the way our society operates.

If everybody in a low-wage job were able to move into a better job, then who would replace the retail clerks, cooks, waitresses, bartenders, janitors, housekeepers, child-care workers, caregivers, home health aides, landscapers and the many others who the pandemic has taught us are more important to the functioning of our community than we had realized? If we were to leave many of these jobs vacant, then could our society even continue to function?

The challenge we face as a community, then, is how can we take many low-wage jobs and turn them into livable-wage jobs? How can we pay these workers commensurate with the good they provide to our community?

One strategy would be for employers to significantly raise the wages of these low-wage jobs. However, some will consider that too disruptive because it likely would cause price increases and create the obstacle of dealing with compressed wage scales. If this is the case, then the primary other strategy is to subsidize these jobs through government actions.

To an extent, we already do both things. We raise the pay in low-wage jobs through such steps as increases in the minimum wage, and we provide government programs, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, to subsidize workers who are in low-wage jobs. Even so, we continue to have high levels of poverty.

This doesn’t mean that the strategies are failing. What it does mean is that we need to place even more emphasis on the strategies to overcome the structural component of poverty. We need to employ them more effectively, and we need to find the right balance among them. Only then will we be able to significantly reduce poverty. The creation of a city council poverty task force is a strong first step.