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Ohio Town Sees Public Job as Only Route to Middle Class


Jodi Taylor lived in a trailer before landing a state job in 1996, when her hourly wage jumped to $9. Money is still tight and her youngest son, Joey Ritter, has just enlisted in the Marines.
Andrea Morales for The New York Times


Brynna Frazier with her daughter on a break at the Courtside Bar and Grill. She says she has worked at Wal-Mart, Taco Bell and a telemarketing firm and has never had health insurance.
Andrea Morales for The New York Times


The New York Times


Decades of Decline
Slide Show
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/03/14/us/OHIO.html

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: March 15, 2011

GALLIPOLIS, Ohio — Jodi and Ralph Taylor are public workers whose jobs as a janitor and a sewer manager cover life’s basics. They have moved out of a trailer into a house, do not have to rely on food stamps and sometimes even splurge for the spicy wing specials at the Courtside Bar and Grill.

While that might not seem like much, jobs like theirs, with benefits and higher-than-minimum wages, are considered plum in this depressed corner of southern Ohio. Decades of industrial decline have eroded private-sector jobs here, leaving a thin crust of low-paying service work that makes public-sector jobs look great in comparison.

Now, as Ohio’s legislature moves toward final approval of a bill that would chip away at public-sector unions, those workers say they see it as the opening bell in a race to the bottom. At stake, they say, is what little they have that makes them middle class.

“These jobs let you put good food on the table and send your kids on school trips,” said Monty Blanton, a retired electrician and union worker. “The gap between low and middle is collapsing.”

Gallipolis (pronounced gal-uh-POLICE) is a faded town on the Ohio River, one whose fortunes fell with the decline in industries like steel in bigger cities along the river. That erased a swath of middle-income jobs in the area, said Bob Walton, who, as a commissioner for the Southern Ohio Port Authority, an economic development agency, has tracked the economic history of the area for decades.

“It’s a real big change,” Mr. Walton said. “It has changed the complexion of our community.”

Today, storefronts are mostly dark. About one in three people live in poverty. Billboards advertise oxygen tanks and motorized wheelchairs. Old photographs in a local diner look like an exhibit from a town obituary. The region has some of the highest rates of prescription drug abuse in the state, with more people dying from overdoses than car crashes, according to Ed Hughes, executive director of the Counseling Center in Portsmouth, about 55 miles west of here.

David Beaver, 65, a barber, said that when he got out of high school, “you could go anywhere you wanted to and pick your job.”

“Now, it’s depressing,” Mr. Beaver said. “I hear the boys talking. They can’t find anything.”

It is not that there are no jobs, but rather that the jobs available pay too little and have no benefits, resulting in, as Mr. Beaver put it, “just scraping by.” A private hospital and two power plants do offer good jobs, but they are highly competitive and many require some higher education, something that fewer than one in five people here have, according to 2009 census data.

So most people scrape by, as Ms. Taylor did before landing her state job in 1996. At the time, she was living in a trailer and working in low-wage jobs at Wendy’s, Dairy Queen and a Big Lots discount store. Her hourly wage jumped to $9 when she started at the Gallipolis Developmental Center, a state home for mentally retarded people, up from $5.25 at a private nursing home.

“If I wasn’t working at the G.D.C., I’d have to work around the clock,” said Chris Smith, Ms. Taylor’s colleague, referring to the center, where she has worked for 20 years. “I’d have to work two or three jobs to keep at this level.”

The Taylors are not college educated, but their public-sector jobs have made them middle class. Together they earn about $63,000 a year, a sum that puts them squarely at the middle point of earnings for American families, and higher than the $50,000 earned by the typical Gallipolis family.

Money is still tight. When their washing machine broke in November, they had to put the new one on a credit card. They could not afford college for either of their sons. One is in the Marines, and the other, a high school senior, just enlisted.

“We’re not living in any rich, high-income way,” said Ms. Taylor, 37, who, together with her husband, protested the public-sector bill in Columbus this month.

“What are they wanting?” she said of the bill. “For everyone to be making minimum wage?”

Wages at the bottom of the labor market have stagnated since 1970, with inflation gobbling up gains made over the years. The federal minimum wage buys a lot less today; it represented just 38 percent of the average hourly wage for private, nonsupervisory workers in 2010, down from 47 percent in 1970, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“The wage story is incredibly bleak for everyone from the middle on down,” said Jacob S. Hacker, a political science professor at Yale University and co-author of “Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.” “We’ve gotten dramatically richer as a society, but if you’re a wage earner below the median, you’ve seen your wages stagnate or shrink.”

Retirement is less secure for private workers. Jeanie Norton, 49, ended up earning less than minimum wage when her job as an airlines reservation agent was eliminated in 2008. At the time, she and her husband, a carpenter who is now unemployed, were building their dream house. She lost her health insurance and had to break into her 401(k) to keep them afloat. Now she drives an hour each way to work as a waitress in Gallipolis.

“I thought I had it all figured out,” Ms. Norton said, “but now I’m just making it. I’m going on faith in God.”

Pensions have shriveled. In 1985, medium- and large-size companies paid full pensions to four out of five workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By 2010, that number was down to one in three. Four out of five public workers still receive the full benefit.

For those on the lowest rungs of the income ladder, wages are so skimpy that the state sometimes picks up the slack. Jeremy Bostic, 27, who supports several relatives on his small salary as a manager at Kmart, has to supplement his earnings with food stamps.

Dim prospects push young people here toward another government solution. Brynna Frazier, 30, said the most popular choice among her friends was the military, which, at $1,600 a month with health insurance, was the best job around. Ms. Frazier, a waitress, has not had health insurance in any job she has ever worked, including Wal-Mart, Taco Bell and a telemarketing firm.

A third of all private-sector workers under 30 have no health insurance, up from 15 percent in 1988, according to the census data.

“Around here, you either choose drugs or the military,” said Kandi Marcum, a cashier at a dollar store, whose 19-year-old daughter, a McDonald’s worker, is leaving for basic training this month. “I want to get her away from this,” Ms. Marcum said, waving her arm angrily. “I hate that she’s here.”

Ms. Taylor was washing dishes when the State Senate passed the labor bill this month. She sat down and cried when she heard the news. It does away with seniority and leaves out any job protection for workers with longer service, putting public workers — most of whom are not eligible for Social Security — at risk of losing their retirement income.

“I’m scared,” Ms. Taylor said. “You just start to think, what about this, what about that? This is going to hurt a lot of people.”

Robert Gebeloff contributed reporting from New York.

© 2011 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/us/16ohio.html [comments at http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/us/16ohio.html ]


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