Greg Kaufmann

This Week in Poverty: 89,000 Children in Pennsylvania Lose Medicaid

Greg Kaufmann on June 29, 2012 - 10:20 AM ET

Since August 2011, 89,000 children in Pennsylvania have lost their Medicaid coverage, including many with life-threatening illnesses who were mistakenly deemed ineligible. The state currently hasn’t a clue whether many of these children have any healthcare coverage at all.

How did this happen?

In late summer, the Pennsylvania Department of Welfare (DPW) began notifying hundreds of thousands of families by mail that they had ten days to provide necessary documentation in order to keep their children enrolled in Medicaid. If the family missed the deadline—or even if they met it but DPW failed to process the paperwork within the ten days—they were dropped from Medicaid.

This Week in Poverty: Ms. Vasquez Goes to Washington

Greg Kaufmann on June 22, 2012 - 10:20 AM ET

On Tuesday, Adriana Vasquez sat to the left of the table where JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon testified before the House Financial Services Committee for two hours. A 37-year-old janitor and a single mother of three, she had traveled from her home in Houston to Washington, DC, to ask Dimon one simple question.

When the hearing adjourned, she crossed to talk to him.

Vasquez is accustomed to speaking to executives at the JPMorgan Chase Tower where she works, so she wasn’t intimidated. But she says she “felt strange” as she approached the table.

This Week in Poverty: Disposable Families in Ohio

Greg Kaufmann on June 15, 2012 - 9:47 AM ET

Since January 2011, Ohio has thrown nearly 70,000 people—including 40,000 children—off of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) cash assistance program, called Ohio Works First (OWF). That’s nearly 25 percent of the state’s TANF caseload. The reason? The state faces up to $130 million in federal penalties if 50 percent of the adults receiving assistance don’t meet the federal work participation requirement by September 30.

“Seventy thousand people is more than the entire TANF roll in thirty-nine states,” says Jack Frech, director of the Athens County Department of Job and Family Services in Appalachian Ohio, where he has worked with poor people for over thirty years. “You can imagine if someone announced they were going to throw all the children in Virginia off of cash assistance it would be national news. But that many get thrown off in Ohio and it’s barely even local news.”

Like Ohio, four other states face similar penalties for achieving low work-participation rates among TANF recipients in 2007. Advocates assert that forcing states to maintain those rates during a recession runs counter to the program’s goal of providing basic assistance to children in poverty.

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This Week in Poverty: Justice for Janitors and Low-Wage Workers

Greg Kaufmann on June 8, 2012 - 9:27 AM ET

Last week I reported that janitors in Houston reached an impasse in their month-long effort to renegotiate their expiring contract with cleaning contractors. The janitors are currently paid an hourly wage of $8.35 and earn an average of $8,684 annually. They seek a raise to $10 an hour over the next three years, but the contractors offered just a $0.50 pay raise phased in over five years.

In response, the janitors began asking building owners and tenants to intervene on their behalf—especially since the cleaning contractors claimed that those corporations were unwilling to cover higher wages, so their hands were tied.

Indeed 3,200 janitors in the city clean the offices of some of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world. Surely these powerbrokers could influence the outcome of any negotiations? Yet despite janitors sharing their personal stories of struggling in poverty and asking for help from the likes of Chevron, ExxonMobil, Wells Fargo, Shell, JPMorgan Chase and real estate giants like Crescent Real Estate Equities (a subsidiary of Barclay’s) and Hines Real Estate, no party stepped forward as hoped.

This Week in Poverty: Will Janitors Strike in Houston?

Greg Kaufmann on June 1, 2012 - 8:36 AM ET

In Houston, more than 3,200 janitors clean the offices of some of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world: JP Morgan Chase, Shell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Wells Fargo, KBR and Marathon Oil, to name a few. For their labor, they are paid an hourly wage of $8.35 and earn an average of $8,684 annually. Two janitors together would earn about $17,300 a year—still well below the poverty line of $22,314 for a family of four.

Yesterday, the contract between the janitors and the cleaning contractors expired. SEIU Local 1 spent the past month trying to reach an agreement to raise the janitors’ hourly wage to $10 over the next three years. But the contractors countered with an offer of a $0.50 pay raise phased in over five years and—according to SEIU spokesperson Paloma Martinez—said that they “wouldn’t budge.” The contractors claimed that the building owners and tenants—the aforementioned corporations—aren’t willing to pay anything close to a living wage.

In response the janitors voted to authorize their bargaining committee to call a strike. For workers already struggling on sub-poverty wages, this was no easy decision.

This Week in Poverty: Wage Theft in the City of Millionaires

Greg Kaufmann on May 25, 2012 - 9:18 AM ET

For two years running Houston has added more millionaires to its population than any other city in the United States. Near-millionaires are enjoying some nice upward mobility, especially those involved in the oil and gas industry.

Low-wage workers, on the other hand, aren’t faring too well in the city. In fact, a recent report from Houston Interfaith Worker Justice (HIWJ) estimates that low-wage workers lose $753.2 million annually due to wage theft. Wage theft can occur in many ways, including: workers being denied the minimum wage or overtime pay; stolen tips; illegal deductions from paychecks; people being forced to work off the clock; or workers getting misclassified as independent contractors so they aren’t entitled to overtime or benefits.

“We’re not talking about a worker here or a worker there, it’s something that has a lot of ripple effects,” says José Eduardo Sanchez, campaign organizer with HIWJ. “It impacts families, communities and local economies.”

This Week in Poverty: A Little Help for the Long-Term Unemployed?

Greg Kaufmann on May 18, 2012 - 8:35 AM ET

There are 12.5 million unemployed people still seeking work in the United States, and over 5 million of them have been looking for work for twenty-seven weeks or longer.

These are “the long-term unemployed,” and their prospects for finding employment or getting assistance are rapidly diminishing.

This Week in Poverty: Republicans Define 'Lower-Priority Spending'

Greg Kaufmann on May 11, 2012 - 8:20 AM ET

When Republican Congressman Paul Ryan released his budget, he charged six House committees with finding $309 billion in spending cuts over ten years in order to avert $55 billion in military cuts scheduled for January 2013 under a bipartisan agreement. He wrote that these cuts would be found in “lower-priority spending.”

On Thursday, House Republicans approved the cuts along a party-line vote, revealing exactly what they consider to be “lower-priority spending.”

These cuts should be viewed in the context of sparing a defense budget that conservative columnist George Will observes is “about 43 percent of the world’s total military spending” and “more than the combined defense spending of the next 17 nations, many of which are US allies.” Even with the $55 billion in cuts that would start in January, the defense budget would still be $472 billion (not including war costs)—three times more than China spends.

The Philly Alliance, Part II: A New Antipoverty Model

Greg Kaufmann on May 8, 2012 - 8:15 AM ET

To understand how 350 people—including more than 100 people from across the country who are experiencing poverty and hunger firsthand—arrived in Philadelphia last week for a conference that culminated in a call to action, you have to go back to 2008.

Dr. Mariana Chilton of Drexel University was doing cutting-edge research on the relationship between poverty and child nutrition—and the trauma of living in poverty—and testifying about her findings at the national, state and local levels.

But the hearings never included any witnesses whose very lives were the topics of discussion. Chilton also didn’t feel like her words sufficiently described the hardships that families in poverty were enduring and revealing to her in interviews.

This Week in Poverty: The Philly Alliance

Greg Kaufmann on May 4, 2012 - 10:23 AM ET

Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane is devoting a full hour to poverty this morning at 10 am, and I have the pleasure of being one of her three guests. So just a quick post on the excellent conference I’m attending this week in Philadelphia—I’ll write more about it over the weekend or early next week.

The promise of Beyond Hunger: Real People, Real Solutions was that it wouldn’t be a gathering of just the usual suspects—academics, advocates, government people, journalists, etc. Sure, that crowd would be there with very important contributions, but really this conference would include and largely be led by “the true experts—those who know hunger and poverty first hand.”

It has lived up to that billing.