January 21, 2004
One woman's life.
Can somebody please explain to us again why it's okay for corporations and the wealthy to get the big handouts, while women like Caroline Payne have to struggle for everything they have, and continually risk seeing their few gains stripped away?
Futility has nagged at Caroline for a long time. Four years ago, at the dawn of the new millennium, she sat at her kitchen table in Claremont, N.H., and added up her life. It was the height of the economic boom. The nation wallowed in luxury, burst with microchips, consumed with abandon, swaggered globally. Everything grew larger: homes, vehicles, stock portfolios, life expectancy. Never before in the sweep of human history had so many people been so utterly comfortable.
Caroline was not one of them. She had achieved two of her three goals. She had earned a college diploma (a two-year associate's degree), and she had gone from a homeless shelter into her own house (owned mostly by a bank). The third objective, ''a good paying job,'' as she put it, still eluded her. Back in the mid-70's, she earned $6 an hour in a Vermont factory that made plastic cigarette lighters and cases for Gillette razors. A quarter century later, she earned $6.80 an hour stocking shelves and working cash registers at a vast Wal-Mart superstore.
''And that's sad,'' she declared. ''I'm only making 80 cents more than I did more than 20 years ago.'' Or less, taking into account the rise in the cost of living.
Now go read her whole story in the NY Times Magazine.
Posted by Magpie at January 21, 2004 02:12 AM | TrackBack