Being Poor, Being True
Comment
by Mark Lacter
Perhaps it’s corny and a little self-serving to admit, but there’s something fulfilling about editing a newspaper that provides information our readers otherwise wouldn’t have. Even in these discouraging, cost-cutting days, the romantic in me clings to the old-fashioned notion that the words we crank out can make a difference that when doing our job responsibly, the 100-year-old journalist’s commandment about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable has present-day applications.
Such was the track of the Business Journal a couple of years ago when we embarked on a 30-story project spread out over three consecutive issues on poverty in Los Angeles. As the mastermind behind this work, which won a few awards and kindled considerable debate (not all of it kind), I look back on those pages largely with pride and a little regret.
Most gratifying about the series is that we did it at all. This is, after all, a modest weekly business journal, not The New York Times or Washington Post, and our examination of the area’s poor all but forgotten at the time in the face of unbridled prosperity reflected journalistic instincts that went beyond the usual array of real estate deals and corporate flackery.
Yes it went on forever, and yes there were moments when it cloyed with misplaced sentimentality (stereotypes aside, not all poor people are brave and noble). But it did lay out in both human and empirical terms L.A.’s widening rich-poor rift that, moral implications aside, has helped fuel the local economy.
We called it a kind of perverse social contract. “Without a ready pool of labor, low-wage services would become more expensive that is, if they were available at all,” we wrote in December 1999. “And without the steady demand for low-skilled services, many of L.A.’s poor would find themselves without a job at all.”
Today, even in the midst of a recession and thousands of lost jobs in travel and tourism, the contract remains mostly in place. For better or worse, L.A. is still a very rich town that needs to be serviced by low-wage gardeners, maids and dishwashers. That’s why unemployment is within tolerable levels, although it certainly will inch up in the months to come.
The question as valid today as it was in 1999 is how much longer can this precarious balance of rich and poor hold up? Put another way, won’t there come a time when demand for low-wage service declines to the point where workers are unable to make a living? And if that happens, won’t the effects include higher crime, greater demand for health care and other public services, and slower income advancement for those at the low end?
I wish I had a better handle on answers to those questions, but coverage of class economics is not one of the local media’s stronger suits. These are complicated matters that go beyond sympathetic profiles of single parents eking out a minimum wage. For all the horror stories about sweatshops and slumlords, low-income workers many of them Latino often are no worse off than they were before immigrating to this country. Many are in better shape.
So before jumping on philosophical bandwagons, keep in mind the shades of gray that help reveal what’s really going on. And in my own line of work, the tried-and-true credos still apply: be honest, be clear, and always be willing to go beyond conventional thinking. That’s often where the truth ultimately lies.
Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal.
