The New York Times published a story yesterday about a study (done at Harvard and elsewhere involving income data from millions of people) that found In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters. If you’re born in the bottom 20 percent in New York City, for instance, you’ll wind up on average around the 40th percentile. People in places like Chicago, Atlanta and Charlotte are not so lucky. Brian Lehrer of WNYC invited listeners today to phone in to tell their upward mobility stories. He asked his listeners to tell him what personal factors and what outside factors made their rise in socio-economic class possible. If you grew up poor but made it to the middle class, how did you do it?
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Callers cited the usual—family, education, mass transit, (public) housing, “hard work”—in their rise to the middle class. Dorothy, 94, from Croton-on-Hudson, was the last caller:
Dorothy: I was going to mention something that nobody has talked about and that is the role
that unions played in raising people from poverty to less poverty. That’s what
happened with my father. He came to this country . . . he and my mother both were
immigrants. I’m a first generation American. My father was lucky to get a job in a
factory . . . in a mill . . . a shop, I should say.
Brian: Where did he come from?
Dorothy: He came from Bessarabia, which was, at that time, part of Russia. My mother came
from a different part of Russia and they met in the United States. But my point is, we
were accustomed to poverty. Everybody was poor. During the depression you weren’t
as ashamed as people are now of being poor. My father joined a union that covered
the kind of work that he did and that union made it possible for him to earn a living
wage. He and my mother were both very concerned that my brother and me get an
education. I must say that they were concerned more for my brother than for me
because that was what the custom was. The boy has to be able to earn a living; the girl
has to be able to marry.
Well, I was lucky to get into a college that didn’t charge anything. In fact, right now
they are in the process of changing that and there’s a big battle going on.
Brian: Oh, so that would be Cooper Union.
Dorothy: Yeah, when I went there, there were very, very few charges. I worked during the day
and went to college at night. It took forever but I got my degree. I was able to earn a
decent living on the strength of what I learned at Cooper Union.
Brian: It is so interesting that you bring up unions because they weren’t referenced in the
study, at least in the New York Times article on the study that I read through last night,
and I wonder because there are so few private sector workers represented by unions
anymore, whether that’s declined so much as a factor in raising people up from poverty
to the middle class so much that it didn’t rate a mention.
Dorothy: Well, but it did at the time when people were poor and raising themselves up, which
maybe go back 30, 40 years, something like that.
Brian: At that time and so, maybe, there’s a lesson there, if people are having policy
conversations out of this big new study, maybe that’s one to bring up, whatever
happened to the unions, if you’re looking for private sector as well as public sector
unions, those are the unions that are strong, as you know, to have another
conversation.
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