Commentary—

State Incomes Continue To Drop

By William A. Collins

My nice job,

Has upped and gone;

Now I work,

At mowing lawns.

Good morning: “Sa-an Ka Papunta.” If that greeting seems unfamiliar, you might want to start practicing. It’s Tagalog, the main language of the Philippines. That’s where CIGNA is about to send another 109 middle-class Connecticut jobs. They won’t be coming back, and the folks losing them will be very lucky to find anything comparable.

Tagalog might also help you in a pinch at the hospital. In fact so many Filipino nurses and doctors are coming to the United States that medical care back home is suffering. Even with special schools that train young ladies for medical work, the Philippines is having trouble keeping enough staff for itself.

Sure, plenty of Americans train as nurses too, but long hours, overwork, and low pay deter many others. Thus immigrants fill the gap, assuring that hospitals, and therefore you and I, never have to pay what the job is really worth.

The results of these and countless other declining pay scales show up in a number of ways. Most noteworthy to the media was a recent report that Fairfield County no longer leads our sleek state in median family income. (“Well, there goes the neighborhood, Martha.”) Not only have Middlesex and Tolland Counties surged ahead, but Fairfield’s median actually dropped from $62,000 to $60,000 over just the last couple years.

But not to worry. Plainly a dropping “median” does not mean that the rich are suddenly forced to head for McDonald’s. Not at all. The rich are doing just swell, thank you, probably better than ever. But since “median” refers to the actual middle-most family along the pay scale of all families, it does mean that the middle class is taking a pounding. Such as when the main breadwinner’s job heads off to Manila, and the next best one available pays ten grand less per year. This is a major cause of what economists have begun calling the “hollowing out of the middle class.” This means that while some members move on up to wealth, the bulk of us are getting poorer. That has left a big hole hollowed out in the center of society.

And lest you think that Middlesex and Tolland must now be booming centers of industrial growth, forget it. They’re simply appealingly quiet spots where the newly prosperous can build homes and begin suburbanization. Since those counties have no urban centers like Bridgeport, Hartford, or New Haven, there are no phalanxes of poor to pull their medians down.

And those dreaded urban phalanxes in the other counties are expanding. The main soup kitchen in our city has zoomed from 8,000 meals per month to 12,000 in the last two years. Meanwhile the urban housing crunch is also getting crunchier.

Connecticut’s response to such suffering has been muted. We’ve joined with most states in conjuring up a health safety net for the poorest kids, but we rank a dismal 50th among the states in offering fed-paid free school breakfasts. Unlike some places in the South, we wisely do impose a $7.40 minimum wage, rather than just the federal $5.15. Of course, you still can’t live here on $7.40, unless you hold two full-time jobs. That’s what has led some Nutmeg cities to experiment with imposing a higher “living wage” on municipal contractors and suppliers.

Unfortunately, America’s traditional economic indicators — the gross domestic product and the unemployment rate — fail to mention these droopy pay scales. By and large government, corporations, business economists, and CNN look only at those misleading conventional numbers and tell us we’re doing great. Yes, service jobs (retail clerks, lawn cutters, etc) are booming, but ever so gradually in Connecticut, the middle class is shrinking and Tagalog is on the march.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)