of ordinary people? I took a year to travel the country and talk with people who live in economically distressed communities. I listened to people in Appalachia, from southeastern Ohio to the coal fields of Eastern Kentucky and the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee. I listened to people living on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation that spans North and South Dakota, and to people living on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. I listened to people living in the poor communities of the bustling city of Oakland, California. I listened to anyone who would talk with me. In all, I talked with over a hundred people and conducted in-depth, recorded interviews with twenty-seven.7 They are Native American, Black, Latinx, and White working women and men who were generous enough to share some very precious time with me.
They appear in Living on the Edge with names they created for themselves to protect their privacy. I have taken care to protect them as well by not identifying specific workplaces or the names of towns whose populations are quite small. As I followed the stories of people living in struggling communities, I researched the larger contexts around them. For example, when someone told me they had to take out a medical loan to pay for dental work, I researched the terms of the loans offered by lenders in their area. When someone told me they relied on a dollar store for groceries, I researched dollar stores.
The voices included here complicate dominant national narratives about inequality by making visible not only the lives of ordinary people but also the corporations who profit from their struggles. The book, then, isn’t just about particular people or places. It is about how business practices and government policies create, normalize, and entrench economic struggles for many in order to produce extreme wealth for a few. It is not just that wages are insufficient, housing is unaffordable, and health care often out of reach – it is that we have a system that cares more for wealth accumulation than for the well-being of its people, for the environment or even for the country itself. Living on the Edge looks at government policies and business practices that produce enormous profit for some people by keeping working people submerged in economic quicksand.8 Ultimately it is a book about power that has been leveraged by government and corporations at the expense of ordinary people.
With that said, the experiences of the individuals featured in this book are both central to and rooted in the places in which they live. For example, some things happen on and around Native American reservations that just don’t happen anywhere else. The same can be said of Appalachian communities and the poor neighborhoods of Oakland. But despite these differences, there are also important similarities. From the coal fields of Appalachia, to fracking fields in the Midwest, to lead-contaminated neighborhoods in Oakland, people live in life-threatening conditions of environmental degradation that often leave them without access to clean water. Substance abuse also troubles every community that I visited, and it always falls hardest in the lives and communities that have the least. In different ways, prejudice and violence also figure centrally, often surprisingly, across all narratives.
Across the country people in struggling communities are forced to make impossible choices from among a range of bad options. They might be forced to choose between taking on debt that they can’t afford or becoming unemployed. Or between borrowing thousands of dollars to have their teeth fixed or borrowing hundreds of dollars to have them pulled. They ask themselves, do I pay the electric bill or the phone bill? If I buy shoes for my child, can I also buy enough groceries? How do I manage meals among the family when the food is about to run out? A seemingly small trouble, like a broken taillight or a bad case of the flu, can trigger a cascade of events that results in the loss of one’s job and subsequently one’s housing. No one should have to expect a level of economic struggle like this.
Wage gaps are tethered to wealth gaps. As of this writing in 2020, the richest 1% of American households owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% of households combined; the entire bottom half of America now owns just 1.3 percent of the wealth.9 As the rich have gotten richer, the poor have been amassing debt.10 Some people are getting very wealthy precisely because others have been made to endure low wages, high housing costs, underfunded education, systemic sexism and racism, and devastating levels of environmental contamination. As we will see, even the criminal justice system has been leveraged to support corporate profits. And then the pandemic hit.11
If there was an initial sentiment that Covid-19 would affect everyone, it soon became clear that the pandemic both highlighted and exacerbated existing inequalities. While the nation’s billionaires increased their collective wealth by more than $1 trillion between the onset of the pandemic and the close of 2020, millions of people who had been living paycheck to paycheck suddenly faced unemployment.12 Even as the Walton family that owns Walmart made over $21 billion in the early months of the pandemic, the company continued to pay wages so low that even its full-time workers continued to qualify for food stamps.
Among those who were already living paycheck to paycheck before the pandemic, the ability to stay home and socially isolate has been an inaccessible form of privilege. Low-wage workers who have been declared “essential” are forced to work – often in unsafe conditions and without the benefit of health insurance or sick leave. This is a virus that impacts everyone, but, like all disasters, it doesn’t impact everyone equally. For example, we know that people with preexisting health conditions, especially those with respiratory problems, are particularly vulnerable. Poor communities carry the heaviest burdens of pollution, which contributes to these conditions. Living on the Edge is about more than individual troubles; it is the story of a nation in a deep economic and moral crisis. Responding to this crisis requires more than a sense of duty to help others; it requires a moral obligation to ensure a self-sufficient life is possible for all. To fight inequality is to fight to change the system.
Systemic economic inequality is not the result of individual choices. It is the inevitable consequence of a government overtaken by corporate interests. This is not new. Fortunately, history has shown us over and again that when millions of Americans come to realize just how badly the deck is stacked against them, they will mobilize. In 2017, the coal company Blackjewel abruptly declared bankruptcy and said it was unable to pay what it owed to 1,700 miners in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia. The company might have imagined it would get away with this because there are no longer any unionized coal mines. But in Kentucky, miners and their families occupied railroad tracks in Harlan County to stop trains loaded with $1.4 million worth of coal from leaving.13 For thirty-eight days, they lived, slept, and ate in a blockade across the train tracks. The coal miners prevailed and Blackjewel eventually agreed to pay $5.7 million in back wages. So much for being broke.
While dramatic stories like that of the Blackjewel miners tend to be the exception, workers demonstrate over and again that they are resilient and determined. Living on the Edge is also the story of people who have a vision of the future in which everyone earns a living wage, has access to health care, education, and affordable housing; a world in which everyone enjoys communities free from environmental degradation. These are not the expensive dreams of idealists, or the radical dreams of an un-American few. They are the aspirations of working people who know that the system we have in place is unsustainable for most of the US population.
Notes
1 1 See, for example, https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap.
2 2 Polls done by Nielsen and Harris for the American Payroll Association and CareerBuilder, respectively, were widely reported in news media. See, for example, http://press.careerbuilder.com/2017-08-24-Living-Paycheck-to-Paycheck-is-a-Way-of-Life-for-Majority-of-U-S-Workers-According-to-New-CareerBuilder-Survey.
3 3 FOTTRELL, Q. 2018. 50 Million American Households Can’t Even Afford Basic Living Expenses. Market Watch, June 9.
4 4 See https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rural-poverty-well-being.
5 5 LOWREY, A. 2020. The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America. The Atlantic, Feb
