It’s elementary that a public budget like New Jersey’s just passed $54.5 billion budget, with an $8.3 billion surplus, reflects our values.  So, the state’s leadership deep sixing last year’s request for $100 million from the New Jersey AFL-CIO for pandemic hazard pay for the state’s lowest paid essential workers says something about just how invisible this cohort of workers are to Trenton’s power structure.

Back in June of 2022, I was walking the halls of the state legislature with a delegation of dozens of essential workers, their families, and representatives from 32 BJ SEIU, which represents building service workers and HPAE, the state’s largest nurses’ union. They were looking to present a letter making the case for hazard pay from the COVID pandemic that claimed the lives of thousands of essential workers and sometimes their family members who were infected due to a workplace exposure. It was signed by several union presidents, including Charles Wowkanech, president of the New Jersey AFL-CIO and was addressed to Senate President Nicholas Scutari and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin.  The letter was also addressed to Gov. Phil Murphy.

“The remaining $3 billion in federal aid funds and the record-breaking $10.7 billion surplus in the state budget offer New Jersey a golden opportunity to do right by its essential workers,” wrote the labor leaders in their letter to Murphy. Scutari and Coughlin. “Throughout the pandemic, workers who because of their jobs were at greater risk of infection from COVID-19 were exalted as essential workers and heroes. Such praise, however welcome, has done nothing to improve the material conditions of these workers’ lives or to compensate them for the additional risks they endured.” 

TOO CHEAP JERSEY?

“Multiple states have provided hazard pay to employees,” according to the union leaders’ letter. “Notably, Minnesota provided $500 million in hazard pay to an estimated 667,000 essential workers with payments of $750. Puerto Rico allocated $200 million to provide $2,000 payments to essential workers. Connecticut has approved $65 million in hazard pay: $30 million to its essential private sector employees ($1,000 for full-time and $500 for part time workers) and $35 million for state employees.”

The American Rescue Plan passed in Washington expressly recommended hazard pay as a legitimate use of the federal COVID aid funds. In the intervening months this funding has been used for a myriad of pet projects including acquiring  new SUVs for the New Jersey State Police’s Executive Protection Unit.

Since June 2022, Connecticut has enacted such a measure. Here in New Jersey,  Hunterdon  and  Burlington granted their county workers hazard pay.

The state AFL-CIO’s modest proposal was limited to workers who were in the 1a or 1b vaccine eligibility groups, did at least 500 hours of work from March 16, 2020, to May 7,2021 when vaccines became widely available. Full time workers would get $1,000 and part time workers $500.

“We had within New Jersey Transit ATU, which represents 5,000 bus drivers—they had a lot of fatalities and a lot of sicknesses—the United Food & Commercial Workers who were on the frontline—just as the nurses and everybody else,” said Wowkaneck during an interview in his Trenton office back in June of 2022. “They were in the Shop Rites and the ACMES keeping food on the shelves in the very beginning before vaccination, before PPE, there was a lot of sickness, a lot of loss of life across all of these unions.”

The NJ AFL-CIO leader continued. “We feel very strongly that a lot of this money that came out of Washington that Biden is talking about was supposed to go to help working families. A lot of these unions and their families suffered tremendously, and we just don’t think it’s too much to ask some special consideration if what we are calling hazardous pay. These people went to work every day with the fear of bringing the virus back home to their families and children. In fact, that did happen.”

GOING, GOING, ALMOST GONE

Back in April, before the Democrats rushed through the budget, NJ Spotlight’s John Reitmeyer was keeping a watchful eye on the rapidly disappearing federal state COVID aid.

“More than $1 billion of the state’s original $6.2 billion allocation has yet to be appropriated, according to the latest official accounting,” Reitmeyer reported. “That means lawmakers will also likely have their own ideas about ways the remaining federal aid should be used as they draft an annual spending bill in the run-up to July 1.”

Reitmeyer’s analysis continued. “If past practice is repeated this year, a deal will once again be made behind closed doors, with the public likely learning only in the final days before the budget deadline exactly how Murphy and majority Democratic lawmakers agreed to use the leftover federal aid.”

“Despite millions that went to legislators’ pet projects, the state’s ARP spending has provided no direct aid for many of the essential workers who took on catastrophic risks during the pandemic,” wrote Peter Chen, a senior analyst with New Jersey Policy Perspective back in April. “Though some state employees received hazard pay, such as staff at psychiatric hospitals and developmental centers, the bulk of frontline workers who kept New Jersey running got little more than a ‘thank you.'”

In the year since the essential workers hazard pay delegation visited Trenton the NJ AFL-CIO has not returned calls on the subject from InsiderNJ. One source within the legislature said it was a non-starter with elements of Trenton’s legislative leadership who took the attitude that these workers “had already been paid for their work.”

Perhaps New Jersey Democratic Party leaders assume they don’t have to worry about rank-and-file union members voting for them because they take the allegiance of labor for granted. Where else are they going to go?

They might point to the recent passage of the landmark Workers’ Retention Act, which was championed by 32 BJ SEIU, which represents more than 175,000 building service workers in 12 states including New Jersey. The bill establishes a 60-day grace period from termination for union service workers at schools, apartment complexes and numerous other buildings statewide from being terminated because a property owner opts to change their building operations or maintenance contractor.

On my July 3 WBAI radio program, Kevin Brown, the New Jersey Director for 32 BJ SEIU, said his union was grateful for the additional job protections—which, if Gov. Murphy signs them, would make New Jersey only the second state in the nation, behind California, to do so.

But Brown recalls that his union lost 150 members, including 26 from New Jersey in that initial COVID wave and that his members were still deserving of hazard pay. “Those were the hardest calls I ever had to make in my 36 years at the union,” Brown said. “We still feel strongly we need to recognize that essential workers were essential and are essential— working right through the pandemic cleaning buildings” putting themselves and their families at significant risk.

Brown said the NJ AFL-CIO hazard pay proposal was modest. “Who knows if somebody will ever wake up and realize these workers should be compensated for that hard work,” Brown said. And now with the Canadian wildfires, this same essential workforce, Brown reasoned now must endure the serious health impacts from having to work outdoors even when public health officials suggest everyone shelter in doors.

FEEDING AMAZON

While the $100 million hazard pay for low paid essential workers did not make the final budget, a tax cut ten times that was granted the state’s largest multinationals like Amazon as well as “major expansions of tax credits for Hollywood studios and commercial developers that were snuck into the budget in the waning hours of negotiations,” according to New Jersey Policy Perspectives, a non-profit progressive think tank.

“For months, advocates have urged lawmakers not to dole out billions of dollars in costly corporate tax handouts to companies like Amazon and Walmart,” said Antoinette Miles, the interim state director for New Jersey Working Families Party. “Trickle-down policies don’t work. They limit our ability to make investments that make New Jersey’s economy work for everyone and do nothing to ensure our state can maintain its fiscal footing.”

As it turns Trenton’s blind spot when it comes to the lower paid essential workforce is part of a larger national neglect of these workers and their families that leaves a real opening for populist sounding Republicans like Donald Trump who in 2016 peeled off just enough of these voters in the rust belt to win the White House. That combined with a measurable drop in African American voters was all he needed. In a July 3rd  New York Times column entitled “Can Biden Change the Economic Narrative” Paul Krugman expressed concern that President Biden would not get credit with voters for the “good news…. even as the economy rapidly improves.”

The Princeton University based Nobel laureate economist’s upbeat assessment was based on an aggregate data analysis 20,000 feet above the real world where essential workers struggle to get by week to week and where the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25, where it’s been since 2009.

MISERY INDEX

He takes us back to the 1970s and the work of Arthur Okun, “an economist who had been a policy adviser to Lyndon Johnson” who “suggested a quick-and-dirty way to assess the nation’s economic condition: the ‘misery index,’ the sum of inflation and unemployment. It was and is a crude, easily criticized measure. The measurable economic harm from unemployment, for instance, is much higher than that from inflation. Yet the index has historically done a quite good job of predicting overall economic sentiment.”

Krugman reasons it’s “worth noting that the misery index — which soared along with inflation during 2021 and the first half of 2022 — has plunged over the past year. It is now all the way back to its level when President Biden took office.”

He credits Biden with a “remarkable turnaround”  as evidenced by an economy that added four million jobs over the past year, and an unemployment rate that has  remained near a 50-year low.

He seems perplexed that polls  indicate voters are still giving Biden a  “very poor marks for his handling of the economy, despite the decline in the misery index.” He makes no reference to the significant decline in American life expectancy in general and the alarming slide for people of color.

Krugman’s sanguine view of Biden’s economy makes no reference to the tens of millions of low income and low wealth Americans, one third of the nation, that Rev. Dr. William Barber referenced last month at the Poor People’s Campaign Moral Poverty Action Congress in Washington D.C. The gathering was convened to demand that Congress and the White House stop acting as if this cohort of well over 100 million people didn’t exist as evidenced by the reality that our political discourse doesn’t address them nor their issues.

MARGINS BIG ENOUGH TO TRANSFORM US

“Together, we can ensure that the days of poverty and low wages—and the unnecessary cruelty of abandonment amidst abundance—are numbered,” according to a fact sheet put out by the PPC which documented how low-income voters accounted for one third of the nation’s electorate yet were historically overlooked.

Consider that in swing states like Michigan they account for over 40 percent of the voters. In Florida its over 43 percent. Even here in New Jersey, this group accounts for 17 percent of our electorate. Yet, all we ever hear from Biden is about the middle class. It’s almost like he’s afraid to concede that so much of America is struggling week to week.

After the 2020 election, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival issued a research report that documented while 58 million low wealth and low wage voters cast a ballot, there were “another 22 million low-income voters who were registered, but did not vote, meaning that out of the 215 million registered voters in 2020, 80 million—or 37 percent—were eligible low-income voters.”

According to PPC: NCMR’s state-by-state analysis of the 1.4 million registered low-income voters in New Jersey, just over one million voted, meaning that close to 400,000 sat out the 2020 election. So, while this cohort’s registration rate was close to 80 percent, only 58 percent felt sufficiently engaged to follow through and cast a ballot.

Consider that in 2022, Rep. Tom Kean (R-7 Dist.) only beat Tom Malinowski, the Democratic incumbent by 10,000 votes. Galvanizing America’s low wage and low wealth could give Biden an FDR type of tidal wave that could break the logjam but the campaign has to speak to their lived experience, needs and aspirations.

Last month, Barber invoked the Declaration of Independence’s instruction that when people suffer a “long train of abuses” by a government that impinges on their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness they have the “right to reshape, restructure and change that government.”

“I want to suggest that unnecessary poverty has been a long train of abuse—people not having healthcare has been a long train of abuse. Not raising the minimum wage to a living wage has been a long train of abuses,” Barber said. Barber went on to describe how the pandemic ravaged communities of color in places like Mississippi where the state refused to expand Medicaid “and one family lost 20 members in a 30 miles radius.”

“During the pandemic’s deadliest phases, death rates in poor and low-income counties were up to five times higher than higher income counties,” according to a fact sheet handed out at Poor People’s Campaign’s Moral Poverty Action Congress. “At least 330,000 were unnecessarily lost due to the denial of healthcare.”

This seems to be the real-world misery index outside Krugman’s happy frame.

“During COVID we called people essential but treated them like they were expendable,” Barber said. “Go to work we said and as a nation save us, but we are not going to pay you a living wage. Go to work—go to work—go to work. We will ring a bell for you at 6 o’clock. We will clap our hands but that doesn’t do anything for you when you go to work to save people that don’t care if you live.”

Meanwhile, the new budget New Jersey established a “Boardwalk Fund program to strengthen Shore towns with an allocation of over $100 million,” according to Gov. Murphy’s budget breakdown.