The Blow the Working Class Saw Coming

"This crisis is urgent," the people on television keep saying, and when the cameras are turned off, they probably go home to plush apartments in Washington and New York. The people for whom it really is urgent have stopped listening, and not just because the cable is getting cut off. The problems are simply too immediate for them to pay attention to people who talk about economic theories, about bailouts and tariffs and gross domestic product. In this world, there are actual sheriffs with actual eviction notices. Something needs to be done now, today.

It won't be. For a lot of people, it is already too late. People have moved back in with their parents, started living out of RVs, moved into trailer parks that are mushrooming around cities such as Las Vegas the way developments with real houses used to. Even pricey Santa Barbara, Calif., recently made several gated parking lots available to people living in their cars.

Mark and Robert are lucky. Mark's girlfriend's father is his landlord, and Robert owns his trailer and takes care of the park fees with odd jobs. Wynn has about three months of savings.

Last week, General Motors announced 10,000 job cuts, Wal-Mart 800, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told an interviewer that in some ways, the current crisis is worse than the Great Depression. But this time around, we appear to have a class of individuals who think that they should not have to suffer with the rest. Circuit City, currently liquidating all its stores and laying off thousands, asked a bankruptcy court judge to let it give bonuses to executives to convince them to stay for the "wind-down process." The New York Post reported on a disgraced financial executive who transferred property to his wife to protect it from legal action.

It is this type of behavior, rather than economics, that the working poor don't understand. I earned $3.35 an hour at my first job washing dishes in 1981, and today, 28 years later, the minimum wage has barely doubled. Congress voted not to raise it for nearly 10 years, while members awarded themselves pay raises on a nearly annual basis. And during the years that the minimum wage was stalled, the pay of a CEO swelled to hundreds of times the wage of an average worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

But of course, nobody really asked the working poor for their opinion of the economic situation. What do they know? "You just knew you couldn't trust it," Mark says, looking at his empty, unused trailer. At least he has no trailer fees to pay. The fortunate decision to move into his girlfriend's father's house was made last summer, before it all turned bad.

But maybe guys like Mark and Robert would have warned you about this economy years ago, when the jobs began moving overseas, and their credit limits went up even as they got pink-slipped. They didn't know when it was coming, but they knew.

And their warning would have been plaintive: Stop taking so much. Does anyone really need a $20 million salary? If you have that salary, do you need a bonus? If you take that much, won't somebody else be deprived?

"You can make a million dollars in America," says Jim Teal, a former waiter at a high-end Raleigh steakhouse who now stays home with his 2-year-old daughter because business has dried up. "But if you're making hundreds of millions, you've screwed someone over."

The people I work with have an arcane belief that money comes from somewhere, that value is added when things are made, and that the only real way to acquire money is to work.

To them, the term "economy" means only one thing: jobs. Most people here believe that the new stimulus package will create them, but the question is, what kind? Will these be more of the jobs that Robert is being forced to apply for, the minimum-wage, part-time, day- labor kind of jobs? Or will they be actual jobs, work that stays around for decades and provides a chance for a steady, decent life? "The word 'jobs' can mean a lot of things," Teal says, skeptically.

They have a right to be cynical. It turns out, the people who understand money the best are the ones who don't have it.

Iain Levison is the author of the memoir "A Working Stiff's Manifesto" and the forthcoming novel "How to Rob an Armored Car."