Part 1 of the US Protests: An American Spring - Unemployment and low wages amidst a crisis in healthcare and education
Analysis by Zeina Dagher, Staff Writer and Cherly Abou Chabke, Staff Writer
June 11th, 2020
With the current civil unrest in the US Staff Writers of The Phoenix Daily explore, compare, and contrast the catalysts, incentives to mobilization, and fundamental inequalities of the US in 2020 and the Arab world in 2011 in a two-part series, The US Protests: An American Spring?
This is one part of the series and examines the roles of unemployment and low wages amidst a crisis in healthcare and education.
The country whose mantra is “Justice and Equality for All” has gained monumental notoriety in the past couple of weeks for the upsurge of the infamous Black Lives Matter movement, which ironically advocates for the same characteristics that shape the slogan aforementioned. The US has seen violent protests break out in all 50 states, although such protests hadn’t taken place in America in a very long time. In a recent tweet, Anonymous (the “hacktivists”, a secret cyber-organization) called the uprisings the “American Spring”, a parallel to the “Arab Spring” name that was given to a series of protests and riots that took place all across the Arab world in 2011. They were the expression of the anger and frustration that (mainly) young people manifested as a result of the worsening living conditions and authoritarian regimes. The appellation elicited quite a few comments from Americans – some expressed discontent, deeming their situation not half as bad as the Arab one, while others endorsed the comparison, considering it a powerful reminder of the shared struggle of The People against their regime’s incompetence. The last of Trump’s most contested policies was his Administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic: as of June 2nd, 2020, the US has the highest number of Coronavirus cases and deaths in the world, many Americans have been let go of from their jobs and are relying on Gofundme donations, friends, family, and aid packages to survive.
Therefore, one may rightfully wonder: is it not paradoxical that a country that once sang the praises of J.O’Sullivan “America’s Manifest Destiny”, and believed without a shadow of a doubt in the “God-given mission of the United States to lead the world in the transition to democracy”, find itself in the 21st century on the sinking boat of egalitarianism? Is the “American dream” still, in fact, a dream everyone wishes to reach? Are the Americans only rioting today for George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter cause, or are they expressing an even deeper-rooted anger with the overall socio-economic situation of the country? Finally, is the “American Spring” really that wrong of an appellation, and are Americans of 2020 any different from the Arab citizens of 2011?
A comparison of the causes that led to both uprisings, the 2020 US uprisings and the 2011 Arab uprisings seems relevant today, starting with unemployment, low wages, and poverty, to healthcare and education, finally the comparative elements of authoritarian regimes.
One of the primary reasons Arabs took to the streets to revolt was arguably stemmed in the very high unemployment rates. According to the statistics from World Bank gathered in 2010, only a year prior, these rates were around 20-30% in the countries that saw uprisings. Educated young people had no jobs, and therefore were faced with zero opportunities of building up the careers they had worked through school to acquire. Why did that happen? Let’s explain things in a very simplified way.
In the 80’s, the IMF began implementing neoliberal policies in Arab countries (Egypt, Iraq, Jordan…) arguably in the hopes of creating growth and therefore jobs. They privatized most public sectors, causing a huge part of the population to lose their previously held jobs. However, instead of being re-employed into the new private companies, these people remained unemployed, seeing as the new jobs had been distributed to those close to corrupt regime officials. Change mostly targeted urbanized places, ignoring rural and more vulnerable zones. The countries had also seen a population size explosion in the decades prior to these aforementioned changes, creating a massive workforce that couldn’t work, which only added to the existing and growing poverty and frustration. Numbers showed that growth was happening, but only because of a few people concentrating high levels of the country’s resources, whilst the vast majority suffered in poverty and/or rural areas.
In the US, unemployment rates were seen to be significantly low before the COVID-19 pandemic started, sitting at around 4% according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, the pandemic proved to be catastrophic for the US’s free-market economy. From January to April, unemployment rates had reached an all-time-high of 14.7%, and all major worker groups suffered temporary layoffs as well as permanent job losses. Here too, race played a critical role: while the rate was 14.2% for White citizens, Black citizens suffered more job losses at 16.7%. Even in normal times, the unemployment rate for Black citizens was consistently twice that of the unemployment rate of White citizens, according to a graph from the Center for American Progress. The government did initiate response aid programs aiming to expand unemployment benefits and stimulus checks, but those who live paycheck to paycheck continue struggle to pay for basic necessities including rent and food. Poverty is therefore rising, and projected to do so twice as much among Black citizens as among White citizens. Researchers at Columbia University estimated that 15.4% of Americans will fall into poverty for the year to come, if quarterly unemployment hits 30%, as the President of one Federal Reserve Bank predicts.
On a second note, if the Arabs in 2011 did have jobs, the vast majority of those employed were paid significantly low wages. For example, in Egypt, a national monthly minimum wage was set at 35 Egyptian pounds in 1984, and remained unchanged at that level until 2010, when it was equivalent to approx. $7 per month. This is because Egypt was opening to the world market, and local production faced lots of competition from international private companies that were settling in the country, therefore having to reduce salaries and dismiss many workers.
Also, in order to attract more foreign companies, Egypt had to lower the legal minimum wage and remove labor protections, rendering workers poor and legally powerless. The same applies to public jobs: the Egyptian State had substantially reduced in size, and therefore couldn’t pay salaries or fund benefit programs. With the well-paying private jobs being monopolized by regime allies, and all the other jobs paying less-than-enough to survive, people were forced to either remain unemployed or under-employed, mostly working in informal sectors. In fact, under-employment was one of the many problems faced by Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian man who is often referred to as a catalyst for the 2011 revolutions. He was a street vendor, and Tunisian officials confiscated his fruit cart and publicly humiliated him, because he did not have a vendor’s permit. When authorities refused to give him back his cart, he set himself on fire and died from the burns.
In the US, the federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour for over a decade. A 2019 study showed that 44% of U.S. workers are employed in low-wage jobs that pay on average $10.22, above the federal minimum wage, but well below what's considered the living wage for many regions (minimum-wage earners with families of four fall almost $9,000 below the poverty line). One may think that teenagers are taking low-wage jobs, but most of the people working these jobs are actually adults in their prime working years, and the majority of them are Black citizens. According to theEconomic Policy Institute, in 2017, 8.6% of White workers were paid poverty wages and 14.3% —roughly one in seven— was the statistic of Black workers with the same wages. One of the prime examples of low wages and racial disparities is Amazon. More than 85% of Amazon’s Black workers in the U.S. hold unskilled jobs, according to a review of the company’s diversity statistics by the Puget Sound Business Journal. After having come under fire for paying “starvation” wages to its factory workers, Amazon raised its minimum wage to $15 for all employees in 2018. It had also taken a few good steps to keep workers coming in during the pandemic, like increasing their hourly pay by $2 and giving unlimited paid leave to those who began showing symptoms of sickness. However, Amazon ended these policies a few days ago, even though the pandemic has yet to near an end and people continue to feel unsafe coming to work.
Not only were Arabs unemployed and poor, but they were also sick: “Arab Spring” countries did not have universal healthcare at the time of the protests. After having extensively developed an effective State-funded healthcare system in the 60’s-70’s, IMF policies significantly reduced healthcare public-funding, leaving many with no way of getting treated. For example, in Iraq, the regime of Saddam Hussein during its last decade cut health funding by 90%, contributing to a substantial deterioration in health care. As a result, maternal mortality increased nearly threefold according to the UNFPA, and the salaries of medical personnel decreased drastically. Medical facilities, which in the early 80’s were among the best in the Middle East, deteriorated. Conditions were especially serious in the south, where malnutrition and water-borne diseases became common in the 90’s. In 2005, the incidence of typhoid, cholera, malaria, and tuberculosis was higher in Iraq than in comparable countries.
In contrast to other developed countries, the US doesn’t have universal healthcare either. On average, Americans spend almost four times as much for pharmaceutical drugs as citizens of other industrialized countries pay. This is because in Europe, drug prices are government regulated, often based on the clinical benefit of the medication, which is not the case in the US: high drug prices seem like an area of overspending, and medical-service providers are free to charge what the market will bear. “Administrative” costs are frequently cited as a cause for excess medical spending: the U.S. spends about 8% of its healthcare money on administrative costs, compared to 1% to 3% in the 10 other countries, according to a JAMA study. The study also found that only 90% of the population in the U.S. has health insurance, compared to 99% to 100% of the population in the other industrialized countries examined. Even insured, one in five working-age Americans report having problems paying their medical bills, according to a New Kaiser/New York Times survey. And here too, racial disparities play a major role: Black citizens have significantly higher uninsured rates compared to white citizens, and some health insurances – like Medicaid, a lifeline for people of color – are not accepted at many hospitals and doctors’ offices. Black citizens also struggle more with medical debt, as nearly one in three Black Americans aged 18 to 64 has past-due medical bills, according to the Urban Institute. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted even more these racial health inequalities. According to NBCLA, the COVID-19 death rate is of 31 per 100,000 Black residents, as compared with 15 per 100,000 White residents.
Evidently, the ongoing protests in the US are not only an explosion of the long and historical frustration of the Black community, but also the reflection of the agony and anguish of a big part of the US population faced with injustice and lacking basic needs. Thus, the mobilization masks wider social-economic disparities within the whole country. One of the most important issues that pushed many young people to take to the streets was, and continues to be, the absence of affordable education.
While the young generation took to the streets in the Middle East for the reasons aforementioned, yet more particularly because of poverty, it is vital to note that in many countries’ education is a luxury for the rich. Lebanon is a crying subject on this matter. With the Civil war leaving public educational institutions in shambles. The Lebanese University (LU) – Lebanon’s only public university – remained neglected and underfunded with 38% of all enrolled university students attending it, while 62% of the students attending 36 private universities, portrayed by unaffordable tuition fees. In response to the ever-increasing fees, the youth network Mada launched a campaign to track the average increase in tuition fees in the top seven private universities in Lebanon between 2013 and 2017. The statisticsrevealed that “tuitions increased by 21.85% at Notre Dame University (NDU), 20.84% at Balamand University, 19.97% at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK), 18.91% at the Beirut Arab University (BAU), 16.79% at the American University of Beirut (AUB), 16.58% at the Lebanese American University (LAU), and 15.17% at Saint Joseph University (USJ)”. However, enrolling in a private university in Lebanon doesn’t necessarily secure post-graduate employment opportunities. In fact, with youth unemployment reaching 40%, only circa 7,000-10,000 newly graduates out of a total of 30,000 from all universities, find jobs.
Looking at the US history, the access to affordable education, has been at the core of demands of many Americans, many who have been living in the never ending nightmare of the student loans that take a disproportionate toll on their well-being. These loans push many young Americans to say no to higher education, thus adding up another barrier to the social and intellectual mobility. While students have taken the streets in the past to address the issue, demanding “tuition-free public college and “cancellation of all student debt”, the ongoing protests today might be their chance to really advocate for what they desperately need. According to a study conducted by the US department of education, statistics gathered found that between 1992 and 2012, the average amount owed by a typical student loan borrower who graduated with a bachelor's degree more than doubled to a total of nearly $27,000. Not to mention, students from low-income families are also less likely to enroll in and complete college than their peers, even when academic ability is taken into consideration. Further than this, the matters degenerate when it comes to African-Americans, who are “much less likely to graduate from high school and attend college than white students with the same family income”.