A Tale of Three Cities: Upper Economy, Lower-and Under
Tyler, Gus
New York's economy is divided into three parts: upper, lower, and under. The first two—upper and lower—are old hat, retailored now to fit the service economy. The third—the underground...
...High-tech is not the light at the end of the tunnel for those displaced from manufacture...
...Lack of unionization in Mississippi or Georgia directly affects earnings in Brooklyn and the Bronx...
...then there are the organized criminals, the oligopolists of the underworld, who stake out their turf, make their long-range plans, exact a steady toll from their., victims, "tip" the man on the beat...
...But even here, the "managerial" posts held by minorities are characterized "generally" by "low pay," notes the CSS study...
...Much of the underground economy is outrightly illegal, simply criminal: burglary, mugging, trafficking in drugs, shoplifting, arson, hijacking, robbery, pilferage...
...New York outdid the nation, where in 1986 75 percent of the jobs were in the service sector...
...If we remove the "outsiders' " earnings from the total, the "insiders' " earnings are less than the overall median yielding, of course, a result that shows commuters earning about twice as much as the natives...
...If they find themselves in an industry that is on the decline, they often have no place else to go...
...As Ehrenhalt argues, poorer-paying jobs are not growing as rapidly as better-paying jobs in the city...
...Such an "informal" economy is not peculiar to New York or the United States or to the last quarter of the twentieth century...
...This "service sector," like many economic concepts, is not a fact...
...The common explanation for New York's loss of manufacture is that its business climate is not congenial to manufacture...
...If it were true that most of those employed at the minimum were black, that would be an added reason to lift the minimum, to avoid further polarization of American society along economic and racial lines...
...While it is true that there is a disproportionately high number of blacks who work at the minimum, they are actually only one out of five in that unhappy level...
...Roughly, Hispanic unemployment was double that of white, and black unemployment was in between...
...The stereotype turns out to be the truth...
...He is far more likely to find himself grasping for a straw in that sector of the service economy that barely pays the minimum wage—or to turn to the proliferating underground economy...
...Theoretically, those who lost jobs here got jobs there, since the total number rose...
...New York is such a city today—split racially, ethnically, geographically, and economically...
...466 • DISSENT A CITY DIVIDED In New York City's economy, this polar structure takes on geographic and racial overtones: who gets the better jobs and who is stuck with the crummy jobs...
...They are not included in any official count because, as one witty economist put it, "Economics deals with goods—not bads...
...Among the "expanding industries" in New York—that is, those creating new jobs—there are many that pay poorly...
...The collapse of manufacture in these boroughs is a minor social, as well as a major economic, tragedy...
...468 • DISSENT A CITY DIVIDED of the families that have dropped out of the formal economy survive and, sometimes, thrive in this "informal" economy...
...Clearly, a disproportionate piece of the "upper" polar region is occupied by Dashing Dans and Dotties from Connecticut, New Jersey, Long Island, and Westchester County...
...These were the findings of a Minimum Wage Study Commission in 1981 and prevail in 1986 Current Population Survey statistics...
...The greatest mobility belongs to the most advantaged (white males) and the least mobility to the most disadvantaged (black females...
...there are about 50,000 holding such jobs, up from 11,000 in 1977...
...So it should be no surprise that in New York the "informal economy" —euphemism of academic choice—should be booming...
...The answer may be— "both...
...There are the stray muggers, hitting the nearest target for some quick cash, living from day to day in the way of the feral beast...
...then there are the hijackers and loft-burglars who supply high-class legitimate outfits with stolen goods, wholesale...
...My tentative conclusion is that, in the United States, it represents about a trillion dollars (1985), or a sum equal to one-third of the Gross National Product...
...Whatever this Messiah is doing elsewhere, he is not doing much for the city...
...A more realistic approach, however, must differentiate between the wages of workers in mechanized monopoly industries and in wage-oriented competitive industries...
...How big is this underground economy...
...Historically, the number of vendors has always risen during periods when people could not find a traditional sort of job...
...These 1984 figures assume fulltime work...
...In toto, they compose a complex entity in which disparate parts live in symbiotic embrace...
...Only about half of these displaced workers had found jobs by January 1984...
...In the years from 1977 to 1984, the "lower earning" spawned 151,200 jobs...
...Crime has always been a traditional way to redistribute income in times of despair...
...The concept of a "dual economy" in the United States—an economic ghetto of vast proportions in the midst of a prosperous nation—is neither new nor peculiar to New York...
...Median earnings for all employed in the city were $12,970...
...The way to go is the way of the street—a tried, tested, and approved modus vivendi, a counterculture without ideology...
...But about one in five (18 percent) dropped out of the labor force...
...And, as Ehrenhalt pointed out, many of the low-paying industries—the turf on which minorities live—are in rapid decline...
...Of some three dozen "expanding industries" in New York, these security-handlers showed the greatest growth...
...The 25 percent profit return on original investment not uncommon in steel and autos as contrasted with the one percent profit in garments does not derive from an inherent virtue of metal over fabrics, but from the monopoly character of the former and the competitive character of the latter...
...The count for New York is startlingly different...
...Contrary to the myth, most of those working at the minimum wage are white: three out of four, according to Earl F. Mellon and Steven E. Haughen in a piece on "Hourly paid workers," appearing in the Monthly Labor Review (February 1986, p. 25...
...Some of these jobs paid well, most did not...
...Between 1976 and 1986, the absolute number of jobs in manufacturing in the country actually increased from 18.9 million to 19.1 million...
...In New York City, in the same years, manufacturing jobs nosedived from 535,700 to 394,700, a loss of 141,000 in a decade: more than one job out of every four was wiped out...
...as turf for corporate headquarters, lawyers, accountants, executives, clericals, brokers, security guards, charwomen...
...In the lower regions, blacks, Hispanics, and women are disproportionately entrapped...
...Brokers are, of course, only part of a larger universe, commonly bunched under the acronym of FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate...
...That statement is, of course, an exaggeration...
...Today, there are less than 400,000...
...Here, too, are upper and nether reaches of an economy...
...If they all left the city or the planet, there would be no problem...
...Minorities who are more restricted do not enjoy that luxury...
...The median for those working in the city but living outside was $21,191...
...As is evident from the description—capital-intensive versus laborintensive— these classifications were conceived in an industrial (manufacturing) society...
...The high-sounding titles suggest big bucks...
...It goes on right under our nose in the form of street crime, sidewalk vendors, cash deals, prostitution, drug pushers, flea markets, shoplifting, pickpockets, home burglary, loft break-ins...
...The collectors of data have repeatedly declared that they do not deign to gather such garbage...
...An additional six million received wages that were just above the minimum . . . from $3.36 an hour to $3.99...
...It includes blue-collar people who wrap and tote...
...There actually are figures published by official sources that do reveal how many people are not at work in the adult population...
...Transactions in cash are a plebeian equivalent of the patrician "tax shelter...
...Before we leave the manufacturing sector and turn to the service and underground sectors, just a word about high-tech—that touted savior of our economy...
...This adds up to about 13 percent of wage and salaried employees...
...they exclude the underground from the count of the Gross National Product...
...the higher earning 135,300 jobs...
...Where blacks and Hispanics do break into managerial posts, it is commonly due to federal involvement or affirmative-action consent decrees...
...So when we net it all out, the higher earning industries are growing much faster (15 percent) than the lower earning industries (7 percent...
...But people are not that fungible: they are specific—with given traits, skills, and access or lack thereof to jobs...
...Although the United States government has, for many years, had an instrument in hand to regulate the flow of imports in apparel and textiles, Washington has consciously used the process to promote imports at the expense of American jobs in labor-intensive manufacture...
...white-collar people who sell, type, file...
...In no small measure the growth of the underground economy is due to the rapid decline of jobs in certain traditional low-paying sectors...
...the school is irrelevant at best and an obstacle at the worst...
...Actually, the South is merely the most militant and effective spokesman for a "rural" point of view that acts as a nineteenth-century drag on a twentieth-century civilization, as an agrarian weight around the neck of the metropolis...
...of Hispanic females, sewing machine operators...
...The Economic Report of the President, for instance, regularly carries a table entitled, "Civilian Employment Population Ratio...
...The victims of the descending floor are not few...
...There are New York City residents who hold better jobs and there are "whites" who hold poorer jobs...
...of black females, nursing aides, etc...
...But the polarized economy—disproportionately large numbers at the extremes—continues...
...as financial pivot of the globe, Wall Street denizens...
...If the products created by low-paid workers are vital to our society —such commodities, for example, as food, fibers, wood, tubes, bulbs, transistors, dresses, overalls, shoes, gloves, and diapers—then society has no right to victimize these workers because their industries are competitive and defy automation...
...as a cultural center, performers, galleries, dance and music studios, libraries, museums...
...As a percentage of all jobs, manufacture did fall from 23 percent to 19 percent...
...Historically, New York City did not fit into this national pattern...
...There are many such "working-class" jobs in New York's service economy...
...There are the thousands, tens of thousands, of women who stitch, paste, fold, join things with things in their crammed flats, earning whatever the boss will pay them when they tote back their finished work...
...Dissent, Summer 1961 q FALL • 1987 465 A CITY DIVIDED 119,000 employed in "eating and drinking places" at an average pay of $200 a week— which is, indeed, less than half the going pay in manufacture...
...The loss of manufacturing jobs in New York—jobs that were the base of a lower- and middle-middle class—has been more severe than in the rest of the nation...
...There is that Turk with his falafel pushcart or that Senegalese peddling his "authentic" works of African "art" on the streets, making just about enough to come back another day...
...If the rich don't pay, why should I pay...
...In still another respect New York has been different from the rest of the nation: it has never been without a sizable service sector...
...If the number of people living outside the city and working inside it were small, the data would be of little relevance...
...Taking both the making and using of high-tech, the total industry is a wash item, showing about a 1 percent growth...
...The city was never blessed or plagued by the smokestack, as is Pittsburgh with its steel mills, Detroit with its auto assembly plants, or Akron with its tire factories...
...As in the past, the debate will continue as to whether we are creating more good than bad jobs...
...A third reason, applying primarily to those who operate in the "cash" economy—a crime that few consider to be a crime—is the desire to escape taxes...
...A quick reply would be: the good jobs go to people who do not live in the city and the bad jobs go to racial and ethnic minorities...
...These are young people (16 to 19 years old) who are FALL • 1987 467 A CITY DIVIDED actively looking for work but cannot find it...
...Put vulgarly, they are seen as a handful of stray outsiders...
...At the bottom of the list are recreation workers who earn $231 a week...
...Within these communities the role models are prostitutes and pimps, drug pushers FALL • 1987 . 469 A CITY DIVIDED and muggers, bookies and numbers runners...
...At a time when the unemployment rate for New York City ran at 8.1 percent (1985), the white jobless rate was 7.2, the black 11.5, and the Hispanic 13.4...
...it is an artifact, an invention of pundits...
...In 1986, about 6.7 million salaried and hourly workers earned the minimum wage—or less...
...just above them are kindergarten and prekindergarten teachers with earnings of $276...
...But, as Herbert Bienstock, former regional commissioner of labor statistics, likes to note: "Behind every average lurks the distribution...
...In absolute numbers, the service sector rose from 2.5 million jobs in 1976 to 3 million in 1986...
...Even this high rate of idleness among youth does not reveal the depth of joblessness, because the official count—as is well known by now—does not include the so-called "discouraged," of whom there are many...
...The common perception is that they are few, teenagers, and part of the minority elements who have not yet found their place in the American mainstream...
...There is the undocumented worker who waits tables in a diner for what amounts to "tips only" that he or she never reports...
...The work is easy though risky...
...Crime and black markets are endemic to all civilizations...
...The question that remains is whether the booming service economy creates more wellpaying than poor-paying jobs...
...of black males, janitors and cleaners...
...The third—the underground economy—has moved from being a pest to being a pestilence...
...That means that the people who once filled those marginal slots are now without work altogether...
...In the last year or two, as job growth has slowed down in the private sector, the slack has been picked up by the public sector, primarily by city government—an area where minorities get a better break than usual...
...Like the theologic trinity, the three phases of New York's economy are one...
...Jobs in high-tech manufacturing industries declined by 23,000 or 27 percent in the eight years ending in March 1985, as against a 22 percent loss in 464 • DISSENT A CITY DIVIDED non-high-tech manufacturing...
...and above them are "licensed practical nurses" with $294...
...They live amidst us and—most make a living...
...In 1986, 85 percent of all jobs in the city were in the service sector, up from 81 percent in 1976...
...But, points out Ehrenhalt, what is happening in the "expanding" industries is only half the picture...
...These are the poles of the underground economy...
...The earnings may be a dollar an hour or less—without Social Security, unemployment insurance, health coverage...
...It is the workers in these latter industries who pose the problem of indigence even in the midst of an "affluent society" and who make up a major part of that one-fifth of the nation that is still ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed...
...no-collar people who handle fast food, sweep floors, or see to it that you don't shoplift...
...Still another part is dubiously legal, as with those who cheat on social welfare programs...
...In the small, labor-intensive, fiercely competitive industries, earnings were—and are—low, even for the more skilled operatives...
...In part, that is true...
...And why not...
...Federal (or state) legislation or court actions which hinder union organizing efforts in the generally unorganized sectors of the nation not only keep wage levels low in these sectors but depress wage levels nationally...
...But they neither disappear nor die...
...To stay alive, they invent their own economy—illicit or illegal as it may be...
...Yet the shocking hyperbole points to a painful truth...
...The largest number—twenty years or older—make up more than two-thirds of those at the minimum...
...In 1984, average earnings in finance were $711 a week, in professional services (legal, accounting, auditing, engineering, architecture) $587 a week...
...In sum, the "dual economy" of old continues into the new service society...
...Based on a recent BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] study of workers aged 20 and over, with three years on the job in all industries, 271,000 New York State workers were displaced due to plant closings or moves, slack work, or the abolishment of their positions or shifts between January 1979 and January 1984," reports Ehrenhalt...
...Three out of five manufacturing jobs have been wiped out...
...Nowadays it is fashionable to say that earnings in the service sector are about half the earnings in the manufacturing sector...
...They were raised in families and neighborhoods that know how to make it in the shadows...
...New York is a caricature of the national economy—with similar, but overdrawn, features...
...It includes brain surgeons and the brainless, airline pilots and dishwashers, stockbrokers and stockboys...
...Evidence can and will be mustered for both sides...
...For thousands of younger people, the underground economy is the normal lifestyle...
...It is a house divided against itself q 470 • DISSENT...
...The average pay for those in the low-wage service sectors that are expanding is $251 a week—again, well below manufacturing wages...
...The fastest-growing sector of those in low-paying service jobs are engaged in "individual and family services," where the average pay is $174 a week...
...In the only data we were able to uncover on who, by and large, gets the better jobs (dug out of the last census in 1980) we found that the annual earnings of nonresidents were double the earnings of residents...
...in absolute numbers an increase from 56.8 million to 75.2 million...
...Economists have named the two economies "core" and "periphery," or "primary" and "secondary...
...A second reason is undoubtedly the opportunities for a parasitical way of life in a culture where there is great wealth and it is on display...
...The overall figures mask the fact that for a vast army of teenagers the world of work is not their world...
...On this basis, it might be argued that more bad than good jobs are being generated...
...The highest percentage of white males in any one occupation is in the category of salaried managers and administrators...
...Although it is not possible to discount the local "climate" —high rents, high crime, high taxes—the real reason for the steep drop in New York manufacture is the unstated, but understood, policy of Washington that laborintensive manufacture is a "sunset" industry, that it has no role in America's economic future, and that—in light of the above—it is both necessary and desirable to give this industry away to other countries, especially at times and in ways that will buy the friendship of those countries...
...The affluent— whether businesses or individuals—provide a market for the service economy...
...Their average weekly earning was more than a thousand dollars...
...New data for 1985," reports Samuel Ehrenhalt, commissioner of labor statistics for the New York Metropolitan Area, "show that manufacturing job losses in New York City have extended to the high-tech sector, which has seen a sharper rate of decline than other manufacturing activities...
...In the world of FIRE there is a high ratio of professionals, technicians, and managers— about one out of every three as contrasted with one out of five in the rest of the city's economy...
...The shift from manufacture to services, however, has not meant the end of a "dual economy," either nationally or in New York...
...A national statute would establish a firm base on which to erect a higher wage in areas that offer "external economies" to the manufacturer...
...the intermediate 137,400...
...But in one respect New York is the same as the rest of the nation: jobs in the goodsproducing sector have been in rapid decline while jobs in the service sector have been in rapid ascent...
...If "averages" were realities, the people of Brunei would be the most prosperous in the world as they claim their statistical share of the sultan's cash and solid gold bathtub...
...As a crossroad of the world, it has always had hotels, restaurants, department stores, theaters...
...Where do the "dropouts" go...
...On the same block are teenagers pushing crack or running numbers or peddling hookers whose average earnings compare with those of our stockbrokers and dealers...
...Department stores have done likewise: they have foreign makers turn out their wares with the store name stitched in overseas...
...Statistically, the tragedy of the hundreds of thousands displaced from New York City's manufacture is no problem at all: jobs rose from 3.1 million in 1976 to 3.8 million in 1986...
...Twenty-eight percent are the heads of households and another 28 percent are spouses...
...The results would have been even more lopsided were it not for the growth of government employment in the city...
...The money is there for the taking and there are those who will take...
...Much of it is only technically "illegal," because the income is not reported to the IRS...
...In a period of five years, about 50,000 people left the world of work...
...The workers in the latter industries suffer although many of them possess skills as great or even greater than those required in the basic industries...
...About one in three remained "unemployed...
...The mores of the larger society are a bore and a burden...
...On the other hand, those high-tech industries that provide services—as distinct from the manufacture of high-tech—have grown by 28,000 in the same period...
...Thus does New York come to resemble the kind of society against which Plato warned in The Republic: "Wealth and poverty: the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent...
...Only 31 percent are teenagers...
...Although the official unemployment figures conceal the extent of idleness, they do not do so intentionally...
...It is the ratio between the number actually employed and the number of adults in the total population...
...of Hispanic males, janitors and cleaners...
...It was higher for whites (61.5 percent) and lower for blacks (54.1...
...For 1986, it was 60.7 percent nationally: six out of every ten adults were on a job...
...It figures: a casino society needs croupiers...
...Even where there are exceptions, they prove the rule...
...The reason...
...New York was the high-paying end of low-pay industries—largely FALL • 1987 . 463 A CITY DIVIDED because of the strength of unions in the needle trades...
...But the "outsiders" represent more than one out of five working in the city (21 percent...
...They are followed by lawyers and judges with $724...
...Many if not most Why have not compassionate citizens cried out to Congress more loudly to protect our most vulnerable wage earners...
...But in our times, the endemic has become epidemic...
...We are apt to find that manufacture is not declining at all...
...Such a city, said Plato, is really two cities: "one the city of the poor, the other of the rich...
...In a fact-filled speech sponsored by the Council on Economic Education, Commissioner Ehrenhalt grouped the city's expanding industries into three categories: higher earning, intermediate earning, lower earning...
...They ignore it although thousands of people in the city work in it full time, are active consumers, create goods, render services, accumulate capital, put money in the bank, and cheat the city, state, and federal governments out of taxes...
...Unions could then negotiate more rewarding contracts because the wage differential between union and non-union areas would be offset by the advantages of the metropolitan climate...
...Manufacture requires space, and space in New York is expensive...
...At the end of the Second World War, there were more than a million jobs in manufacture in the city...
...The relative mobility that whites have in moving from one industry to another is a distinct advantage in finding jobs...
...The great New York banks have silently cheered from the sidelines because they believe that the growth of labor-intensive manufacture in debt-laden countries will earn debtors the necessary American dollars to service their intolerable burden...
...these are at war with one another...
...Behind the high pay in "finance" lurk the commissions of the broker and the measly pay of the woman at a teller's window...
...In the process, New York City—the traditional heart of light manufacture— is hard hit, harder than the rest of the nation...
...The duality has been transferred from those making goods to those rendering services...
...Of the jobs that in 1979 paid $50,000 a year or more, outsiders held more than 60 percent...
...as an image maker, Madison Avenue...
...Reprinted from the AFL-CIO American Federationist, March 21, 1987...
...The facts, however, belie the belief...
...Finally, most of those who work in the minimum world are not teenagers...
...Just about every New Yorker is aware of the underground economy, although he or she rarely thinks of it as such...
...Although New York has been a great manufacturing center, one of the largest in the nation, its manufacturers operated relatively small plants, turning out light products through labor-intensive production—such as apparel, printed materials, leather goods, plastics, ceramics, furs, paper products...
...Consider the range in a category referred to as "professional, technical, and managerial," for instance...
...Women's and misses' outerwear, for instance, showed average earnings of $315 a week in 1984, $8.40 an hour...
...As a percentage of jobs in New York, manufacture fell from 16.8 percent to 11 percent...
...The "lower earning" industries lost 85,400 jobs, while the "higher earning" lost only 45,700...
...A primary step in relieving the oppressive poverty of this one-fifth of the nation (not confined to the South but all too present in the streets of our greatest metropolis) is to raise the Federal minimum wage and to extend its coverage to the millions of workers who are not included under the present provisions...
...In terms of employment, the service sector has offered hope...
...The "dual economy" is doubly dual—racially/ethnically/sexually, as well as economically...
...There is the lowly employee who pilfers tools, merchandise, paper clips, and personal computers, and then there is the mousy accountant who embezzles a couple of million...
...Official statistics are of no help...
...it is merely moving from the factory into the home...
...the pay is good and tax free...
...But even those that did not were, by and large, better paying than like jobs in other parts of the country...
...In the large, capitalintensive, highly mechanized, oligopolistic industries, earnings have been—and are—high, even for the most unskilled...
...In which event, the old duality in manufacture still persists, with a very sizable portion of it paying wages of less than one dollar an hour—with no overtime and no fringes...
...and then there is the fixer who is "tipped" with several thousand dollars for his services in getting some public official to okay a contract...
...But then there are many that pay well: stockbrokers and dealers, for instance...
...Between 1977 and 1984, their number grew from 56,000 to 99,000—an increase of 43,000...
...In a study entitled Closed Labor Markets, the Community Service Society of New York (CSS) records "The Underrepresentation of Blacks, Hispanics and Women in New York City's Core Industries and Jobs" (1985...
...As a consequence, unemployment among blacks and Hispanics is much higher than among whites—and the gap is likely to grow...
...Among white youth, the jobless rate is 22.5 percent and among black youth 47.9 percent— one out of two...
...If people were just interchangeable numbers, the equation would balance...
...The "ghettos" are as might be expected...
...Distressing as the jobless figures are (New York's overall rate is above the national), they do not really reveal the extent of the problem in terms of societal impact...
...Within the duality of the service sector, with its higher and lower earning industries, lies a further duality within each of these categories...
...While white males are relatively mobile, black and Hispanic males and females and white females have their fixed places in the economy...
...If ever we get to count the underground operations, we will have to revise all our concepts about the nature of the city's economy...
...For instance, there are (1984 figures) In most discussions of wages in America, only the average earnings of workers are considered...
...of white females, secretaries...
...New York had a vibrant service sector long before the nation as a whole turned to "services" as primary employer...
...the other half is what goes on in the "declining" industries...
...A second step is to encourage rather than discourage unionization outside the already well organized areas like New York...
...We are also likely to discover that we have more millionaires in our midst, fattened on drug sales, gambling, embezzlement, bribery and extortion, than are revealed by the tax returns...
...Remember the apple sellers of Depression days...
...In short, adults—age 20 or older—make up nearly 70 percent of those earning the minimum...
...We respond by buying stolen goods when we think it is a bargain, paying in cash when we get a discount, installing burglar alarms and window grates, taking lessons in karate, staying out of the subways, and refusing to walk the streets alone after sundown...
...American manufacturers have joined in the strategy: they contract out their sewing to other countries...
...The thrust of the study is that the city's economy is ghettoized...
...These provocative calculations—based on "industries"—still don't tell the whole story...
...Within the city, these inhabitants of the underground economy build their growing city—with its own ethos, ethic, and expanding turf...
...Partly, it is due to a stereotype of those working for the minimum...
...We will also have to revise our estimates on retail trade to allow for the thousands of sidewalk vendors...
...Those who in a past era might have been employed in semiand unskilled jobs at a livable wage turn to a parasitic existence, preying on the affluent, less affluent, and even the nonaffluent...
...In some half a hundred select occupations in the United States, we find airline pilots and navigators at the top of the list with salaries of $738 a week...
...To avoid the high rents of Manhattan, many manufacturers moved to the other boroughs, where factories became the core of solid neighborhoods—with many walking to work and back and forth to homes for lunch...
...The factory worker in New York City who averaged $431 a week in 1984—more than $10 an hour—is not likely to find a new job as a computer programmer, stockbroker, or even schoolteacher...
...The same industry, however, that in 1977 employed more than 73,000 now employs 63,700—a steady and continuing loss of above-poverty jobs...
...the entrepreneurial spirit has free rein...
...Only 51.6 percent of the adult population is employed in the city as contrasted with the 60.7 percent in the nation...
...Intrigued by the challenge—to count the uncountable—I have spent about a dozen years collecting anecdotal evidence, stories, and stray statistics to estimate the size of the underground economy...
...Among blacks it is 50.4 percent and among Hispanics it is 43.4 percent...
...All our Silicon Valleys have been moving to Asia...
...As with the industrial and more recently the service economy, so too in the underground the law of duality persists...
...Those who serve in restaurants, cafés, hospitals, homes, offices, beauty parlors, warehouses, department stores at very modest pay make life more comfortable for those they serve...
...It includes law offices with legions of lawyers and their paras as well as mom-and-pop stores, free-lance writers, roofers, thespians, theologians, psychiatrists, and street peddlers...
...A third step is to use governmental power to tax the more affluent sector of the society to care for the needs of the less affluent...
...Industries" are ranked by "average earnings...
...This statement is more or less correct if we are talking about the "proletariat" in the service sector—the nonprofessional, nontechnical, nonmanagerial person...
...But they do so in unorthodox ways, in the wide, wild world of the underground economy...
...We will discover that there is a very real economy, of considerable magnitude, operating outside official ken—even more polarized than the formal economy...
...But whatever we do, we are aware of the all-pervasive presence of those who make their living outside the law...
...In the eight-year period 1977 to 1985, the finance, business, and related professional services showed a gigantic gain of 200,000 jobs with average earnings of $590 a week...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
