By Harold Henderson
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“Since many of the poor do work, work by itself does not eradicate poverty,” Marlene Kim explains in Poverty & Race (January/ February). Using U.S. census data, she surveyed working poor people who qualify for food stamps, AFDC, and Medicaid. “Most were in married-couple families, in their prime working years, worked many hours and had at least a high school education. These workers were poor not because of abnormal lifestyles or deviant behavior, but simply because they earned too little or were in unstable jobs. Most, almost 60%, worked in…retail, agricultural, personal household services, health care or residential care industries.”
“Since 1971, the Loop has seen sensitive restorations of the Marquette Building, the Cultural Center, the Rookery, the Railway Exchange Building, the Monadnock, the Auditorium Theater, much of South Dearborn Street, among others. And now, the Reliance Building,” writes Nan Greenough in a letter to members of the 25-year-old Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois. “What would the Loop be like without these buildings? How many of them would be there were it not for the tax incentives for which LPCI worked so hard? Or, in some cases, without direct LPCI involvement?”
Department of selective quotation. When Illinois Politics (January) published its regular survey of pay equity in Illinois congressional delegation offices, 5th District Democratic primary candidate Nancy Kaszak wasted no time blasting Republican incumbent Michael Flanagan for paying women on his staff about 56 cents for every dollar earned by men. “There is no excuse for this sort of sex discrimination from our politicians in Washington,” she fumed. But downstate Democrat and possible future U.S. senator Dick Durbin finished at 51 cents. In fact, ranking on the pay equity list appears to be random as far as political affiliation goes. (It also fluctuates wildly from year to year, suggesting that personnel reasons other than discrimination are at work.) In 1995 the three reps who paid women most proportional to men were city progressive Bobby Rush, suburban conservative Dennis Hastert, and Senator Carol Mosely-Braun; the three lowest were Flanagan, Durbin, and downstate progressive Lane Evans.
