In Ohio, Public Work Is a Road to the Middle Class

GALLIPOLIS, Ohio — Jodi and Ralph Taylor are public workers whose jobs as a janitor and a sewer manager cover life’s basics. They have moved out of a trailer into a house, do not have to rely on food stamps and sometimes even splurge for the spicy wing specials at the Courtside Bar & Grill.

While that might not seem like much, jobs like theirs, with benefits and higher-than-minimum wages, are considered plum in this depressed corner of southern Ohio. Decades of industrial decline have eroded private sector jobs here, leaving a thin crust of low-paying service work that make public-sector jobs look great in comparison.

Now, as Ohio’s legislature moves toward final approval of a bill that would chip away at public sector union, those workers say they see it as the opening bell in a race to the bottom. At stake, they say, is what little they have that makes them middle class.

“These jobs let you put good food on the table and send your kids on school trips,” said Monty Blanton, a retired electrician and union worker. “The gap between low and middle is collapsing.”

Gallipolis (pronounced Gal-IP-po-LEES) is a faded town on the Ohio River, one whose fortunes fell with the decline in industries like steel in bigger cities along the river. That erased a swath of middle-income jobs in the area, said Bob Walton, who, as a commissioner for the Southern Ohio Port Authority, an economic development agency, has tracked the economic history of the area for decades.

“It’s a real big change,” he said. “It has changed the complexion of our community.”

Today storefronts are mostly dark. About one in three people live in poverty. Billboards advertise oxygen tanks and motorized wheelchairs. Old photographs in a local diner look like an exhibit from a town obituary. The region has some of the highest rates of prescription drug abuse in the state, with more people dying from overdoses than car crashes, according to Ed Hughes, executive director of The Counseling Center in Portsmouth, about 55 miles west of here.

David Beaver, 65, a barber here, said that when he got out of high school, “you could go anywhere you wanted to and pick your job.”

“Now, it’s depressing,” he said. “I hear the boys talking. They can’t find anything.”

It is not that there are no jobs, but rather that the jobs available pay too little and have no benefits, resulting in, as he put it, “just scraping by.” A private hospital and two power plants do offer good jobs, but they are highly competitive and many require some higher education, something that fewer than one in five people here have, according to 2009 census data.

So most people scrape by, like Ms. Taylor did before landing her state job in 1996. At the time, she was living in a trailer and working in low wage jobs at Wendy’s, Dairy Queen and a Big Lots discount store. Her hourly wage jumped to $9 when she started at the Gallipolis Developmental Center, a state home for mentally retarded people, up from $5.25 at a private nursing home.

“If I wasn’t working at the G.D.C., I’d have to work around the clock,” said Chris Smith, Ms. Taylor’s colleague, referring to the center, where she has worked for 20 years. “I’d have to work two or three jobs to keep at this level.”

The Taylors are not college educated, but their public sector jobs have made them middle class. Together they earn about $63,000 a year, a sum that puts them squarely at the middle point of earnings for American families, and higher than the $50,000 earned by the typical Gallipolis family.

Money is still tight. When their washing machine broke in November, they had to put the new one on a credit card. They could not afford college for either of their sons. One is in the Marines, and the other, a high school senior, just enlisted.

“We’re not living in any rich, high-income way,” said Ms. Taylor, 37, who, together with her husband, protested the public sector bill in Columbus this month. “What are they wanting?” she said of the bill. “For everyone to be making minimum wage?”

Wages at the bottom of the labor market have stagnated since 1970, with inflation gobbling up gains made over the years. The federal minimum wage buys you a lot less today; it represented just 38 percent of the average hourly wage for private, nonsupervisory workers in 2010, down from 47 percent in 1970, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“The wage story is incredibly bleak for everyone from the middle on down,” said Jacob S. Hacker, a political science professor at Yale University and co-author of “Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class” (Simon & Shuster, 2010). “We’ve gotten dramatically richer as a society, but if you’re a wage earner below the median you’ve seen your wages stagnate or shrink.”

Retirement is less secure for private workers. Jeanie Norton, 49, ended up earning less than minimum wage when her job as an airlines reservation agent was eliminated in 2008. At the time, she and her husband, a carpenter who is now unemployed, were building their dream house. She lost her health insurance and had to break into her 401K to keep them afloat. Now she drives an hour each way to waitress in Gallipolis.

“I thought I had it all figured out, but now I’m just making it,” Ms. Norton said. “I’m going on faith in God.”