Three Ties at SOTU

Many people, including all of us at Topos, were delighted by many of the themes in President Obama’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday – such as his strong emphasis on actions we all take together for the common good, his proposals to take steps to improve access to early childhood education, to increase energy efficiency, and to improve the economy by expanding and strengthening the middle class.

Specifically, we were thrilled by the President’s surprise proposal to raise the minimum wage. It was the most tweeted moment of the speech, at 24,000 Tweets per minute. 

Topos’s Ford Foundation research identifies ways to have a public dialogue about job quality issues that build understanding of the state of the labor market – and broad support for a higher wage and benefits floor.

Our research tells us that Americans need to hear clear messages about how we can make jobs better. The President used words in the State of the Union speech that signal the benefits of the wage increase for all of us:

Corporate profits have skyrocketed to all-time highs — but for more than a decade, wages and incomes have barely budged.  

It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth — a rising, thriving middle class.  

A growing economy that creates good, middle-class jobs — that must be the North Star that guides our efforts.  Every day, we should ask ourselves three questions as a nation:  How do we attract more jobs to our shores?  How do we equip our people with the skills they need to get those jobs?  And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?

We know our economy is stronger when we reward an honest day’s work with honest wages.  

For businesses across the country, it would mean customers with more money in their pockets.  And a whole lot of folks out there would probably need less help from government.  In fact, working folks shouldn’t have to wait year after year for the minimum wage to go up while CEO pay has never been higher. 

Stronger families.  Stronger communities.  A stronger America.  It is this kind of prosperity — broad, shared, built on a thriving middle class — that has always been the source of our progress at home.  It’s also the foundation of our power and influence throughout the world. 

We’ve been watching the news carefully to see how the debate over this policy initiative unfolds and how the White House’s framing is playing out. An informal scan reveals a mix of helpful and not-so-helpful media coverage.

Some is really well-framed, like this article on CBSNEWS.com, which makes a strong case the wage increase is good for the economy as a whole – a theme that our recent research for the Ford Foundation tells us is an important one to include in the conversation. Consider the “all of us” language in this quote from a Costco executive:

“We’d all be better off in our country if the lowest-paying jobs paid enough for people not to be on food stamps and not to be on welfare when it comes to going to the hospital,” he added.

We also noticed this great headline in Business Week: Obama Seeks Minimum Wage Boost to Bolster Economy in Speech.

And a well-framed quote from Chris Owens, Executive Director of NELP in the New York Times:

“The president said he was putting jobs and the economy front and center tonight, and that’s exactly what he did by calling for a minimum wage increase,” Christine Owens, the executive director of the National Employment Law Project, said in a statement. “A higher minimum wage is key to getting the economy back on track for working people and the middle class. The president’s remarks also cement the growing consensus on the left and right that one of the best ways to get the economy going again is to put money in the pockets of people who work.”

But not all of the coverage picked up the economic importance of increasing the minimum wage. It’s possible that the framing of minimum wage increases as a way to “help the poor” is so common that it’s easy for media to default to that framing, as we see in some media reporting.

For example, this article in TIME Magazine, is narrowly focused on the proposal as a benefit to the poor, asking:

“But does the law make sense for the low-income workers it aims to help?” 

And:

“But given that there’s a good chance that minimum wage laws actually hurt the people they are designed to help, isn’t there a more effective way to help the working poor?” 

And concluding:

“…since a Republican Congress would likely be more amenable to expanding tax credits than to raising the minimum wage, this proposal seems more like a political gesture than a serious attempt to improve the lives of the working poor.” [Our emphasis.]

Topos research finds that there are risks to framing the wages and benefits conversation narrowly as a poverty-alleviation strategy.  The reality is that people are working and poor, but images of poverty (and framing the wage issue as a charitable solution to poverty) continue to cause people to default to stereotypes of long-term unemployed ”looking for a handout.”

For this reason, it’s particularly critical for advocates to continue the framing of minimum wage as good for the entire economy, or “all of us”.  As it becomes entrenched, the idea that higher wages advance workers, communities and the economy, will inoculate against “job killer” attacks and allow progressives to be on offense, not defense.

Informed citizens are the foundation of effective democracy, but informing citizens depends on providing the context for issues that most mass media neglect; that’s where nonprofits come in. Read the whole report.

Photo Credit: flickr Ben C

In a recent cover article for Mother Jones, Kevin Drum tells a fascinating story about how researchers have uncovered a surprising connection: The sharp increase in violent crime in post-war America, and the sharp decline since the 1990s, may be largely due to one surprising factor – leaded vs. unleaded gasoline.

If true (and the evidence certainly seems compelling), the story of this discovery is important food for thought on many levels, with a number of lessons for communicating effectively on social issues.

Moral vs. material dimensions of an issue

It is all too easy to interpret any public issue in terms of “good guys” and “bad guys” at the simplest level.

• Child abuse is committed by “bad guys” – so there is little that the rest of the community can do beyond policing and imprisoning.
• Farmers are “good guys” so there is no reason to be concerned about the practices they use to eliminate insects or maximize crop yields.
• Even the economy is shaped by the choices of “good guys” (who work hard, are loyal to employees, make responsible purchases etc.) and “bad guys” (who spend beyond their means, treat employees cruelly, and so forth).

What these tempting interpretations often miss are the “material” dimensions of the story. How do housing arrangements – which increase or decrease social isolation – end up affecting rates of child maltreatment? How does excessive nitrogen fertilizer affect the ecosystems of downstream lakes, rivers and oceans? How is the economy shaped by laws that make it harder or easier for workers to stick together for their common interests?

The lead poisoning story provides a beautiful illustration of the fact that the “material” dimension, that can seem dry and technical, is often much more important than the simple and appealing moral story about “bad guys” (violent criminals) and the role of parenting, video games, and moral values in creating them.  In fact, the moral story is often deliberately used to distract public attention from the material concerns that policy can address. 

To regulate or not to regulate

One of the most contentious issues in American life is the extent to which citizens ought to regulate business. Even many Democrats – who are more likely to favor active government – are concerned that putting constraints on businesses can hurt profitability and ultimately put people out of work. The link between leaded gasoline and violent crime offers a striking case study of how our communities and our whole society have a deep stake in the choices made by businesses. And a simple collective decision – i.e. the (government-mandated) phase-out of leaded gasoline – had tremendous benefits for all of us.

Connecting the dots

Scientific findings often get pushed out of policy debate. On a range of issues – evolution, global warming, drug addiction and so on – scientists are ignored or even ridiculed by politicians.  This dynamic, once constrained to the most extreme, religious right wing, is becoming increasingly common.  This story provides a clear example of the need to rely on science and facts in policymaking.

However, science gets pushed out of public discourse on social issues not just by anti-science activists, but more often by advocates’ inability to provide a simple explanation that people can hear and embrace. It can’t be stated too many times that if people don’t have a simple grasp of how an issue works, they have little chance of engaging with it constructively. Insiders know this on some level, but often fall short when it comes to offering audiences a clear, common sense picture of the important dynamics at work on a given issue. The leaded gasoline story is a great illustration of how understanding the story that links A to B to C makes all the difference. Not only would understanding of this connection have made a difference in the 1950s, it is a critical connection to communicate now.  As Mother Jones points out, the inability to see the big picture and connect the dots between issues is a significant obstacle to moving forward on dealing with continuing lead exposure.

An ounce of prevention

Policymakers are famously short-term in their thinking.  They focus on today’s crisis, the current economy, this year’s budget.  However, on issue after issue, we know that an investment today will yield significant rewards later.  This story has the potential to remind policymakers of this important lesson.

It’s the environment, stupid

Americans of whatever political stripe find it easy to put “environmental” topics near the bottom of their list of concerns. Even if Americans are generally sympathetic to environmental perspectives, they often think of them as being about plants and animals – somehow disconnected from human urgency.

While it is obvious to insiders and professionals that “the environment” relates to everything from our own health to food output levels to property damage and even loss of life from storms, this is simply not the default perspective of average people.

Advocates face an important challenge in helping the public focus on the infinite ways in which our own wellbeing depends on our physical surroundings including natural systems. What could illustrate this point more viscerally than the connection between the kind of gasoline we burn in our cars and our own odds of being mugged or murdered? Not to mention the fates of the kids whose own lives were derailed by lead exposure, and the significant costs to society related to imprisonment, special education, lost productivity, and so on.

On issue after issue, advocates for important causes must contend with cultural patterns that work against their goals. Despite these communicators’ passion, wisdom and hard work, progress is often frustratingly slow because broadly shared patterns of thought and understanding are preventing progress and engagement.

Communicators often know or sense – whether through research, instinct or experience – that they are up against stubborn patterns like these. So what to do?

Unfortunately, one all-too-common approach is to work “with” current attitudes rather than against them. For instance, communicators are advised to “beat up on government” before advancing their own proposals. They are told that referring to government’s shortcomings or failures is a way to “connect” with the public, to show they “get it.”

But what happens when this advice is followed? One result is predictable: further reinforcement of the attitudes that stand in our way. So even a “win” ends up making future victories more difficult, and may in any case be reversed or undermined by the next vote.

In this way communicators can end up winning a battle while losing the war – because they haven’t worked towards changing the culture, towards the kind of change that lasts.

With this short memo, we explain the limitations of winning without culture change.

And on another continent, Senior Fellow Margy Waller was in Cape Town speaking at the international conference convened by the  Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) about reframing poverty policy and research.