UCLA Report on Poverty

Your article presents hard facts which support what I and many people I know have sensed.

How much are people paid who we know and supervise? My wife and I find that even supposedly enlightened institutions (in our case universities) do not pay employees commensurate with their work. Hard-working administrative assistants and secretaries are paid less than subsistence wage regardless of the efforts they put into their jobs.

Immigrants who baby sit and clean homes work 80 or more hours a week with critical responsibilities are never paid enough to get out of the poverty level.

While this injustice is occurring for our “have-nots” citizens, many of us already affluent citizens continue making large sums of money with little effort. We work in various sales, legal and professional capacities, extracting more and more money from rising prices on a fixed collection of goods and services.

To whom are we really paying our own hard-earned dollars? Are we spending thousands for our homes, cars and medical care, increasing the income of these already affluent individuals, while we begrudge our domestic and office assistants who work equally hard a few dollars per hour?

As long as people with vested interests continue to make large amounts of money without doing commensurate work, the poverty gap in Los Angeles and throughout the United States will grow. Furthermore, as people make large amounts of money doing parasitic jobs rather than directly productive jobs, our economic standing in the world will continue its decline.

This is no abstract problem. Each of us must look at our own action and inaction: Do we continue to pay people who care for our children a few dollars an hour while imposing on them long hours? Do we hire support personnel in our offices at salaries that we would not tolerate ourselves? And at the same time, are we spending our money on personal luxuries? The problem is not out there; it is with us. And so is the solution.

JONATHAN D. MELVIN

Culver City