Let’s Take Care of Our Have-Nots

In affluent Orange County, which has the highest per capita income of the five Southern California counties, it’s easy to be lulled into thinking that everyone here is well off. Not so.

For anyone having such a mistaken impression, the recent forum on janitors’ wages held at the St. Joseph Justice Center, which is affiliated with the Sisters of St. Joseph in Orange, should be a wake-up call to the plight of the many thousands of working poor, and to their squalid living conditions, here in a county of plenty.

Typically, janitors in Orange County make about $6 an hour, some less.

They may have a family and live in a garage or a trailer. They may share a small apartment overcrowded with as many as 10 or more and rely on home remedies instead of care from doctors and hospitals for themselves and their children.

This is because there are no medical benefits at work, and little is left of their meager paychecks after paying for food and housing.

Adding to their financial strain is the huge gap between their wages--lower than those for janitors in neighboring counties--and housing costs that are among the steepest in the state.

An Orange County study on low-income housing found that a couple working two minimum-wage jobs would each have to work 11 hours a day, seven days a week, to afford the average apartment in Orange County, which now rents for about $1,100 a month.

Pay for janitors is now in the spotlight because of the recent forum here and the janitors strike several months ago in Los Angeles that boosted pay and benefits there. The problem is not only for janitors.

Many others holding the new jobs being created here by the county’s economic growth are in the minimum- and lower-wage categories. Child-care workers, nursing home attendants, dishwashers, fast-food servers and others face the same daily dilemma of stretching their low wages to survive in a high-cost county.

The janitors are seeking a $2-per-hour increase in pay. That would take them to $8 an hour--about the federal poverty level of $16,700 annually for a family of four.

The county’s low-wage workers would need to about triple their hourly pay rate to come close to affording the county’s average rent.

That reality only emphasizes the critical need for building more affordable housing for the labor pool needed to sustain the county’s economic health.

And it shows the need to improve on the quality of life for those eking out just a bare existence in Orange County’s expensive environment.