Y2K fears mask another grave danger
by Rodolpho Carrasco
Saturday, January 9, 1999 in San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group
(Rodolpho Carrasco is associate director of Harambee Christian Family Center in Pasadena, Calif. and a columnist for the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group. Check out more articles by Rodolpho Carrasco here.)
Has anyone imagined what will happen to poor people if the Year 2000 bug - the dreaded Y2K - is for real?
Most media reports are fixated on the effects of Y2K on the middle class and well-off, with the occasional veiled threat of "looters," for whom the prudent Y2K planner should keep a loaded gun nearby. I have not read or heard any scenario dealing with the effects of Y2K on a low-income neighborhood like mine.
Many of my neighbors, those who squeak by from check to check, are talking about the rent and the kid in trouble at school - not about stockpiling food or whether to yank the money out of the mutual fund and stick it in a jar.
It is difficult to predict the damage that will be done should computers malfunction, on a mass scale, come midnight 2000. My opinion is that there will be some major disturbances, but widespread cataclysm will be averted. After all, it's in the best interest of private industry - including banks and merchants - to squash the bug promptly wherever it rears its head. National and worldwide economic stability is dependent on things as basic as our nation's power grid to staying up.
Should my community find itself offline and in a crisis, we at Harambee Center, the nonprofit I co-direct, will join with many other community organizations to serve in any way possible. We pray there will be significant aid to needy children and families. The time is now to not only prepare, but to encourage those around us to be prepared.
I'm vexed, but not paranoid, about what the Y2K bug will do to low-income communities. However, I spent the holidays in a quiet panic about a more figurative question of the poor's Y2K compliance: Will low-income people be able to compete for jobs in the information economy of the new millenium?
After a tour of Earthlink Network's headquarters in Pasadena, I decided the answer was no.
Inside the gray building at 3100 New York Drive, the diverse multitude of employees was hard at work. But there was no frantic typing, nor were there loud noises. Lots of workers were talking into tele-headsets and nodding toward the ceiling, as if talking to themselves. Employees smiled at me as they walked by, purposeful yet unhurried.
In this manner, gobs of money was being made. Earthlink, the world's #2 internet service provider with over one million subscribers, posted approximately $175 million in revenues for 1998.
Earthlink makes that money by manipulating bits of electronic information which allow access to a whole world of bits. They advertise this to the public as dial-up access to the Internet for $19.95 a month. Earthlink processes enough electronic information to employ 1,400 employees, with an additional 40 people joining the ranks every week. These jobs go to people who can type fast, read quickly, write and operate a computer well, and understand the Internet.
That does not describe many low-income people I know. Many who are coming off welfare or looking for work after dropping out of high school are qualified only for manual labor or basic service positions. The jobs they tend to find are not full-time, nor do they pay enough to take care of a family. Their weak or non-existent information processing skills mean any application they would fill out at a place like Earthlink would not get past the first round of cuts.
This lack of readiness among low-income people for jobs of the new millenium alarms me. I'm even more disturbed because of a situation I'm managing right now.
At our nonprofit, we have a budget to put teens to work in our Junior Staff program. Junior staffers gain valuable work experience helping our adult staff administer our tutoring program. But there are more teens wanting these jobs than there are positions available.
Meanwhile, there is plenty of information-based work to be done. We manage a web site for a national association of urban nonprofits. One task involves creating and posting a web page for each one of the hundreds of member organizations. Our arrangement with this association generates enough resources to pay a kid a few bucks per page.
But many of these out-of-work teens can't take advantage of this arrangement. How can we assign a page to someone who can't type and does not know how to use a computer well enough to work independently?
Sometimes we assign information tasks anyway, receiving back incomplete work that needs to be fixed later. We do this because some teens need money so desperately - their family can't pay rent, they own only one pair of pants - that we let them learn as they go. We are not unaware that we are also helping them fight the temptation to get cash by illegal means.
From where I stand on the corner of Howard and Navarro in Pasadena, each day I see new people like these teens for whom the information economy is a hindrance, not an opportunity. New jobs are being created, but they are unprepared to win them.
As January 1, 2000 approaches, tremendous attention is focused on averting one Y2K problem when this other, more subtle Y2K problem will also inflict unpredictable - perhaps even greater - damage.
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