Posted on: Friday, November 12, 2004

ISLAND VOICES

By Geri Marullo

A recent Advertiser article delved beyond the superficial "good news" that Hawai'i has the lowest unemployment rate in the nation and explored the darker side of its headline, "Hawai'i's workers struggle with low pay, low-level jobs."

In the article, reporter Dan Nakaso mentioned that in 2003, 44,977 people in Hawai'i had more than one job. Here's another piece of this picture, from the Coalition on Human Needs: In 2003, 68,333 of Hawai'i's families — 23.6 percent — had incomes below $35,000 a year. Put another way, one out of every four Hawai'i families had incomes more than 200 percent below the national poverty line — in a state with one of the highest costs of living in the country, and escalating housing and healthcare costs.

These numbers are disturbing, certainly, but they are still only numbers. Let me try to acquaint you with the faces and families behind them.

Child and Family Service is the state's largest private human services agency. We serve the neediest among us — from infants to the elderly — and our 767 employees touch 44,000 lives every year on all islands. At Child and Family Service, we see the human faces behind the sobering statistics.

We see parents under stress, running from job to job just to feed, shelter and clothe their children, and we see the product of that stress. Some children are spending most of their waking hours with adults who are not their parents. Even when parents are home for the evening, they are often distracted and moody — still mentally untangling the problems of their workday. With their emotional fuses cut short, they may over-react to typically challenging childish behavior. They may be too tired to engage their children's attempts to connect. It is hard for a child not to take this personally — especially if the stress is chronic, and all too often we see how it adversely affects children's self-esteem and view of the world.

Some children become so angry at their parents they misbehave at school in an attempt to get the attention they crave. Even negative attention is better than none. They disrupt their classrooms, making it difficult for other children to learn, and often force their parents to leave work to tend to them. This, in turn, affects the parents' job performance and impacts the employer, who needs a productive workforce to remain competitive. It may put the family's livelihood on the line.

And the level of stress rises another notch or two.

Factor in another reality — the aging of our state's population — and the stress mounts even more. In addition to wondering how they'll care for their children, many in our working class are trying to care for aging parents. Sandwiched between generations, the working couples juggle this all, with little left for a marriage.

At Child and Family Service, we are seeing a continued need for therapeutic foster homes, which take in children with the most troubled backgrounds. We are seeing an increased demand for alternative education for children expelled from school. We are seeing the increased need for complex parenting skills, where a generation ago, sex, drugs and violence were not routine social norms.

What are the solutions? I, along with other nonprofit CEOs, would love to help the leadership of this state develop and implement public policies that attack these problems from a number of fronts:

• Reduce the barriers to a productive and well-paid workforce. As the CEO of a large business, I can personally attest to the difficulty of balancing the desire to provide my employees with proper compensation against the increased costs of unemployment and workers'-compensation insurance, healthcare benefits, and the effect of costly and unfounded litigation. These challenges do not include providing employees with added education and training, college courses, promotional consideration and inflationary wage relief.

• Explore the impact of an inadequate living wage. What are the truths behind the need to work harder to provide the basics of a healthy life, and the real costs and consequences of the stress imposed on families, and a distracted and unproductive workforce?

• Increase the availability of help to families. What are the best practices and opportunities both public and private for stress-management programs, health and wellness programs, information and referral to help with aging parents, and quality childcare for Hawai'i's workforce, either as company benefits or through linkages with other organizations?

• Find safe and quality child care. Let's explore all the ways to make sure that our working parents can be assured that child-care programs are safe, and content is meaningful and contributes to healthy child development.

As we have seen with the unemployment figures, numbers can tell a good story or a bad one, depending on how they are viewed. But the faces of our keiki and kupuna do not lie. Let's probe beneath the statistics and explore our family lifestyle in Hawai'i and the cost benefits of enacting sound work and family policy. And then let's work together to make that happen.

Geri Marullo is the CEO of Child and Family Service. She wrote this for The Advertiser.