Today, it is estimated that 65 million U.S. adults have a criminal record and continue to face barriers to employment as a result.
According to a new report by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), the overuse of imposing criminal background checks and blanket bans against hiring people who have been charged with even a misdemeanor offense is a practice that has been adopted by at least 10 leading national employers, including Bank of America, Aramark, Lowe's, Domino's Pizza and Radio Shack, among others.
In 1987, the EEOC issued policy guidelines that determined barring people from employed based solely on a criminal conviction history disproportionately excluded African-Americans and Latinos from the labor market because they are overrepresented in the criminal justice system.
Just as it is illegal to overtly discriminate by race, ethnicity or skin color, it is also a violation of civil rights law for an employer to use non-job related selection criteria that disproportionately disadvantages people of color in hiring decisions.
Still, the violations are numerous and bold. NELP's four-month scan of Craigslist, which operates in more than 400 geographic areas of the U.S., documented more than 300 ads precluding the consideration of individuals with criminal conviction histories:
"No Exceptions!...No Misdemeanors and/or Felonies of any type ever in background." "Do not apply with any misdemeanors/felonies." "You must not have any felony or misdemeanor convictions on your record. Period."
Though each of these statements violate the EEOC prohibition against blanket bans, employers and their recruitment agencies continue to artificially and illegally limit the pool of qualified candidates for available jobs. The effects take not only a toll on resources in our institutions, as violations are now leading to considerable legal and community advocacy; they also take a human toll as well.
Darrell Langdon, from Chicago, struggled with addiction in his youth.
Despite this setback, he has persevered through the years, working as a boiler room fireman in the Chicago Public Schools and then as a mortgage broker. Though sober for more than 20 years, his 25-year-old felony conviction for possession of cocaine remains on record.
In 2008, Mr. Langdon applied to be a boiler room engineer in the schools. Despite the fact that he'd been clean for more than two decades and that he had prior experience in the schools, he was initially rejected for the job because of his conviction. It was only after Mr. Langdon's case benefited from substantial publicity, that the school system reversed its decision and hired him for the position in 2010.
"When they denied me for the job, I couldn't believe it, especially since it was because of something that happened way back then," said Mr. Langdon. "I just felt that there was no way they could deny me this job, so I went through the motions to contest it. I'm at work right now, and I feel great about it!"
Though research has confirmed that employment helps to thwart recidivism, and many of our public leaders, including U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis acknowledge employment as a pathway to help keep former incarcerated people "out of the legal system," our public policies and private employment practices often fail to consider long-term impact on our communities when people are illegally prevented from reclaiming their lives.
For example, Calvin Moore, who is 59 years old, grew up in a tough neighborhood in Washington, DC. He was convicted and served a 10-year sentence: 3 ½ years in prison, and the remaining 6 ½ years on parole.
Mr. Moore tried to start over and took college courses, but in the late 1980s, he again found himself face-to-face with the criminal system, after being unable to find a job. He was finally able to find various jobs that did not pay well, were hazardous to his health, and ultimately did not provide any benefits.
Over the years, Mr. Moore started developing some serious health problems from these poor jobs, and was forced to go on SSDI. Since August 2008, Mr. Moore has been out of work. He has been diligently looking for a job and since that time, has applied for over 42 jobs. Unfortunately, he's been turned down by all of them due to his criminal record.
In 2009, Mr. Moore went to the D.C. Employment Justice Center about the possibility of sealing his criminal record under the District's 2006 Expungement and Sealing law, but he was unable to seal any part of his record because the law in DC is so narrowly drafted.
"Things are beginning to happen. I'm trying to obtain my certification as a drug addiction counselor, but I have to be employed before I can continue my education," said Mr. Moore, who is optimistic and still interviewing for jobs. "Within the next couple of months, I hope something concrete settles, part-time, full-time...It doesn't matter at this point."
The report offers several recommendations for combating employer abuses of background checks. In addition to calling for the aggressive enforcement of civil rights and consumer protections that apply to criminal background checks by both the private and public sector, NELP also recommends that employers take a more active role in raising the profile of this issue and promoting best practices with respect to fair employment, beginning with an accurate and appropriate use of criminal background checks.
"We want the employer to do the right thing in the first place. I'd love to see the employer community step up in this area. Our employer best practices guide is a good resource for that," said Michelle Natividad Rodriguez, NELP staff attorney and lead author of the new report.
"In the Bay Area, we have a hotline, and in some cases, we try to represent people who have been affected by this type of discrimination. But if an individual feels they've been affected by an automatic ban, they should reach out to their local EEOC office directly, or to a local nonprofit that can help him or her file a charge with the EEOC, try to have a conversation with the potential employer, or look at the consumer protection laws."
In the end, fair and transparent processes -- in both the public and private sector -- are what lead to the best pool of candidates for our nation's jobs. Unnecessarily excluding qualified candidates from work violates these individual's civil and human rights, and limits the capacity of our inclusive nation. We cannot thrive as a democracy or viable economy when so many -- now 65 million people -- "need not apply."
Can Employers disqualify Job Applicants for having a Criminal past?
You’d think the answer might be a flat “yes,” but it turns out the answer may not be so clear cut, reports the Associated Press.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has been cracking down on efforts to disqualify potential hires with criminal records or bad credit history, arguing that the practice can be tantamount to discrimination, as such applicants are disproportionately black or Latino.
Companies have increasingly sought to weed out applicants with bankruptcies, court judgments or credit problems in recent years, as improved technology has made the task easier and easier.
“Our sense is that the problem is snowballing because of the technology allowing these checks to be done with a fair amount of ease,” said Carol Miaskoff, assistant legal counsel at the EEOC, in an interview with the AP.
But some employers say the information gleaned from such databases are critical to making hires that will help them maintain a safe work environment.
“Past indiscretions may be an indicator of future behavior, especially in the criminal context,” Chicago employment lawyer Pamela Devata told the AP.
A blanket refusal to hire someone with a criminal record could run afoul of federal employment law, though. According to the story:
If criminal histories are taken into account, the EEOC says employers must also consider the nature of the job, the seriousness of the offense and how long ago it occurred. For example, it may make sense to disqualify a bank employee with a past conviction for embezzlement, but not necessarily for a DUI.
The EEOC indicated its disapproval of such practices last fall, when it it filed a class-action discrimination lawsuit against Dallas-based Freeman Companies, an events planning firm. The EEOC alleged that Freeman Companies used credit history and criminal records to discriminate against against blacks, Hispanics and males. Freeman has denied the charges, according to the AP.
It welcomed Curtis Andrews, Ed.D, Ph.D, to its adjunct faculty. A few days later, the emails about faculty orientation sessions and department meetings started arriving in Andrews' email inbox. But when a college human resources officer called him three times to ask for details about his 2006 wire fraud conviction, Andrews started to suspect that the job was no longer his.
“He just said, 'We’ll be in touch,'” said Andrews. “By that point, I had filled out, I guess, 70, 80 applications. So, I knew all about the box I have to check saying I have been convicted of a crime and that the applications all say that having been convicted may not prevent you from being hired. But you do get the sense that they get one look at a conviction and they put you in the technological trash … This time, they apparently thought I was qualified, then changed their mind.”
About 65 million Americans -- that’s one in four adults -- have an arrest or conviction that can show up on a routine criminal background check. What’s found can effectively upend their search for work or put them out of a job amid one of the most difficult job markets in recent history, according to a new report released by the National Employment Law Project.
In fact, in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, criminal background checks calibrated to detect everything from arrests on dismissed or expunged charges to misdemeanor and felony convictions have become an increasingly common part of the job application process. A 2010 survey of the Society for Human Resources Management's member firms found that more than 90 percent routinely probe job applicants' backgrounds. The trade group’s members are mostly large employers.
A booming private criminal background industry has made clients of all kinds of companies doing everything from cleaning offices and delivering pizzas to sorting and delivering retail merchandise, said Maurice Emsellem, a policy co-director for the National Employment Law Project and one of the researchers behind the NELP report.
The National Association of Professional Background Screeners, a North Carolina-based industry trade group, could not be reached for comment.
“The industry of private screening firms, they make a big buck off of these practices,” Emsellem said. “They’ve got better and better at identifying and isolating employers who don’t use criminal background checks. The marketing pitch goes something like this: 'All your competitors are doing criminal background checks. Do you want to take the alleged risk?'”
What’s never mentioned is the growing body of evidence suggesting that after as few as three years –- depending on the person’s age and original crime -- people released from prison are no more likely than the general population to commit more crime, Emsellem said. But failing to find legitimate work is a major predictor of a return to jail, according to the NELP report.
That’s part of the reason why nonprofit agencies and even some corrections departments throughout the country are working to help ex-offenders find jobs.
"I think we’ve finally reached the point where people are starting to realize that if we have 3 percent of the world’s population but 20 percent of its prisoners, disqualifying that many people from work once they get out just isn’t sustainable," said Todd Berger, the managing attorney with the Rutgers School of Law-Camden’s Federal Prisoner Reentry Project. Berger oversees a law school clinic in which students seek to resolve some of the issues preventing federal parolees in the area from obtaining work.
In Maryland, Catholic Charities of Baltimore established the Our Daily Bread Employment Center four years ago. The center helps people with criminal backgrounds and limited job skills find work. The program reports serving more than 3,000 people in fiscal 2010. Since July, Our Daily Bread has helped place in jobs 296 of the 540 people who committed to the most intensive part of its program, according to Karen Heyward-West, a program manager for employment services.
Our Daily Bread informs employers about tax credits available to companies that hire ex-offenders, but Heyward-West said one of the program’s most effective tools is the mock interview. About 80 percent of the companies that send volunteer representatives to conduct mock interviews wind up offering to hire the center's clients, putting in a good word at their company for the program or referring clients to job opportunities elsewhere, she said.
“I am just going to be really honest -- there is a fear,” Heyward-West said. “There are people, employers who think we don’t want to hire those people, people with (criminal) backgrounds, people who were previously homeless. That’s a big part of what we have to overcome.”
In 1987, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the nation’s workplace discrimination watchdog agency, issued a statement that declared employer policies that disqualify any job candidates with a criminal record likely illegal. Employers are supposed to consider the age and nature of a conviction and its relevance to the job. Because a disproportionate share of African American and Latino adults have criminal records, blanket policies can effectively discriminate against groups protected by U.S. civil rights law, the commission said.
Still, the National Employment Law Project report found ample evidence of job ads that overtly exclude anyone with a criminal conviction. In a review of ads posted on Craigslist during a four-month period in five major cities, researchers found more than 300 ads in which employers stated that applicants with criminal records would not be considered. One ad for a sewer cleaning technician read, “***Do not apply with any misdemeanors/felonies.***”
“This is a major civil rights issue and a violation of the law,” NELP's Emsellem said.
There are entire industries where people with any type of criminal history –- no matter how minor or old –- will have difficulty finding work. After 9/11, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security began requiring truck drivers to undergo background checks in order to pick up or drop off loads at certain locations, such as ports. Truck drivers with a criminal record can request a waiver, but if the waiver is declined, a driver’s ability to work just about anywhere on the east or west coast is virtually destroyed, Berger of the Rutgers-Camden law clinic said. At least three or four times per semester, Berger said, his clinic hears from a truck driver who is having problems getting the necessary clearance to work at a port.
The situation defies reason, Berger said.
“You can understand how someone with an embezzlement conviction should not work in a bank or why someone with a child pornography charge should not work with kids," he said. "But you cannot understand how a drug conviction should disqualify someone from driving a truck or working as a janitor for the rest of their lives.”
A series of lawsuits filed last year against staffing companies and corporations has highlighted just how common blanket bans on hiring applicants with criminal records have become. A 2010 suit filed against First Transit, Inc. alleges that the busing company won’t hire anyone who has been convicted of a felony or served a single day in jail.
The practice isn’t limited to private employers. A class action lawsuit filed last year claims that the U.S. Census Bureau has refused to even consider applicants with criminal records for temporary Census jobs.
“Another part of the problem is the total lack of regulation on background check providers and the extremely high number of errors that pop up in their reports,” said Elizabeth Farid, deputy director of the National HIRE Network. HIRE is a New York-based nonprofit founded by the Legal Action Center, an advocacy group that opposes hiring discrimination against those with criminal records, HIV/AIDS or a history of addiction.
HIRE distributes information and advocates for policies that may expand job opportunities for people with criminal records. It also runs The Rap Sheet Workshop, in which job seekers with a criminal record are taught how to discuss their past in a frank but productive way. Participants are also shown how to identify duplications and errors and find help getting their records corrected.
Some cities, including Chicago, and states such as Michigan have implemented policies that require public agencies or private employers to stop automatically screening anyone with a criminal record out of the applicant pool.
But, there are also places like New Jersey.
Andrews called the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General after the community college backed away from his job offer. Andrews said office staff told him that they were no longer taking on criminal background check-related civil rights cases.
In an email, the New Jersey attorney general's office declined to comment on Andrew's case or its plans to pursue cases involving employers and criminal background checks.
“If I had a hard time, I don’t know what the hell some of the people who are being released form jail are supposed to do,” said Andrews, who has found an adjunct slot teaching liberal arts courses at another New Jersey community college. “People have to be able to work.”
The killing of a south Charlotte store manager - allegedly by a felon hired to work there - highlights the risks companies take when they hire an employee with a criminal record, or don't do a full background check on applicants.
The Flying Biscuit Cafe in StoneCrest shopping center faces possible fines or other penalties from the Alcohol Law Enforcement division for hiring Mark Anthony Cox, 22.
Background checks are only legally required in certain fields, such as child care and for people who work with the elderly, but the Flying Biscuit could be penalized because businesses aren't allowed to hire Felons convicted in the last three years for jobs that involve serving alcohol.
Cox is accused of stabbing 25-year-old Danielle Watson to death and robbing the store the night of Jan. 13. Prosecutors also have said they plan to charge Cox with a second count of murder in connection with Watson's unborn child.
He was released from prison in November, state records show, after serving nearly two years for robbery and breaking and entering.
A state Department of Crime Control and Public Safety spokeswoman said the Flying Biscuit's owner told ALE agents that a background check wasn't performed on Cox. The owner did tell WBTV that Cox had acknowledged a conviction during his interview. It's not clear if the owner knew the nature of the conviction.
Attempts to reach Flying Biscuit owner Hugh Bigham were unsuccessful Friday.
"A lot of small employers just don't think about background checks, or say they don't have the money," said Kenny Colbert, president of the Charlotte-based human resources group The Employers Association. He said the cost of a full screening is usually about $50, although there are North Carolina-only screens that go for as little as $10.
In the Charlotte region, Colbert said, 90 percent of companies with 500 or more employees do pre-hiring background checks, based on a survey of The Employer Association's nearly 900 member businesses. In contrast, only about 20 percent of firms with 20 or fewer employees said they do background checks.
Companies that don't conduct background checks on employees could be exposing themselves to legal liability, Colbert said. Employers lose more than 70 percent of negligent hiring lawsuits, according to statistics from background check company American DataBank.
Employers spend roughly $2 billion a year checking out employees, according to published reports. A wealth of material also is available free online, such as N.C. Department of Correction records, which detail Cox's prior conviction.
Timothy Keister, general partner at Charlotte-based background check company Total Screening Solutions, said business has been steady through the recession and recovery. He said his company does background checks and drug tests on behalf of large employers, but also for smaller employers.
"In this bad instance we have here, more than likely we would have pulled it up," said Keister, talking about Cox's past conviction.
He said his role isn't to tell employers whether to hire someone, but to enable them to decide based on the facts.
Advocates for those with criminal records point out that nearly everyone who is sentenced to prison will be released at some point, and they are less likely to be involved with further crimes if they can find legitimate work.
Employers shouldn't assume that someone with a criminal record will cause harm in the workplace, said Myra Clark, executive director of the Charlotte-based Center for Community Transitions, which provides employment and transition services to people with criminal records.
"There are a lot of people who have an encounter with the criminal justice system, and that's the only encounter they're ever going to have," she said. "There are people who make a conscious decision to change their lives."
Often, a search of someone's criminal record will show arrests for charges that may later have been dismissed. That might make it difficult for employers to determine which charges they should pay attention to, Clark said. Last year, background check company HireRight agreed to pay $28.4 million to settle claims related to not notifying people their background was being checked, and not responding to complaints of inaccurate information.
Outside of industries that are legally required to conduct background checks, there's little in the way of universal standards when it comes to employer liability, said Bernard Tisdale, managing partner for the Charlotte office of labor law firm Ogletree Deakins.
"It's all a matter of degree," said Tisdale. "It's all gray. Not everybody has got a duty to do a background check."
Aside from extreme cases - "bringing on the convicted ax murderer with ongoing psychological problems," as Tisdale put it - employer liability can vary greatly. It depends, for instance, on the type of business, and whether the employer kept the employee on despite warning signs.
Tisdale also said employers could put themselves at risk of legal action if a background check prompts them to improperly reject an applicant.
Colbert tells employers to examine how relevant and recent a prospect's criminal record is.
Background checks have figured in several high-profile N.C. cases. The estates of two women who were beaten to death at Galloway Ridge retirement home near Chapel Hill sued the facility in 2010. They claimed the facility should have done a background check on the cleaning woman convicted in their killings. The case is still in court.
But employers can be faulted even if they performed background checks, especially if those checks miss something.
The city of Charlotte has paid more than $617,000 to defend and settle lawsuits stemming from former Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Officer Marcus Jackson. He was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting women during improper traffic stops. CMPD admitted that a pre-employment screening didn't turn up a domestic violence restraining order filed by Jackson's girlfriend, which should have disqualified him.
And Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is being sued by a former South Mecklenburg High School student who claims she was sexually victimized by a band director. A proper background check, the lawsuit alleges, would have found a history of inappropriate behavior with students at previous schools. CMS said it conducted a thorough background check.
The killing of a south Charlotte store manager - allegedly by a felon hired to work there - highlights the risks companies take when they hire an employee with a criminal record, or don't do a full background check on applicants.
The Flying Biscuit Cafe in StoneCrest shopping center faces possible fines or other penalties from the Alcohol Law Enforcement division for hiring Mark Anthony Cox, 22.
Background checks are only legally required in certain fields, such as child care and for people who work with the elderly, but the Flying Biscuit could be penalized because businesses aren't allowed to hire Felons convicted in the last three years for jobs that involve serving alcohol.
Cox is accused of stabbing 25-year-old Danielle Watson to death and robbing the store the night of Jan. 13. Prosecutors also have said they plan to charge Cox with a second count of murder in connection with Watson's unborn child.
He was released from prison in November, state records show, after serving nearly two years for robbery and breaking and entering.
A state Department of Crime Control and Public Safety spokeswoman said the Flying Biscuit's owner told ALE agents that a background check wasn't performed on Cox. The owner did tell WBTV that Cox had acknowledged a conviction during his interview. It's not clear if the owner knew the nature of the conviction.
Attempts to reach Flying Biscuit owner Hugh Bigham were unsuccessful Friday.
"A lot of small employers just don't think about background checks, or say they don't have the money," said Kenny Colbert, president of the Charlotte-based human resources group The Employers Association. He said the cost of a full screening is usually about $50, although there are North Carolina-only screens that go for as little as $10.
In the Charlotte region, Colbert said, 90 percent of companies with 500 or more employees do pre-hiring background checks, based on a survey of The Employer Association's nearly 900 member businesses. In contrast, only about 20 percent of firms with 20 or fewer employees said they do background checks.
Companies that don't conduct background checks on employees could be exposing themselves to legal liability, Colbert said. Employers lose more than 70 percent of negligent hiring lawsuits, according to statistics from background check company American DataBank.
Employers spend roughly $2 billion a year checking out employees, according to published reports. A wealth of material also is available free online, such as N.C. Department of Correction records, which detail Cox's prior conviction.
Timothy Keister, general partner at Charlotte-based background check company Total Screening Solutions, said business has been steady through the recession and recovery. He said his company does background checks and drug tests on behalf of large employers, but also for smaller employers.
"In this bad instance we have here, more than likely we would have pulled it up," said Keister, talking about Cox's past conviction.
He said his role isn't to tell employers whether to hire someone, but to enable them to decide based on the facts.
Advocates for those with criminal records point out that nearly everyone who is sentenced to prison will be released at some point, and they are less likely to be involved with further crimes if they can find legitimate work.
Employers shouldn't assume that someone with a criminal record will cause harm in the workplace, said Myra Clark, executive director of the Charlotte-based Center for Community Transitions, which provides employment and transition services to people with criminal records.
"There are a lot of people who have an encounter with the criminal justice system, and that's the only encounter they're ever going to have," she said. "There are people who make a conscious decision to change their lives."
Often, a search of someone's criminal record will show arrests for charges that may later have been dismissed. That might make it difficult for employers to determine which charges they should pay attention to, Clark said. Last year, background check company HireRight agreed to pay $28.4 million to settle claims related to not notifying people their background was being checked, and not responding to complaints of inaccurate information.
Outside of industries that are legally required to conduct background checks, there's little in the way of universal standards when it comes to employer liability, said Bernard Tisdale, managing partner for the Charlotte office of labor law firm Ogletree Deakins.
"It's all a matter of degree," said Tisdale. "It's all gray. Not everybody has got a duty to do a background check."
Aside from extreme cases - "bringing on the convicted ax murderer with ongoing psychological problems," as Tisdale put it - employer liability can vary greatly. It depends, for instance, on the type of business, and whether the employer kept the employee on despite warning signs.
Tisdale also said employers could put themselves at risk of legal action if a background check prompts them to improperly reject an applicant.
Colbert tells employers to examine how relevant and recent a prospect's criminal record is.
Background checks have figured in several high-profile N.C. cases. The estates of two women who were beaten to death at Galloway Ridge retirement home near Chapel Hill sued the facility in 2010. They claimed the facility should have done a background check on the cleaning woman convicted in their killings. The case is still in court.
But employers can be faulted even if they performed background checks, especially if those checks miss something.
The city of Charlotte has paid more than $617,000 to defend and settle lawsuits stemming from former Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Officer Marcus Jackson. He was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting women during improper traffic stops. CMPD admitted that a pre-employment screening didn't turn up a domestic violence restraining order filed by Jackson's girlfriend, which should have disqualified him.
And Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is being sued by a former South Mecklenburg High School student who claims she was sexually victimized by a band director. A proper background check, the lawsuit alleges, would have found a history of inappropriate behavior with students at previous schools. CMS said it conducted a thorough background check.
LOUIS SAVARESE, the son and grandson of butchers, was raised to know the difference between a rib-eye roast and a cross-rib roast, but he is the first in his family to appreciate the finer points of cow hooves and chicken feet.
The Savarese family has run Michael’s Prime Meats on Nostrand Avenue in Flatbush, Brooklyn, since 1931. As the neighborhood changed from a mix of Irish, Jewish and Italian families to a solidly Caribbean enclave, the fare has changed as well.
“Forty years ago, we wouldn’t have a cow foot,” Mr. Savarese said, pointing to a bucket of them. Goat meat, oxtail, Jamaican curry powder — these are the gradual changes that have allowed Michael’s to stay open as so many of its neighbors have closed to make way for wig stores and West Indian bakeries. “We’re the last one,” Mr. Savarese said, slicing into a side of beef.
In a city where Jewish neighborhoods turn Puerto Rican, then African and then something else, Mr. Savarese belongs to the sparse ranks of holdouts who have held firm amid the city’s churn, even as newcomers have remade the streets around them. They dig in for many reasons: love of place, loyalty, optimism or sheer stubbornness. Nostalgia grounds some; inertia others. But all of them can still imagine, as they look out on their reshaped blocks, the neighbors and businesses that left decades ago.
At Michael’s, a woman carrying two shopping bags pushed open the door on a recent afternoon and asked, in a Caribbean lilt, for the price of the oxtail. It was $6.29 a pound, she was told. “Lord have mercy,” she said, backing out the door.
Mr. Savarese’s disparate tribe of holdouts includes an Irish bar owner in Brooklyn’s version of Chinatown, an artist hanging on in a zone of shoppers and tourists, and a drum maker who still creates them by hand. Taken together, they offer a twist on New York’s famous promise of reinvention. Theirs are stories of staying put.
“I call it the diehard effect,” said Joseph J. Salvo, the director of the population division of the Department of City Planning. “There are people who will not leave. Irrespective of the change that is occurring, they regard that as their home.”
“The smaller the number gets,” Mr. Salvo added, “the stronger the diehard effect.”
ONCE upon a time — actually, about 40 years ago — two brothers from Ireland bought two popular bars in Brooklyn, where longshoremen and firefighters played darts and bought their friends round after round. The families still own the bars, and the brothers, if they were still alive, would recognize much about them: shamrock posters, weathered dartboards, old men nursing morning beers.
But thanks to New York’s fickle demographic tides, the two bars have found themselves in very different worlds, with very different fortunes.
The Soccer Tavern, in Sunset Park, has flourished, adopted by the Chinese community around it. Meanwhile, the Lief Erickson in Bay Ridge — its name a vestige of the Norwegians who settled in the neighborhood — is languishing amid a growing population of Arabs who frown on alcohol.
“Chinese people drink,” said Julie Walsh, owner of the Lief Erickson, which sat nearly empty on a recent afternoon. “If every Middle Easterner around here would be spending money, the place would be booming.”
Over in Sunset Park, the changes are impossible to miss. Census data show that the area’s Irish population fell by half, to about 1,347, from 1980 to 2009, while the number of Chinese grew more than tenfold, to over 26,000.
But even more striking evidence can be found among the dart trophies that line the back wall opposite Jimmy Gillick, daytime bartender and keeper of the house corned-beef-hash recipe. A scratched plaque from the NYC Dart League lists the champions for 1998-99: Farley, Luno, O’Sullivan, Connolly, Hennessy, Price.
The winter 2009 trophy: Mei, Chan, Zhu, Manczuk, Farley.
“When we walk into other bars, they say, ‘Here comes the Chirish team,’ ” Brendan Farley, the bar’s owner, said in a thick brogue.
Other changes have crept in. A Chinese calendar hangs on the wall. Chinese New Year is one of the bar’s biggest nights. On Christmas, the tavern hosts an international pot luck dinner; the Chinese regulars bring in a whole roasted pig, and Mr. Gillick cooks up his hash.
Irish or Chinese, his customers speak a common language of tipped glasses and back slaps. In their own dive-bar way, they have broadened one another’s worlds.
“I didn’t even know what bok choy was,” said John Bleszcz, a retired city sanitation worker, sitting at the bar the other morning.
“It’s a mild cabbage,” answered Steve Constantin, a few stools down. “Or a mild radish.”
About a mile away, Mr. Farley’s cousin, Ms. Walsh, waited for customers, who rarely trickle in from the nearby mosques, halal butchers and hookah shops.
“We got them, and they don’t drink and they put people like me out of business,” she said. “That’s what happens.”
WHEN Ivy Brown moved into a fourth-floor loft in the meatpacking district of Manhattan in 1985, the blocks around her building were a desolate precinct of transvestite prostitutes, sex clubs and slaughterhouses.
“Nobody lived here,” Ms. Brown, 49, said. “It was nasty. It was gritty. It was gross.”
Friends and family were afraid to visit her apartment, on Hudson Street near 14th Street. Her electricity was spotty. But over the years, this self-described “nice Jewish girl” grew to love her adopted neighborhood, where she cycled through 17 roommates and was free to make art and, eventually, open a gallery that she still operates in her living room.
She gave her old dresses to the prostitutes, who made sure she got home safe. She befriended the bouncers and stopped eating meat, even if she grew to almost like the smell of animal blood. She was home.
But Ms. Brown, a birdlike woman with a pixie haircut, stylish glasses and always-moving hands, has spent the past decade watching her neighborhood slowly vanish. “Things start to disappear,” she said. “We lost the laundromat and the shoemaker and the hardware store.”
What was once the Locker Room, a sex club where patrons checked their clothes at the door, is now a cosmopolitan bar with pressed-tin ceilings. J’s Hangout, a gay club in her building into which men used to vanish for days, is now a splashy Mexican restaurant with blaring dance music and tacos that cost $18. Stretch Hummers and off-duty bankers have replaced the meat trucks and swingers. The Whitney Museum of American Art is moving nearby.
Ms. Brown said she used to feel as if she were living in a surreal movie. From her window, she could see butchers “in white coats covered in blood, warming their hands over fires in oil cans as pig carcasses are flying by.”
Now she has a view of the Apple store, where lines wind around the block whenever a new gadget is released. “I’m used to seeing some things outside,” she said, “but not white people in sleeping bags.”
She has become something of a hero to stalwarts; a blog dedicated to “Vanishing New York” has cataloged her memories. She has thought about moving, but not seriously; her rent-stabilized apartment and its 18 windows would be impossible to match.
Ms. Brown pines for the old days — “I cannot believe I miss that stench!” — but she understands the futility of New York nostalgia. “If you embrace this city, you have to embrace the fact that it’s not going to stay the same,” she said.
Instead, she is waiting for the neighborhood to change again. “Somewhere else is going to be the area, and everyone will go there,” she said.
And until then, she added, “I’m still holding on.”
AT this year’s Miss Norway competition in Bay Ridge, only 2 of the 13 contestants were from Brooklyn. They both lost.
A generation ago, not only would the entire slate have hailed from the borough, but most would probably have been from the Bay Ridge neighborhood, the hub for Norwegians in New York, said Arlene Rutuelo, a pageant organizer who doubles as the neighborhood’s de facto cultural ambassador.
Ms. Rutuelo and her mother, Helene Bakke, run Nordic Delicacies, a business that has become much more than just a shop for cod liver oil and lingonberry jam.
As the neighborhood’s Norwegian-American population plummeted, to 1,135 from a high of tens of thousands around World War II, according to the most recent census estimates, and nearly every other Norwegian business in Bay Ridge closed, Nordic Delicacies became a Scandinavian clearinghouse. People call requesting recipes for dishes their grandmothers used to make. They ask for the date of the annual parade, and for the phone number of the Swedish Consulate. So many people asked for souvenirs that Ms. Rutuelo set aside a counter, next to the cold cuts, for miniature flags and traditional Scandinavian troll dolls.
“We’re the official Norwegian information center,” she said.
When the store opened in 1987, the plan was for Ms. Bakke to cook the head cheese and salted lamb rib, using recipes from her childhood in Kvinesdal, Norway, and for Ms. Rutuelo to run the business. Bay Ridge “was a Norwegian village,” Ms. Rutuelo recalled. “Every business you could think of had a Norwegian.”
Today, her neighbors include a falafel shop, a sushi bar, two Polish diners, a Russian bodega, a Mexican grocery and an Indian restaurant.
On a recent afternoon, a customer walked into Nordic Delicacies and eyed the pickled herring, next to the fish balls in brine, before settling on the pea soup.
“I wouldn’t have thought 25 years ago that we would be the last one left,” Ms. Bakke said. “I never would have imagined.”
IN Cali Rivera’s workshop in the South Bronx, layers of smoke and grime that are older than his grandchildren cover the heaps of jumbled tools he has used to make countless drums of every pitch and size for more than 40 years.
His business, J. C. R. Percussion, has stayed open year after year despite pressure from all sides. Development around the new Yankee Stadium threatened to push him out, but he stayed firm — and rooted for the Mets. When rents rose and old neighbors left, he dug in even deeper.
But his lifelong battle extends beyond the borders of Highbridge, a neighborhood of bodegas and fried-plantain shops, to the economy of cookie-cutter factories, outsourced labor and even modernity itself. In an era when youngsters play the drums on iPhone apps and pop music is made on laptops, Mr. Rivera, hunched over a welder’s flame in a smoke-filled closet, is a holdout against time.
“Everything you see here, I put it together,” he said, surrounded by cowbells, bongos and faded photographs tacked to the wall. “It was created by me!”
Most of his competitors have their drums made in factories overseas, but Mr. Rivera’s instruments are made in his basement workshop, where his assistant clatters and bangs to a blaring salsa soundtrack.
“If you don’t do it by hand, it doesn’t go coo-coo,” Mr. Rivera said, smacking a cowbell he made that morning. “It goes blegh-blegh.”
The neighborhood has changed as many Puerto Ricans have left, to be replaced by Dominicans, Mexicans and Africans. But new neighbors have made for new customers. Downstairs, Mr. Rivera’s assistant worked one day on a set of Ashiko drums for an African musician.
“I’m not going to be rich, never,” Mr. Rivera, 61, said. “But it satisfies me.”
His spit-and-sweat operation seems galaxies away from 21st-century New York. His drumheads, stored in a bathroom, are the stretched skins of mules and goats from Venezuela. To loosen them up, he soaks the skins in a bucket in another bathroom, beneath the urinal.
Mr. Rivera starts most sentences with a curse word and ends them with a wheezy laugh. His stoop serves as a local clubhouse where men drink beer and tell jokes in Spanish.
Mr. Rivera was born in Puerto Rico and came to Highbridge in the late 1950s. He began making cowbells in his apartment, then switched to a studio on Ogden Avenue. He took over his current space, once an Irish bar, about two decades ago.
Business has been slow lately, and his daughter has been nagging him to give up the shop. But orders still come in, and customers still stop by to play the timbales and discuss salsa.
“This is the only place I got,” Mr. Rivera said. “This is what made me happy. We’ll keep banging.”
The average fair market value of top-tier college football and men's basketball players is over $100,000 each, and the athletes are entitled to at least a portion of that, a new report from an advocacy group argues.
Instead of getting what they're worth, the players receive athletic scholarships that don't cover the full cost of attending school, leaving many of them living below the poverty line, says the report, "The Price of Poverty in Big Time College Sport."
A national college athletes' advocacy group and a sports management professor calculate in the report that if college sports shared their revenues the way pro sports do, the average Football Bowl Subdivision player would be worth $121,000 per year, while the average basketball player at that level would be worth $265,000.
The Associated Press obtained a copy of the report ahead of its official release, scheduled for Tuesday.
Ramogi Huma, a former UCLA linebacker who heads the National College Players Association, wrote the report with Drexel University professor Ellen J. Staurowsky. The association is an advocacy group for college athletes which Huma says has more than 14,000 members - about half of whom are currently enrolled.
Huma and Staurowsky argue that the players should receive a portion of new revenues, like TV contracts, to be put in an "educational lockbox." Players could tap those funds to help cover educational costs if they exhaust their athletic eligibility before they graduate - or receive the money with no strings attached upon graduating. They also propose that athletes be free to seek commercial deals, such as endorsements, with some of the money from that going to the lockbox, and the rest available for the athlete's immediate use.
They also say that schools should pay for costs beyond the tuition, student fees and room and board covered by athletic scholarships. The report calculates the shortfall for the full cost of attending college - when things such as clothing and emergency trips home are added in - at $952 to $6,127, depending on the college. That leaves students on full athletic scholarships living below the poverty line at around 85 percent of the schools, the report claims, by comparing the value of the scholarship's room and board to the federal poverty guideline for a single individual.
Huma acknowledged that calculation does not take into account financial assistance students might get from home, or summer jobs, but he said most athletes are pressured to attend voluntary summer workouts, making it hard to get outside work.
The report calls for action from Congress to achieve some of these goals, arguing that federal intervention is necessary because college presidents aren't in a position to take meaningful reform. The NCAA, which puts the athletes' amateur status at the center of its mission, would oppose much of what the report proposes.
In a statement Monday, the NCAA said it had not yet reviewed the report, but that President Mark Emmert and university presidents made it clear at last month's retreat - a meeting called in the wake of a run of scandals in college football - that they were committed to evaluating an increase to grants in aid that would cover the full cost of attending college. The NCAA added that the Committee on Academic Performance is meeting this week to discuss the issue, and will make recommendations to the Division I Board of Directors next month.
"Dr. Emmert has been similarly clear that paying student-athletes a salary is in no way on the table," the NCAA said.
The report argues that playing big-time football and basketball is a full-time job, and an NCAA study released this year backs that up. It found that players in the Football Bowl Subdivision - the highest level - reported spending 43.3 hours per week during the season in athletic time commitment, while Division I men's basketball players reported 39 hours a week in season.
The report said that players at the most powerful programs are worth far in excess of even the average athlete. The report estimates that Duke's basketball players are worth the most, at around $1 million each, while Texas' football players top that sport at $513,000 each.
Officials at Texas and Duke did not return email and phone messages Monday.
The report argues that the main beneficiaries of preserving the current system for athletes are coaches, athletic directors, conference commissioners and bowl directors, citing, for example, the multimillion-dollar salaries of several high-profile coaches.
"The NCAA's definition of amateurism has proven to be priceless to obscenely paid coaches, athletics administrators, and colleges but has inflicted poverty on college athletes," the report charges. It found that some football coaches' bonuses alone were worth more than the entire scholarship shortfall for their teams.
Huma and Staurowsky argue that compensating players would go a long way to eliminating the black market, in which athletes have violated rules for accepting things of value.
"Rules that prohibit valuable players from accepting benefits above and beyond their scholarships set athletic programs and their players up for failure," they say, citing the case of former USC receiver R. Jay Soward, who told Sports Illustrated last year that he took money from NFL agent Josh Luchs because his scholarship didn't cover his food and rent costs.
"I would do it again," Soward said. "I have four sons, and if somebody offered my son money in college and it meant he didn't have to be hungry, I would tell him to take it."
The recent scandal at Ohio State involved players trading memorabilia for cash and tattoos from a man at the center of a federal investigation. And the University of Miami is being investigated by the NCAA for the relationship a rogue booster and Ponzi scheme artist had with players and coaches.
Huma, who graduated from UCLA in 1999, said that he struggled to get by on his full athletic scholarship. Even though the school was providing him with three meals a day, he said, he needed to eat five or six times a day because of the calories he was burning playing football. And he wasn't able to get any support from home.
"I got by taking toilet paper and soap at hotels, and taking out the credit card," he recalled, adding that he had $6,000 in credit card debt when he graduated. The school did provide him with team-issued clothing, but not all of it was appropriate for everyday use, he said.
"The bottom line is that players are misled into thinking that their labor will fully pay their way through school, and they are definitely earning much less than their fair market value," he said.
It's NCAA tournament time, and once again the Texas Longhorns' men's basketball team has a spot at the dance. All over the state fans will be slipping on burnt orange and looking for super-sophomore Jordan Hamilton and teammates to entertain them and erase the memory of last year's first-round exit. Televisions will hum, merchandise will be sold and the business of college basketball will come to a close for the year. Last season, the men's basketball program generated $15.6 million in revenue.
If this were the NBA, in which players get 57 percent of league revenue, the 13 scholarship players on last year's roster would have been paid an average of $684,102 each.
University of Texas football brought in $93.5 million in 2009, with quarterback Colt McCoy leading the Longhorns to the national championship game. Punch the numbers. NFL players get 58 percent of league revenues. If McCoy and his 80 teammates on scholarship were to divvy up that share of the pie, the average cut would be $672,676.
Instead, each athlete, by NCAA rule, could receive no more than tuition, fees, room, board and books -- valued at $18,172 for in-state students, $35,924 if for out-of-state.
"I personally think that it's the greatest injustice in American sports," said Andrew Schwarz, a Bay Area antitrust economist who has studied college sports finances. "We have these people that everyone loves to watch on TV and in person. We adore them, we adulate them, but we do not let them benefit from all of the money that they generate in anywhere near the way they would if there was a market system in place."
One of the top jobs of new NCAA president Mark Emmert, as the representative for the presidents of the leading universities who hired him, is to preserve the lid on player costs, while letting the market work its magic in just about every other aspect of college sports, from licensing fees to sponsorship deals to television contracts. The NCAA men's basketball tournament that begins Tuesday will mark the start of a new 14-year, $10.8 billion deal with CBS Sports and Turner Broadcasting.
Emmert has several tools at his disposal, in confronting Schwarz's argument.
Chief among those is the claim of poverty -- that NCAA programs could not afford to offer a hotshot player more than the value of a scholarship. "Fourteen schools out of the 1,100 last year actually had positive cash flow out of intercollegiate athletics," Emmert said, one of his talking points he shares with audiences across the nation when defending the NCAA's economic model.
That number (14) comes from the NCAA's most recent analysis of athletic department finances at member institutions, based on data supplied by schools for the 2008-09 school year. The NCAA notes that 25 schools in each of the prior two years generated more revenue than expenses, before the nation's economic recession took hold.
But the NCAA understates the amount of revenue that flows into athletic departments.
An ESPN review of the financial statements submitted by individual schools to the NCAA, Department of Education and the Internal Revenue Service found that half of all athletic departments in the Football Bowl Subdivision -- 60 of the 120 -- brought in more money than they spent during the 2008-09 year (and another 21 broke even). The organization arrives at its lower number of 14 schools in the black by not counting what it calls "allocated revenue," which it considers direct and indirect support provided by the university, student fees and direct government support. That's almost $10 million in excluded revenue at the median FBS school, according to the NCAA report.
The NCAA stopped counting allocated revenue in its 2004 report, according to NCAA spokesman Erik Christiansen. "College presidents wanted to know the real cost of intercollegiate athletics without any institutional support," he wrote in an email to ESPN.
Schwarz considers that method to be misleading because any support that flows the other way -- from the athletic department to the university -- counts as an expense in the eyes of the NCAA. Some athletic departments, for instance, give money annually to their school. Further, Schwarz argued, any payments made by universities to athletic departments could be seen as marketing fees, given that sports teams provide enormous publicity for universities.
"The NCAA wants to say these programs are horribly expensive and there's not enough money for them, but on other hand they admit they're valuable to the campus," he said. "They provide advantages in fundraising and help with admissions by driving up the quality of applicants. Those benefits don't show up on the balance sheet."
On the expense side, there are also caveats. NCAA member schools provide $2 billion a year in athletic aid to students, Emmert said. But most of those costs stay within the university; it's one department, athletics, transferring money to another, such as the bookstore. Tuition, the largest chunk of any athletic scholarship, carries no real hard cost, as it's just a seat in a classroom (though it could count as an opportunity cost, if it's true that seat would have been taken by a non-athlete paying full tuition).
Some athletic departments are showing signs of financial distress, including those at the BCS level at which entertainment dollars flow most freely. The University of California-Berkeley recently announced it is cutting baseball and men's gymnastics, in response a budget crisis in the university system that will reduce institutional support for athletics. And among the weakest programs in the FBS, football and men's basketball teams -- the breadwinners elsewhere -- often fail to cover even their own costs, much less those of other teams such as softball or tennis that lose money, according to the NCAA.
But most athletic departments are rebounding nicely from the recession. The NCAA hasn't yet released its report on the 2009-10 financial statements submitted by schools, but ESPN's independent review of the records shows that 76 of the FBS schools had higher revenues than expenses last year, up from 60 the year before. In all, 99 schools either broke even or had revenues in excess of expenses.
At the top, the rich keep getting richer. The most prominent football programs generate surpluses in the tens of millions of dollars. Texas set the pace in 2009 with $87.6 million in revenue, then added another $6 million on top of that in 2010 by advancing to the BCS National Championship Game, in which the Longhorns lost to Alabama. With bonuses, Longhorns football coach Mack Brown made a record $6.4 million that season and his assistants another $3.6 million, according to the audited financial statement the school submitted to the NCAA. The team splurged on travel, dropping $2.4 million, and other costs. Still, the Longhorns couldn't spend anywhere near the cash they generated. Total team expenses came to $23.8 million -- for a tidy surplus of $70.1 million. After all other athletic department expenses were paid, $13.1 million remained.
More largesse is in the pipeline. In January, ESPN committed $300 million over 20 years to the Longhorns to set up a cable channel dedicated to University of Texas content.
DeLoss Dodds, Texas athletic director, declined to respond to requests for an interview. Longhorns spokesman Nick Voinis said that while Texas has the cash to pay athletes above the value of their scholarships, the school would be against having that option.
"I'm not sure what athletic director would be in favor of that," Voinis said. "Where do you draw the line? How much do you pay them? Not that many schools could afford it."
The idea of being able to offer a blue-chip recruit a scholarship, plus some, terrifies Ross Bjork, athletic director at Western Kentucky University. "That could be a scary day because then you'd get into the have-and-have-not discussion, where our budget is $20 million and their budget is $100 million. They can pay their athletes more."
Karl Benson, commissioner of the Western Athletic Conference, invoked the possibility of implications from Title IX. "The day that the NCAA permits pay-for-play, if it's done for only a certain class of student-athlete -- football and men's basketball -- there will be lawsuits that follow from other sports. The gender equity issues would be massive unless you paid every student-athlete, regardless of sport or gender, the same amount."
Schwarz dismissed those fears as unfounded, noting that Title IX, a federal law designed to promote equitable educational opportunities, does not require that schools spend equally on men and women. Texas spent $8.7 million on men's basketball last year, $4.3 million on women's basketball, a gender disparity reflected in overall spending for the athletic department, too. Yet, Texas stays out of Title IX hot water because half of its athletes, like half of its campus undergraduates, are women.
As for Bjork's expressed concern, Schwarz said the glamour schools get the best talent today, even without the ability to offer more than an athletic scholarship.
"Right now, we see big programs beating up on small programs for the first few weeks of college football season, so we already have that," he said. "It is just that the people on the big team would have, I don't know, $40,000 a year in their pocket and the people on the small teams might just be getting a scholarship. But it wouldn't change the allocation of talent much at all when it is all done. There might be a little bit of shifting in conferences. Some schools might say, 'we want a scale down and compete against other schools that do not want to pay quite as much.' But we see conference shifting all the time. Right now, all sorts of schools switch to other conferences for money reasons.
"Any time there is a big change in the system, it is hard. Athletic departments would have to actually do some math, and that could be challenging, but they are smart people. Our universities are filled with lots of smart people that can solve all sorts of math problems. And in the end, we will have this great American tradition without the sort of indentured servitude that we have now."
Won't happen on his watch, Emmert insisted.
"They are not employees, they are students," he said. "We want them to be students, and we expect them to be good students. That's really the line in the sand that I'm drawing. This isn't about the [financial] resources. This is about, 'Do they work for us? Or are they our students?' They're our students."
The NCAA has long been aggressive at defending legal challenges to its control over athletes, and Emmert appeared to be preparing for the next assault. Upon joining the NCAA in October, the former University of Washington president replaced longtime general counsel Elsa Cole with an outside litigator, Donald Remy, who he hailed in the news announcement for "his commitment to amateur athletics."
Emmert also has some judicial language on his side. In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled against the NCAA in a case that would allow schools to negotiate their own television contracts. But Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the majority opinion, dropped in one line that was unrelated to the central legal issue, stating, "In order to preserve the character and quality of the 'product,' athletes must not be paid, must be required to attend class, and the like."
Schwarz said he has worked with plaintiff's lawyers who want to test that language but have gotten intimidated. He said he wonders if it's ripe for a challenge now that Stevens and rest of the '84 court have retired. He also takes heart that the NCAA wasn't very good at predicting the future, if it lost the case. Its lawyers argued the games would be hurt. But just the opposite happened. College sports have never been more popular.
"Imagine a world in which paying the athletes wasn't a problem, wasn't an infraction, and what those [NCAA] enforcement people were doing was actually making sure the people in sports programs were students," he said. "With one cross-out of one NCAA bylaw, you could free up a lot of resources and get rid of a lot of bureaucracy. You could let the market prevail and find ways to really achieve the ideal of the student-athlete."
In the meantime, college athletes will look to achieve in the ideal basketball tourney.
Amid a still struggling economy, more people in America fell below the poverty line last year, according to new census data released Tuesday.
The nation's poverty rate rose to 15.1% in 2010, its highest level since 1993. In 2009, 14.3% of people in America were living in poverty.
The results are not surprising given the economy," said Paul Osterman, author of "Good Jobs America," and a labor economist at MIT. "You would expect with so many people unemployed, the poverty rate would go up. It's just another sign of what a difficult time this is for so many people."
About 46.2 million people are now considered in poverty, 2.6 million more than last year.
The government defines the poverty line as income of $22,314 a year for a family of four and $11,139 for an individual. The Office of Management and Budget updates the poverty line each year to account for inflation.
How the rich became the über rich
Middle-class wealth falls: For middle-class families, income fell in 2010. The median household income was $49,445, down slightly from $49,777 the year before.
Median income has changed very little over the last 30 years. Adjusted for inflation, the middle-income family only earned 11% more in 2010 than they did in 1980, while the richest 5% in America saw their incomes surge 42%.
"Over that period of time, it's not that the American economy has necessarily performed badly," Osterman said. "As a country we're richer over that period, but there's been this real shift in where the income has gone, and it's to the top."
Amplifying that trend, the bottom 60% of households saw their income fall last year, while households making $100,000 or more enjoyed a rise in income.
More children in poverty: The poverty rate for children under age 18 increased to 22% in 2010, meaning more than 1 in 5 children in America are living in poverty.
Meanwhile, the poverty rate for adults ages 18 to 64 rose to 13.7%.
For people 65 and older, the poverty rate was barely changed at 9%.
Following the recession, fewer young adults are moving out of their parents' homes. Last year, 5.9 million young adults age 25 to 34 still lived with their folks, compared with 4.7 million before the recession.
Race and gender factors: By race, the poverty rate was lowest for non-Hispanic whites at 9.9%.
Blacks had the highest rate at 27.4%, followed by people of Hispanic origin at 26.6%. Asians had a poverty rate of 12.1%.
About 14% of men were below the poverty line, compared to 16.2% of women.
Families headed by a married couple had only a 6.2% poverty rate, whereas families with a single mother had a 31.6% rate, and families with a single father had a 15.8% rate.
South hit the hardest: For the fifth year in a row, Mississippi households were the poorest in the country, this time with a median income of $37,985. New Hampshire households had the highest median income, at $66,707.
Among different regions of the country, the South had the highest poverty rate at 16.9%, while the Northeast had the lowest rate at 12.8%.
The poverty rate was 13.9% in the Midwest and 15.3% in the West.
The income used to calculate poverty status includes earnings, workman's compensation, unemployment insurance, Social Security, veteran's payments, pensions, interest and dividends, and just about every other source of cash.
It does not, however, include capital gains, so, theoretically, millionaires could qualify as poor if they lived solely by selling off investments.
Non-cash benefits, such as food stamps or subsidized rents, also do not count as income.
More people are uninsured: The census report also contained data on health insurance, showing people lacking medical benefits climbed to 49.9 million last year, up from 49 million in 2009.
Overall, about 16.3% of people in America were uninsured in 2010, statistically unchanged from 2009.
Bank of America’s chief executive, Brian T. Moynihan, vowed on Monday to eliminate $5 billion in costs annually by 2014, a move that will eliminate at least 30,000 jobs at the company, which employs 288,000 people and is the largest bank in the United States.
In a widely anticipated speech at an investor conference organized by Barclays in New York, Mr. Moynihan outlined his plan to make Bank of America, the largest bank in the United States, more efficient and profitable even if that means sacrificing scale. “We don’t have to be the biggest company out there,” he said. “We have to be the best.”
While he did not specify the number of jobs that might be involved, the company announced shortly after his speech that 30,000 jobs are to be eliminated under the company’s Project New BAC cost-cutting initiative. The initial recommendations by the architects of New BAC, which takes its name from the company’s ticker symbol, were reviewed last Thursday and Friday by the company’s top management in Charlotte, N.C.
“As the decisions are implemented, employment levels in the areas under review during Phase I are expected to be reduced by approximately 30,000 jobs over the next few years,” the bank said in a statement. “The company expects that attrition and the elimination of appropriate unfilled roles will be a significant part of the anticipated decrease in jobs.”
The first part of New BAC involves the consumer banking operations of the company, as well as its home loan, technology and support operations. Other parts of the business, including Bank of America Merrill Lynch, will be reviewed in the second phase, which begins in October and continues through March 2012.
Out of $73 billion in annual expenses, Mr. Moynihan aims to cut at least $5 billion by shutting some of its 63 data centers, eliminating overlapping deposit systems and trimming layers of back-office staff accumulated during the acquisition binge undertaken by his predecessor, Ken Lewis.
“It’s taking out work we don’t need to do any more, and getting it out of the company,” he said. “We’re a much simpler company than we were 24 months ago.”
While the speech fell short of the bold blueprint many analysts and investors had been hoping for, Bank of America shares rose in early trading by 1.1 percent to $7.06.
It has been a very busy summer for Mr. Moynihan. In the last few weeks, the company has announced a management shake-up, a $5 billion investment by Warren E. Buffett and the sale of more than $15 billion in assets.
None of those major news events have propped up the bank’s battered stock, which is down nearly 30 percent since the beginning of August.
During the question-and-answer part of the session, Mr. Moynihan was asked whether Bank of America had been asked by the federal regulators to raise capital at the time of Mr. Buffett’s investment. Mr. Moynihan said they had not.
A shareholder asked him: “Can you or would you bankrupt Countrywide?” Mounting losses at Countrywide Financial are still plaguing the bank, three years after Bank of America bought it for $2.8 billion when Countrywide nearly collapsed into bankruptcy as its financing dried up.
Mr. Moynihan answered that in dealing with the troubled mortgage giant, the bank “looks at all our options on everything.”
When the questioner followed up by asking Mr. Moynihan if he was saying that bankrupting Countrywide was a viable option, Mr. Moynihan again demurred. “There are options around all this stuff that we continue to work on,” he said.
Angry investors are trying to force Bank of America, and other large banks, to buy back billions of dollars worth of mortgages that have defaulted, arguing that the home loans did not conform to the original underwriting standards or were originated with little evidence of adequate assets on the part of borrowers.
In other cases, investors including the federal government and the insurance giant A.I.G. want to recover tens of billions of dollars from the big banks for losses on securities they assembled from now-troubled subprime mortgages.
Then there is the investigation by state attorneys general into mortgage servicing abuses, which could cost the big banks more than $20 billion in a proposed settlement that so far they’ve been unable to finalize. “The attorneys generals settlement is part of what can move us forward, but the settlement has to be reasonable for the company and reasonable for shareholders,” Mr. Moynihan said.
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