Andrew L. Yarrow is a senior research advisor at Oxfam America who studies inequality and low-wage work in the US.

The Labor Department’s monthly jobs numbers, released earlier this month, suggest an economy on the mend, with unemployment down to 7.7 percent, the lowest level since Barack Obama took office. While the President can rightfully claim that nearly five million private-sector jobs have been created on his watch, what we don’t see in the numbers is that a disturbingly high proportion of these are less than desirable jobs paying less than livable wages.

The good news is that America, unlike many European economies, is creating jobs; and the number of high-skill, higher-wage jobs is going up. However, the bad news is that the majority of new jobs in the US are low-wage, and the US has a much higher proportion of low-wage jobs than other rich countries.

Three of five jobs created between the summer of 2009 and the summer of 2012 pay less than $13.83 per hour, while only one of five jobs created during this period pay more than $21.14 per hour, according to the National Employment Law Project. Indeed, despite much rhetoric about bringing back manufacturing jobs or creating highly skilled, well-paying “jobs of the future” in science and technology fields, the stark reality is that a growing share of the workforce is being consigned to low-wage jobs.

While definitions of low-wage work vary, by most estimates, one-quarter to one-third of the nation’s 143 million workers are in occupations that barely lift them out of poverty. These are the store clerks, health aides, restaurant workers, laborers, and others who earn, on average, about $10 per hour or just $20,000 a year (usually less).

These workers are also much less likely than higher-paid workers to receive benefits or have job security. Only 34 percent of workers in the bottom quarter of the wage distribution receive employer-provided health insurance, and only 29 percent get paid sick leave—compared with 92 percent and 84 percent among those in the top quarter, according to the Labor Department.

And most of these workers need steady and significant incomes: they are neither young nor single. Eighty-eight percent are over 20 and most are over 30; 28 percent are parents of school-age children. In the 16 million families headed by parents who earn less than $11.50 an hour and may have irregular schedules, children certainly feel the effects; they may face hours without parental supervision and support.

The increase in low-wage jobs and the decrease of mid-wage jobs are contributing to the nation’s increasing division between the prosperous and the poor (and near poor). And just as America has become the world’s most economically unequal rich nation, it also has become the country with the highest proportion of low-wage jobs. Whereas one-quarter of US jobs are low-wage, just 11 percent of French jobs and 8 percent of Italian jobs were classified as low wage by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Despite the cheery talk about how the US can create millions of well-paying jobs if only we invest in education, present trends do not augur well. Without dramatic changes in our economy, many jobs of the future are likely to pay poorly. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the proportion of low-wage jobs will remain unchanged in 2020. And the Labor Department projects that the two fastest-growing occupations of the 2010s are personal care aides and home health aides, whose median annual wages stand at about $20,000.

While raising the minimum wage would not solve these problems, it could help. The federal minimum wage stands at $7.25 an hour—40 percent below what it was in 1968 in inflation-adjusted terms. If it were raised to the 1968 level, it would jump to $10.55 an hour, and would dramatically benefit nearly 30 million Americans. The Rebuild America Act, introduced this year by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Ia.), would raise the minimum wage to $9.80 and index it to inflation. While this measure stands little chance of passing, our political debate needs to go beyond mere calls for “creating jobs” to creating jobs that pay livable wages.

Every Sunday, my wife and I make a pot of coffee and settle in to watch our favorite political shows—“Sunday Morning” on CBS and “Meet the Press” on NBC. Every week, we cringe when it goes to commercial and we hear the Zydeco music kick in: here comes BP, trumpeting the message that the Gulf of Mexico is not only doing A-OK, but better than ever two and a half years after the largest offshore oil spill in our nation’s history. In one, Mike Ulster, a BP executive handling cleanup and damages, cites BP’s commitment of billions of dollars to ecological and economic restoration and says, “People in the Gulf measure commitment by what’s getting done.” In terms of paying those who lost income in the spill, BP, has paid billions to date in economic damages and is on the verge reaching a settlement with many parties, despite vocal concerns from many in the fishing industry about not accounting for unknowns of long-term impacts.

But in addressing ecological restoration, the reality is that BP just isn’t measuring up to its commitments.

It looked good at first. BP committed a down payment of $1 billion to start the work of repairing the ecological damage wrought by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. However, over a year and a half later, BP has approved only $66 million in ecological restoration projects—less than seven percent of the promised money. At this rate, it would take about 25 years to “measure up” and fulfill their commitment.

And make no mistake: timing is critical. We still don’t know the extent of the damage, but we do know that we need to act fast to mitigate the long-lasting effects and restore the vital resources of the Gulf Coast. For example, Prince William Sound’s herring fishery took a big hit after the Exxon Valdez disaster; but it didn’t totally collapse until four years later. Had action been taken to repair herring habitat, who knows what could have been prevented? While BP is dragging its heels and “slow walking” the process, key ecosystems are languishing.

Shrimp and oyster harvests have been down since the spill, crushing the spirits and livelihoods of thousands of working families. But the effects may extend further; oysters take two to three years to mature, and the bays and bayous are still suffering from the 4.9 million barrels of oil that hit the area in 2010. After Hurricane Isaac, Louisiana closed 12 miles of coastline because of thousands of pounds of oiled debris washing up—the same oil that leaked during the spill.

Under BP’s agreement on early restoration, BP must approve with relevant state and federal agency heads what projects are considered and has the final say on what moves forward.

Project ideas are out there. State and federal trustees have drafted plans that would repair damage, reduce storm surge, protect livelihoods, and more. Louisiana and Mississippi have both proposed significant sets of projects, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, which would restore barrier islands, wetlands, and fisheries. Other states have also engaged with coastal communities in finding solution. But despite having good projects ready to go, the approvals to move forward on vital projects are not materializing.

So, with less than seven percent of this initial commitment to the Gulf Coast  met, it’s fair to say BP must do a better job of working fairly with the state and federal trustee to move projects forward.

On another front, a BP-backed trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, has sued the Securities and Exchange Commission to try to overturn a landmark anti-corruption and transparency regulation that requires all oil, gas and mining companies to disclose their payments to governments both overseas and here at home. In the US, this Oxfam-supported regulation will give Gulf communities a picture of how much BP pays the Federal government in royalties and taxes for each offshore license in the Gulf. Yet another situation where BP talks a good game—in this case with public commitments to transparency—but has refused to follow through in doing the right thing: publicly backing away from this lawsuit which is trying to overturn a landmark disclosure law.

The question to Mr. Ulster: Is your company really willing to do what it takes to measure up?

By Nick Galasso, Oxfam America research and policy advisor on inequality and economic growth.

As the President works to put the American economy back on track in his second term, I think the mandate of the election is clear, if Obama will listen.

Economic growth—the kind America enjoyed during its longest decades of prosperity (from the mid-1940s through the 1970s); where workers earn a fair wage and unemployment is low—does not happen in countries with chronic income inequality.

Among developed countries, the United States has the highest levels of inequality. This is an unsettling trend that has worsened over the past three decades. As we know, chronic inequality is bad for growth and threatens macroeconomic stability. Societies with high income inequality also suffer from greater health and social ills (including crime, sickness, violence, shorter life spans, & stress) than more equal ones.

Throughout America’s greatest period of prosperity and growth, inequality steadily declined. Part of the reason why was top earners carried a high tax burden, helping to create a society of real equal opportunities. From the end of World War II until the mid-1960s, the top marginal individual tax rate was 90%, falling to 70% in 1964. When the proponents of trickle-down economics came into power during the early 1980s, that rate fell to 50%, then 28% in 1988, turning higher to 35% (where it is now). The trickle-down theory, also called supply side economics, claims that privileging the super-rich somehow makes the poor and middle classes better off.

Instead, the era of falling tax rates for the highest earners has enriched the top, while everyone else’s wages have stagnated or declined. Worse, the privileging of top earners over the past 30 years has generated an inequality gap not seen since the eve of the Great Depression.

Though the very top earners were taxed heavily from the 1940s through 1970s, innovation and American capitalism flourished. Entrepreneurs competed to build world class industries and firms, ushering in new technologies that radically changed the human experience. And they were rewarded for their sweat and tears handsomely. At the same time, they helped ensure Americans at all income levels had access to education and other opportunities to pull themselves up the income ladder.

Importantly, it’s not just about raising taxes on the highest earners. It’s also about dismantling politically driven rents that transfer wealth from society to elites. These include ending corporate welfare, curbing Wall Street’s moral hazard problem through tougher regulations and enforcement (so tax payers don’t get stuck bailing out firms taking unsound risk), and demanding tough policies for monopolistic behavior that stifles competition, and raises prices on consumers.

By Nick Galasso, Oxfam America research and policy advisor on inequality and economic growth.

Last week, the World Bank released a new report assessing declining income inequality over the 2000s in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Each country experienced significant reductions in inequality over the last decade. This finding is not new, but the authors helpfully tease out some nuance behind the trend.

Their findings suggest two factors drove the contraction in inequality. First, the skills premium (the wage distribution based on education) fell. In other words, the difference in pay between skilled versus unskilled workers declined. In Argentina, declining labor income inequality was driven by a boom in trade that caused a drop in demand for skilled workers. These conditions were bolstered by strong unions and a rise in the minimum wage. Focused government spending on higher education increased the supply of skilled labor in Mexico. Both factors—reduced demand and increased supply for skilled workers—were in play in Brazil.

The second factor is more progressive government transfers, as expanding coverage of cash transfer and social security programs played a significant equalizing force in the distribution of non-labor income in each country.

All three cases put in relief that solving inequality is fundamentally a problem of politics, not economics. In each, government spending on education, conditional cash transfers, and other social expenditures helped drive down inequality.

The authors provide some astounding figures highlighting why tackling inequality is crucial.

In Mexico, nearly 60 percent of the poverty decline since 1996 is attributed to reducing inequality. Argentina’s inequality drop accounts for 40 and 50 percent of extreme and moderate poverty declines, respectively. For Brazil, 50 to 60 percent of extreme poverty decline is attributable to reducing inequality.

These figures remind us that the fight against inequality and the fight against poverty are one in the same.

Americans recognize a problem when we see it. But what happens when that problem continues to worsen year after year, and leaders are reluctant to speak its name?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of workers under the federal poverty line rose to a 20 year high in 2010, the last year analyzed. The number of working poor families in America, many who work multiple jobs, has steadily risen each year since 2005, even before the recession.

Still, after three Presidential debates, neither candidate has spoken about how to address this issue. To be fair, Governor Romney has mentioned poverty five times, and President Obama has spoken about those “who want to climb to the middle class” without being explicit. But neither took the opportunity to detail how their policy agenda will help the working poor. Thought leaders as diverse as Michael Reagan, the pundit and son of President Ronald Reagan, the USA Today editorial board, and former Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Lynn Woolsey have each expressed surprise or dismay that the working poor are not a part of this campaign’s debates.

Speaking up for the working poor is not only vital, but it is a winning argument that resonates with a majority of Americans who want to find viable solutions.

Ignoring the issue of poverty is a missed opportunity according to new polling commissioned by the American Values Network. In total, 87 percent of voters, a strong majority of respondents across ideological lines, believe the working poor should be a top or important government priority.

The next Congress and President will make decisions that could significantly impact these families’ income and economic mobility. The survey tested which arguments voters found most compelling in support of policies addressing poverty and for cutting such efforts. When asked to choose between the best argument in support of government initiatives to help struggling families and the best argument for cutting those programs, 58% of respondents found the messages supporting government poverty programs more convincing. Whoever is on Capitol Hill or in the White House after this election should take note.

The poll, conducted among 1005 voters nationwide by the Prime Group between September 26-30, also found voters say candidates who address the issue of poverty as more trustworthy and authentic than those who focus solely on the middle class.

And we’re seeing renewed political interest as American s have come together across the country and online to elevate the discussion of the working poor. Earlier this month, Oxfam joined with Sojourners, World Vision and Bread for the World to launch the documentary film, “The Line”, to highlight the story of hard working American families doing everything right but still struggling in poverty. We could never have imagined the response: over 2,000 screenings in churches, community centers and homes in every state in the union, attended by tens of thousands of people since the film premiered Oct 2. People have gathered to talk about growing poverty in our communities and start a conversation they do not see their leaders having. You can still sign up at http://thelinemovie.com/ to host a screening and join the conversation.

At the film’s premiere, Rev. Jim Wallis encouraged a crowd of 400 in DC plus online viewers to encourage our Presidential candidates to #TalkPoverty and take the conversation to social media. The Half in Ten Campaign has spearheaded the response by grassroots communities who have used Twitter to ask our leaders to discuss their plans for addressing poverty. In 24 hours after the second Presidential debate, these messages reached over 700,000 followers.

Americans care about these issues and they are not afraid to act. But will our leaders listen?

Tonight’s the last debate between President Obama and Governor Romney. This one is advertised as the “foreign policy” debate.

US foreign engagement is often described as resting on a three-legged stool; the three “Ds”. Defense, diplomacy, and development. The Obama administration, and Secretary Clinton in particular, has always emphasized that diplomacy and development are equal partners of the three. In past Presidential debates, US financial contributions to foreign assistance and reducing poverty were occasionally topics. During a 2000 debate, then-Governor Bush and Vice President Gore talked about their views, prodded by a question from Jim Lehrer.

I’m guessing that the last “D”, development, will be missing this time round.

CBS newsman Bob Schieffer will moderate tonight and has announced an agenda with topics ranging from Afghanistan to the Middle East, with a bit of terrorism thrown in. Also China. But no airtime for development, foreign assistance. There’s a lot to talk about, actually; the outstanding progress made on some counts and the terrible failure on others. The fate of initiatives launched by President Bush during his term to address AIDS and new foreign aid programs for poor countries with good governance. The new initiatives launched under President Obama on food security and health.

Some politicians (former and possibly future) still think it’s worth talking about and supporting.

But, in all likelihood, issues that matter to the roughly 1.3 billion people who live in and with poverty—and to the hundreds of millions of US taxpayers who pay for these programs—won’t make an appearance.

To make the debates go better, a lot of my friends play drinking games. They’re generally designed to crystalize and shatter the clichés, pierce the banality, and give life to the predictable.

So, I’ll make a game of it. If either candidate mentions “poverty” or “poor people” or even something close, I’ll give $25 to their campaign. If either candidate makes something like a defense of foreign aid, or talks about US obligations—moral and otherwise—to the least of us, I’ll donate $100.

Should make it more interesting.

Editor’s note:  At 9 pm tonight, hundreds of Oxfam America supporters will raise their voices to change the conversation by calling attention to the fight to end hunger and poverty during the debates. How? By signing up on Thunderclap to tweet and post to Facebook. Join us.  

Somalia

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Pastoralists and their camels on the road in southern Somalia. Photo by Njoroge/Oxfam

For the last few weeks, whenever I could get a quiet moment, I’ve been trying to read and think about resilience. It seems like the whole development and humanitarian sector is rapturous about resilience. And already, there’s a bit of backlash.

A lot of smart people are taking up the theme, and I think we should. As a frame for thinking about policy and programming, I think there’s a lot of utility in it.  One of the primary innovations of a focus on resilience is that it presumes an unstable and adverse external environment. This is a big advantage because, actually, reality presents a lot of unstable and adverse situations for poor people. My colleague Gina points out that presuming a stable environment is a big weakness of other frameworks, for example the sustainable livelihoods approach, which is one of the most important tools in development practice.

But if resilience has advantages, there must also be some disadvantages and cautions.

One of the most important is to define resilience in a way that’s useful—which is to say that excludes some things as NOT resilience. This is a big problem in the field right now, where it feels like some people are simply redrafting existing plans to include resilience as a goal or an outcome. In that case, maybe we were building resilience all along? If building resilience is something, then it can’t be everything. If it’s everything, then it’s actually not a thing.

So—a lot of my thinking lately has been to try to create a useful, exclusionary definition of resilience that has operational and policy value. To do this, I’ve been trying to disentangle some issues around resilience.  Here goes:

1.Resilience of what? What are we concerned with? The individual, the household, the village, the community, the region, the country, a financial system, a supply-chain, a farming system, an institution? It matters. If you prioritize one, you are probably undermining others. This isn’t absolutely true: building resilience of some component units can contribute to the resilience of larger units. But the opposite can be true also. So which one is important? How do we select? As a rights-based organization, I have to think that Oxfam would prioritize the resilience of individuals. Or maybe households. Possibly villages. But I’m not totally sure.

2. Resilience is an attribute not a form of support. I think resilience is a characteristic of the individual (or household or community, see item #1 above). Resilience might be improved through outside intervention; building assets, reducing risk exposure, preparing response. But outside intervention during or after a shock is not resilience—it’s assistance. Providing a robust safety net for people when they experience shocks is a good and important thing to do. But it is not building the resilience of beneficiaries and is a different species altogether than resilience-building. On the other hand, you might argue that a robust safety net program builds the resilience of a country to shocks. But not the beneficiaries, unless there’s a program of DRR or asset building that is part of the assistance.

3. Is resilience multi-dimensional or not? Can one build resilience against a variety of shocks at once? It seems to me that it’s best not to presume that resilience to one form of shock—let’s say a drought—implies resilience to another—say an earthquake or economic crisis. One might try to address them together, but the intervention probably needs to have distinctive strategies for each. Or no? Some forms of resilience assets—like having a significant cash reserve or a diversified household livelihood—seem to help build resilience across many potential hazards. When we think about resilience, should we organize around the individual’s (or other unit, see #1 above) resilience to various potential shocks? Or should we organize ourselves around each possible hazard and think about how to improve resilience each in turn; to drought, to earthquakes, to currency inflation, etc.?  Intuitively, we probably want to do the former, but it might not be an effective way to organize action and allocate resources.

4. Shocks v. stresses. Does resilience address both shocks and stress? A shock is an idiosyncratic event. A stress in a longer-term condition. Some materials can absorb stresses better than shocks; quantum of energy, applied in an instant, will break an iron rod. The same amount of energy applied over an hour has no effect. But maybe I’m making a distinction without a difference? Personally, I think resilience is about response to shocks. Using climate change as an example, long-term trends like rising sea levels and hotter temperatures would create a stress and require adaptation. But shorter-term events like hurricanes and droughts are shocks that test resilience.  They’re clearly related in their genesis, but different in their impacts and response strategy? Or am I wrong?

5. Resilience v. resourcefulness? In usage, these terms can seem interchangeable. “The Somali pastoralists are very resourceful; they find water even in the midst of a drought.” Ironically, we often use the word “resourceful” to describe people without resources. You wouldn’t call a rich family resourceful—because, indeed, they are full of resources. But you call a poor family resourceful when they send their kids to college by hook or by crook, i.e. DESPITE a lack of resources. Observers wonder at the “resourcefulness” of others largely because they don’t understand the real access and control over resources that they have. So seeing someone as “resourceful” probably reflect the ignorance of the observer more than the actual characteristics of the observed. Is there something similar in resilience? Do we understand an individual/household/community as resilient only because we are so ignorant of its assets and strategies that we don’t understand how shocks are accommodated?

6. Resilience is a floor. I think resilience is—and should be—a pretty sad goal. That is, if a definition of resilience is rigorous, it should set a baseline of survival; a floor, but not a ceiling. Resilience is the capacity to resist, withstand, and recover from shocks. That doesn’t mean becoming happy, healthy, or rich. Just getting through it and back to normal. Really, that’s aiming pretty low. And our hopes and aspirations for one another are a lot higher than that. But if we are honest, even resilience is often beyond our reach. Much of the energy behind the new fad of resilience is coming from the humanitarian response community. They are recognizing that the mismatch between the response capacity and the need for assistance is growing wider. Motivated as much by frustration as by a positive vision, they are saying we need a new paradigm. We can’t keep responding to droughts in the same way; we have to build up the resilience of communities to withstand them. My humanitarian colleague points out that part of the frustration is that the livelihoods and development programmers have ignored shocks and resilience, so the humanitarians end up having to pick up the pieces.

More thoughts soon.

Sarah Kalloch’s blog is cross-posted from Women Thrive Worldwide. Oxfam America is working with women’s groups that are actively working on ending violence against women and making links between violence against women and food security. 

World Food Day—October 16—falls right in the middle of Domestic Violence Awareness month. At first the connection between the two might seem tenuous. But as Oxfam’s GROW Campaign eloquently argues, “Hunger isn’t about too many people and too little food. Hunger is about inequality. And women and girls face the greatest inequalities of all”. When women are hungry, they are forced to make impossible choices and take untenable chances that make them vulnerable to violence.

Women grow the majority of the world’s food—and are also the majority of the world’s hungry because of vast inequalities in resources and power. Women farmers in the US still face a “grass ceiling”—denied access to billions in loans from the USDA.  And the situation is worse in developing countries, where women face discrimination in land ownership, lack of education, and little access to the capital, technology, and markets needed to make a living on the land. Women could feed up to 150 million more people if they had the same agricultural resources as men, according to a United Nations report.

But before women feed the world, they must feed themselves and their families—a simple act which exposes them up to violence, rape and abuse.

• In Bangladesh, women in households with lower food security are more at risk for physical and emotional abuse.
• Women in Bostwana who did not have enough to eat were twice as likely to have sold sex and were more likely to report a lack of control in sexual relationships.
• Women displaced by conflict in Darfur face further violence when they go to gather firewood and water.
• When food rations were cut at refugee camps in Tanzania in 2005, the World Food Program warned of an increased violence against women as women ventured further afield to feed their families and tensions rose in hungry households.
• Women from Canada to the Congo who have left abusive relationship or been victims of violence are often left economically vulnerable and food insecure.

This month, join Oxfam’s GROW Campaign and hold a WFD dinner with friends and family. Take time to talk about the amazing culture, community and power of food. Food security is human security. Women feed the world—they deserve the chance to feed their families free of violence.

Two campesinos (farmers) in northern Guatemala (2012). Pablo Tosco/Intermón Oxfam

Paul O’Brien is the vice president, policy and campaigns, for Oxfam America.

Washingtonians: I regret to inform you that we need your home. Please remove yourself and your belongings by the end of the month, or we will have our armed goons do it for you. Unfortunately, we are not going to talk about this, and there is no money for your troubles. We need your land. It is for the greater good. Thank you for understanding.

Sound crazy? Somewhere in the developing world, that speech, or something like it, will probably happen today. Over the last decade, in developing countries, a land area larger than Washington, D.C. has been sold from under the feet of poor communities every day. 500 million acres—enough to feed a billion people—have been traded, mostly to cash-rich countries, foreign agribusiness and equity investors over the past 10 years. Think about California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Texas being sold off in a mad, unregulated, land rush without any real transparency on who is doing the buying, under what terms, or what they plan to do with the spoils. All those Southwesterners wondering what the hell happened to their land and their lives?

Why am I writing about this now? Honestly, because we are launching a report today laying out these facts, Our Land, Our Lives, and I want you to read it and join our new campaign. We may have an opportunity to meaningfully address this madness in the next few months.

The World Bank is about to gather the mighty in Tokyo for their Annual Meeting. It’s the coming out party for the new Bank president, Jim Kim—and we are going to hear what he cares about. If he makes stopping bad land grabs a priority, the Bank could play a massive role in fixing this Achilles heel in the global food system.

Early signs are discouraging. Today, the World Bank rejected our report recommendations, claiming “[the Bank] does not support speculative land investments or acquisitions which take advantage of weak institutions in developing countries or which disregard principles of responsible agricultural investment.”

Having watched the Presidential debates last night, I’m acutely sensitive to spin, and that feels like spin to me. Of course the Bank doesn’t actively “support” bad acquisitions or investments in land. But here is the thing—they don’t even know if their land investments are good or bad for affected communities. When we asked them to show us good large scale land investments where communities weren’t kicked off their land and were adequately compensated, they couldn’t find one.

That’s why we are asking the World Bank Group to take a breath! We want them to temporarily stop funding new large scale agricultural land acquisitions until they can be sure these deals aren’t going to violate human rights or harm communities. We want the Bank Group to put solid guidance in place, particularly because we want the 100+ major investing institutions that follow the IFC’s Performance Standards to take basic, reasonable precautions when doing a land deal.

Personally, I still have hope that Jim Kim will commit to doing this in Tokyo. My gut says he is “one of us”—a development activist who wants the poor to know what his institution is doing across the board. He can be proud in other areas: A new aid transparency index rated the Bank second of all major donors on aid transparency this week. Human Rights Watch (notoriously hard to please) recently applauded the Bank for using transparency to fight corruption.

The Bank knows that information is power. It is time to acknowledge that fact in the global land free-for-all. Our report suggests precisely how the Bank can lead an honest public effort to grapple with this issue.

And let’s not spin this proposal as an investment-killing idea. Oxfam has called for greater investment in poor countries for decades. We want communities to benefit from sound investments in agriculture. The Bank can leave its head in the sand and ask communities to trust the market’s invisible hand, or sort this mess out before we see even more community-used land disappear.

The campaign rhetoric and the media coverage of an election focused on our economy have largely overlooked a major national economic shift: the number of working families living under the poverty line grew by over 25% since 2007. A recent study found national media has devoted a mere 0.2% of its election coverage to the challenge of poverty.

Maybe candidates can look away from more working mothers bringing home checks that place their families below the poverty line or one job loss or medical bill away from financial disaster. Maybe they can brush aside the impact of public policy helping struggling families find better opportunity in reducing costs to taxpayers and the economy. But even if you can ignore all this, how can you ignore the politics?

The official poverty rate rose to 15.9% this month. Since 2007, 10.4 million more Americans have seen their incomes fall below the federal poverty mark, $23,500 for a family of four. Now over one in four Americans live either in poverty or near poverty, a number that has grown by 22.6% since 2007, far outpacing the growth even of the nation’s Latino population (14.3%), a demographic shift with significant electoral implications.

Most of this campaign’s rhetoric has focused on the candidates plans to create jobs and help the middle class, implying job creation alone is still a ticket into prosperity. But even as unemployment begins to go down slowly, and economic growth improves, the amount of workers and families in poverty continues to rise, a trend economists believe may continue. Research shows that many of the few jobs being created so far in the economic recovery are low and poverty wage jobs, highlighting that job growth alone will not address the plight of hard-working poor families.

In 2008 voters in households earning under $30,000 accounted for 18% of the vote. Despite the recent debate around the voting habits of the 47% of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes, the working poor are among the closest thing in the electorate to political free agents. Working poor and near poor families benefit from policies that have had bipartisan support in the past like the earned income tax credit, a policy created by Republicans and strengthened by Democrats. According to Gallup a full 50% of poor voters are political independents. Voters earning under $20,000 account for a higher percentage (8%) of undecided voters than any other income bracket in recent polls.

Politicians ignore low income working families at their political peril in 2012. Battleground states of Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia saw a combined rise in the ranks of poor and near poor grow of 3.7 million since 2007, an increase of 27.9%, well above the national average. In Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Virginia, these newly poor or near poor individuals outnumber the number of voters who made up the margin of victory in each state’s 2008 Presidential general election.

Sources: US Census Bureau, US Election Atlas.org

Additionally, according to a recent survey by the Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, 88 percent of voters across all incomes said a candidate’s position on reducing poverty is important in deciding their vote.

Working poor families and the people who care about them make up a significant portion of voters still up for grabs. Democrats and Republicans would do well in the next 41 days to speak to their challenges and offer solutions.

In order to elevate this discussion, Oxfam America has worked to support a groundbreaking documentary, “The Line,” which shines a light on the reality of poverty in America, and especially the working poor. We helped feature Ronnie Duplessis, an oysterman from Davant, LA, who tells his heartbreaking story of the struggle to survive after the BP spill. And we’re partnering with Sojourners, World Vision, Bread for the World, and other organizations to help bring this topic into the presidential campaign.

Please join us in spreading the word! Already over 1000 people across the country have agreed to host film screenings already. You can still sign up to host a screening on October 2 and receive a free DVD to premier the film with friends, family, and neighbors! Let’s start the conversation about reducing poverty, increasing economic opportunity, and about the dignity and rights of all of us to prosper.