[Bermuda] Does one in five black kids live in poverty?

From The Bermuda Sun

Nigel Regan Chief Reporter

Working a 40-hour week and still can’t make the rent? Maybe that’s because there’s no minimum wage.

Charities say lots of people live hand to mouth but now one of the them, the Coalition for the Protection of Children, is trying to turn the anecdotes into cold hard facts by conducting what founder Sheelagh Cooper calls “the first major study on poverty that has ever been done in Bermuda.”

Some sources, like the World Bank, say Bermuda is among the top five richest countries in the world, but the reality is there are hundreds, if not thousands of families living in poverty, says Mrs. Cooper.

She’s hoping the new study will, for the first time, “establish a uniquely Bermudian poverty line.” But she needs our input.

Families familiar with the Coalition have already been given questionnaires. For the rest of us, forms are available at the Mount Hill Road offices.

Mrs. Cooper said: “Our primary target group are people struggling financially… that’s what a poverty line is really all about —what it requires to subsist and have adequate housing, food and clothing and other basic necessities. But we want to broaden the scope of the study.”

Early findings have produced some alarming results. “Up to 20 per cent of black children live at or below the poverty line. It could be more than that, but that’s our initial estimates,” Mrs. Cooper said. And it gets worse when there are no men around.

“About ' per cent of black children in single female headed households are at or below the poverty line.”

These are only the initial findings; the final study could be much more explosive. Mrs. Cooper draws attention to the fact that the PLP promised to help the working class when it was elected for the first time seven years ago. And while under the current Premier, Alex Scott, it continues to talk about a ‘Social Agenda’, the reality is more and more people are turning up at her doorstep desperate, homeless and broke.

She said: “Addressing the existence of this level of poverty in this community is very difficult for governments to acknowledge, especially this government that rode into power with a specific commitment to the workers and working poor. What we have now is a case of black elitism. My sense is that the majority of the Cabinet members and their colleagues on the back benches have lost touch with the people that elected them.”

As well as collecting basic facts and figures, the study wants to look at the hidden costs of poverty. Mrs. Cooper uses the example of how much it costs a mom with two kids with no transport and no washing machine or drier to do the laundry compared to a middle class mom who has all she needs right in her own home.

She said: “The woman who has no washer or drier at the end of the week has to go to the laundromat. She can’t take the laundry on the bus or on the bike, if she’s got one, because she’s also got two kids. Her only option is to get a taxi, which could cost at least $60.”

There are other examples, too. Mrs. Cooper said: “Many of the women we deal with here have had their electricity cut off because they can’t pay their bills. The repercussions of that in terms of food for any family are enormous because it means they can’t store fresh or frozen goods.

“Women on low incomes can’t buy in bulk either because they can’t afford to put out enough money all at once. These are just some of the hidden costs of poverty that keep women feeling as though they’re always behind.”

There are other, broader factors at play, too, such as the downturn in the tourism industry, which used to be a major wage payer, and the prohibitive cost of housing. Mrs. Cooper said these things combined have created a “significant widening of the gap between the very wealthy and the very poor.”

It’s not just home ownership that’s become a pipedream for many Bermudians, it’s renting, too. “It creates a very hostile and volatile generation of people coming up because they feel completely disenfranchised and alienated in their country of origin — they’re like refugees in their own land,” Mrs. Cooper said.

The study will continue throughout the first part of the new year. Results will likely produce two scenarios, either raise people’s capacity to pay, by legislating a living or minimum wage, or lower the costs.