In the months since typhoon Mawar struck our island, we have seen the outcome of decades of underinvestment in hardened physical capital, the services of our government, and the resiliency of working class families.
Typhoon Mawar has damaged and destroyed hundreds of millions in physical capital that our people have built over decades. Following the passage of the typhoon, few had power or water, much less both. Most were fortunate to have reinforced concrete homes that had weathered the storm well, but far too many working class families live in inadequate housing, including those made of wood and tin or even tarps. Many lost their roofs or weatherheads or other vital parts of their homes.
Unfortunately much of our community has gotten complacent about the hundreds of families which are typically homeless. The typhoon made this issue multiples times worse. If our community lived up to its aspirations, we could largely eliminate homelessness among our people, but that would require sacrifice, which is a hard sell for a legislature which serves the advantaged and the wealthy, first and foremost. Shared responsibility just doesn’t have the same positive ring to politicians as tax cuts for the land owning class.
Natural disasters have a way of clearing away the debris that obscures the inadequacy of our social protections. In the wake of the typhoon, we see our social services are inadequate.
How many have lost their jobs and/or their health insurance due to the economic effects of the typhoon? We have programs like Medicaid and the Medically Indigent Program to provide health insurance to low income familes, but even in good times 1 in 5 fall through the cracks, insured by neither private nor public health insurance. In good economic times, like we were experiencing immediately before the typhoon, around 1 in 20 are unemployed, but without the protection of a permanent system of unemployment insurance. Following the typhoon, our Governor has been able to put together a disaster unemployment compensation program, which is commendable. However, we should have had unemployment insurance for decades now, after the many bills the late Speaker Don Parkinson had introduced to enact such protections for the unemployed. The lack of unemployment insurance saved big corporations operating on Guam hundreds of millions of dollars in the last few decades, which they then compassionately, dutifully did not pass on to the workers, as we see from the low wages and compensation in the private sector. Working families on Guam need universal health care and a permanent system of unemployment insurance to defend their physical and financial well-being against the effects of ill health and involuntary unemployment.
The working people of Guam will rebuild following this typhoon, as they have every time physical capital owned and controlled by big business has been damaged and destroyed following a natural disaster. But thanks to recent cowardice at the Guam Legislature, they will continue to be paid far too little to meaningfully rebuild their own financial capacity to provide for their families.
Politics on Guam must be transformed to address the needs of ordinary working families, not just the needs of big corporations and the wealthy few. We will know this transformation has begun when homelessness is largely eradicated, all our people have health care as a right, the jobless have unemployment compensation to support their families, and all working people on Guam are earning a living wage. There is much to do and you can be a part of the change we all want to see. Solidarity!
GuamMinimumWage.org 