Janet Aguilar is a cashier working in downtown Los Angeles. The 29-year-old woman makes $11 an hour. Her husband Armando, 38, is a mechanic. They have two kids, Bridget, 10, and two-year-old Alexander, and rent an apartment near Normandie and 82nd Street. The Aguilars, who together earn about $35,000 a year, are hurting. They can no longer meet their family's basic necessities.

"We've had to cut down on food," Janet says. "Before I used to go grocery shopping every week to buy everything. But now I don't go shopping until I'm out of everything. I go shopping a lot less, maybe just once every two weeks, and I buy less. I cannot buy stuff for me or my husband. I've got to save for the kids, like for Pampers and milk."

Over the last three months, Janet has had her hours cut from 36 down to 16 many weeks. She stays at the low-paying job on account of the family medical and dental benefits, because Armando's job has no health insurance.

But she wonders how much longer she'll be able to pay $430 a month for medical and dental coverage, which isn't even all that comprehensive. When her son broke his hand a month ago, the co-pays were high, and the bill for surgery was $755. The Aguilars could only come up with $200 the day of the operation and had to arrange to pay the rest over time.

Trying to make ends meet, predicatively, has led to stress and marital problems.

"It's hard, that's why we're fighting for higher pay and better working conditions," Janet reports. "Gas has gone up. Milk, the vegetables, the fruits - everything is expensive now. I got my first credit card because I needed the money. So I started using it, and then I was like 'Wow!' making the payments. I'm trying not to use it so much, but when you don't have nothing, it's hard."

After a moment, the working wife and mother says, "I got my check today, only $293 for two weeks. I told my husband, 'They're cutting my days, so you have to work more.' I feel stress because I cannot help him."

Haves and have-nots
Janet Aguilar and her family make up part of the 3.6 million people in Los Angeles County whose income doesn't provide for their basic needs, according to an analysis of recently released U.S. Census data by the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE).

And although an August 27 headline of a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times proclaimed, "Poverty down in L.A., up in U.S," the real local poverty picture, according to LAANE, is much more complex - and grimmer.

While census figures show that the percentage of county residents living below the federal poverty line did go down in 2007 and the median household income went up slightly from the previous year, income inequality - that great divide between haves and have-nots - became more severe. The Southland also had higher levels of poverty and income inequality than both California and the nation, with many people remaining poor even though they were working.

"Poverty, Jobs and the Los Angeles Economy" points out that the local high poverty rates are having a disproportionate impact on children, minorities and women.

Moreover, the report cautions that the U.S. Census Bureau's annual "American Community Survey" data covers 2007, when the Los Angeles economy was still adding new jobs.

"In 2008, the situation has worsened for L.A.'s residents due to a dramatic rise in the cost of basic necessities and a deteriorating economy," it states, noting that: "An increase in the state's minimum wage, active efforts by labor and community groups to improve job quality and innovative policy campaigns at the local level have mitigated the negative effects of the downturn for many workers."

Some of the key findings of the analysis deal with "extreme poverty," which LAANE equates with the federal poverty line, because it hasn't changed since the early 1960s and doesn't take into account the drastic jump in housing, health care and child care costs as well as geographic differences in the cost of living.

During 2007, the percentage of Los Angeles County residents living in extreme poverty decreased slightly from 15.4 to 14.7 percent. But an estimated 1.4 million-plus people still lived below the federal poverty threshold ($20,650/year for a family of four). And extreme poverty rates were even higher for the cities of Los Angeles (18.5 percent) and Long Beach (18.2 percent).

Even more disturbing, one-in-five of the county's children lived in extreme poverty in 2007, with significantly higher rates again for Los Angeles (27.2 percent) and Long Beach (26.9 percent).

LAANE argues that a more realistic poverty level would actually be twice the feds' poverty guideline, or $41,300 for a family of four, last year. Using this figure, almost two-out-of-five country residents (36.9 percent or 3,587,068 people) didn't make enough money to meet their day-to-day needs.

And even for those with full- or part-time jobs, one-in-four workers did not have enough income to make ends meets. Leisure and hospitality, construction and other service sector jobs had the highest poverty levels in 2006.

While the median household income in Los Angeles County rose by $566 to $53,573, 30 percent of the county's three million full-time workers earned less than $25,000 in 2007, compared to $30,702 in all of California. And the typical woman worker here only earned a little over three-quarters of what her male counterpart made.

During 2007, income inequality also increased, with fewer households accounting for a larger share of all income in Los Angeles County. The 20 percent of the households with the highest earners made up more than half of all income in the county, but the lowest-earning 20 percent got only a 3 percent slice of the income pie. And Los Angeles had the highest level of inequality of the state's five largest cities.

Middle class face same problems
"Two things surprise me every year," said Jessica Goodheart, LAANE's director of research who conducted the 2008 analysis along with research intern Lauren Akins. "One is the high percentage of children in poverty - one-in-five in extreme poverty. That to me is incredibly shocking. And in some neighborhoods, it's going to be even much worse.

"We ask ourselves, 'Why aren't we doing better in terms of education?' But when people are living in these circumstances, it's very challenging to plan for the future and to be in the kind of environment that allows kids to succeed.

The other finding the researcher finds alarming is the fact that full-time workers are earning so little in Los Angeles County, with the data showing that the situation is much worse in the cities of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Part of the problem is the Southland's high cost of living. But she points out that for the three-in-ten county full-time workers earning less than $25,000, it would be hard surviving "anywhere in the country."

Although the report focuses on poverty and the working poor, Goodheart observes that so-called middle class residents are facing many of the same problems: not being able to buy a house plus concern over job security and finding or keeping affordable health insurance.

"To stay in the middle class, you have to be working harder and longer than we did a generation ago," she said. "There's just a lot of connection between people below the poverty line and those who are slightly above it. We're kind of falling behind in our living standards."

Can anything really be done today - during a nation-wide recession - to raise people out of poverty? Goodheart says our current economic situation is not inevitable. We're in this fiscal sinking boat because of conscious policy decisions that have, and haven't, been made.

To move the Southland's economy from "the low road to the high road," government, business, labor and community leaders need to work together to prioritize the quality of jobs in the region, Goodheart stresses.

"We need to raise the minimum wage and index it to inflation, so it reflects the true cost of loving," she told The Tidings. "We need to make it possible for workers to organize in their work place and improve standards. Union organizing is a time-tested way to fight poverty.

"We have unions in Los Angeles who are leading the way and have succeeded in raising standards for security officers, hotel workers and janitors. So that needs to happen, but at a much greater scale. And we need to have a safety net that works, so that when people are falling into poverty, when people are losing jobs, they don't fall any farther than they need to."

Goodheart says the community census data every year is an annual reminder of where the nation, states, counties and cities are - and how far "we need to go."

"People think, 'Well, we need to help poor people,'" she said. "But we actually are missing out and our economy is not where it should be because we have so many people who are unable to buy things. And it's not good for our economy to have this great divide, with a few people on top and a lot of people at the bottom - and a hollowed-out middle in between.

"The benefits of our society are not being shared," she pointed out. "So therein lies the problem."