TOGETHER IN DIGNITY

The reluctance to make use of available government programs, even when they work well, may be related to the fact that a majority of Republicans and a substantial fraction of Democrats are against the government starting a universal income program or a national job program to support those who lose their jobs to automation, even though many more are in favor of limiting the right of companies to replace people with robots.⁸⁶ Behind this is partly suspicion about the government’s motives (they only want to help “those people”) and partly exaggerated skepticism about the government’s ability to deliver.

When Abhijit was serving on a UN Panel of Eminent Persons to come up with what were to be new millennium development goals, he was often subjected to low-key lobbying by prominent international NGOs with views on what some of those goals should be. This was often a very pleasant way to learn about interesting initiatives, and Abhijit enjoyed the encounters. But the one meeting he remembers most vividly was with an organization called ATD Fourth World.

When he walked into the cavernous room in the EU headquarters where the meeting was held, he immediately noticed it was a very different crowd. No suits, no ties, no high heels; lined faces, scruffy winter jackets, and also an eagerness he associated with college freshmen in their first week. These were people, he was told, who had experienced extreme poverty and were still very poor. They wanted to participate in a conversation about what the poor wanted.

It turned out to be nothing like anything he had ever encountered before. People quickly intervened and talked about their lives and about the nature of poverty and the failings of policy, drawing on their own experiences.

He left with enormous respect for ATD Fourth World, and an understanding of why its slogan is “All Together in Dignity to Overcome Poverty.” It was an organization that put dignity first, if necessary even before basic needs. It had built an internal culture where everyone was taken seriously as a thinking human being, which is what gave the members the confidence Abhijit had not expected.

Travailler et Apprendre Ensemble (“Work and Learn Together”), or TAE, is a small business started by ATD Fourth World to provide people in extreme poverty with permanent jobs. One winter morning, we went to Noisy-le-Grand in the east of Paris to observe one of their team meetings. When we arrived, the group was preparing the schedule for the workweek across their different activities, assigning people to tasks and drawing up their plan on a whiteboard. When they were done with scheduling the work, they started discussing a company event. The atmosphere was relaxed but engaged, problems were discussed with seriousness, and everyone then went off to start their tasks. It could have been the weekly meeting of a small start-up in Silicon Valley.

What was different was the activities they were scheduling (cleaning services, construction, and computer maintenance) and the people around the table. After the meeting, we continued talking to Chantal, Gilles, and Jean-François. Chantal had been a nurse, but after an accident found herself seriously disabled. Unable to work for many years, she ended up homeless. This is when she reached out to ATD for help. ATD gave her housing and directed her to TAE when she was ready to work. She had been working there for ten years when we met her, first on the cleaning team and then on the software team, and had become a leader.

Gilles had also worked at TAE for ten years. After a period of severe depression, he found himself incapable of working in a stressful environment. TAE allowed him to work at his own rhythm and he progressively got better.

Jean-François and his wife had lost custody of their son, Florian, who suffered from ADHD, and Jean-Francois himself, who had temper issues, was placed under administrative custody of the state. They reached out to ATD, which was allowed to take Florian on a supervised basis in one of their centers, where he learned about TAE.

The CEO, Didier, had been the CEO of a “traditional” firm before joining TAE. Pierre-Antoine, his aide, had been a social worker in a job placement office. Pierre-Antoine explained the limits of the traditional job-placement model. When people have one difficulty, it is possible to help. When people accumulate problems, they don’t conform to what regular jobs expect from them, and they often quickly give up or get rejected. What is different at TAE is that the business is designed around them.

The key, according to what Bruno Tardieu, an ATD leader who accompanied us to the meeting, told us, is that “all their lives people have given them things. No one has even asked them to contribute.” In TAE, they are asked to contribute. They make decisions together, train each other, eat together every day, and take care of each other. When someone is missing, they are checked on. When someone needs time to deal with a personal crisis, they receive help getting it.

The spirit of TAE reflects well that of its mother organization. ATD Fourth World was founded by Joseph Wresinski, a Catholic priest, in France in the 1950s, out of the conviction that extreme poverty is not the result of the inferiority or inadequacy of a group of people, but of systematic exclusion. Exclusion and misunderstanding build on each other. The extreme poor are robbed of their dignity and their agency.

What does a small business in France, employing less than a dozen ultra poor people and struggling to get by, teach us about social policy more generally?

First, given the right conditions, everyone can hold a job and be productive. This faith gave rise to a French experiment trying to create “zero long-term unemployed territories” where the government and civil society organizations commit to finding a job for everyone within a short period of time. To get there, the government is offering a subsidy of up to ˆ18,000 per employee to any organization that agrees to hire any long-term unemployed who wants a job. At the same time, NGOs are being engaged to find the long-term unemployed (including those who face multiple difficulties: mental or physical handicaps, prior convictions, etc.), match them to jobs, and offer them the assistance they need to be able to take the jobs.

Second, work is not necessarily what follows after all the other problems have been solved and people are “ready,” but is part of the recovery process itself. Jean-François was able to take back custody of his son after he found a job and is inspired by the pride his son takes in him now that he is working.

Very far from Noisy-le-Grand, in Bangladesh, the enormous NGO BRAC arrived at the same conclusion. They noticed that the poorest of the poor in the villages where they worked were excluded (or self-excluded) from many of their programs. To solve this problem, they came up with the idea of the “graduation approach.” After identifying the poorest people in the village with the help of the community, BRAC workers provided them with a productive asset (such as a pair of cows or a few goats) and for eighteen months, supported them emotionally, socially, and financially, and trained them to make best use of their assets.

The deep disregard for the human dignity of the poor is endemic in the social protection system. A particularly heart-wrenching instance is what happened to Chantal, one of the TAE employees we met. When Chantal and her husband, who are both disabled, asked for assistance at home with their four children, two of whom are also disabled, they were offered temporary placement for their children in foster care. This “temporary” solution ended up lasting ten years, during which they were only allowed to see their children for one weekly supervised visit. The suspicion that poor parents are incapable of taking care of their children is widespread. Until the 1980s, tens of thousands of poor Swiss children were removed from their families and placed on farms. In 2012, the government of Switzerland formally apologized for the separations. This discrimination is in effect a form of racism against the poor, a reminder of the policy in Canada where scores of indigenous children were sent to boarding school and forbidden to speak their language, to ease their “assimilation” in mainstream Canadian culture.

A social protection system that treats anyone with this kind of callousness becomes punitive, and people will go to great lengths to avoid having anything to do with it. Make no mistake. This does not just affect some small sliver of the extreme poor that’s very different from the rest of us. When part of the social system conveys punishment and humiliation, it is the entire society that recoils from it. The last thing a worker wants when he has just lost his job is to be treated like “those people.”