A six-year employee of the Oklahoma City Public Schools, Deborah Brown works the evening shift at Lee Elementary. From 2 to 10:30 p.m., five days a week, 50 weeks a year, Brown scrubs bathrooms, sweeps and mops floors, empties trash and dusts classrooms, all so teachers and students can have a clean and safe place to learn. She loves her job and takes pride in it.

Yet twice every month, when she receives her paycheck—$584 before taxes and health insurance deductions, a salary that translates to about $7 an hour—she wonders how she’s going to make ends meet for herself and her 11-year-old daughter. What bills can she put off this week? The choices are agonizing—choices no parent wants to face.

The Economic Policy Institute calculates the cost of a basic family budget in each region of the nation. The budget includes child care, housing, transportation, clothes, food, other basic necessities, and taxes. It doesn’t include retirement savings, restaurants or movies. According to EPI, Deborah Brown is one of 198,000 people in Oklahoma who have incomes below the line necessary to sustain a basic family budget. She isn’t alone.

The poverty rate has gone up every year since 2000. In the same period, an additional 5 million  people have joined the poverty rolls. And the so-called economic recovery is not creating broadly shared benefits. Between 2002 and 2003, the average income of the poorest 20 percent of the population actually declined, while the average income of the wealthiest 1 percent of the population grew from $648,000 to $701,500.

To make the picture grimmer, a fascinating and disturbing new report from the Center for American Progress suggests that the American Dream is endangered. One out of 100 children born into the bottom of the income distribution will manage to reach the top 5 percent in earnings. A child born in the top fifth of the income distribution has a 22 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent. Increasingly, the governing factor in your children’s chance to succeed is birth and not hard work.

A lot needs to be done to fix this problem, and the union has a role. The first order of business is fighting to preserve the estate tax. The Bush administration and other moneyed interests have been engaged in an effort to permanently eliminate the tax on estates worth more than $1 million. This both adds to the concentration of wealth and prevents funding for programs like education that can create opportunities.

Another step is fighting to provide school support workers with a living wage. David Gray’s op-ed, cited above, is part of a campaign to achieve just that in Oklahoma. And we should not forget that Deborah Brown’s plight is replicated for thousands of workers on college campuses. Their fight to earn a living wage is one that student activists have joined, going on hunger strikes and erecting tent cities to show they won’t back down in their support for these underpaid employees.

Finally, we need to work to increase the minimum wage for all workers. Campaigns to accomplish this are under way in Arizona, Maine, Montana, Ohio and other states, with recent victories in Arkansas, Maryland and Michigan.