NEW ORLEANS – Laissez le bon temps roulez! Roughly translated, it means: “let the good times rule.” The French saying comes alive in New Orleans today — fat Tuesday.
Believe me, we take good times seriously. We spend nearly the entire year preparing for the Mardi Gras season. Well-to-do business leaders with memberships in secret carnival societies spend thousands of dollars to don masks, ride brightly colored paper-mache floats, throw beads and doubloons to parade goers and attend masquerade balls catered with the finest wines, most potent spirits and traditional New Orleans cuisine.
New Orleans high school bands practice all year, synchronizing music notes, precision marching steps and flamboyant dance moves in flashy uniforms so that their band can be recognized as the best in this year’s parades.
Black men in New Orleans’ historic African-American neighborhoods practice chants and sew ornate costumes and masks appointed with feathers, beads, and sequins, all designed to imitate and pay tribute to Native Americans who helped Louisiana slaves escape their masters and find freedom. Accountants, teachers, lawyers and librarians trade their stiff business suits and dresses for creative costumes ranging from colorful and cheery to bold and political.
Sure it is a lot of work, but it is all in the name of a good time. As much food, drink, partying and sinning as you can stand until 11:59 pm, Tuesday night when Mardi Gras ends and the Christian season of Lent begins.
After more than three centuries of celebrating Mardi Gras, New Orleans has learned to make it a key component of our economy. We measure the success of each Mardi Gras by the tonnage of garbage and debris collected over the season. In 2010, between Super Bowl and Mardi Gras, the City collected more than 8,000 tons of refuse. In 2009, economists found Mardi Gras yielded $145 million in direct revenue and a $322 million indirect impact. Rubish you say? Well that trash accounts for 1.61 percent of New Orleans’ gross domestic product. That revenue is life blood for local businesses and translates into jobs and food on the dinner table for the citizenry.
But there is a downside. The jobs that support Mardi Gras in particular and tourism in general tend to be service industry positions that oftentimes do not pay high wages. In fact, frequently the wages are so low that employees have to work multiple jobs to keep the lights on and the cupboards from going bare.
The service industry accounts for 13 percent of jobs in the New Orleans metropolitan area, third only to government and retail. In 2009, the average annual income for service-related and food preparation occupations was $17,608 per year. Employees earning the 2009 industry average salary cannot afford the 2010 average apartment rent of $1,350 per month; $16,200 per year. Further, most service positions do not offer basic benefits like healthcare, sick or family leave or retirement savings.
The low salaries certainly make it tough on families. But there are societal costs as well. Low paid service industry workers often have little choice but to rely on government subsidies for housing and food. That’s right: after working 40 hours per week or more, many of New Orleans’ service industry workers have so little cash on hand that they have to rely on public housing or food stamps to make ends meet.
Some argue that when government fails to require companies to pay a livable wage and as a result government has to provide basic necessities like food and housing, government is essentially subsidizing corporate profits. New Orleans’ economy certainly supports this theory. Some advocates have long suggested that public housing developments like Iberville and Lafitte, only blocks from the French Quarter, wind up being corporate giveaways, providing housing for service industry employees so that French Quarter businesses do not have to pay higher wages.
Most thriving American cities share a key component…a thriving middle class. Unfortunately, New Orleans’ middle class has been in a nosedive for more than two decades. From 1990 to 2010, New Orleans lost almost 110,000 jobs. The combination of the mass relocation of oil companies from New Orleans to Houston, the downsizing of the NASA space shuttle booster construction facility and the exodus of upwardly-mobile residents in the wake of Katrina has made it difficult to sustain, much less grow, New Orleans’ middle class.
In 2009, the city had 93,500 job opportunities for low skilled employees but only 30,900 for high skill employees. New Orleans’ 2010 poverty poverty rate of 27 percent was nearly twice the national average.
For now, this great American city has to make due. And while tourism and Mardi Gras will not and cannot be the answer, perhaps they provide evidence that New Orleans can grow its economic base. Events like the Super Bowl, Sugar Bowl and Mardi Gras give investors a chance to see what we’re capable of. Erecting stages, fine tuning sound systems, providing hotel accommodations for tens of thousands of visitors and cooking tons of delicious gumbo and jambalaya all require serious hard work.
Perhaps in the near future, we can match the effort required to pull off the purple, green and gold citywide indulgence that is Mardi Gras with an effort to grow new industries and expand New Orleans’ middle class. We can let le bon temps roulez, but let us be sure to make the growth of our middle class a strong runner up.
Happy Mardi Gras.
James Perry is a civil rights advocate and political analyst. Follow him on Twitter at @JamesHPerry.