Opinion: Why it's so hard to make ends meet in the Lehigh Valley

By Ahmad Chaudry The question I hear most in my exam rooms isn't 'Will it hurt?' It's 'How soon can I go back to work?' I'm an oral and maxillofacial surgeon in Bethlehem. People come to me with fractured jaws, infections left too long and teeth that needed attention a year ago. Before we've finished talking through the surgery, many want to know how many shifts they'll lose. They don't ask because they love the job. They ask because the arithmetic at home has no slack. Monday is Labor Day, and in the Valley it ought to mean something more than a long weekend. The Lehigh Valley is booming, and it is booming on labor. My children ride past the blast furnaces in south Bethlehem and see a concert venue. What I want them to understand is that the region didn't stop working when the mills went cold. The work moved. It moved into the warehouses off Interstate 78 and Route 100, the nursing homes, the cargo docks near the airport. Logistics alone employs tens of thousands of people here. Those shifts pay the tax base. They fill the new restaurants. They lifted the home values. They are the growth every candidate takes credit for. Which is what makes the next part hard to say plainly. The median Lehigh Valley home sold for $360,000 this spring. The median warehouse wage is around $17 an hour, roughly $35,000 a year. Two full-time paychecks in one household no longer clear the bar on a median house in the valley that those two people are keeping running. That gap has two halves, and this is where it gets slippery. Wages are too low and housing costs too much, and every party can point, accurately, at the other half. Employers say wages are set by the market, and they are. Township supervisors say they don't control what anyone pays, and they don't. Developers say they build what the zoning permits and the math supports, and they do. Our own Realtors' association markets the Lehigh Valley to outside buyers as a bargain against a Northeast median above $510,000, which is true. Every one of these statements is defensible. Together they close a circle, and a warehouse worker is left standing outside. There is a chapter of the Quran that has stayed with me for years. It condemns merchants who demand full measure when they receive and give short measure when they give. What's striking is that it isn't addressed to thieves. It's addressed to respectable people running ordinary businesses who arranged things so the scale tipped their way every time. Nobody here is stealing. The scale just tips the same direction month after month, and everyone holding a corner of it has a reason why it isn't theirs to level. The Prophet Muhammad instructed that a worker be paid before his sweat dries. It's a startling standard, because it treats the obligation as urgent and as nobody else's to carry. You don't get to hand it to the market. I should be honest about where I stand. I'm a surgeon. I own a home in the Lehigh Valley worth considerably more than I paid a decade ago, and I did nothing to earn that increase. This economy has been good to me, and indignation from my position isn't worth much. What I can offer is what I see from an exam room: people making medical decisions around pay periods. So I have no single ask this Labor Day, because there isn't one. Employers can raise the floor without waiting to be forced to. Supervisors approving the next distribution center can approve housing at the same table, meaning duplexes, apartments over storefronts, smaller lots and accessory units, not another subdivision priced north of half a million. Those of us who already own something here can stop treating every proposal for smaller homes nearby as a threat. Each of these is easy to wave off on its own. That is precisely why nothing moves. I'd like to tell my patients to go back to work when they're healed. I'd like that to be advice they can afford to take. This is a contributed opinion column. Dr. Ahmad Chaudhry of Lower Nazareth Township is an oral and maxillofacial surgeon and president of the Lehigh Valley Chapter of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. The views expressed in this piece are those of its individual author(s), and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of this publication. For more details on commentaries, read our guide to guest opinions at themorningcall.com/opinions.