For most Maine families, life is difficult and it isn’t getting any easier.

“Maine, the way life should be,” it paints a beautiful picture in your mind: the rocky coast, the mountains, the rich fall colors.

The reality is for most Maine families life here has many difficulties and is not getting any easier, and the picture is not so beautiful. It is a picture of chronic underemployment and of working multiple jobs just to make ends meet.

As voters consider the question of whether or not to support the resort casino, I think you might want to consider some important facts.

Maine has lost 17,300 manufacturing jobs in the last three years. Those jobs had an average annual wage of $36,374; the jobs that replaced them have an annual wage of only $27,007. We have a new service based economy, and our largest industry is tourism.

The state of Maine will spend $7.5 million promoting tourism this year. Yet, we have no plan to ensure that people who work in the industry will be able to provide a decent standard of living for their families. In fact, we know that for many it will not. They will suffer from seasonal under or unemployment, no health benefits, no retirement and no hope for the future.

Only two-thirds of jobs in Maine today pay a living wage. That means 33 percent of Maine’s people know as they leave for work each day, they will not earn enough money to provide the basic necessities for their families. How can this be considered the way life should be? If we are to truly prosper in this new service economy, we need to find a way to raise these jobs to a new level, one that gives workers hope for their families’ future. A full-time, year-round job with benefits that include health care, dental, retirement, educational opportunities and – the rarest of all benefits – child care will do just that. These are the jobs the proposed resort casino will bring.

Yet, I hear opponents of this plan to employ 10,000 people here in Maine say the cost of these jobs is too high.

I keep asking myself, “What do they mean by that?” They seem unconcerned by the cost to the taxpayer for underemployment, which requires the state to pay the health care costs of the working poor. I’ve never heard them speaking out against Wal-Mart, which employs 6,200 Maine people, 4,300 as part-time workers to avoid paying benefits.

To oppose jobs that provide a living wage and a comprehensive benefits package makes little sense until you look at who is really behind the opposition.

Many casino opponents benefit from exploiting Maine’s chronic underemployment by using Maine people as a source of cheap or temporary labor. Why else would MBNA, a company that makes millions marketing credit cards for Las Vegas casinos, spend more than $350,000 to oppose a casino, other than the fear that they might have to pay their telemarketers more than $8.50 an hour or offer them health benefits or let them work more than 20 hours a week.

Would the Gorman family, owners of L.L.Bean, give tens of thousands of dollars to oppose 10,000 jobs for Maine families if their company didn’t rely on thousands of underemployed Mainers being available to work their part-time, seasonal jobs every holiday season?

What will your vote for a resort casino really mean for Maine? It will mean thousands of jobs with a living wage and benefits for Maine’s families; it will mean a doubling of the corporate income tax in Maine; it will mean we will have the highest-taxed casinos in the nation, which will provide opportunity for tax relief all over our state; it will mean 2,500 construction jobs for two years.

What would a no vote mean? Because the opponents have no job creation plan, it means no new jobs and no new tax revenue.

It will mean that for the one-third of Maine workers, whose wages provide them wages less than the cost of supporting their families, will be forced to join the thousands who have gone before them and leave our state in order to find a real job opportunity.

For Maine’s unemployed and chronically underemployed, this is definitely not the way life should be.

Join me in voting yes on Question 3, yes to opportunity and yes to hope for Maine’s future.

Maine Rep. Deborah Simpson lives in Auburn.

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