Who Gets to Have a Cell Phone? And Who Pays?

That’s the question The Philadelphia Inquirer asks today in an article that has poverty advocates and some conservative leaders squaring off. Admittedly, the question seems pretty absurd. Tianna Gaines, a woman living below the poverty line who has been given a free cell phone by a company called TracFone Wireless, puts the issue in perspective from the get go. “The public should worry less about free cell phones and think more about the kids who go to sleep at night living in poverty,” she says.

But the debate is still an interesting one. It stems from a 2004 report from the Heritage Foundation which described the poor as having “high living standards.” Part of the evidence for that claim was that many poor people have cell phones. According to the Inquirer article, 73 percent of people who live in poverty have cell phones. For context, about 90 percent of Americans own a cell phone.

The particular controversy in question here is over TracFone, which started giving free cell phones to poor people in 2008. The phones come with a little over an hour of free minutes, and from there recipients can pay to recharge them. The phones are paid for by charges the phone company tacks on to all phone bills. This charge is allowed by the federal government. The agreement is hazy, and people have come to call the cell phones a “welfare wireless” service, accusing the poor of leaching off the phone bills of the better off. People can apply for the free phones if they receive food stamps, welfare or other assistance from the federal government.

So this initially sounds pretty suspect. And the same old voices who always speak out against welfare are happy to chime in here, too.

“It’s just another way to redistribute the wealth. The poor get helped, and the cost is passed on to working people, who get depressed,” says Susan Lord, a Tea Party leader in southern New Jersey. Matthew Brouillette, president of the Commonwealth Foundation in Harrisburg, absurdly describes the program as “subsidizing texting and sexting” among the poor.

But then you hear from the people themselves. Tangela Fedrick is one of these cell phone recipients, and her description of her cell phone usage ought to cause the critics to think twice.

“Welfare case workers say to me, ‘Oh, you’ve got a cell phone. You don’t need welfare.’ Ninety percent of the time, I have no minutes. I keep it if I have to call the cops, or if my kid’s asthma gets bad and I need a doctor,” she says.

I’ll admit that I was initially skeptical of the freebie program. I think it’s still fair to argue against it for the fees being charged to other people, but it’s not really possible to argue that a rechargeable cell phone couldn’t make a poor person’s life better.

At the most basic level, however, TracFone is just trying to increase its customer base. It can claim charity as much as it wants, but as a researcher in the article states, the company is “look[ing] at the poor as a possible market.” If they like their hour of free minutes, they’ll want to buy some more. And with people below the poverty line, that seems tricky and exploitative.

Paul Richards is a staff writer for Campus Progress. He attends the University of Pennsylvania.

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