BRUCE HAD a decent job as a dispatcher for a courier company in downtown Manhattan. But the company did 98 percent of its business at the World Trade Center. After September 11, it went under--and Bruce was out of work.

A year ago, a flurry of articles in the mainstream media reported that it was easy to find a job--and that working people were able to get higher wages and better benefits out of employers as a result. No longer.

In New York, people like Bruce have been searching for work for months--and finding nothing. Bruce has spent long, frustrating hours at the city-run Waverly Job Center, applying for aid and looking for a job. "There's just too much paperwork," he says. "People need help now."

Bruce and his family are getting by for now--thanks to a little help that he's gotten from his church. But he's fallen two months behind on his rent--and isn't sure where to turn next. Many more New Yorkers face the same situation.

According to official figures, more than 120,000 people have lost jobs in the city since the September 11 attacks. The real total may be higher. But this alone amounts to 5 percent of the 2.5 million jump in unemployment across the U.S. over the past 12 months.

And it's not like New York City was the land of milk and honey before September 11. As of last August, an incredible 1.5 million New Yorkers--one in every five residents--received some emergency food aid during the past year from soup kitchens, pantries and shelters to avoid going hungry. That's triple the number of food aid recipients in 1995, according to WorkingForChange.

Now the recession and the September 11 attacks have made a bad situation worse. According to Food For Survival, the city's largest food bank, roughly two-thirds of people receiving free food in New York since September 11 were getting donations for the first time.

"There's been a 70 percent increase in need since September 11," Joel Berg, executive director of the NYC Coalition Against Hunger, told Socialist Worker. "But this is roughly the same increase we saw in the first half of 2001 and also during 2000."

The same increased demand on food charities is being felt beyond New York. A recent survey for America's Second Harvest, a national network of nonprofit food banks, discovered that the U.S. passed a horrible new milestone: More people now get food from private charities over the course of a year than take part in the federal government's food stamp program.

According to the survey, emergency feeding sites serve more than 7 million people in a given week and more than 23 million at some point during the year. That's close to one out of every 10 Americans. Another startling revelation of Second Harvest's research: Many of those who seek food aid are in families where one or more people work full-time.

Yet while the crying need only grows more obvious, federal government programs are helping fewer people. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that only 17.7 million people use federal food stamps, down from 21.9 million in 1997--a direct result of Bill Clinton's 1996 welfare "reform" law and other attacks on programs for the poor.

The impact of these cuts was somewhat hidden by the late 1990s economic expansion. But the cost is becoming clear now--and all the more starkly in New York City, thanks to former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Giuliani's final days in office in December were filled with fawning press accounts of his reign--especially his "heroic" behavior in the aftermath of September 11. But the truth is that Giuliani's eight long years of attacks on workers and the poor set the stage for the recession to hit New Yorkers hard.

For example, his administration came up with some of the harshest welfare "reform" measures in the country--like the notorious Work Experience Program that forced recipients into humiliating jobs at sub-minimum wages.

City officials would limit "access to federal benefits like food stamps and TANF [Temporary Assistance to Needy Families] by giving people who were applying false information--like that there are work requirements for food stamps--and having offices only open during bad hours for people," Joel Berg said. "The push was not to move people towards paid, full-time employment."

Now the bill for all this has come due--and private organizations are scrambling to fill a gaping hole left by public services drained of funds. "Things have definitely gotten worse since September 11," Berg said. "The only silver lining is that there's now the beginning of a discussion on the growing inequality in wealth in the city." As columnist James Ridgeway wrote in the Village Voice: "The recession is turning so-called welfare reform into a catastrophe happening before our eyes."

We have to expose the consequences of the politicians' savage attacks on the poor--and build the fight to defend our jobs and our rights.

Huge handouts for New York's richest companies