Americans fret over our racial divide, but barely notice that Congress is cutting poor people loose from the body politic. In an era when more and more people are viewed as redundant, we need to redefine the value we attach to work in a way that acknowledges our need for one another. Sandy Close is executive editor of Pacific News Service.

Three decades ago the late Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton remarked that the problem of the poor in Oakland was not that they were exploited but that they were redundant.

Newton's words have a prophetic ring today. As the gap between rich and poor grows steadily wider, Americans have lost all sense of why the poor matter to the rest of us. Each week we come up with some new term -- illegal, illegitimate, irredeemable, unwanted -- to justify writing them out of our lives. We fret over America's racial divide and barely notice that Congress is cutting the poor loose from the body politic.

Liberals complain that Americans are abandoning our compassion. But neither liberals nor conservatives can answer the question, "Of what use are the poor?" We have no equivalent in our secular vocabulary for the religious understanding that poor people matter because they have souls. Is it any wonder why so many dispossessed people in America are turning to religion instead of politics?

The problem of redundancy isn't confined to the poor. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in his book "The Work of Nations" says that only 27 percent of the working population keeps America competitive in the global economy. Just where does that leave the rest of us 73 percent?

Maybe it's not surprising that over 70 percent of the Junior League's volunteers in San Francisco are women with full time professional careers. Like the dispossessed, they are seeking reassurance, hands-on evidence, that what they do matters to society, reassurance a fat paycheck doesn't always provide.

The pathway back to renewing social bonds in our increasingly apartheid society may well lie in redefining the value of work, particularly work performed by those at the lowest end of the pay scales. When Michael Milliken earns $50 million for six days' consulting and Zoe Baird's nanny earns $1000 for tending children for a week, we have clearly lost all sense of proportion over how to judge work in relation to the larger social whole.

Perhaps the most undervalued, overlooked work in America occurs in small businesses and micro-enterprises. A professor at a prestigious Ivy League business school told me once that small business wasn't part of the school's curriculum. If people talked about it at all, the metaphor was the acorn that grows into the oak -- Hewlett Packard or Microsoft. As a journalist who has covered the social unraveling of California for the past 25 years, I see it otherwise.

Small businesses and micro-enterprises have become the engine of growth in an era of downsizing and deindustrialization. There's an energy here that makes small businesses, and even micro-enterprises, the envy of CEOs, not the other way around. (Notice how big corporations tend today to appropriate their language to advertise themselves: "We do it the old fashioned way ... one by one," they boast in their TV commercials.) Indeed it may be that small business and micro-enterprise, where failure rates are high but start ups consistently higher, make up the one institutional sector of our society that still believes in second chances.

What energizes these businesses even when the hours are long, the pay low, is people-to-people bonds. In some cases these are blood ties -- which is why immigrants with strong families do so well at it. But in many small businesses and micro-enterprises it's the ability of the founder to impart his or her vision to co-workers, to make them feel they have a stake in the enterprise and its larger purpose, and to convey that sense of purpose to the clients and customers they serve. Through this activity millions of people create a communal assurance for one another that their lives have a point.

In short, small businesses and micro-enterprises are precisely the sector that generates the two commodities in shortest supply and greatest demand in our society: a sense of purpose and of connection. At a time when the major calamity of America is loss of a relational texture to our life, these businesses are an extended family in the market place. Even when they fail, the youngest employee learns social skills he or she never got in the empty household.

We live in a culture where the first question you ask a stranger is "What do you do?" In most other cultures, the question to the stranger is: "Where do you come from? How many children do you have? Who do you know?" In other words, how are you connected to other people's lives?

As we think about the value of what we do, we need to find a way of connecting the two questions. We need to ask not just "What do you do?" but "Who do you do it for?" and "Who do you do it with?" Only once we measure the value of work in relation to the larger social whole will we begin to imagine ourselves again as an inclusive society, where there is no such thing as redundant people.