The Working Poor (16 page)

There was also the tyranny of time, which all businesses suffered. “You have to start making it four to six weeks before you actually ship it,” Maria explained, “and you don’t get paid for at least another four to ten weeks after you ship it. So there’s like a three-month period of when maybe
you’ve actually paid for the stuff before you see your money. So if you have like double the amount of business next month as I had this month, I’m gonna need to fork out a double amount of money; I’m not gonna see any money back for three months. I’ve got to carry myself, pay my workers, pay my bills, have to have a surplus of money to last for those three months before I get paid back.” Many manufacturers “get factored,” she said, meaning a bank fronts the money and takes 4 to 5 percent of the profits. She had avoided that.

Sometimes the three or four contractors Maria routinely used complained that they hadn’t made anything on a job because it had taken longer than expected, and sometimes she paid them more than the agreed rate. But since costs were critical, and since her own employees’ salaries were part of that constant overhead that she had to watch, she deemed it imprudent to raise wages above the going rates in the industry, even if her sympathy often pulled at her to do so. “I always want to give them more,” she said, “but then I think: I’ve got two kids. What if things don’t go well? I’ve given away all my money. You see how they live. They’re taking the bus, don’t have a car. It’s an awkward thing. We’re doing well; we’ve only been doing really well for two years. You just got to go slowly. What if you start paying someone, say $20 an hour, and your business starts going bad? I mean, I have to like cut down their salary?” she asked. “Or I have to now fire you because you’re getting this great big salary but people aren’t buying my product?” High wages would have increased her risk.

“I think the first person we hired was a sample maker,” Maria said. That was in 1993, for $12 an hour, a bit high at the time. “She’s still making the same amount of money,” but with bonuses on top. “Sometimes we give like $800, $1,000,” twice a year, in June and December. That way, lean times would mean bonus cuts, not necessarily wage cuts or layoffs.

Winston Churchill once remarked that democracy was the worst system ever devised, except for all the others that had been tried from time to time. The same could be said about capitalist free enterprise: It’s the worst—except for all the others. It has a ruthlessness about it, a cold competitive spirit that promotes the survival of the fittest and the suffering of the weak. But it also opens opportunity unparalleled by communism, socialism, or any other variant so far attempted. The sense of injustice that it fosters derives from its lack of egalitarianism—that exalted ideal that other systems also fail to practice. The American ideal embraces an equality of opportunity for every person but not an equality of result. In fact, free
enterprise thrives on difference—the difference between the owner and the worker, the educated and the less educated, the skilled and the less skilled, the adventurous and the timid, and ultimately the rich and the poor. That differentiation, particularly the freedom to hire labor at relatively low cost, has fueled the entrepreneurial risk-taking so essential to a robust, decentralized economy. It is a highly regulated economy, woven with legal and contractual restrictions on abuse. But those regulations, aimed at protecting health, environment, and employees’ well-being, are kept in check by constant debate across the American political spectrum; they have not been allowed to suffocate private business, which needs space to maneuver, invent, and grow.

Like most employers, Maria saw no alternative to the discrepancy among various grades of workers, and she was devoted to preserving the differences. “You certainly don’t want to pay someone who is doing shipping or a tedious manual job a huge salary,” she declared. “It’s almost not fair. Someone who went to college, studied, tried to make something of their lives, those people should be rewarded and they should be making the better salaries. The person that dropped out of high school … I mean, that doesn’t make sense ’cause then, in fact, no one’s gonna go to college. That’s like the way it works. If you go to school and get a good education you’re gonna get a better paying job.”

The head of a temp agency in Kansas City shivered at the notion of paying the people she placed more than $6 to $7 an hour. “You’d fall out of whack,” she said, and falling out of whack was a disturbing idea. “You’re offsetting the entire pay scale. They’re making three, four, five dollars more an hour than they maybe should be. A clerical person that I would typically pay seven, if I paid them ten, now I have to pay my accountants thirteen, fifteen, seventeen dollars an hour. Now you’re pulling up the whole pay scale.”

The words “should be” were significant. Another Kansas City employer, Paul Lillig, used the same phrase to lament the rise in the hourly rate— from $6 to $9—being earned by the few workers who could operate an inserter machine for handling mail. “Pretty soon we’ve got these people who are being paid more than they really should be paid,” he declared. Other employers echoed the conviction that there was a “right” wage for a job, and that if they raised their manual laborers’ pay, they would have to do the same for their foremen, accountants, and executives to maintain a substantial distance between salaries. In other words, the national ethic is
ambivalent, decrying the disparity on the one hand (as some CEOs get five hundred times their workers’ lowest wage) and, on the other, embracing the differences as virtuous. It is somehow morally wrong not to pay an accountant more than a secretary.

The disparities in earning power were even enshrined in the formula used to calculate compensation after the terrorist attacks of September n, 200I. The survivors of a thirty-year-old married father of two who was killed in the World Trade Center, for example, would receive $1,066,058 if he had been paid $25,000 a year, and $3,856,694 if he had been paid $150,000. Everyone’s life had a price.

Some employers even use the earning gap to argue against narrowing it, noting that raising wages at the bottom would have a direct impact on prices for the same people. Randy Rolston, president of a mail-order stationery company, Victorian Paper, put it this way: “If you move the minimum wage up, where they are spending their money is back within the minimum wage realm.… They can’t afford to go to a nice restaurant. If they go out to dinner at a Wendy’s or a McDonald’s, well, you raise the price there.… You go to the grocery store, they’ve got to buy their food, you raise the price there. When the wages are raised, prices would have to be raised. People are either gonna go out of business or they’re gonna raise the prices. The inflation it would cause would be a low-end inflation. Those are the businesses that they usually patronize.”

The economy resulting from the wage differentiation has been agile in responding to need, demand, and the impulse for innovation. Unfortunately, it has also increased the disparity between wealthy and poor—and, in an ominous harbinger of a troubled future, has not enhanced the opportunity for upward mobility during a worker’s lifetime, especially among Third World immigrants impeded by low education and low skills. In a booming economy, practically anyone who wants to work can get a job, but usually at a low wage without much prospect of promotion. Except in certain growth industries such as health care, with high turnover and a demand twenty-four hours a day for a variety of talents, the entry-level job often turns out to be the dead-end job.

It is mobility that has created the global reputation of the United States as a land of opportunity, and it is that impression that has generated the popular view of a society more open and less stratified than others. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the son of Polish immigrants
could drop out of school after the eighth grade, work on the Jersey City docks for eight cents an hour, and rise to become president of Bethlehem Steel’s steamship lines. That’s what my grandfather did. Not today. Most modern American mobility is generated by economic growth, not by any absence of boundaries between races or classes. That economic expansion, rapid enough after World War II to open broad avenues of advancement, has slowed since the 1970s, leaving many workers behind, especially men and women with nothing more than high school diplomas. More mobility occurs between generations than within generations. It is a sad truth now that a young person with limited skills and education arriving on these shores—or entering the workforce from a background of poverty—will start on the bottom rung only to discover that the higher rungs are beyond his grasp.

Nowhere is the stifling frustration more obvious than in the ethnic enclaves that serve America’s economy. Formidable walls surround the subcultures of Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mexicans, Hondurans, Ethiopians, and others who populate the ranks of low-paid workers. Those who lack fluency in English, proper immigration papers, or advanced skills cannot easily scale those walls; they are imprisoned in an archipelago of scattered zones of cheap labor that promote the country’s interests. They are not Americans, but they are an essential part of America. They sustain not only the garment industry, but also the restaurants, farms, parking garages, landscapers, painting contractors, builders, and other key contributors to American well-being.

“They treat ’em like shit,” said Roxie Herbekian, a gangly, fast-talking union organizer and president of the Parking and Service Workers Union in Washington, D.C. She represented parking garage attendants in Washington, northern Virginia, and suburban Maryland, most of whom were Ethiopian immigrants, plus some West Africans, Latinos, and African-Americans. “People are routinely fired without good reason,” she contended, “and there’s a lot of racist division of work. It’s very hard for people of color to get out of the garages into anything higher [such as] a supervisory position, a management position, accounting.” Many workers “feel this wall of disrespect,” she said. “A lot of the immigrants, particularly from Ethiopia, are professionals. There’s a lot of lawyers, a lot of pharma-
cists, people that were highly trained … and then they’re working these jobs, and some young white kid is the supervisor and treats ’em like they don’t know anything.”

Parking attendants get minimum wage—in the District of Columbia that is a dollar more than the federal minimum—but a lot of their time is off the clock, Herbekian complained. It may take a cashier twenty minutes after she punches out to complete forms and deposit receipts in the bank, but those minutes go unpaid. One big company had “forced breaks,” she said. “They automatically deduct an hour and fifteen minutes for breaks— well, people don’t get the break.” They had to work right through most of it. Personal connections also count. If you have friends who can get you a late afternoon or evening shift parking cars downtown, you’ll get up to $200 a week in tips from people retrieving their vehicles. But you need the contacts, and you need to be a man. Women are usually confined to the tipless position of cashier.

A fine-boned woman named Leti, fatigue and defeat etched in her ebony face, worked twelve hours a day as a cashier in a Washington garage. Although she spoke good English, she had never finished high school in Ethiopia, and her long hours and two children hadn’t left her time to get her degree here. Seventeen years ago she arrived in the United States on a tourist visa, and two years later managed to get her green card, which signified her legal status as an immigrant. But neither the card nor her English nor her long time in the country opened doors. “I feel like I came last year,” she said. “Nothing has changed.”

In Los Angeles, “Nara” and her husband were also stuck. Her piercing eyes were bright with anger, her words bitter. For twelve hours a day six days a week, she worked as assistant cook in a Korean restaurant, where customers’ tips were not shared with the staff in the hot kitchen. In the evenings, because her husband refused to cook for himself, she got home and had to prepare dinner for him and their son. “Cooking all day and then at home is like being in hell,” she said angrily. During one of her many fights with her husband, she shouted at him, “Why did you make me come here?” He walked out and didn’t return for ten days.

In 1991 he came from South Korea with $20,000; she arrived six months later with $15,000. Now their savings had dwindled to $5,000, and they had moved to a smaller, cheaper apartment where they slept in the living room, letting their boy of thirteen have the one bedroom. In Seoul, the husband ran an import-export business dealing mostly in sunglasses; in

Los Angeles, he picked up odd jobs as a welder. She was a dress designer but without English couldn’t get such work here, so she felt confined to the subculture of Korean restaurants in the “Koreatown” section of Los Angeles. “I went to a language institute for three months,” Nara said through an interpreter, “but I forget very easily. I’m too old.” She was forty-five. “I live in Koreatown; I can get along without English.” She could get along, but she couldn’t get out.

When they both had work their income didn’t look bad on paper. She made between $1,700 and $1,800 a month, though her long days meant that the hourly rate barely reached California’s minimum wage of $6.75 and omitted overtime, which the law required. He could earn $1,000 to $2,000 a month welding gates and fences, so together they may have taken in nearly $40,000 a year. That was a graphic illustration of the virtue of having two wage-earners and the hazards of being a single parent: At those low wages, single parenthood would have been a prescription for poverty.

Still, they felt pinched. Los Angeles was an expensive place to live. Public transportation was so bad that they had to own two vehicles, a truck and a car. Their jobs provided no health insurance, so they spent large sums on Korean doctors and dentists. As illegal immigrants, they got virtually no government benefits (which Nara insisted she would have refused in any case). Moreover, a psychological confinement imposed a mood of defeat. Marginalized, cloistered, and stagnant, Nara simply wanted to go back to South Korea; her husband wanted to stay.