The Working Poor (23 page)

When I quoted Ann’s observation to employers, some of them said, “Oh!” as if a light bulb of revelation had just been turned on. They suddenly understood something. The feeling that you don’t matter, that you aren’t seen, that you have no value in the running of a store or a factory, means that you can miss work casually because the boss can’t possibly care whether or not you’re there. Only with dramatic steps can such lack of self-regard be countered, as Michael Summers, president of the Summers Rubber Company in Cleveland, had learned from his father. An employee who didn’t come to work would get a call. If his car had broken down, Michael sent someone to pick him up. If he had a doctor’s appointment at 9 a.m., “You say, ‘Fine, we’ll see you at 10 when your appointment’s over.’ One, it calls their bluff, tells them, ‘We expect you here. If we didn’t expect you here every day, you wouldn’t be [working] here…. But we rely on you, we depend on you, and when you’re not here it creates hardship and cost. And you got to be here. And if you can’t be here you got to tell us what’s going on.’ You got to pound that into this group ’cause they’re not used to being accountable. That is a problem with that group.”

His was a small business of sixty employees, founded by his father and grandfather to produce hoses and fittings for hydraulic, chemical, and fuel lines used in heavy industrial machinery. Every single man or woman who stood at a workbench or sat at a desk or drove a forklift was vital to getting shipments assembled, packed, and out on time. That meant that every absence left a gaping hole in the process. Either it had to be filled by somebody else who was pulled off another job or it delayed production. “My father, who ran this business for years, he reminded me when I first showed up, he said, ‘You’re gonna be like a parish priest,’ ” Michael recalled. “You turn your collar backwards, and you gotta deal with the issues ’cause they’re blocking performance. He needed the guy’s skills, the guy was in jail, he’d post his bail so he could come in and weld the metal hose for us.”

As a CEO, Michael was thoroughly unpretentious. His Spartan office had a spectacular view of the parking lot. The reception room was spare: four black vinyl and wood chairs, magenta wall-to-wall carpet, cheesy white walls with little blue and black specks, a reception window that had sliding glass and a little silver bell on the counter with a plunger on top— like an old-fashioned hotel bell. Behind the window sat a redheaded receptionist who seemed bored. On the wall hung a framed photocopy of the front page of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
of October i, 1949, the day the
company was founded. A banner headline read: “500,000 Quit Jobs in Steel Strike.”

Back then, boys could learn by working on their cars without expensive tools, computers, and complex training, and many who discovered their mechanical talents followed their fathers happily into the factories, where they found financial security, a sense of professionalism, and a pathway up. Michael Summers was young, but he had a sense of that history, and he missed it. “Kids today do not have the ability to work on mechanical things,” he said. “We’re in a throwaway society where the lawn mower breaks, you don’t tear apart this little two-cycle engine. You throw it out and you get another one. So a kid sees his father—if he has one—throwing away everything and buying new, and his expectation is, what do you mean we make things? What do you mean we take things apart and fix them? [We have a] shortage of tool and dye makers and fluid power mechanics, the guys who are basically screwing things together and building systems. People who are good at that are good because they like it, they have an aptitude for it, and they’ve had exposure to it. There are a lot of kids who [would] be good at it, but they have no clue that they have mechanical interest.”

Add family dysfunction, survival instincts from the street, and the culture shock of entering the workplace, and you have a dearth of qualified labor. “The family issues become overwhelming to them, and the job is secondary,” Michael observed. “So a person will be at work for a month, and then all of a sudden they won’t show up, and then they show up two days later and you say, ‘Where were you?’ and they say, ‘Well, my car broke and I had to fix it.’ Or, ‘Somebody got sick and I had to stay home with them.’ And you discuss the issue and you try to explain: ‘You don’t understand. That might have been an important family problem, but you’ve got to work around that. You cannot
not
show up here, especially if you don’t call.’ ”

Typically, members of what he labeled “the non-job-ready group” started work with an enthusiasm that usually lasted a month or two, Michael noticed. “And then there’s friction: with other co-workers, with the supervisor who’s giving them a hard time or doesn’t understand them, and they don’t know how to deal with that. And the reaction is, ‘I’m out of here.’ And I think our challenge as employers to deal with this very delicate work group is to learn how to shepherd them through that emotional crisis. It’s almost guaranteed it’s gonna happen. ‘Somewhere in the first six
months, you’re gonna emotionally be very upset with what’s going on here. Let’s understand that up front. Now, here’s how we’re gonna handle that. You’re gonna come in and tell me what’s going on, but you’re not gonna
not
come into work. That can’t be an option here.’ ”

None of the supervisors at Summers was black, and that, Michael conceded, subtracted from the counseling tools that good management required. “Our supervisors, the first-level supervisor, does not have the training or the sensitization to deal with it in that way. They’re being beaten on for raw performance issues, and they lose tolerance real fast with that, and they’ll say, ‘You’re out.’ And if you have cultural differences—you’ve got a white middle-class male and a young black male—big communication problem, big culture problem. Low tolerance of poor performance on the part of the supervisor. Inability to comprehend and understand. The employee, a young black male, will say, ‘This is a hostile environment to me.’ ”

So, did it help to make employees feel essential? “People who are abusers of the employer relationship leave,” Michael said. For others, who had ambition, “It gives an alternate view of the world.”

It has been argued that workers feel devalued when they are paid low wages, and that higher pay would be the most tangible way for management to express its need for the people who actually do the production or provide the service. In the Summers case, though, as in many other small enterprises, the profit margins provided little cushion. A raw recruit, a new warehouseman, started at $8 or $8.50 an hour and could be making $12 in about two years, Michael said. He pulled out a spreadsheet showing the income and expenses of his $10-million-a-year company. “If you think in terms of a sales dollar,” he explained, “60 cents goes for the material we make, 25 cents goes for people, and that puts us basically at 85 percent right there.” Most of the rest of the incoming dollar was consumed by “utilities, phone costs, communications, maintenance, repair, training,” he added. Then he pointed to a number all the way down at the bottom right-hand corner of the spreadsheet: the company’s profit of 3 percent. “In this business, this is a middle position,” he said. “It’s not a high performer or a low performer. So 3 cents in distribution after tax is considered pretty good. And it’s that 3 cents that fuels our growth.”

In a bountiful year, Michael Summers, the son and grandson of the founders, the chief executive officer of this successful enterprise, takes home for himself between $80,000 and $100,000, “which frankly I think
is great pay,” he declared. It was about six times the salary of his beginning employees. “Of course we read about the big spreads, where it’s five hundred times,” he said with a grimace. “I happen to think that’s a little criminal. I personally, I can’t justify that that guy is worth that much money to any company, you know, $10 million or whatever it is—that’s absurd. But that’s also not the norm. The norm is us.”

If employers don’t think they can spare the money to make their workers feel wanted, they may look for other ways. The Landmark Plastic Company in Akron, facing a turnover rate of more than ioo percent a year, decided to ask people in exit interviews why they were leaving, and the answers surprised the managers. In its sprawling factory with its two hundred employees, Landmark made throwaway plastic pots and trays for plants at nurseries. Little plastic chips, arriving in cardboard barrels, were heated and formed into small pellets, which were heated again; driven by hydraulic force into molds; and pressed into black, white, or green plastic pots of various sizes. Huge machines, their innards a maze of hoses and thick pistons, generated thunderous roars and hisses, and those on the floor almost had to shout to be heard. The air was misty with a plastic dust that a factory safety officer, Ken Slone, called a “gray hue,” and which the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration considerately labeled “nuisance dust” so that it was not ruled as dangerous. Masks were available for workers, but none was wearing one; everyone had the required safety glasses, and a few had put little green or orange rubber plugs in their ears. Every six seconds a $200,000 machine called the Husky was spitting four plastic pots onto a short conveyor belt, which lifted them to the eye level of a woman and dumped them onto a broad tray in front of her. As they toppled down, she gave them a cursory inspection, stacked them inside one another, and then packed them into a cardboard box behind her. Every two hours she got a fifteen-minute break.

It was not the mind-numbing routine, the noise, or the plastic dust that departing workers complained about, however. It wasn’t even the low starting wage of $7 an hour. It was something less tangible—“that they didn’t feel needed, necessary, or wanted,” reported David Bokmiller, the unsmiling, tough-minded manager of manufacturing services. “And that’s what most people want in life,” he continued. “They were ignored, just another body. The supervisors weren’t doing the job because they were busy doing what supervisors had to do. So we looked back and looked through the whole matrix and said, all right, what’s distracting the super-
visor? Why is the supervisor not able to do the humanistic things that he needs to do? ’Cause he’s too tied up in technical things.” The company’s answer was to assign each new employee a “sponsor,” a peer who would “be their friend, so to speak, and their guide for ninety days during their probationary period,” David said, “make sure they’re comfortable, make sure they got friends, get them connected with other people, make sure they’re not left standing around or wondering, have lunch with them, take breaks with them, hopefully engage them socially, or try. Just to make them feel connected, wanted, needed, help them understand rules, policies. We’ve had people on exit interviews tell us they were here ten days and never met the supervisor. I mean, that’s kind of a horror story, but we hear that, and it’s true.” If the employee stayed at least ninety days, “that sponsor gets a $100 reward.”

Trying to lock employees in “golden handcuffs” by improving benefits and raising pay would not do the trick, David insisted. “I can go out to people earning $7 an hour. ‘Here’s $2 an hour [more].’ Trust me, I would get nothing more for it except a higher labor cost,” he said. “If we increase the unit cost per hour, my customers won’t pay that. I have to find a way to absorb those increases.” Then he added reflectively: “It’s not what you pay people. It’s what they cost you. You pay people what they’re worth, they don’t cost you anything. You pay people too little, it can cost you everything.”

As the unemployment rate falls, quality does also. It’s one of those cruelties of free market economics: the better the times, the more difficult the employers’ search for high-caliber workers, especially at low wages. So, if the bosses aren’t going to pay more, they at least have to do some hand-holding. Few seem interested, according to Carla Tillmon of the Kansas City Full Employment Council, which saw few managers attend its training sessions on how to supervise former welfare recipients. “It makes me mad that there are some employers out there who want the earth, moon, and the stars for $6 an hour,” she declared. “They want a high school degree, job experience, et cetera, really good work experience, no gaps in employment. You have to forgive some things and go forward.”

In Kansas City, where federal welfare reform stimulated intense cooperation between corporations and job-training programs, executives who railed against welfare were often challenged to make good on their opinions. “I say, OK, put your money where your mouth is,” declared Terrence R.

Ward, assistant to H&R Block’s chairman. “The typical welfare recipient is a single mother, high school dropout, competing at a second- or third-grade level. You say she ought to get a job. How are you going to make it happen?” He got evasive answers. “If they say, ‘We can’t hire them,’ I say, ‘So you want to perpetuate welfare.’ ‘Well, no.’ ‘Well, take your choice. It’s one or the other. The only thing missing is a job, and you can provide that.’ ”

Employers also have to provide what Ward called “tough love and a nurturing attitude,” that combination of discipline and compassion that makes for good managing as well as good parenting. The approach was forced on Sprint as the economy prospered. Paying $7.45 an hour, the company could no longer attract enough operators to its call centers in the suburbs, where the unemployment rate dropped to 1 percent and the annual turnover rate reached 80 percent. So, to draw workers from mostly black inner-city neighborhoods with double-digit unemployment, Sprint opened a call center with great fanfare in the heart of Kansas City’s historic jazz district, installing cubicles crammed with computer equipment on the third floor of an old brick building at 18th and Vine. The company reduced its educational requirement from high school diploma or G.E.D. to “seeking a G.E.D.” It raised the starting wage to $8.25 and assigned a couple of no-nonsense black women to supervise the forty-five employees, virtually all of whom were also black women.

“They don’t trust anybody,” said Hazel Barkley, the operations manager. She came to the office as if dressed for church, carrying with her that caring firmness of the teacher who is now feared and then remembered fondly after years have passed. She saw two pervasive problems among the mothers coming from welfare. One was an absence of any belief in others, a profound distrust. The second was a conviction that backing down meant weakness. Those two disabilities stole from her employees the ability to manage their anger and to form collegial connections in the workplace. She lectured them. She demanded that instead of screaming and yelling, “You be the bigger person and walk away,” as she put it. “If we can help them up front with that, we probably wouldn’t have a turnover rate.” It was running at 48 percent a year, better than in the suburbs, but still too high.