The Working Poor (8 page)

“2nd Spent 136.00 food stamps,” she wrote. So the benefit was all gone the day she got it. Three days later she had to come up with an additional $25 in cash for groceries, another $54 on October 10, and $15 more on the twelfth. Poor families typically find that food stamps cover only one-half to three-quarters of their grocery costs.

Even the opening balance on the card was chipped away as Christie inched up in salary. It makes sense that the benefit is based on income: the less you need, the less you get. That’s the economic side. On the psychological side, however, it produces hellish experiences for the beneficiaries. Every three months Christie had to take half a day off from work (losing half a day’s wages) and carry an envelope full of pay stubs, utility bills, and rent receipts to be pawed over by her ill-tempered caseworker, who applied a state-mandated formula to figure her food stamp allotment and her children’s eligibility for health insurance. When Christie completed a training course and earned a raise of 10 cents an hour, her food stamps dropped by $10 a month.

That left her $6 a month ahead, which was not nothing but felt like it. Many former welfare recipients who go to work just say good riddance to the bureaucracies that would provide food stamps, medical coverage, and housing. Some think wrongly that they’re no longer eligible once they’re off welfare; others would rather forfeit their rights than contend with the hassle and humiliation. Quiet surrender ran against Christie’s grain, however. She was smart and insistent, as anyone must be to negotiate her way through the system. She never flinched from appealing to higher authority. When she once forgot to put a utilities bill in her sheaf of papers, her caseworker withheld her food stamps. “I mailed it to her the next day,” Christie said. Two weeks passed, and the card remained empty. Christie called the caseworker. “She got really snotty,” Christie remembered. “ ‘Well, didn’t I tell you you were supposed to send some documentation?’

“I was like, ‘Have you checked your mail?’ ” No, as it turned out, the caseworker’s mail had piled up unread. “She was like, ‘Well, I got people waiting up to two, three months on food stamps.’ And she didn’t get back with me. I had to go to her supervisor.” The benefits were then restored.

It is easy to lose your balance having one foot planted tentatively in the working world and the other still entwined in this thicket of red tape. Managing relations with a boss, finding reliable child care, and coping with a tangle of unpaid bills can be daunting enough for a single mother with little such experience; add surveillance by a bureaucracy that seems more prosecutor than provider, and you have Christie’s high blood pressure.

While she invoked the system’s rules to get her due, she also cheated— or thought she did. Living with her surreptitiously was her boyfriend,
Kevin, the father of her son. She was certain that if the Housing Authority
knew, she would be evicted, either because he was a convicted felon (two years for assault) or because his earning power, meager though it was, would have lifted her beyond eligibility. So slight are the margins between government assistance and outright destitution that small lies take on large significance in the search for survival.

Kevin looked like a friendly genie—a solid 280 pounds, a shaved head, and a small earring in his right ear. His income was erratic. In decent weather he made $7.40 an hour working for a landscaper, who rewarded him with a free turkey to end the season at Thanksgiving—and then dumped him onto unemployment for the winter. He wanted to drive a truck or cut meat. He had received a butcher’s certificate in a training course during imprisonment, but when he showed the document from the penitentiary, employers didn’t rush to put a knife in his hand.

The arithmetic of Christie’s life added up to tension, and you had to look hard through her list of expenditures to find fun or luxury. On the fifth she received her weekly child support check of $37.68 from Kevin (she got nothing from her daughter’s father, who was serving a long prison sentence for assault). The same day, she put $5 worth of gas in her car, and the next day spent $6 of her own money to take the day-care kids to the zoo. The eighth was payday, and her entire $330 check disappeared in a flash. First, there was what she called a $3 “tax” to cash her check, just one of several such fees for money orders and the like—a penalty for having no checking account. Immediately, $172 went for rent, including a $10 late fee, which she was always charged because she never had enough to pay by the first of the month. Then, because it was October and she had started to plan for Christmas, she paid $31.47 at a store for presents she had put on layaway, another $10 for gasoline, $40 to buy shoes for her two kids, $5 for a pair of corduroy pants at a secondhand shop, another $5 for a shirt, $10 for bell-bottom pants, and $47 biweekly for car insurance. The $330 was gone. She had no insurance on her TVs, clothes, furniture, or other household goods.

Utilities and other bills got paid out of her second check toward the end of the month. Her phone usually cost about $43 a month, gas for the apartment $34, electricity $46, and prescriptions between $8 and $15. Her monthly car payment ran $150, medical insurance $72, and cable TV $43. Cable is no longer considered a luxury by low-income families that pinch and sacrifice to have it. So much of modern American culture now comes through television that the poor would be further marginalized without
the broad access that cable provides. Besides, it’s relatively cheap entertainment. “I just have basic,” Christie explained. “I have an antenna, but you can’t see anything, you get no reception.” And she needed good reception because she and Kevin loved to watch wrestling.

One reason for Christie’s tight budget was the abundance of high-priced, well-advertised snacks, junk food, and prepared meals that provide an easy fallback diet for a busy working mother—or for anyone who has never learned to cook from scratch. Besides the staples of hamburger and chicken, “I buy sausages,” Christie said, “I buy the TV dinners ’cause I might be tired some days and throw it in the oven—like Salisbury steaks and turkey and stuff like that. My kids love pizza. I get the frozen pizzas. … I buy my kids a lot of breakfast things ’cause we’re up early and we’re out the door. You know, those cereal bars and stuff like that, they’re expensive! You know? Pop Tarts, cereal bars, Granola.” The cheaper breakfasts, like hot cereal, came only on weekends, when she had time. “They eat the hot cereal, but during the week we’re on the go. So I give them cereal in the bag. My son likes to eat dry cereal, so I put him some cereal in the lunch bag. Cocoa Puffs. They got Cocoa Dots.” She laughed. “Lucky Charms. He’s not picky. My daughter’s picky.” Those candylike cereals soak up dollars. At my local supermarket, Lucky Charms cost dearly: $4.39 for a box of just 14 ounces, while three times as much oatmeal goes for nearly the same price, $4.29.

Recreation for Christie and Kevin centered on food and drink. When her eleven-year-old daughter brought home a good report card, they rewarded her by scraping together a little cash for an evening at a modest restaurant, either Mexican or, if it was Wednesday, at Ryan’s down the street. Wednesday was steak night at Ryan’s, a big, boisterous, all-you-can-eat family place at the edge of the black neighborhood where they lived. The buffet counters, heaped with steaming potatoes and green beans and slabs of beef, were encircled by a jovial, multiracial crowd of grandparents, parents, and kids jostling one another with friendly apologies as they carried away piles of stick-to-your-ribs food for just nine bucks apiece.

As an occasional present to themselves, Christie and Kevin invited friends over, lit a charcoal fire in the metal barrel that had been made into a grill behind her ground-floor apartment, and feasted on barbecued chicken and ribs and lots of cans of Miller’s. Did they drink to get drunk?

“Mmmmmmmm,” Kevin replied in a long, low hum.

“Mmmmm,” said Christie. “Not around my children. I go to the club
for that. Then I come home and go to sleep.” She gave a delighted laugh. She liked Boone’s Farm wine, Manischewitz Cream, and Paul Masson brandy, which explained the entry in the records she kept for me: “15.00 on bottle” on October 12. But she was no alcoholic, and she and Kevin swore that they had stayed away from drugs despite the constant temptation in a
neighborhood crawling with pushers.

“Christie likes to have fun,” her mother said tartly. Her mother, “Gladys,” had dropped out of high school, spent years on welfare, and nurtured the fervent dream of seeing her three children in college. The ambition propelled two of them. Christie’s brother became an accountant, and her sister, a loan officer. But Christie never took to higher education. She began reluctantly at the University of Akron, lived at home, and finally got fed up with having no money. The second semester of her sophomore year, she went to work instead of to school, a choice that struck her then as less momentous than it turned out to be.

“She didn’t take things as serious as they really were,” Gladys complained. “Now she sees for herself how serious this is.” Just how serious depended on what she wanted to do. She loved working with children but now discovered that without a college degree she would have trouble getting hired at a responsible level in the Head Start preschool program, much less as a teacher in a regular school; she was limited to a YWCA day-care center whose finances were precarious. Since 95 percent of the Y’s children came from low-income families, the fees were essentially set by the center’s main source of income, Ohio’s Department of Human Services, which paid $99 to $114 a week for full-time care. Given the center’s heavy expenses, the rates were not enough to pay teachers more than $5.30 to $5.90 an hour.

Christie’s previous jobs had also imprisoned her close to the minimum wage as a hostess-cashier at a Holiday Inn, a cashier at Kmart, a waitress in a bar, a cook and waitress and cashier in various restaurants. She had become a veteran of inadequate training programs designed to turn her into a retail salesperson, a bus driver, and a correctional officer, but the courses never enabled her and her classmates to pass the tests and get hired. She had two words to explain why she had never returned to college. “Lazy. Lazy.”

It was strange that she thought of herself as lazy, because her work was exhausting, and her low wage required enormous effort to stay afloat.

When the bills would inundate her, she explained, “I pay that one one month and don’t pay that one and play catch-up on this one, one month. I play catch-up pretty much. I rotate ’em around. You got a phone bill. You got to pay that every month. If you miss a payment, pssshhh. It’s double the next month and triple the next month. The next thing, you got a disconnect. I live on disconnect notices. And I pay my bill every month, but get a disconnect every month, because everybody wants you to pay on the first of the month. I don’t get paid on the first of the month. I can’t pay ten people on the first of the month. I get the disconnect notice, and I get very, very close. I call, I make payment arrangements. I’m like, ‘Hey, please give me a break. Don’t turn me off yet. I’m gonna send ya something,’ you know. The car dealer man, I might not take him all of my 150, but I take him something. They’re funny guys. They work with me, they’re real nice. And he said, ‘Well, Miss V, what do you have for us today?’ One thing the guy said, he said, ‘I notice you come every month with something.’ And I do. I come with the majority. Every month. I’m like, ‘Hey, I gotta buy food, fellas.’ ”

Her strained schedule made her vulnerable to fees and fines, including one that ended her children’s summer day care. Because she couldn’t afford the $104 a month it would have cost to put her kids part-time in the Y’s day-care center, her mother watched them after school. In the summer they went to a Boys and Girls Club for a token $7 each. But the club had a strict rule about pickup times—3 p.m. except Friday, when it was 1. One Friday, her mother forgot the earlier deadline. Instead of calling Christie at work, the club started the clock running, imposing a fine that began at $10 apiece for the first five minutes and continued at a lower rate until her mother finally appeared, more than an hour late. It reached $80 per child, an impossible amount for Christie to afford, so her children could not continue. In her life, every small error had large consequences.

Christie seemed doomed to a career of low pay without the chance of significant promotion, no matter how important her jobs might be to the country’s well-being. At her level in the economy, everything would have to be perfectly aligned to open the door to comfort. After the missteps at the outset of her adulthood, she would now need the boost of higher education or the right niche of vocational training. By itself, hard work alone would not pay off. That lesson, tainting such a revered virtue, is not one that we want to learn. But unless employers can and will pay a good deal
more for the society’s essential labor, those working hard at the edge of poverty will stay there. And America’s rapturous hymn to work will sound a sour note.

Work didn’t work for Debra Hall either. Like many welfare mothers forced off the rolls into the labor force, she found almost everything in her life changed except her material standard of living. She had to buy a car to get to work, wake up before dawn, struggle to learn new skills, and weave her way among racial tensions on the job. Her budget had more complexity but no surplus. Her major gain was emotional—she felt better about herself—and so, on balance, she was tentatively glad to be working.

Debra was fortunate enough to live downstairs in a two-family house owned by her mother, in a Cleveland neighborhood of faded comfort. With her meager wage on the open market, she would have been confined to a dreadful flat. Here, the houses needed paint and their roofs needed shingles, but the rooms were spacious and the streets were not so hard. Across her stoop wafted the sweet smell of marijuana being smoked by two young women sitting on the steps next door. A curtain was drawn across Debra’s large front window.

Inside, the living room was dark at the height of the afternoon. She had been sleeping on the couch since returning from her 3:30–11:30 a.m. shift in a bakery, and she still wore her white uniform shirt with “Debra” on a label stitched above the right-hand pocket. Her black hair was straightened, and a perpetual smile illuminated her broad face, touched by a flicker of sadness now and then as she managed to laugh pungently through the tales she told of hardship.