The Working Poor (9 page)

The television set was on, and an upright vacuum cleaner stood in the middle of the living room floor. Decorating an end table were pictures of her two children: a younger son who was handicapped by Down syndrome, and an older daughter who was progressing modestly at the lower levels of a banking career. “Thank God she didn’t get on welfare,” Debra declared in her deep voice.

It was the birth of her daughter, when Debra was eighteen, that launched a twenty-one-year career of welfare checks and “under-the-table-type jobs,” as she put it, including positions as a housekeeper and bar hostess that paid her in unrecorded cash. The widespread practice of holding undeclared jobs while getting welfare meant that “welfare-to-work”
should have been called “work only,” for it slashed people’s actual incomes. “I got used to that, having the extra money,” Debra explained. “I could make like, per week, probably like $120 ’cause they would pay you like $30 a night, plus tips. … So I got used to that and got stuck on it and forgot about the outside world.”

The letter reminding her of the real world came from her caseworker. At age thirty-nine, Debra had no skills to speak of. She had dropped out of community college—“I wasn’t puttin’ anything into it,” she confessed. She judged herself “lazy” and had never tried to learn a trade. She had lived off her welfare check, her illicit earnings, and her Supplementary Security Income (SSI) payments from Social Security for her son, a teenager who was in special schooling. Welfare reform was now catching up with her. The 1996 act allowing states to impose time limits and work requirements gave Ohio the right to demand that Debra get a job or do job training.

She found her way to the Cleveland Center for Employment Training, whose board members were executives of local industries that needed machinists, welders, and other laborers, and because she liked wearing jeans and sneakers instead of dress-up clothes, she chose warehouse work— “shipping and receiving,” in the trade vernacular. As part of its real-life training, the center dispatched UPS packages for companies in a small industrial park, so Debra learned how to type, how to operate the computerized UPS system, how to keep an inventory, how to run a forklift. The course “settled me down and made me want to learn and want to do something as far as getting into the workforce,” she said. It was the first time in her life that she felt motivated, and it made her think that welfare-to-work wasn’t a bad idea. “People will want more,” she predicted, “and be able to teach their kids that’s growing up to want more…. And if they put us into these training centers and show us that we can do it, we can show our kids.”

That’s how it looked when Debra was still a trainee. It didn’t look as bright once she got into a job. First, the car she had to buy to avoid a long bus ride to work was not cheap and not reliable. Then, UPS had no openings, so she took her forklift certification, her carefully prepared résumé, and her newly acquired interviewing skills to Orlando Bakery. Poised to answer all questions brilliantly, she never got to speak. A man guided her quickly around the plant, and then asked, “Can you start at seven?”

She was stunned. “All this rehearsing I did to talk and everything like that, and he just asks me can I start at seven.” She gave a sour laugh. “I
thought I was being hired as a forklift operator,” she continued. “I was wanting to run a forklift ’cause they have forklifts. They have them in shipping and receiving, the dock area where the trucks pick up. You have to load the trucks up and everything. But it’s all men!” she yelped. When she arrived at work the first day, she was put on an assembly line. “Excuse me, heh,” she told a supervisor. “You just hired a woman that can drive a forklift.”

“ ‘Oh, we don’t have any openings for a forklift operator.’ ”

On-the-job training could be summed up in a single command: copy the worker next to you. Debra watched closely and began by flipping bread on the dreaded garlic line, a conveyor that required employees to start at 7 a.m. and stay until the entire day’s production was packaged, usually about 5 p.m. and sometimes as late as 6. “Everybody there can’t stand it,” she said. “The garlic loaves, the sticks, garlic sticks, garlic rolls—and every chance they got they was coming over with a different type of bread to see if they could make it garlic.” After the bread passed through a slicer, “you have to separate it, lay it flat, then it’s two people next to the one that’s separates it, make sure it lays flat and don’t go down double. Then it goes through the butter. You know, they have butter like a fountain. It goes through, then it goes through the freezer, then you got four people there that stacks it. Then you got a person that stands there makes sure it goes through, then they pack it.”

The workers were unionized, but the conditions were unworthy of a union contract. The pay was $7 an hour, including a paid lunch hour and a fifteen-minute break after nine hours of work. Benefits didn’t kick in until an employee had been on the job for six months. It wasn’t hard labor, but it challenged Debra’s mental and physical agility. “The first day I worked there, I’m like, I’m not gonna get this. It was terrible.” She was laughing again. “I’m like, oh, God, my whole body was sore. And just lookin’ at the conveyors ’cause the stuff is steady movin’, you know, and it’s movin’ fast ’cause it’s comin’ past you. … I was crying almost. I was like, I can’t do this.”

After a while she was offered a welcome chance to move off the garlic line, and even though it meant getting out of bed at 2 a.m for her shift, she would be doing less stressful work: packing bread into bags and cartons. The respite from tension was short-lived, however. No sooner had Debra learned the packing task than she was yanked again into panic when a supervisor abruptly assigned her to a machine that she was untrained to
operate. “I didn’t even know the name of the machine,” she said. “I just happened to hear them say, ‘You be Number Two.’ I was like, ‘What you all be talking about?’ ” Number Two was, indeed, the name of the machine, a huge piece of equipment that needed somebody to “flip switches,” Debra explained. “You have to feed the bags in, make sure the zip locks that close the breads is on. You have to set the machine a certain way—different kinds of bread, hamburger buns, hot dog buns. You know, different parts of the line you have to set the slicer to slice the bread. You have to know how deep.”

She was having nightmares. “I’m still disoriented because I can’t think. All I keep doing is feel like I’m floating, because of this machine. … I done had dreams where my supervisor was fussin’ because this didn’t go right. You know what I’m saying? The job came home with me.… This doesn’t make sense for this little seven dollars.” A few months later her wage went to $7.90.

Being black, Debra also felt herself on the wrong end of subtle racial strains. “Seems like they’re too lenient on the Hispanics,” she asserted. “I was next to one, and she wouldn’t keep up. You know, bread was piling all up, and she puttin’ ’em in boxes, and flattening them out, and he come over and raise hell.” She pretended to speak no English, so Debra became the target of the complaint. “Hold on!” she objected. “She can understand as much English as I can understand. Don’t come over here pressing me because she won’t keep up! I done made three boxes to her one. But she runs off that Spanish, gets a Spanish partner, and they get to going on and on and on and on, you know what I’m saying? Oh, my God, yeah. It’s a lot of that, a lot of that.”

Debra had no confidence that she could move up in position and pay. Whenever she asked supervisors about the salary at their level, they’d answer vaguely, “It varies.” She couldn’t get specific figures, so she had no sense of what her goal might be. She seemed doomed to repeat her family’s inability to emerge from low wages. She barely knew her father and couldn’t remember what work he did. Her mother had cleaned houses and had drawn a welfare check. Two of her brothers had been shot dead, one in a bar fight, the other in his car. A third was in prison for burglaries, a fourth worked as a truck driver, and a fifth did maintenance at a retirement center. One sister worked in a factory, another in a bar, and a third took care of her grandchildren. Debra’s daughter had taken the modest step from bank teller to a promotional sales job, but Debra was mostly
delighted that she had avoided pregnancy. “I was lucky. I just did a lot of preaching to her,” Debra said. “I did escape being a grandma early.”

Debra’s cash flow was so anemic, compared with her expenses, that she barely had a bank balance. Her wages from the bakery were deposited directly, but they were gone as soon as they hit the ledger. “I have maybe $8 in the account every week,” she said. “You can’t get less than ten from the money machine, so if I have five, I can’t get five.” If she went to a teller, the bank levied a $3 charge. She was so low one January that she had to pay a $15 fee for a two-week $100 advance from a storefront payday loan operation.

Her fellow workers in the bakery were trapped in gloom. Nothing there encouraged her. As she began the job, one employee after another cautioned her: “You don’t want to work here.” She heard the warning even from an assistant supervisor who had been her high school classmate.

“Debra, I know you don’t want to work here,” she remembered her classmate saying.

“How long you been here?” Debra asked.

“I’ve been here twelve years,” her friend replied.

“And I didn’t have anything to say,” Debra remarked to me, “but my mind was saying, ‘What the hell you doing here so long?’ ”

The new millennium arrived in a crescendo of American riches. The nation wallowed in luxury, burst with microchips, consumed with abandon, swaggered globally. Everything grew larger: homes, vehicles, stock portfolios, life expectancy. Never before in the sweep of human history had so many people been so utterly comfortable.

Caroline Payne was not one of them. A few weeks after New Year’s Day, she sat at her kitchen table and reflected on her own history. Two of her three goals had been achieved: She had earned a college diploma, albeit just a two-year associate’s degree. And she had gone from a homeless shelter into her own house, although it was mostly owned by a bank. The third objective, “a good-paying job,” as she put it, still eluded her. Back in the mid-1970s, she earned $6 an hour in a Vermont factory that made plastic cigarette lighters and cases for Gillette razors. In 2000, she earned $6.80 an hour stocking shelves and working cash registers at a vast Wal-Mart superstore in New Hampshire.

“And that’s sad,” she declared. “I got thinking about that the other day.
I’m only making eighty cents more than I did more than twenty years ago.” Or less—the equivalent of $3.70—taking into account the rise in the cost of living. And she did not know then how much sadder it would become.

Caroline’s was the forgotten story of prosperity in America. With indifference, the economic boom at the turn of the century passed her by. The reasons were not obvious, but they were insidious. She was not the victim of racial discrimination—she was white. She was not lazy—she was caustic about colleagues and relatives who were. She was punctual, rarely out sick, willing to do night shifts, and assiduous in her work habits. The Wal-Mart manager, Mark Brown, called her “a nice lady” with lots of enthusiasm. “She’s self-driven,” he observed. “She’s always willing to learn and better herself. She’s got potential. She can definitely move up.”

But she did not move up. She had never moved up. And that ceased to amaze her, it had been going on for so long, in job after job after job. She was astonished only by Mark Brown’s praise. “I’m surprised,” she remarked when I told her what he had said. She was stacking blank videotapes on a shelf. “I didn’t think they liked me here. People don’t usually say nice things about me.”

Somewhere along this track that leads nowhere, a good many Americans give up on the dream. They sink back onto welfare, or they stop imagining themselves as foremen or department heads or office managers. Caroline was fifty, with so many years of disappointment that her moments of despair seemed quite reasonable. She had been treated occasionally for depression, and she once tried to commit suicide with an overdose of aspirin. Still, she kept striving. She called herself “luckylady” in her e-mail address. She said, “Have a wonderful day” on her answering machine. She did not have big thoughts about corporate profits or dark judgments about society’s unfairness; she just tried for basic financial security. Her persistence seemed so incongruous that it played like a dissonant melody against the monotone of job stagnation. Again and again, she applied to manage one sales department or another at the store, and again and again she was passed over in favor of men—or, she observed wryly, women who were younger and slimmer.

“I work my butt off, excuse my language. I’m there most of the time,” she said sharply, “but that don’t matter to them.” She was paid a dollar an hour more during nighttime shifts, nothing close to what her flexibility was worth to a store that stayed open around the clock. Trying to get ahead, she was always available to change hours and fill in, even during
evenings when she had to leave her fourteen-year-old daughter, Amber, home alone. Without a car, Caroline had a twenty-minute walk each way, trekking back and forth at odd times of night in all kinds of weather. One cold February day, walking gingerly along icy streets to save her temperamental back, she trudged from her house to her job at her normal time of io a.m., only to be told to come for a shift beginning at i p.m. instead. So she made her way home and then returned to the store: three trips consuming one hour before earning her first dime of the day. This she did willingly—even after the store had hired a man, whom she knew, at a wage higher than hers. “He’s working in electronics at night, but you go in and he’s standing around looking at them TVs or doing something else,” she said in a soft whine. “He doesn’t keep busy or do anything, and they don’t say nothing. And I’ve complained about it, and I’ve been practically told to mind my own business.”

Nor could she compete with the slender women, who received flirtatious attention from the assistant manager. “You notice a lot of these young girls get these jobs,” Caroline declared. “My age shows on me terribly. I’ve had people think that I’m Amber’s grandmother, I’ve had such a hard life.”