The Working Poor
Page 6
But buying a couple of CDs didn’t make her happy for long. “For the day,” she said.
“Till she’s out of the store,” he countered.
Their routine living expenses were not exorbitant. They included $300 a month rent to Sarah’s grandmother, about $100 for the use of her phone, and nothing for electricity and cable TV. But Willie’s long commute usually cost several hundred dollars a month in gas, except when he hitched a ride with fellow workers, as he had to do after his license was suspended. The couple paid $220 a month for a car they couldn’t afford to insure, about $200 a month on laundry because their appliances didn’t work, and $200 a month to eat out because the gas company wouldn’t turn on their gas until they paid $400 in overdue bills. Also, Sarah rarely felt emotionally well enough to cook, and Willie was too exhausted when he got home from a fourteen-hour day.
Furthermore, they liked to spoil themselves sometimes. “We’re both young,” Willie explained, “and because neither one of us really had everything when we were kids, I suppose we do sometimes go overboard with birthdays and Christmas and stuff.”
Their accounting, from mid-April to mid-May, showed that they had added enough outflow to their rent, car payments, and other recurring bills to use up almost all of the $2,500 Willie had earned.
Groceries (includes diapers and cigarettes) $467.19
Movie rentals $53-93
Eating out $214.45
Miscellaneous $785.09
The groceries included expensive items, such as $3.99 a day for Lunchables, the only kind of lunch that Cody would not hurl around the room of his preschool. The Miscellaneous category comprised fifty-two entries, most of whose details neither Sarah nor Willie could remember a month after listing them. They ranged from $2 and $5 for instantly forgotten things to $161 for concert tickets (to hear Ozzy Osbourne), a $52 outfit for a wedding, and numerous presents at $45 and $50 for birthdays, weddings, and one of those occasions cleverly invented by the manufacturers of nonessential items: Mother’s Day.
Their main effort at economizing came at Willie’s expense. Instead of smoking Camels, his favorite, he agreed to smoke Marlboros at $4 a carton less. Cutting out smoking altogether did not make it onto the agenda. Forgoing restaurants, prepared foods, and junky snacks seemed an impossible sacrifice, and Sarah angrily spurned advice on this point from Brenda the home visitor. “Her plans on a budget are: You eat hamburger and mashed potatoes for the week and stuff like that, and that’s just not the way I want to live,” Sarah scoffed. “I like to be able to eat what I like.”
Even if Sarah and Willie had been models of frugality, their lives would still have been shackled to a heavy history of debt. From leaner days before he’d landed his roofing job, Willie owed $700 on a phone bill, $5,000 on a repossessed car, and $10,000 in medical bills. He could not get a phone; she could, only because her phone debts were run up before she became legally responsible at age eighteen. Eventually, she would probably have to try a ruse employed by some parents in this situation: open telephone accounts under a child’s name and Social Security number.
Willie’s medical bills were incurred in a fashion typical of working people without health insurance. He could not afford to go to the dentist, his teeth were decaying, and he was on the road working construction jobs. Whenever an abscess developed, he went to the nearest emergency room for painkillers and antibiotics. The law requires hospital emergency rooms to treat everyone, covered or not, but they can then send bills, which are usually whoppers. The charges were all beyond Willie’s reach, and they ruined his credit rating.
“Poor,” Sarah said in describing their socio-economic level, and then laughed a high-pitched, nervous giggle.
“We’d put ourselves poor,” Willie echoed, “but I know if we were smart people, we could be very well off. Sometimes I bring home $700 a week. I know I could be very well off. But, you know, neither one of us can just sit home and say, OK, this is what we’ve got for dinner, and that’s it.” He smiled sadly. “If we had $10 in our pocket and we were sick and tired of sitting in the house, we’d go out and spend $10 on ice cream and supper. I guess it’s easier to make life easier by doing something that costs money.”
Sarah offered her definition of being poor: “We don’t have any money saved. We don’t really have a home we can call our own.”
“It’s our own fault,” said Willie. “I’m not blaming it on anybody else.”
Willie’s earnings from working with sheet metal were high enough to put his family above the federal poverty line but low enough to get them some benefits. The children were eligible for SCHIP, the federally funded State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and Sarah got milk, cereal, peanut butter, baby formula, and other foods from WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. Some years, when they filed their income tax return, they received not only a refund of taxes withheld, but the additional Earned Income Tax Credit.
One year, they used part of their check from the IRS to get tattoos. “It’s like we’re still kids ourselves,” she said, “so we’ve got to act like kids once in a while.” Willie got a wizard etched on his arm. Sarah pulled her shirt up in back to show hers: a heart made of thorns.
Chapter Two
WORK DOESN’T
WORK
It is not easy for men to rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty.
—Juvenal, Satires
Christie did a job that this labor-hungry economy could not do without. Every morning she drove her battered ’86 Volkswagen from her apartment in public housing to the YWCA’s child-care center in Akron, Ohio, where she spent the day watching over little children so their parents could go to work. Without her and thousands like her across the country, there would have been fewer people able to fill the jobs that fueled America’s prosperity. Without her patience and warmth, children could have been harmed as well, for she was more than a baby-sitter. She gave the youngsters an emotionally safe place, taught and mothered them, and sometimes even rescued them from abuse at home.
For those valuable services, she received a check for about $330 every two weeks. She could not afford to put her own two children in the day-care center where she worked.
Christie was a hefty woman who laughed more readily than her predicament should have allowed. She suffered from stress and high blood pressure. She had no bank account because she could not keep enough money long enough. Try as she might to shop carefully, she always fell behind on her bills and was peppered with late fees. Her low income entitled her to food stamps and a rental subsidy, but whenever she got a little pay raise, government agencies reduced the benefits, and she felt punished for working. She was trapped on the treadmill of welfare reform, running her life according to the rules of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The title left no doubt about what Congress and the White House saw as poverty’s cause and solution.
Initially the new law combined with the good economy to send welfare caseloads plummeting. As states were granted flexibility in administering time limits and work requirements, some created innovative consortiums of government, industry, and charity to guide people into effective job training and employment. But most available jobs had three unhappy traits: They paid low wages, offered no benefits, and led nowhere. “Many who do find jobs,” the Urban Institute concluded in a 2002 report, “lose other supports designed to help them, such as food stamps and health insurance, leaving them no better off—and sometimes worse off—than when they were not working.”1
Christie considered herself such a case. The only thing in her wallet resembling a credit card was a blue-green piece of plastic labeled “Ohio” and decorated with a drawing of a lighthouse projecting a beam into the night. Inside the “O” was a gold square—a computer chip. On the second working day of every month, she slipped the card into a special machine at Walgreen’s, Save-A-Lot, or Apple’s, and punched in her identification number. A credit of $136 was loaded i
nto her chip. This was the form in which her “food stamps” were now issued—less easy to steal or to sell, and less obvious and degrading in the checkout line.
The card contained her first bit of income in every month and permitted her first expenditure. It could be used for food only, and not for cooked food or pet food. It occupied the top line in the balance sheet she kept for me during a typical October.
“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?
“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.