The Working Poor

by David K. Shipler

  Social Security provided Amber with SSI, a monthly disability payment, but that didn’t give Caroline the means that an affluent parent would have to muster an arsenal of expensive private tutors and therapies. Nor did Caroline have the skills and sophistication to help her child extensively at home, as school officials urged. “They came right out and told me in one of the meetings that it was my job to teach my daughter to read,” Caroline complained. “I said, ‘Wait a minute. I’m a single mom. I bring up my daughter … I do my job … I pay my taxes in full. You do your job.’ They gave me a dirty look. They didn’t say nothing.”

  Brenda, her caseworker, hit the same wall. “I would say to Caroline, At night, please sit and read to your daughter, even if it’s ten or fifteen minutes.’ She’d say, ‘That’s not my job. That’s the teacher’s job.’ ”

  So Amber had only the meagerly funded special education classes in the public schools of Claremont, a town so strapped for financing that it led a group of communities in a celebrated victory before the New Hampshire Supreme Court to win state grants for impoverished school districts. The court’s ruling was not implemented effectively, however, and Claremont—ranking 236 out of New Hampshire’s 259 municipalities in per capita income—still badly underpaid its teachers. Amber felt herself standing still, and she was furiously frustrated, especially after she entered high school and was consigned to a vocational-technical department that taught cooking, check-writing, and other basic skills of independent living—but little or no reading.

  Whether her capacities could have been expanded by the kind of training that money could buy was an open question. Would affluence have made any difference to Amber? Her pediatrician, Steven Blair, who had treated her since she was nine, paused for a long time, considering his answer. “Minute differences,” he said finally. “Not substantial differences.” On the other hand, specialists in mental retardation generally argue for “individualized therapeutic and educational services for the child in conjunction with flexible support services for the family,” as Jack P. Shonkoff puts it in a basic pediatrics textbook. “Such services are delivered best when they focus on the family as a dynamic system and view child and family adaptation as interdependent and mutually influenced by the environment in which they live.”3 That was as realistic in Caroline’s case as suggesting a long vacation in Paris.

  To flee with Amber from Vermont, Caroline had to suspend her studies, which she later resumed in Florida, at Webster College, completing a two-year associate’s degree in office technology and information processing. She also ran up a debt of $17,000 in student loans, a sum that rose to $20,000 as she deferred payments. Contrary to conventional wisdom about education as a good investment, Caroline’s degree turned out to be a colossal waste of money. She never landed a job in her field of training, never got one that required anything more than a high school diploma. She would have benefited with a bachelor’s degree, of course, but the associate’s degree proved useless as a credential.

  When she moved back north from Florida to New Hampshire, Caroline lived for two weeks with her aunt, applied for welfare, and had a typical brush with governmental absurdity. She was told by officials that the best way to get welfare benefits and subsidized housing was to move into a homeless shelter, so she did. That made her an emergency case. In just three weeks—a hundred times faster than if she had lived in a major American city—she had a Section Eight voucher that paid most of her rent in a privately owned apartment. Then she set about working toward her dream: a house of her own.

  For seven days a week she worked two part-time jobs—one in a store for $5.25 an hour, the other for “four something” an hour answering phones and doing other chores at the local lodge of the Loyal Order of Moose, where she was also a member. In two years, Caroline paid off most of her back bills and put herself in a position to start thinking seriously about finding a house to buy.

  She did not quite realize it at the time, but she had assembled an essential structure of attributes to open the door to a mortgage. They included a record of diligence on the job and connections with people of influence—both intangible benefits of being in the workforce. Furthermore, she had a reliable monthly check in the form of Amber’s Social Security payment. Very few low-wage workers can claim a steady income from the government or helpful personal contacts.

  The key individual for Caroline turned out to be her boss at the store, also a real estate agent, whose good friend happened to be president of the Sugar River Savings Bank. The banker met Caroline and was impressed. “She seems like the type of woman who would go hungry to pay the bill,” he told her boss. Not quite, though. She had two or three bills to take care of to burnish her credit check, so she spent a year on those while the house she wanted stayed unsold. The price dropped, and she finally got the bank’s approval for a mortgage.

  It didn’t hurt that Amber’s Social Security payment of $514 a month would be deposited directly into an account at Sugar River Savings, from which the mortgage installment would be automatically withdrawn. (The SSI check rose to $736 after Amber’s father died, but the money flowed in and out, which usually left an account balance of under $100.) Using those funds for mortgage payments was legitimate, Caroline reasoned, because Amber would eventually inherit the house—an assumption that, in the end, couldn’t survive the family’s poverty. It was a terrible fact that a mortgage would not have been forthcoming without Amber’s disability.

  The snug, gray clapboard house, built in 1891, was nestled among others on an icy street. It was about to be improved, courtesy of a federal program that would replace the siding, repaint the trim, and remove lead paint inside—testimony to Caroline’s skill at securing government aid. The windows were now insulated with plastic sheeting stapled to the frames, and over the side door hung a “Merry Christmas” banner. In a different place at a different time, the house would have been considered quaint and charming enough to be worth plenty. But sitting in a sad, old neighborhood near the center of a New England town that had been left behind, it was worth just $37,000 when Caroline discovered it in 1997. With $1,000 from her income tax refund to cover closing costs, she became the owner—along with the Sugar River Savings Bank.

  There was no price tag on her satisfied sense of possession and autonomy. She proudly conducted a tour: the two beige couches in the living room, the flowery wallpaper, the yellow curtains, the old TV set and VCR, Fluffy the cat with a red collar and a bell, the pantry and storeroom behind the kitchen, her adult son’s crossbow for deer hunting, the cellar with a washer and dryer and oil furnace, the upstairs where colorful afghans she had crocheted lay folded waiting to be given to Amber’s teacher and school bus driver and principal for Christmas.

  Caroline worked in a clothing factory, sewing for $6 an hour. She was laid off. She worked a few hours a week at the shelter where she had lived, helping applicants to the fuel assistance program. When winter ended, she was out of a job, so she worked at Tambrands, a factory that made Tampax, for $6.50. Sitting for hours at a time, she began to get acute pain in her legs and finally had to go to the emergency room. Her back was the cause. “And so the doctor says, ‘I want you to take one night off and rest as much as you can. Stay off your feet. Stay off your legs.’ ” She called Tambrands, owned by Procter & Gamble, to tell them she wouldn’t be in on Sunday because of her back. Monday morning the phone rang: Her services were no longer needed. So she went back to the sewing factory and got laid off two or three times. Working at the edge of poverty means working on the coldest side of corporate America.

  The Claremont Savings Bank, which had rejected her as a teller, called to invite her to apply for a filing job. She was hired for twenty-five hours a week at $7 an hour, with the prospect of going to $10 or $11. Mercifully, it was less painful because she could alternately stand and sit as she went about her main task of taking cancelled checks in a tray to a large open drawer where customers’ accounts were separated by dividers. Each account had a signature card,
so Caroline—and others working the same job—were to verify the signature on each check, then file it in the proper account.

  She liked the position. The bank was a short walk from her house. She had bought the right clothes. She would learn other tasks. She had $2.02 in her own bank account. Her mother was dying. Her tortured relationship with her mother was coming to an end—except, of course, it would never quite end but would rather be frozen in whatever emotions had been created over the years. And when her mother died, Caroline was thrown unknowingly into depression. She heard the diagnosis when she went for counseling. “I didn’t realize that I’d been in depression. I didn’t realize, OK?”

  People at the bank were beginning to notice mistakes. “We know that on average, three or four times a year we will get a call that a customer has gotten wrong checks,” said a bank officer, preferring not to have her name published. “In a period of eight weeks, we got three or four calls. We started monitoring and had people double-checking, and we isolated it and found where the error was coming from.”

  Caroline was called in for a talk. “They said I wasn’t catching on fast enough,” and she admitted that she may have made errors. But others were filing too, she noted. “I was gettin’ the blame for it, and I felt it wasn’t all me, you know what I’m saying? And in the meantime I was dealing with my mother being in and out of the hospital, dying, and they had told her she was gonna die but we just didn’t know when.”

  It was hard to get the checks mixed up, the bank officer insisted, because they were different colors. Maybe Caroline’s attention wandered, the officer speculated. “She had difficulty learning what we needed her to do. There were other functions we needed her to learn how to do, but we could never get to that. We would ask people to start assembling statements to be mailed to customers, researching any errors.… We couldn’t even get to that. Microfilming. There’s a systematic way to microfilm work and file it away. She really had difficulty learning to do that, so we stopped having her do it. So she was only doing filing, and that was not working out well.… She wasn’t receptive at all to the fact that she was making mistakes. It was definitely her. To be honest with you, I was surprised she had trouble because I thought she could do it. In fairness to her, we had just come out of a situation where we had to do a lot of handholding. She came in after that other person was gone, and I think everyone was exhausted and didn’t have the energy to spend the time with her.” After eight weeks Caroline was fired.

  Her back was killing her, and she applied for SSI disability payments through Social Security. She was afraid to get another job while she waited for the decision, lest she undermine her case, so she went back on welfare and waited and waited. She thereby became typical among low-income laborers who develop back problems, apply for SSI, and don’t work for months while hoping for approval. When Caroline was finally turned down six months later, she got a job at Wal-Mart.

  Now the problem took a different form. Thanks to a chiropractor paid by Medicaid, Caroline’s back had improved. But then she got a rude lesson in welfare law: “I just found out I have no medical insurance anymore,” she said desperately one day. She had fallen ill, had seen a doctor, had been given a prescription, and had gone to the pharmacy to have it filled. There she learned that her Medicaid had expired because she had gone to work (Amber’s continued because of her disability). “I didn’t know that,” Caroline declared. She had to pay $11 for the medicine and cancel an appointment for an eye exam the next day. More urgently, “I got to stop going to the chiropractor and everything now,” she said, “and that’s what kept me going to work, because I can’t afford to pay it. I owe him 150 already.”

  Wal-Mart offered health insurance, but she found the premiums too expensive. Besides, she couldn’t handle the $250 annual deductible, so she joined the growing ranks of the 45 million uninsured Americans, who included the many low-wage workers passing up insurance that their employers made available. They did short-term calculations that made the weekly cost seem high, without figuring the long-term cost of large medical bills. It was a gamble, and Caroline was lucky. Through the following year her back pain eased enough to permit her to continue working. She drifted along with no insurance and never went for regular checkups and did not get seriously ill.

  Anyone who walked all the way around the outside of the Wal-Mart superstore on Route 103 would walk a mile, Caroline said. The place was immense. It sold everything from lawn mowers to ground beef, under-pricing smaller stores that were struggling to survive in the center of town. Its 300 to 330 employees, who came and went seasonally, wore Wal-Mart’s uniform of blue smocks and friendly smiles, trained as they were to be surprisingly helpful to customers.

  Mark Brown, the manager, could pay his people more without raising prices, he conceded. He sat at a table in the store’s snack bar, watching the part of the grocery section he could see, listening to the public address system’s calls for help at the registers, his eyes darting around this corner of his fiefdom like a school principal waiting for the next catastrophe. He was thirty-one, but he looked as young as a college kid and spoke with the twang of his native southeast Missouri. He had come from another store in Georgia and was learning to ski here in New Hampshire.

  His employees started at $6.25 an hour, earned an extra dollar at night and another 25 cents “for going to the front end,” which meant working one of the twenty-four cash registers. And if he started them at $8 an hour, say, instead of $6.25, how would that change the economics of the store? “Hmmm. I don’t think it would change at all.” He wouldn’t have to raise prices? “No. We’ve got a corporate pricing structure. And the way we do things, we go out and we check our competition every single week. Every department manager in this store goes out once a week and checks competition, and that’s what determines our prices. We have a core price structure that we set regionally, by areas. Definitely the base price here would be probably higher than what it is in Arkansas, where there’s a cheap cost of living. So it would be higher here, but it would still be standard to this area. And then after they give us that base, then we go out and check our competition, and if we’re gettin’ beat, we lower our prices.”

  So there’s enough profit to absorb an increase from $6.25 to $8? “There would be, because if we were having to raise our wages, then evidently everybody else would be too, and if we make sure we’re low enough, our competitors’ customers are gonna shop with us.” Would wage increases have any effect at all? “We’d have to cut corners on other things like, you know, we may not be able to put all the pretty balloons up all over the store. The non-necessities we’d have to cut back on.”

  Three days later Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., announced a net income of $5.58 billion for 1999, up 26 percent from the previous year.

  Caroline was bouncing from one department to another, from one shift to another, but her pay stayed within a narrow range, beginning at $6.25, going to $6.80, sometimes up to $7.50 if she worked at night. So unpredictable were her hours that she couldn’t work a second job, which would have helped her cash flow. She kept applying for higher positions and kept hearing that she needed a bit more experience.

  “I did make Cashier of the Month for November,” she reported happily. “I’ve collected over fifteen hundred dollars for the World War II veterans memorial in Washington. That’s what got me Cashier of the Month.” She also persuaded customers who checked out at her register to buy a total of seventy-two tickets to a Bruins game in Boston to raise money for the Claremont fire department, and that won her a weekend getaway from Pepsi. She could take herself and three other people to a paid stay in any Marriott she chose, anywhere. “But I have to get there,” she said. That was the catch. So it was going to have to be nearby, someplace that somebody would drive her. Hawaii never entered her mind, not even New York; she considered only places in New Hampshire. “I think there’s one up here in Lebanon,” she said. “If I could get somebody to take me to Manchester, Amber likes to look at the malls. I�
�ve never been down there. Just to look at things.” In the end, Caroline, Amber, a friend of Caroline’s, and her child drove north to a hotel in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, where they visited a small shopping center in North Conway.

  “I bought this,” said Amber. “It’s a lamp. It’s one of those bunny lamps that goes round and round. And I bought a sweatshirt that I took with me on the trip.”

  “That jacket I was wearing that was ripped on the side for two years,” said Caroline, “I bought me this winter coat at one of the stores in the mall. Originally it was a hundred-dollar coat, OK? It was marked down to $79.99, but they were having a big discount so I got it for $31.99. So that wasn’t bad.”

  Wal-Mart had such a big turnover of personnel that Mark Brown didn’t feel comfortable saying how high it ran. But he was clear about the reasons in the years of prosperity. “A lot of it, I think, has to do with the fact that our economy’s so strong today. You could go anywhere in this town, anywhere outside of town, and you see the signs, ‘Now Hiring, Now Hiring.’ I mean, if they’re not treated right, all they got to do is just walk out the door. It’s very competitive, very competitive.” So Wal-Mart tried to hold people by providing them with a share of the company’s profits. Eighty percent came in stock, the rest in cash, maintained in an account in which an employee began to be vested after a year, and was fully vested after seven.