The Working Poor

by David K. Shipler

  “I cannot say that I’m poor, poor, because I have a car,” he explained. “The most important is that I have my children and my wife. I have a life that continues, so I can’t say that I’m so poor. I also recognize that I don’t have money. I have something to eat, and my children have their clothes and their shoes, and I feel good. If I say I’m poor, I don’t know, maybe. If I say I’m really poor, it would be bad before God, and if I say I’m rich it would be too proud. So I cannot classify myself.”

  Chapter Five

  THE DAUNTING WORKPLACE

  People who don’t call when they can’t come to work probably don’t think they’re important enough to matter.

  —Ann Brash, after plunging into poverty

  They were a tough bunch. They had survived crack wars, homelessness, and prison, but now they were venturing into truly frightening territory— the unfamiliar world of work. They were terrified.

  The sixteen men were callused addicts, alcoholics, and ex-convicts who had done some hard living on the streets of Washington, D.C. All were black. On a Wednesday evening, they gathered for the weekly meeting of their support group in a halfway house within sight of the glowing dome of the United States Capitol. They filled the chairs around the edge of the room, sat on the floor, leaned against the walls, and began to confide in one another about their feelings.

  Fear had been a taboo subject in their former lives, where “bad” was good, and the best defense was a threatening posture of aggression. To be safe, they had to look mean, act dangerous, and never admit to being scared. Mothers taught that lesson to their sons, brothers to their brothers. Tonight, however, the men sat in a circle of security where they had discovered that candor could be therapeutic. They could talk comfortably here. Their treatment program required them to look for jobs, find work within a month, get apartments, and move out on their own. Each task seemed formidable, and they were nervous.

  The job hunt is never pleasant, even for a white, middle-class college graduate with high credentials and a sense of ease in the workplace. But for these men, the workplace was like a foreign culture. They entered it burdened by their personal histories of repeated failure: failure to finish school, failure to resist drugs, failure to maintain loving relationships, failure to hold jobs. Nothing in their track records predicted success, and no brave promises could paper over their doubts about themselves. Their brash, streetwise armor seemed a thin veneer. Underneath, they were as tender as babies, deeply vulnerable. They admitted gently that they were afraid of making the phone call, of getting no reply, of filling out the application, of going to the interview. They waited tensely for the inevitable question about a police record—afraid of telling the truth, and afraid of lying. “You got to put down, have you been arrested? I always have a feeling I’m not gonna get hired here—sitting there looking at people’s faces and knowing I’m not gonna get hired,” said Wayne, his eyes lowered to the floor. “So I pick up little [jobs] here and there—McDonald’s. It’s a fear of rejection, and it’s holding me back.”

  “Each step is an obstacle to me,” a tall, sinewy man confessed. “The interview is an obstacle. I’m kind of shaky with dealing with rejection. I know there’re gonna be some problems. I’m gonna run from it or deal with it. I still get feelings when I know I got a job and then I don’t get it. I still feel disappointed. There’s this worry with me in the way I feel and the way I perceive things. I still have to work on this. Thanks for letting me share.”

  “Thanks for sharing,” the group replied in unison.

  The room contained a smattering of successes. One man wore a dark blue uniform with a triangular red shoulder patch reading “Prince Security Incorporated.” Another had found work moving office furniture at $6.50 an hour. A third, however, had been turned down as an airport baggage handler because of his criminal record.

  Even getting hired wouldn’t have ended the anxiety for some of the men in the halfway house. A couple of them were scared of success in being accepted, for they doubted that they were up to the job, whatever job. For at least one of them, though, work itself became therapy. “When I got there I was afraid—oh, no, I can’t do this,” he admitted. “But every day it comes back a little more. Damn, I forgot I had this in me. It makes me feel good.”

  Talking about fear took a lot of courage.

  Across the continent, Camellia Woodruff carefully missed her orientation for a sales job in the jewelry department of Macy’s. She was a lithe black woman of twenty-six who moved like a self-conscious dancer through the yards of Imperial Courts, the Los Angeles housing project where she lived. Attempting a stylish look, she straightened her hair, twisted it into a bun, slicked it down, and pasted a lock at an angle across her forehead. She wore dangling gold earrings. Then she tried to ward off male attentions. Anxiety and anger were transmitted through all four limbs, constantly in motion, gracefully threatening, as if to say, “Get out of my face!” She gave her voice an edge as cold as a blade.

  In her living room, she sat down briefly on a blond wooden TV stand—the only other piece of furniture was a white plastic lawn chair— but she could not stay still. As she talked, she fidgeted by mopping and sweeping, pacing and gesticulating. She turned sharply on a burly man who came to her door, cutting him with contempt: “I’m in the middle of an important conversation!” He scampered away.

  Camellia had dropped out of school in the eleventh grade, then “started getting into street life,” fell into an abusive relationship, and saw her mother die of a drug overdose. She had not married, had no children yet, loved taking care of friends’ little kids, and had worked sporadically at low-wage jobs. She’d lasted at each one for quite a while, by her definition. “I’ve worked for a long time,” she boasted. “Four, five, six, seven, eight months.” Her horizon was not very far away; she had never considered where she wanted to be ten years out. “Getting up for work every morning seems hard,” she said. Her dream job? “I would love to work with kids, like a teacher’s assistant or child care.”

  Isolated in the projects, many like Camellia lack the encouragement and connections to find decent work until a helping hand gives a push or opens a door. The help for Camellia came from Glenda Taylor, a caseworker at the project’s federally funded Jobs Plus program, which was designed to overcome the array of barriers to employment. Those obstacles, not always visible to an outsider, were clear to Glenda from her childhood just a few blocks away in this neighborhood of Watts. When she enrolled at San Diego State, she had become the only girl in her large family to go directly from high school to college. Then, having escaped from Watts, she returned to help. Like a tracker with a keen eye, she could read the telltale signs of dysfunction among young people here, the inner anxieties that smothered initiative. “Fear.” That was the first barrier on her list. “A tendency not to want to go out there, because you’re scared, you’re afraid,” she said, then added frankly: “Another issue is, people are just plumb lazy.”

  Or, she observed, they’ve never been in a family where they’ve seen anyone going to work. “It becomes a cycle.… I think kids role model after what they see, and the first thing they see is in the home.… My dad got up at four, five o’clock in the morning every morning, and he was a construction worker.”

  Many felt inadequacy and rage, she added. “They just build up anger inside of them, build up this sense of low self-esteem, which will not give them a desire to want to go further, because they think that they can’t. There’s no one saying that you can; there’s always someone saying ‘Oh, you can’t, you won’t.’ And so when you constantly hear that and even go to school and you hear it, because you’re reacting and so the instructor thinks that they’re doing something by saying, ‘Oh, you’re not gonna be anything, you’re just gonna be trouble,’ well, eventually that’s what’s gonna happen.”

  She tried to break the cycle for Camellia by using a contact. From part-time work at Macy’s, Glenda knew a manager, vouched for Camellia, and got her a job selli
ng jewelry—a position with some prospect for advancement.

  Camellia had misgivings. Two days before her orientation, she told Glenda that she wasn’t going because of an embarrassing shoplifting charge on her record, which she was sure would mean rejection. “But I think it would be very helpful if you went anyway and just let them deal with that,” Glenda advised her. “Sometimes when you’re honest or you’re up front about it, they’ll be honest and up front themselves.” But would they have hired a shoplifter? “I don’t think so,” Glenda told me later. “I personally don’t think that they would have, but I also don’t think that you can keep hiding behind your past. You’ve got to break open and let yourself experience some things.” Furthermore, the door was not completely closed. The manager was willing to go ahead if her superiors approved, and Macy’s protected itself by impressing new employees with an intimidating display of the store’s high-tech security. “It’s the fine jewelry department, so they have a camera four ways. Every bay you’re at, every side, the camera’s beaming down at you,” Glenda said. “The registers, if they so much as suspect you, in the computer room they can pull up your register from their office and see that you’re not making a good transaction.”

  Pushed relentlessly to attend her orientation, Camellia started out by bus, she claimed, but never arrived. “Once I got down there I couldn’t find anything,” she said. Did she call? “No. I don’t know. I don’t think that’s the job I like to do. I’m an outside type of person. I heard it was on commission, and I don’t think I could sell stuff well.” The job would have paid a base salary plus commissions.

  So, she had thought up four reasons not to appear at her orientation: shame over shoplifting, distaste for being cooped up indoors, self-doubt about her sales skills, and losing her way. She could not find her way through the thicket of tangled anxieties and excuses. And she never called Glenda to tell her, to thank her, to apologize. Only several days later did Glenda learn of the missed appointment from the manager, leaving the obvious question of how to help Camellia now. Glenda’s answer: “Keep hugging her.”

  A few months later, Glenda was transferred to another housing project and moved out of Camellia’s life.

  At Imperial Courts, shabby little apartment buildings were separated by weedy lawns where children scampered and clusters of young men stood, postured, and glared. Aesthetically, the compound was less dismal than the brick jungles of high-rises that were designed in Middle Penitentiary Style for Chicago and New York. Socially and economically, however, this was a wounded community. Domestic violence ran rampant, and of the 1,462 residents (two-thirds black, one-third Latino), only 54 were employed full-time and 12 part-time—and that was in the booming years of a prosperous economy, just before the recession began in 2001.

  Nevertheless, adults who were looking for jobs fell into a peculiar pattern, here and in other low-income housing developments: They did not want to leave their compounds. The outside culture, with alien rules and fearsome challenges, seemed so daunting that residents preferred work inside the projects, preferably for the Housing Authority, according to Glenda and caseworkers elsewhere. Despite the run-down buildings, the broken people, the gangs, the pushers, and the gunfire after dark, the project was the comfort zone. “It’s like a shield where they can feel very protected,” said Truong Cam, a Vietnamese immigrant in Los Angeles working where he grew up: at William Mead Houses, a project surrounded by factories that wouldn’t hire its residents. “Everything that’s in the development, it’s like a little town, a little city, everybody knows each other,” he observed. “When you refer them outside, even four or five miles from here, they don’t want to do it. The fear of meeting new people, experiencing different stuff… the fear of even asking for an application, because they have low self-esteem. They think, ‘Oh, they’re not going to give me this job because I live in the projects or something.’ That’s how a lot of them think.”

  Employers rarely see those corrosive suspicions of worthlessness that course beneath the surface. They see the surface behavior: the employee who shows up late or not at all, who lacks a “work ethic” and the “soft skills” of punctuality, diligence, and a can-do attitude. Sometimes they see a worker who takes no initiative, relates badly to his colleagues, has bursts of temper, cannot take an order from a boss without a spasm of anger. If employers had to choose, many would prefer low-wage workers with those “soft skills” rather than the “hard skills” of reading, writing, and math.1 A lot of menial jobs don’t need writing or math, but they all require people to show up on time. “Basically the only skill that you require is a work ethic— and sometimes you have to teach that,” said Bryan Hagin, a Burger King manager in Maryland.

  The soft skills should have been taught in the family, but in many cases, the family has forfeited that role to the school. In turn, the school has forfeited the role to the employer. The employer simply does not know what to do. When Bryan opens a new Burger King, for example, he spends six months or more going through hundreds of workers until he boils down his labor force to a core of dependable employees. Some of his new people don’t even brush their teeth. They look “like they just rolled out of bed, put the uniform on, and came to work,” he lamented. “And you have to teach these people these skills: ‘Listen, man, you come to work for me, you’ve got to wash your hair and make sure it’s combed over. If you’re a guy, you’ve got to shave.’ ” He starts his workers at $6.50 an hour and has to hire three for every one that he needs during the course of a year, making his turnover rate about 300 percent.

  The notion that grown adults would have to be taught such basic elements of workplace behavior stunned C. Mitchell Ball when he took over

  Jackson County Rehabilitation Industries, an on-the-job training center in eastern Kentucky that had contracts with nearby companies. “I thought that was the craziest thing that I had ever heard,” he said. For a long time he refused to believe that his trainees, all poor Appalachian whites, needed to learn what he felt he had always known instinctively. “ I knew what time I was supposed to be at work,” Ball declared. “ I knew that I couldn’t miss for just any reason. I knew if I had car problems I’d call someone or at least call in or fix the car. If I was sick I knew to call in. If child care became a problem with the first option, then I went to plan B. And I was a little slow being convinced, having worked all my life and even before I was old enough to work—did a lot of hard work, farming and so forth—I was really hard to convince. Surely not. People know to get up. They know to comb their hair. They know to wash their bodies. I’m not being nitpicky here, but I’m telling you the truth. It took me a while to realize that there was a need for soft skills and job readiness skills, job preparation skills.”

  Among those lacking such skills, the dropout rate is high. Paul Lillig needed about 200 people to operate Docusort, a firm he founded in Kansas City, Missouri, to bar-code and sort outgoing bulk mail for corporate clients. So he hired 250, most of them poor blacks and immigrant Vietnamese, paid them minimum wage, and usually ended up with the requisite minimum of 200 on any given day. “We would go through somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 W-2s at the end of the year,” he grumbled. “Today they worked, tomorrow they wouldn’t.” He observed his employees as prone to friction along racial lines, inclined to blame others for their own mistakes, and “very fragile, very fragile.” He ultimately replaced almost all of them with machines, which were easier on the balance sheet and the nerves.

  Employers in three focus groups that were arranged for me in Kansas City griped about their workers’ tardiness, absenteeism, lack of initiative, fistfights, drug use, and high attrition. Several employers did not get to complain, though, because they never showed up at the meetings they had agreed to attend. Two wandered in late. By contrast, all the former welfare recipients who committed themselves to a group discussion came punctually. To complete the irony, one of the latecoming employers, Brad Casey, who owned a document-imaging company, denounced workers who had b
een on welfare. “Just coming to work every day is a new paradigm,” he said of them. “And on time!” he added straightfaced, without the slightest hint of a sheepish smile.

  Some employee “problems” may be little more than the fantasies and exaggerations of managers who harbor prejudices about minorities, women, and welfare recipients. Established American stereotypes hold that blacks are lazy and incompetent, women are too obsessed with their families to be productive employees, and welfare recipients are unwilling to work. Therefore, when such a case is actually encountered, it resonates with the longstanding expectation and becomes memorable. When employers are questioned closely, they sometimes turn out to be generalizing from a couple of extreme examples.

  On the other hand, real problems do exist. “I’ve got a woman with seven children, and she’s on the phone constantly with her children,” complained K. B. Winterowd, who owns CISCO, a construction supply firm in Kansas City. “Her supervisor has difficulty communicating to her that, you know, ‘Let’s take some breaks in the day and then take calls from your children.’ Instead, she spends half of her time on the phone dealing with personal crises and problems. That’s true with a lot of the employees that come out of this.” By “out of this” he meant out of the welfare ranks, from which he hired, both for the larger good and for a $3-an-hour subsidy that Missouri paid companies as an inducement. But he found the performance so poor and the supervision so costly that he could not help ranting against government handouts to folks on welfare and raving in favor of handouts to him. “If you’ll pay a full-time supervisor for every six people I hire,” he declared as if speaking to the state, “and you pay me for a full year for the full salaries of those six people, I will provide society a basic function.”