Can the wealthiest country in the world afford to pay? You bet we can, especially if those at the top are willing to sacrifice a little. It might even save us money elsewhere in our social welfare budgets, as suggested by the results of the federal Infant Health and Development Program, a clinical trial aimed at premature babies. From birth through age three, 985 children in eight locations across the country were bombarded with attention from pediatricians, social workers, home visitors, and others who monitored their health, referred families to services, provided educational child care, and the like. At three, the kids had higher IQ scores, larger vocabularies, and fewer behavioral problems than children who had not received the services.11 In other words, when we do it right, it works. “And everywhere we’ve tried to do it on the cheap, everywhere we’ve tried to cut a corner, we end up spending money with no appreciable results,” said Representative George Miller of California, who was chairman of the House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families.12 We have known all this for a long time. He made the observation in the 1980s.
Even our extensive efforts don’t reach enough children. Head Start, the preschool program for the poor, is funded at an annual amount worth the price of one and a half new aircraft carriers. It enrolls only 60 percent of the youngsters who are eligible, according to the Children’s Defense Fund, and its teachers, only half of whom are required to have a college degree, earn an average of just $22,000 a year. The Bush administration has shaken up the program by announcing plans to require it to push reading for preschoolers, a policy disputed as unwise by many educators. Early Head Start, begun in 1995 to tackle the critical years from birth to three, has been deemed effective by preliminary studies, but it touches only 5 percent of the nation’s eligible children. Meanwhile, government policies operate at cross-purposes by ratcheting up the work requirement imposed on welfare mothers without raising funds for child care. We don’t even do what we know how to do.
To appraise a society, examine its ability to be self-correcting. When grievous wrongs are done or endemic suffering exposed, when injustice is discovered or opportunity denied, watch the institutions of government and business and charity. Their response is an index of a nation’s health and of a people’s strength.
The United States possesses agile mechanisms for discerning troubling truths and adjusting toward reform. We have done so against racial discrimination, environmental degradation, corporate malfeasance, misguided foreign policy, police brutality, and domestic poverty. The fact that all these ills remain, many of them less virulent than a half century ago, testifies to both the challenge and the accomplishment. If the ideal is high enough, it is never quite attained. If the striving is sufficiently intense, it never runs to completion; at best, it yields success after success indefinitely. That should be our mission against poverty in working America.
If a single cause were identified, a remedy might be readily designed. It would fit neatly into a liberal or a conservative prescription. If either the system’s exploitation or the victims’ irresponsibility were to blame, one or the other side of the debate would be satisfied. If the reasons were merely corporate greed or government indifference or impoverished schools, then liberal solutions would suffice. If the causes were only the personal failures of parents and children, teachers and workers, then conservative views would hold. But “repression is a seamless garment,” as Salman Rushdie wrote. This is repression of a kind, and it lacks the clear boundaries that would define the beginning and the end of accountability. In the fields of North Carolina, the migrants are driven by Mexico’s destitution and drawn by America’s promise. They are indentured to coyotes and contratistas. They are warehoused in squalor and paid a pittance by growers, by wholesalers, by supermarket chains, and by shoppers who enjoy low prices for the cucumbers and tomatoes that the migrants harvest. When accountability is spread so broadly and diffused, it seems to cease to exist. The opposite is true. It may look as if nobody is accountable. In fact, everybody is.
The liberal-conservative divide is not only about how big government should be; it is also about what government should do. Liberalism is the use of the state for some purposes; conservatism is the use of the state for other purposes. Just as liberal Democrats call for increasing grants and programs for the poor, “social conservatives” among Republicans want big government to give or withhold money to promote marriage, dictate local education policies, discourage child-bearing by mothers on welfare, and subsidize religious institutions’ moralistic efforts to combat indigence.
The troubles of the working poor will not be relieved by this ideological debate. Political argument is vital for democracy, but solutions must finally transcend the familiar disagreements. The political opponents have to cross into each other’s territory to pick up solutions from the opposite side. Just as President Bill Clinton entered conservative ground to impose time limits and work requirements on welfare recipients, so would conservatives do well to step into the liberal arena for the assistance that government needs to provide. Opportunity and poverty in this country cannot be explained by either the American Myth that hard work is a panacea or by the Anti-Myth that the system imprisons the poor. Relief will come, if at all, in an amalgam that recognizes both the society’s obligation through government and business, and the individual’s obligation through labor and family—and the commitment of both society and individual through education.
Wo rkers at the edge of poverty are essential to America’s prosperity, but their well-being is not treated as an integral part of the whole. Instead, the forgotten wage a daily struggle to keep themselves from falling over the cliff. It is time to be ashamed.
Epilogue
Lives continue unresolved. Since the hardcover edition of this book appeared, some of the people in these pages have taken happier directions, others have seen hopeful prospects dissipate, and many remain mired in stagnation. Here is what has happened to a few of them.
Ann Brash (this page–this page), still working as a poorly paid book editor, received some financial relief from her son, Sandy, who lived at home and contributed part of his wage as a computer specialist at Dartmouth. But she watched in dismay as her daughter, Sally, dropped out of the New England Conservatory of Music to take a job in a flower shop for $13 an hour. After all, to maximize Sandy’s and Sally’s opportunities, Ann had chosen poverty as an alternative to working multiple jobs, which would have meant sacrificing the time needed to raise her children well. Nothing scares a dedicated, impoverished parent more than the specter of a child repeating the pattern.
Sally dropped out because she was not succeeding. “I almost failed every single class that I was taking,” Sally told me between customers in Brookline, Massachusetts. “I hated being in school; I always hated being in school.” Nor could she tolerate the anxiety before she went onstage to sing opera. During two intense summers in Italy and Austria, “I got so nervous that my muscles trembled,” she said. “That affected my pitch.” When a violinist friend offered her a beta-blocker, usually prescribed for high blood pressure and other cardiac ailments, she tried one “and realized if that’s what I have to do, to do what I love, that’s just wrong.”
So, for the time being, she was applying her creative talents to assembling flowers artistically in vases and baskets, making her choices as she wove gracefully and cheerfully along the aisles, among clusters of riotous colors. Doing arrangements for weddings or theater productions would bring her pleasure, she thought, but she also felt pressure to finish her college degree. The pressure came from her mother, of course, and it came from the New Hampshire couple who had helped pay Sally’s tuition. They would continue giving her rent for an apartment, she explained, only on the condition that she continue her studies. She had started one course in Harvard’s extension program and dropped it.
“Mom’s terrified,” Sally said. “She’s horrified that I left school and that I’m not immediately going back.”
Part of Ann’s concern was practical. “I worry ab
out Sally not having health insurance,” Ann said, “and worry about her not working toward a degree to enable her to work where she can have health insurance.” For herself, Ann had a worry and a wish that could not be resolved: “I would like to be thirty years younger, so I could find a better-paying job with more challenges instead of being stuck in a low-paying, dead-end job.”
Leary Brock (this page–this page) had a lilt of contentment in her voice when I called to check in. Her career at Xerox continued on a gradual climb. As the technical support coordinator at the Energy Department, where Xerox had a contract, she made $27,000 a year and shouldered increasing responsibility. The company was still investing in her, sending her to a technician’s course that would, she hoped, teach her to repair complex machines and, she believed, triple her salary.
Xerox was also paying for on-line business courses from the University of Phoenix, and Leary hoped to get her college degree eventually. She was taking a scriptwriting course at her church, where one of her plays was performed, “and it was well-received,” she said proudly. She had benefited from the perfect alignment of her personal strengths and the right assistance at the right moments from society’s institutions—the court, the drug rehab program, the job training center, and the private company that recognized her promise. She had come a long way from the addict-infested streets, and she was not going back.
Life at home grew quieter, because children were doing well enough in various jobs that her grandchildren had moved out to live with them. Leary’s mother, Velma, turned ninety, enjoyed reasonably good health, and still had a mind as sharp as a tack. A financial uncertainty looms in the future, though, for when Velma dies, the pension and Social Security checks that help pay the mortgage and taxes will end, and the house where they live will become part of Leary’s burden. Furthermore, Velma has become an anchor of stability. Her absence will test Leary’s ability to maintain the equilibrium she has attained.
Lisa Brooks (this page–this page), whose son’s ambulance charges propelled her into credit problems, was rescued by marriage and by the skewed values the American economy places on certain jobs. Her meager wage from caring for mentally ill adults in a state home was replaced by her new husband’s comfortable income of $500 to $1,000 a week as a polisher for a gun manufacturer. He was paid by the piece, earning enough to permit Lisa to stay home with the six children, ages eight to thirteen, whom they both brought to their new family.
Her husband owned their house and had a sound credit record. He took out a home equity loan to put in a new kitchen and then a mortgage to build a large addition. The house provided a healthier environment for Lisa’s son, whose asthma was much improved. The boy was no longer being rushed to the hospital, and so the chain reaction from housing to health to poor credit to higher interest rates was broken.
Medical insurance remained a problem, however. Lisa and the children were insured through the gun company, “but it doesn’t cover prescriptions,” she said, “so you have to pay yourself. When I need medicine, I buy it, but when we run out, I don’t take it.”
Lisa wanted to work. She ran a day-care center in her home for a while, cleaned houses, and took a small business management course on-line.
Eventually she hoped to start a private concern to serve people with special needs, like those at the state home where she had been such an effective caretaker. “I absolutely loved it,” she said, “and I miss it.”
Christie (this page–this page), who had earned too little to place her own children in the church-run day-care center where she worked, quit her job and slipped back onto welfare. Her boss had refused to give her time off for the required office visits to renew her food stamps, she said, had denied her the vacation days she was owed, and had refused to pay for a course to get her certified as a child development assistant. The center also assigned too many small children to each caregiver, a ratio of fourteen to one, Christie reported. The tension was raising her blood pressure, and she framed the choice starkly: “Do I want to be dead, working—or alive, not working?”
But she found the life of the welfare mother, sitting at home and drawing a check, utterly boring. By pushing her into a job, welfare reform had given her a taste for the workplace. Furthermore, the time limit under the law was approaching—she had only a year and a half before her welfare payments would stop—so she scrambled to find employment.
From time to time, she earned under the table by caring for children in her apartment in public housing. She applied for a bank teller’s position but then learned that the only openings were an hour’s commute, a trip she couldn’t make with two children of her own at home—kids who were not doing well in school. She applied for a telemarketing job, but smelled a rat when they asked her to spend $120 for “supplies,” including the smoke alarms she was to sell.
She seemed to be spinning her wheels, sliding from one idea to the next with no forward motion. She could improve her typing and get an office job, she figured, or work in the insurance industry, perhaps in a billing department. That was especially appealing: She thought it would be nice to send out collection notices instead of receiving them.
Kevin Fields (this page–this page, this page), the ex-con who couldn’t get a job as a penitentiary-trained butcher, was maligned by Bill O’reilly, the combative talk-show host of The O’reilly Factor, who carefully selected negative elements of Kevin’s story and left out ameliorating details. It was a clear case of not letting facts get in the way of an ideology.
After The Working Poor was published, O’reilly invited me on the show and wanted to find Kevin as well. Kevin had moved, and I hadn’t been able to locate him, but O’reilly insisted that the producers track him down, through prison records if necessary. Without telling me they had done so, a producer called him to update his story. O’reilly didn’t put Kevin on the air with me, probably because he would have contradicted O’reilly’s distortions.
To bolster the familiar conservative position that “some people can’t be saved,” O’reilly noted that Kevin had fathered four children by four different women—two more than at the time I had interviewed him for the book. That was true. (A month or so later, another baby was born, bringing the total to five children by four women.)
O’reilly then proceeded to falsehoods and omissions. “He’s been incarcerated time and time again for failing to pay child support,” O’reilly declared. In fact, as I learned after the show, he had been jailed once for one week, and otherwise had made his payments. “Here’s a man who’s just flat out irresponsible!” O’reilly huffed. There were people “basically, at their core, unable, unable—all right?—to be responsible. Thus, no one’s gonna hire them.”
But Kevin had been hired, which O’reilly failed to mention. As Kevin had told O’reilly’s producer, he had been working steadily for the last three and a half years as a meat wrapper in a Giant supermarket, earning $7.35 an hour.
Kevin is no model citizen; like many in his circumstance, he is a study in contradictions. His responsibility holding down a job stands alongside his irresponsibility in fathering multiple children by multiple women. His record in paying child support is imperfect. But the ambiguities of real life are too complex to fit into O’reilly’s political simplicities. The real Kevin can’t quite be squeezed into the right wing’s stereotype of the poor as irredeemable ne’er-do-wells whom society can guiltlessly cast aside. Therefore, O’reilly had to create a caricature of Kevin by deftly concealing from viewers the significant facts that Kevin had a job and that much of his wage went to child support.
Meanwhile, the real Kevin still hoped that he would be promoted by Giant to full-fledged butcher.
Tom King (this page–this page), the widower with three kids, lost his job when LaCrosse shut down two of three shifts at its boot factory. “The Chinese are killing us,” Tom said, passing on what he had been told. “The same boot, they can make it over there for seventy-eight cents a pair.” The sudden vacuum hit his life and his wallet hard.
“It was kind of a shock to me to go from twelve hours to nothing,” he said. “They let us know a week ahead of time.” It was in the depths of January. The water to his trailer froze again, and he had to move in with a friend for a couple of weeks.
Did he vote the next month in the New Hampshire presidential primary? “No, I didn’t. I was out lookin’ for a job.” He might have added, echoing what he had told me in earlier years, that no candidate held the promise of a job or any other improvement in his situation. By the fall, he still wasn’t sure whether, or for whom, he would vote. “I don’t even bother. I’m on the go most of the time. I don’t have time to watch TV.”
After the spring thaw, he picked up bits and pieces of construction work and then settled into a routine of collecting scrap iron—rusting trucks and cars and engines and the like—and selling it to a recycling plant in Claremont. “I’m junkin’,” he explained. “Everybody gives it to me. The price is right, money’s good.” And he was also haying on the two-hundred-acre farm where his father worked as caretaker. His daughter, Kate, a sixth-grader, helped out too, stacking bales.
“She’s the spitting image of her mother,” Tom said. “What’s in her head comes out her mouth.”
Zach, the oldest who didn’t go to college, was training in Nebraska as a mechanic in the Air Force, and he loved it, he told his grandmother. “He said, ‘When I get out of the service I can go to any airport and work on the planes,’ ” she reported. “I said, ‘Your mother would be very proud of you.’ He broke down. I told Tom later, ‘I didn’t mean to make him cry’ ”
“I’m OK,” Tom said bravely on the phone, and I could imagine him rubbing his hand down his face. “I’m up and taking nourishment. Any day above ground’s gonna be a good day.”
Caroline Payne (this page–this page), the mother without teeth, was very busy behind the register at the convenience store when a boy in a long line asked for a pack of cigarettes. “Usually I card everybody,” she said, but this time “I was really overwhelmed.” The kid turned out to be part of a sting operation by the state, and when he returned with the inspector, both she and the store were given tickets for selling cigarettes to a minor.
The Working Poor Page 40
