The Working Poor (13 page)

Clinton wasn’t running, of course. No, but she felt that Gore shared responsibility. “He’s the vice president. He must have a good idea of what’s going on in there. He’s next in line. Why couldn’t he have stepped in and done a little more and straightened things out?” For that reason, Bush struck her as preferable, but she obviously didn’t know about his affluence. “I want a motivated person like me that has been through these situations and knows what it’s like out here. It will never happen. If I vote it will be straight women. I’d like to see a woman president. I would not like to see some rich person in there. I’d like to see somebody who has sense enough to help these people who need the help, you see what I’m trying to say?

The system needs to be straightened out. They need more resources to help these people who are trying to help themselves.” November 7 came and went without her vote.

Faced with the threat of being reported to the state’s child protection agency, Caroline stopped going to work and started working the phones and surfing the internet trying to find care for Amber. Unlike most of America’s low-wage laborers, Caroline had a computer, bought on time with a Sears credit card. Mostly she liked to play games and send e-mails, and even search for men on-line, but now the machine became a tool in a desperate task. She found the website of one agency after another, made calls, and came up empty-handed: the Governor’s Office of Disability, Parent to Parent, Social Security, Health and Human Services, Family Assistance, the Parent Information Center. “They’re all trying to find help, and there doesn’t seem to be help out there,” she said. She was told that Amber was too old for welfare’s child-care support and too young for Social Security’s.

All she really needed was a month, because a young couple she knew in Massachusetts planned to move up and live in her house while they worked—and they could be there evenings and nights with Amber. But when Caroline called her boss at the factory, he told her that he could not leave the position vacant for a month and had asked the temp agency to find someone else; he needed workers.

At school, the principal, Donald Hart, raised the issue with his “wraparound team,” comprising a school psychologist, a local counseling agency representative, a juvenile protection worker, and a guidance counselor. “I’ve asked them what is out there for services for Amber while Mom is working,” he reported, “and there is just nothing out there.”

“And I don’t have any extra money to pay anybody either,” Caroline added. “And I’m trying to do the best I can and get caught up on little bills. And now I don’t have a job, and I’m gonna have to go apply for welfare. You pull yourself up and then somebody has to knock you down. If I don’t work, it’s [also] neglect: not feeding or clothing my child.”

Perhaps the most curious and troubling facet of this confounding puzzle was everybody’s failure to pursue the most obvious solution: If the factory had just let Caroline work day shifts, her problem would have disappeared. She asked and got brushed off, but nobody else—not the school principal, not the doctor, not the myriad agencies she contacted—nobody in the profession of helping thought to pick up the phone and appeal to
the factory manager or the foreman or anybody else in authority at her workplace.

Indeed, this solemn regard for the employer as untouchable, off limits, beyond the realm of persuasion unless in violation of the law, seems to permeate the culture of American anti-poverty efforts, with only a few exceptions. Even the most socially minded physicians and psychologists who treat malnourished children, for example, will advocate vigorously with government agencies to provide food stamps, health insurance, housing, and the like. But when they are asked if they ever urge the parents’ employers to raise wages enough to pay for nutritious food, the doctors express surprise at the notion. First, it has never occurred to them, and second, it seems hopeless. The suggestion makes them shrug. Wages are set by the marketplace, and you cannot expect magnanimity from the marketplace. It is the final arbiter from which there is no appeal.

Perhaps they’re right. With Caroline’s permission, I called her supervisor at the factory, just to ask why they had swing shifts. I assumed that it was hard to find people willing to work only evenings or nights, so a rotation expanded the labor supply. The supervisor never called back. After leaving many messages, I finally got a call from the human resources manager, a curt woman named Deborah Garrity. Since Caroline was a temporary worker hired through an agency, Garrity said, the factory had no responsibility for her and could not comment on her working hours, or even on the reason for the swing shifts. The following week was Caroline’s turn for the day shift anyway, and the temp agency had not yet found a replacement, so she went back to work. The school had not yet made a report of neglect, but the prospect hung over her.

The company did have a rationale for the rotating shifts, I later learned from Kevin Paradise, the Human Resources Leader of Tambrands factories in New Hampshire and Maine. “Rotation allows greater exposure of employees to the overall business,” he explained. People on perpetual night shifts tended to lose the big picture, to be less aware of a factory’s mission, and to leave problems for the succeeding shifts. He called this “a separation from the cultural standpoint.” Nighttime workers were also less likely to be promoted, because at night they didn’t have contact with management. These reasonable arguments did Caroline no good.

And then a little miracle happened. A woman with whom Caroline had worked at the homeless shelter happened to know someone from her church who offered to take Amber whenever necessary to her farm outside
of town. So the job was saved. And in the end, the young couple moved early from Massachusetts, and Amber didn’t need the farm option. And when the couple was eventually evicted by Caroline, who felt they were snooping into everything, she found a woman nearby who would take Amber for $50 a week. That effectively reduced Caroline’s hourly wage by $1.25, but she was still ahead financially.

“God works in mysterious ways,” she declared. “I have a guardian angel.” Even with the angel’s help, though, she didn’t hope to be rolling in money. “I don’t want to,” she replied. “I want to be average. I think rich people have a lot of problems too. I wish for a normal life.”

But hers was a normal life in the forgotten America, and in such lives, small blessings had a way of shimmering elusively, then evaporating. For months, Caroline had looked forward to requesting a permanent job at the Tampax factory. At first, she was told that she could apply after working five hundred hours as a temp, then she was told one thousand hours, and then she learned that a young man had been hired permanently after only a month as a temp worker. When she questioned the procedure, a supervisor barked, “We hire who we want.” Furthermore, the application required her to take a written test without being paid for the time she would spend. And her pleas to work a day shift were rejected, even though a few people were being put on steady hours.

So she left Procter & Gamble and returned to the factory that made books of wallpaper samples, working 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and dropping from $10 to $7.50 an hour. She tried to look on the bright side. She was saving $50 a week in child-care expenses, her daughter was more content, and her income had the chance of declining enough that she would qualify for fuel assistance, a government program that subsidized the cost of heating oil. It was February, after all.

As the recession set in, Procter & Gamble closed the Tambrands factory, which made Caroline feel smart about having resigned. Otherwise, she didn’t notice the economic downturn. “I can’t see much difference,” she remarked. “I’ve always struggled, and I’m still struggling.” She continued to move horizontally from job to job. She felt free to walk out of the wallpaper factory after a squabble, got hired by a manufacturer of photo albums for $7 an hour, and then worked as a cashier at a Cumberland Farms convenience store and gas station for $7.50. “The only thing I don’t like is a drive-off,” she said—the driver who fills the tank and speeds away without paying. “You can lose your job if it’s more than five bucks, if you get too
many of them.” How many would be too many she did not know, however: The boss kept the employees off balance by never telling them.

She was still living on the edge, perhaps one drive-off away from unemployment, unable to keep up payments on her debts. Life seemed oppressive and dangerous. Every dollar that was coming in was going out, and she still owed about $12,000 on her credit cards, $20,000 on her student loans, and $54,000 for two mortgages on her house. Nothing in her job prospects suggested that she would ever be able to make any headway against the weight of all those debts. She was trapped in the inescapable netherworld of work, and as the grinding fact of that stagnation gradually infiltrated her understanding, as she finally accepted the improbability of advancement, she began to think about the unthinkable: bankruptcy. Under the law, her student loans would not be forgiven, and her mortgages could not be avoided without losing her house. But the credit card balances would go away, and that would ease her burden.

The trouble was, Caroline did not feel morally right about taking the step. She had recently purchased new appliances on time from a local store, and Brenda told her that declaring bankruptcy was a form of stealing. “It hurt my feelings when she came out and said that,” Caroline admitted, but it also struck a chord. Her spending had been undisciplined, she knew, though she thought she had improved. She needed a fresh start. Painstakingly, she saved until she had $800 for filing and lawyer’s fees, and made the move. “It was hard, and I got real depressed,” she said. “It was my pride, and I didn’t want people to know about it.”

Amber was chafing against the limits of her schooling. She hungered to read, but the high school provided only one hour of tutoring a week. She craved more math than she could get. She yearned to be in the main part of the school, not in the vocational and technical wing, where students were stigmatized as stupid and many seemed considerably less able than she. “Beth,” a counselor at a community center, concluded after intervening with the school: “They did not have here in this district what Amber needed and wanted very desperately. What she needed and wanted was to be more in the mainstream, and this was really not allowed, and that was a shame, because she had so much to offer.” Amber also needed “continuous, intense reading instruction,” Beth observed. Instead, she was taught what she already knew: cooking, shopping, doing laundry. When school officials received pleas from the counselor, who had previously worked as a para-professional with emotionally handicapped kids in a
nearby town, “they laughed at me,” Beth said in surprise. Perhaps they wouldn’t have laughed if Caroline had been wealthy enough to hire a psychologist or a lawyer to make her case and bring pressure, as the affluent must often do.

Whether or not Amber could have been mainstreamed was an open question. The school psychologist, who had done a battery of tests the year before, had confirmed Amber’s mild to moderate retardation, with IQ scores ranging from 43 to 57 in a variety of areas from numerical operations to written expression. “Amber did not know her birthday,” the report stated. “She had difficulty with word finding. Amber’s math skills are dependent on using her fingers to add and subtract.”

Whatever the best course, Caroline gradually lost confidence in the Claremont system’s ability to provide it. She had no money for a private school, but she did have a daughter-in-law in Muncie, Indiana, who agreed to take Amber temporarily while her husband served in the army. The public school there sounded promising. “I spoke with the superintendent’s office,” Beth said. “They told me what school it would be. I spoke to the special ed teacher there. She was very helpful, and I explained exactly what Amber needed. [She said,] ‘We have programs here. She’ll be at the high school with everybody, will be expected to do as much as she is able.’ ”

By September, Amber was in Indiana, ecstatic with school, enrolled in an adult literacy class, and slated to begin three tutoring sessions a week in reading and math. She soon moved into higher-level special ed classes, was scheduled for tests in the spring, and felt herself progressing. Her brightened mood on the phone buoyed her mother’s spirits. But the advances would come at a high price.

Caroline had heard that jobs were plentiful in Muncie, so she prepared to follow her daughter there. To leave, however, she had to sell her precious house, for she could not comfortably rent it out from a distance. Tenants might do damage, and she had no money to travel back and forth to oversee repairs. It took a few months until a buyer could be found to invest in this struggling town, and Caroline had to settle for a break-even sale at $79,000, an amount that should have brought her a nice profit over the $37,000 she had paid. She made nothing, though, not a penny. In effect, she said sadly, “I gave it away.”

The responsibility that she had demonstrated as a homeowner had lifted the value and, ironically, had stolen her equity. She had maintained
and improved the house sensibly for the long term. She still owed about $34,000 on the first mortgage, and the second mortgage of $19,000 carried a pre-payment penalty, which forced her to pay just over $20,000 to get out of it. The federal grants of $17,000 for lead paint removal and new siding required pro-rated reimbursement if the house was sold within ten years and five years respectively, so she had to pay back nearly $16,000. In total, she owed about $70,000. After adding the real estate agent’s fee, taxes, and other closing costs, she ended up short $300, which the agent kindly absorbed by reducing the commission. Five and a half years of mortgage and interest payments had yielded nothing, and one of her dreams was gone.

As the New Hampshire winter arrived in early December, Caroline left with pockets nearly empty. She could not even afford to rent a U-Haul truck. Her older daughter, who had a good job with Verizon, lent her $700, and a couple of friends donated their vacation time to drive the truck and Caroline to Indiana, by way of a slashing blizzard in upstate New York. On the move again, as she had been since childhood, she was happy to see a little of the country.