The Working Poor (44 page)

The creation came out looking rather grand on her curriculum vitae, thanks to the wordsmithing skills of Kathy Troutman, who ran workshops on the art of résumé writing. She was white and middle class, but if trainees felt a barrier, she quickly lowered it by revealing that she was a single mother and a college dropout. “I don’t recommend not going to college,” she said, “but you have to survive.” Around the table, heads nodded. They were with her.

When they organized their lives, she advised them, they should think about how it would look on their résumés. “It’s important,” she said, “to do community service and not do dumb things. And not work at McDonald’s for four years. What are you going to do with that on a résumé? You learn corporate rules, service, sanitation—OK, do it for one year. Don’t do it for four years.” Flesh out every bit of education and experience, she urged. “SOME Center for Employment Training. Certificate, name of program,” she dictated. “You have to describe the program, number of hours: 960 building maintenance and construction, 810 office skills. Classroom and hands-on training hours.” She fed them the lingo, translating the mundane into the special, and suggested that they read the want ads to select the right vocabulary. “The more key words you can use from the industry you’re going into, the more you seem to know about it and seem to be part of it,” she said. Typing, for instance, became “keyboard skills.” Remedial English became “business communication and interpersonal skills.”

As Kathy teased out the details of their training and made a list of impressive accomplishments, they all began to sit a little taller. When she learned that the building maintenance class had been renovating the center, she got very excited. “This is a job,” she declared. “Major projects. Write them down. ‘Building a classroom. Tenant build-out. Tear out the walls, put up new ones. Electrical work to support office technology. Major renovation of an office technology classroom with special electrical and lighting to support computer technology’ You’ve got to learn to write down what you do.” When she heard about the newsletter, she said: “ ‘Graphics. Publishing.’ Let’s call it ‘desktop publishing.’ In parentheses put ‘Microsoft Publisher,’ because that means you’re really going to be a smart office automation person, not just inputting data.”

Then, somebody uttered the magic word “team,” and Kathy was delighted. “Somewhere we have to get teamwork in there,” she declared. “Teamwork is so hot in the real world. So you’re completing projects as a
member of a team. I like that. I like that. You can talk about that in an interview. They’ll fall over.”

The interview loomed as a nightmare. As trainees gathered for another workshop, a consultant named Pat asked which of them had ever been through a job interview. Half raised their hands, but half did not. She asked what words they associated with the experience. They said: fear, trickery, worried, confused, intense, inadequate, questions, and overwhelming. One man added: confident. He was targeted with skeptical looks.

“Sit a little taller,” she told them. “Sit up straight.” They did. Know about the job, she said, arrive at the interview on time. Dress neatly. Ask questions about the company’s career possibilities, the job responsibilities. Answer questions by sticking to what’s relevant about the job. They worried about gaps in their résumés, owing to stints on welfare, on drugs, or in prison. “Honesty is the code of the road,” she advised, and gave them tips: Focus on what they could do right in the job, not what they had done wrong in the past. Then she took them through a drill using the questions they feared.

“Why should I hire you?” a trainee asked.

“ ‘I get along with people,’ ” Pat replied. “I am used to being a team player.… Don’t worry about criminal history. You just focus on your background that applies to your job.”

“Do you have any trouble with authority?” another trainee suggested.

“ ‘No.’ That’s a confident answer. You’re sitting up straight in your seat and you’re saying, ‘No, I don’t.’ ”

“Tell me about yourself.”

“They really don’t want your life history. ‘Well, I would like you to know that I am a very good worker and I can do this job in a very responsible way.’ You don’t have to give a sermon for twenty-five minutes.”

“Where do you see yourself in two years?”

This time a trainee answered. “I plan on getting myself more prepared to climb the ladder in this field and possibly move up the ladder within this company.”

“Oh!” Pat exclaimed. “Music to the employer’s ears.”

And what if they were asked why they had left their previous employer, or why they had bounced from job to job?

“You have to think of something,” she told them. “Let me make a suggestion: ‘Yes, in my earlier years I had many terminations, but I am moving
forward to turn my life around. I have attended this program, I am basically a responsible person, a hard worker, and’—again, you have to be honest—‘I guarantee you will not be sorry you hired me.’ But you see what you have to do? You have to have the mental confidence in your head.”

All this worked. The Xerox Corporation needed motivated people to staff mail rooms and photocopying centers for lobbyists, law firms, and government agencies; signed up for a welfare-to-work program; got $I million a year in tax breaks; and hired four from this batch of trainees. Peaches was one of them. So was Wendy Waxler, the single mother whose daughter had cerebral palsy. The company trained them to operate and maintain equipment that could print, sort, and bind full-color reports. Their salaries started at $8 an hour and moved quickly to $10, with health insurance and other benefits. So dramatic was their turnaround that Xerox honored them (and itself) at various ceremonies, including one in Chicago where Wendy spoke with President Clinton in attendance. “He congratulated me on my speech and everything,” she said, bubbling, “told me how much he liked it, gave me a hug and had me smile at the camera.” She giggled like a schoolgirl. “The picture was all over Xerox, in the Xerox newspaper, in
Jet
magazine.” She then accepted an invitation to take her daughter for a visit with Clinton in the Oval Office. Several years later, when her daughter’s condition worsened, Wendy had to quit her job to manage medical care for the girl, who at age six weighed just twenty-five pounds. Wendy went back on welfare, but it wouldn’t be for long, she was sure, because her training and good performance record propelled her into a school for computer technicians and website designers, paid by welfare. She was confident that she would soon have some real earning power.

Peaches was also pleased with herself, even though she still felt poor. “I’m a working welfare woman,” she declared. “Yeah, I’m working, and I’m getting about as much as this woman sitting on her behind doing nothing. I’m a working welfare woman. I don’t have enough money to go anywhere, do anything.… She’s sittin’ at home looking at soap operas, getting her hair done and her nails done.” Peaches laughed deeply. “And I’m scrambling like I don’t know what. I’m a working welfare woman.”

The expenses of work, which for women include not only transportation but usually child care and new clothes, make the transition stressful financially. Still, Peaches found ways to dress fairly well in $25 outfits from thrift shops, though they were out of style. She put aside enough money for an apartment. She started a little business on the side, arranging gift
baskets of silk flowers. She began to taste the refreshing breeze of freedom, and she let herself dream a little. “I can go to New York and see it if I choose to,” she said with a wistful smile. “Let’s do lunch, let’s do dinner, let’s go to—what is the place, oh, my goodness, I can’t even think of it— the Kennedy Center. Whatever. I plan on going to the Bahamas.… By myself or with somebody, I’m going to the Bahamas, because I want to. New Orleans, because I want to. And not feel bad about it. And do it and be secure in the fact that I can do it … so I can enjoy myself and be a real person and have something to talk about besides who screwed who, who shot who, so and so’s dead.”

Contact with new, more successful people has been a boon of going to work, say many who have moved off welfare and out of stifling circles of indigence. Encounters with achieving colleagues can revive, broaden, and educate. Wanda Roundtree, for example, who made $22,000 as a secretary in a Kansas City office, got unexpected advice on child rearing from her boss. “She says, ‘Wanda, try this,’ and, ‘Wanda, try that. And don’t hit ’em. Do this.’ And I stopped hitting them and I started doing some of the things that she suggested, and it worked. And I was like, ‘Wow! I like this!’ She was like, ‘Give ’em those.’ She told me about the Rugrat books and the magazines and the
Sports Illustrated.”

Some employers awaken to surprising possibilities as well. Xerox found the ex-addicts and ex-welfare recipients who graduated from SOME’s training center more reliable than walk-in applicants, said Beverly Smith, the company’s local staffing and development manager, so she decided not to hire anyone who hadn’t been through such a program. “They do the work-ready part,” she said, “which makes the transition easier … to get them motivated and back in the mode of getting up in the morning.” In her experience, training courses without the “soft skills” component graduated workers who let child care, transportation, and financial mismanagement defeat them on the job—“getting paid on Friday and by Tuesday not having transportation money,” she observed. Hiring welfare recipients through the good training programs “has enabled us to have a larger pool of talent” and “has eased our training efforts.”

Here was a key to moving people from welfare to work: Make the process beneficial to business. In many parts of the country, welfare reform stimulated cooperation between private industry and nonprofit organizations. Corporate executives were given a major role in a Kansas City effort that blended government and private funds, and combined business, antipoverty
organizations, and city government to train people for the workplace. In Cleveland, to make sure the instruction focused on jobs that actually existed, the board of the Cleveland Center for Employment Training was dominated by executives from local industries that donated equipment and hired many of the trainees. In other words, the job training was meshed with the demands of the labor market. This may sound like common sense, but it has not characterized every government-funded program.

Success meant a symbiosis between the worlds of profit and nonprofit, a mutual benefit that sometimes looked like a healthy subsidy for private industry. An example could be seen at the edge of a tax-abated industrial park in rural Kentucky, where Jackson County Rehabilitation Industries, a nonprofit job-training enterprise, had contracts to make appliance cables for Mid-South Electrics, a few hundred yards away. Impoverished white women from Appalachia sat at machines that cut brown wires into precise lengths and fastened terminals on the ends. Other women and men, sitting before big tilted boards bearing spools of wire, laced intricate telecommunications cables, tying them together with plastic thread the size of dental floss. A “clean room” encased in hanging clear plastic was being built in the hope of getting contracts from Lucent and Hewlett-Packard. Completed wiring would have been cheaper to make in Mexico but costlier at most other American manufacturers because Rehabilitation Industries had to cover only 70 to 80 percent of its expenses through sales; the rest came from government grants. The trainees, there for ninety days, got minimum wage and lower benefits than at similar jobs at private firms, where most of them would eventually end up working.

Such mini-companies, sometimes called rehabilitation workshops, have no need to pretend that they are a demanding workplace. They are. Since they don’t have to make a profit, and they get government funding to put trainees in authentic working situations, they can often underbid profit-oriented competitors who are in the same business of assembling and packaging products for larger concerns. Everybody seems to win—except the small competitors. The large manufacturers save money, and the trainees train realistically enough to become desirable employees elsewhere.

There are downsides. The trainees are non-unionized, and they are sometimes sent with their low wages to do contract labor inside privately owned factories, which don’t have to pay for medical insurance, vacation time, or other benefits. This adds to the practice of outsourcing jobs once
performed by full-time employees, which undermines benefits and depresses wages. On the other hand, as the corporations get cheap labor, the trainees get valuable work experience. In Chicago about 40 of the 250 workers in a Turtle Wax factory came from Options for People, a job-training program whose executive committee chairman, Denis J. Healy, was also chairman of Turtle Wax. As part of its contract, Options even sent supervisors to the factory to relieve Turtle Wax of the task of overseeing the low-wage workers who stacked boxes and performed other unskilled labor. It was a sweetheart deal for Turtle Wax, but it was also a good entry point for trainees from Options, many of whom became regular employees with opportunities for promotion. Options graduates made up more than half the factory’s full-time workforce, and a couple of them moved up to middle management.

On the other hand, such job-training programs rarely train workers in their rights. The entire burden rests on the trainee to be good enough to get a job, not on the employer to be good enough to provide decent pay and working conditions. No true empowerment takes place, and the hiring process itself militates against the worker enjoying even a fleeting sense of leverage. Barbara Ehrenreich observes as much in Wal-Mart’s hiring process. “First you are an applicant, then suddenly you are an orientee,” she writes. “You’re handed the application form and, a few days later, you’re being handed the uniform and warned against nose rings and stealing. There’s no intermediate point in the process in which you confront the potential employer as a free agent, entitled to cut her own deal.”
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Hard against the tracks and sidings north of the 59th Street railroad yard, Options for People turned a cavernous warehouse into a bustling factory, and its big-bellied director of training, Richard Blackmon, was busy spreading his zealous work ethic. “This is our contract packaging division,” he explained, threading his way among stacks of cartons and barrels. “What this part of our program is designed to do is give people the opportunity to get their time schedules down, get used to working all day, get a baby-sitter in line, figure out transportation routes, to earn some money, ’cause they actually earn money while they’re in this division: $5.15. That’s our training stipend.”