But this enticement was not working for Caroline. She had taken out a second mortgage, for $19,000, to replace her roof, doors, and windows, and she needed money now. “The way they schedule your hours,” she said, “sometimes it’s ten to seven, sometimes it’s nine to four, sometimes it’s seven to four, sometimes you work later in the evenings, and you never know what day. You don’t always have the same two days off. Like I was supposed to have last Sunday off because of Amber’s recital. I asked for it off. Well, I got home and later that night there was a message on my phone: ‘Can you please come to work for a while?’ I did. I did. It was overtime. I never said no to them. But why couldn’t they have the decency to pay me a little bit more?”
That was the way the store treated “associates” when the economy was booming. In more depressed parts of the country and during recessions, however, some Wal-Mart managers were accused of forcing employees to work before punching in or after punching out to avoid paying overtime as required by law. “Wal-Mart management doesn’t hold itself to the same standard of rectitude it expects from its low-paid employees,” wrote Barbara Ehrenreich, who worked at a Wal-Mart in Minnesota while researching her book Nickel and Dimed. “When I applied for a job at Wal-Mart in the spring of 2000, I was reprimanded for getting something ‘wrong’ on this test: I had agreed only ‘strongly’ to the proposition, ‘All rules have to be followed to the letter at all times.’ The correct answer was ‘totally agree.’ Apparently the one rule that need not be slavishly adhered to at Wal-Mart is the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires that employees be paid time and a half if they work more than forty hours in a week.” Workers were warned against “time theft,” which meant “doing anything other than working during company time, anything at all,” she reported. “Theft of our time is not, however, an issue.”4
Caroline never had the overtime problem in her New Hampshire store, but in six Southern states employees filed a class-action suit against the company for ordering them off the clock as their weekly time approached forty hours. Their attorney calculated the benefits to the firm: If each of 250 hourly wage “associates” in a single store worked just one hour of unpaid overtime a week, that would total 250 unpaid hours a week, 1,000 a month, 12,000 a year—and there were over 300 Wal-Mart stores in Texas, producing savings in that state alone of more than $30 million that should have been paid to employees.5
Caroline did not suffer from any violations of law, as far as she could tell, but her career went nowhere. Mark Brown, the manager who liked her, got transferred to Pennsylvania, dimming her prospects for advancement. So after a year and a half at Wal-Mart, she signed up with a temp agency, which found her a $7.50-an-hour daytime job Monday through Friday assembling wallpaper sample books. And she had the pleasure of telling Wal-Mart’s assistant manager that she was leaving for higher pay.
“I’m just hoping they’ll be sorry someday,” Caroline said.
“Because they don’t know who they’re missing,” Amber added. “She’s such a nice mom, and she’s pretty cool.”
After a month the agency tempted Caroline with a job back at the Tampax factory for $10 an hour, the most she had ever earned. She took it, but there was a problem: Procter & Gamble had organized the factory on rotating shifts. One week she left the house at 5:30 a.m. and got home at 2:30 p.m., the next week she left at 1:30 p.m. and was home by 10:30 p.m., and the third she left home at 9:30 p.m. and returned at 6:30 a.m. Putting aside the question of sleep, stamina, and the basic requirements of an orderly life, the “swing shifts,” as they were called, raised havoc with Caroline’s arrangements for Amber. She had rented rooms to boarders occasionally or taken in homeless families so Amber wouldn’t be alone. But these situations never lasted long; Caroline found the people intrusive or bossy or dishonest.
One family staying with her as she worked the swing shifts became difficult, and she kicked them out. “The people were sort of homeless,” she said. “I was kindhearted, you know me, took ‘em in. They had three little kids. He was on probation, a car accident, something…. They were paying $100 a week. They didn’t pay the last two weeks. They said they would stay for the winter. I only intended it to be a short-term thing. The little kids destroyed wallpaper in my house and other things.… On top of that, come to find out, he had got another girl pregnant and had another baby.” Furthermore, they were getting checks from welfare and food from WIC, while he had his own business laying flooring and carpeting. “They make good money,” Caroline said resentfully, “and I’m wondering if they reported it all. They’re not married. People scheme the system like this, and they get away with it.”
Without the boarders, though, Caroline had nobody to look after Amber, so she very reluctantly left the girl home alone during her evening and nighttime shifts. While Caroline was running the machines that put tampons into boxes, she was worrying about Amber, and with good cause. “I don’t think she should be left alone now,” said her pediatrician, Steven Blair, who feared that given her epilepsy and cognitive problems, “she could be in trouble pretty easily.” She could stay home by herself for “a short evening,” he believed, “but I wouldn’t leave her for many hours at a stretch.”
Amber happened to tell her teacher how scary it was being home alone after dark. The teacher was alarmed. “She can’t take care of herself,” said the principal of Claremont Middle School, Donald R. Hart. “She’s fourteen, that’s our concern. No young lady, middle school student, should be left alone at night. She gets scared, she’s had people knock on her door at night. We would still have the same reaction with a normal fourteen-year-old. When you look at statistics when kids get themselves into trouble with drugs, alcohol, sex, it’s after school hours in the home.” So, what did the school do to help? It summoned up a dreaded specter from Caroline’s past: The teacher threatened to report Caroline for neglect. “We have a legal obligation to report if neglect is going on,” said Hart. “We would be breaking the law if we suspect neglect, abuse, or anything like that.”
It was late in October of 2000, the height of the presidential election campaign, and the country seemed consumed by politics. Not Caroline. Her voice trembled with rage and fear as she searched frantically for a way to keep both her job and her daughter. The celebrated New Hampshire primary had long since passed without so much as denting Caroline’s consciousness. She didn’t bother to see any of the candidates as they crisscrossed the state, and, looking back, she was not even sure whether or not she had voted. “I can’t remember,” she said frankly. “I might have been working. I don’t think I did.” And now, even with Al Gore and George W. Bush arguing and preaching and promising intensely on the TV in her living room, Caroline had no spare room in her thoughts for either of those men. “I haven’t really listened to them,” she said. “Right now it’s the least of my concerns. They’re all liars in a way. They tell people they’ll do this or that. I have no use for Clinton, because he did not set a good example by running around with that girl. I think his wife’s a fool to stay with him.”
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, Caro
line 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 e
ase 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.
The Working Poor Page 10