The Working Poor

by David K. Shipler

  The disparities in earning power were even enshrined in the formula used to calculate compensation after the terrorist attacks of September n, 200I. The survivors of a thirty-year-old married father of two who was killed in the World Trade Center, for example, would receive $1,066,058 if he had been paid $25,000 a year, and $3,856,694 if he had been paid $150,000. Everyone’s life had a price.

  Some employers even use the earning gap to argue against narrowing it, noting that raising wages at the bottom would have a direct impact on prices for the same people. Randy Rolston, president of a mail-order stationery company, Victorian Paper, put it this way: “If you move the minimum wage up, where they are spending their money is back within the minimum wage realm.… They can’t afford to go to a nice restaurant. If they go out to dinner at a Wendy’s or a McDonald’s, well, you raise the price there.… You go to the grocery store, they’ve got to buy their food, you raise the price there. When the wages are raised, prices would have to be raised. People are either gonna go out of business or they’re gonna raise the prices. The inflation it would cause would be a low-end inflation. Those are the businesses that they usually patronize.”

  The economy resulting from the wage differentiation has been agile in responding to need, demand, and the impulse for innovation. Unfortunately, it has also increased the disparity between wealthy and poor—and, in an ominous harbinger of a troubled future, has not enhanced the opportunity for upward mobility during a worker’s lifetime, especially among Third World immigrants impeded by low education and low skills. In a booming economy, practically anyone who wants to work can get a job, but usually at a low wage without much prospect of promotion. Except in certain growth industries such as health care, with high turnover and a demand twenty-four hours a day for a variety of talents, the entry-level job often turns out to be the dead-end job.

  It is mobility that has created the global reputation of the United States as a land of opportunity, and it is that impression that has generated the popular view of a society more open and less stratified than others. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the son of Polish immigrants could drop out of school after the eighth grade, work on the Jersey City docks for eight cents an hour, and rise to become president of Bethlehem Steel’s steamship lines. That’s what my grandfather did. Not today. Most modern American mobility is generated by economic growth, not by any absence of boundaries between races or classes. That economic expansion, rapid enough after World War II to open broad avenues of advancement, has slowed since the 1970s, leaving many workers behind, especially men and women with nothing more than high school diplomas. More mobility occurs between generations than within generations. It is a sad truth now that a young person with limited skills and education arriving on these shores—or entering the workforce from a background of poverty—will start on the bottom rung only to discover that the higher rungs are beyond his grasp.

  Nowhere is the stifling frustration more obvious than in the ethnic enclaves that serve America’s economy. Formidable walls surround the subcultures of Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mexicans, Hondurans, Ethiopians, and others who populate the ranks of low-paid workers. Those who lack fluency in English, proper immigration papers, or advanced skills cannot easily scale those walls; they are imprisoned in an archipelago of scattered zones of cheap labor that promote the country’s interests. They are not Americans, but they are an essential part of America. They sustain not only the garment industry, but also the restaurants, farms, parking garages, landscapers, painting contractors, builders, and other key contributors to American well-being.

  “They treat ’em like shit,” said Roxie Herbekian, a gangly, fast-talking union organizer and president of the Parking and Service Workers Union in Washington, D.C. She represented parking garage attendants in Washington, northern Virginia, and suburban Maryland, most of whom were Ethiopian immigrants, plus some West Africans, Latinos, and African-Americans. “People are routinely fired without good reason,” she contended, “and there’s a lot of racist division of work. It’s very hard for people of color to get out of the garages into anything higher [such as] a supervisory position, a management position, accounting.” Many workers “feel this wall of disrespect,” she said. “A lot of the immigrants, particularly from Ethiopia, are professionals. There’s a lot of lawyers, a lot of pharma- cists, people that were highly trained … and then they’re working these jobs, and some young white kid is the supervisor and treats ’em like they don’t know anything.”

  Parking attendants get minimum wage—in the District of Columbia that is a dollar more than the federal minimum—but a lot of their time is off the clock, Herbekian complained. It may take a cashier twenty minutes after she punches out to complete forms and deposit receipts in the bank, but those minutes go unpaid. One big company had “forced breaks,” she said. “They automatically deduct an hour and fifteen minutes for breaks— well, people don’t get the break.” They had to work right through most of it. Personal connections also count. If you have friends who can get you a late afternoon or evening shift parking cars downtown, you’ll get up to $200 a week in tips from people retrieving their vehicles. But you need the contacts, and you need to be a man. Women are usually confined to the tipless position of cashier.

  A fine-boned woman named Leti, fatigue and defeat etched in her ebony face, worked twelve hours a day as a cashier in a Washington garage. Although she spoke good English, she had never finished high school in Ethiopia, and her long hours and two children hadn’t left her time to get her degree here. Seventeen years ago she arrived in the United States on a tourist visa, and two years later managed to get her green card, which signified her legal status as an immigrant. But neither the card nor her English nor her long time in the country opened doors. “I feel like I came last year,” she said. “Nothing has changed.”

  In Los Angeles, “Nara” and her husband were also stuck. Her piercing eyes were bright with anger, her words bitter. For twelve hours a day six days a week, she worked as assistant cook in a Korean restaurant, where customers’ tips were not shared with the staff in the hot kitchen. In the evenings, because her husband refused to cook for himself, she got home and had to prepare dinner for him and their son. “Cooking all day and then at home is like being in hell,” she said angrily. During one of her many fights with her husband, she shouted at him, “Why did you make me come here?” He walked out and didn’t return for ten days.

  In 1991 he came from South Korea with $20,000; she arrived six months later with $15,000. Now their savings had dwindled to $5,000, and they had moved to a smaller, cheaper apartment where they slept in the living room, letting their boy of thirteen have the one bedroom. In Seoul, the husband ran an import-export business dealing mostly in sunglasses; in

  Los Angeles, he picked up odd jobs as a welder. She was a dress designer but without English couldn’t get such work here, so she felt confined to the subculture of Korean restaurants in the “Koreatown” section of Los Angeles. “I went to a language institute for three months,” Nara said through an interpreter, “but I forget very easily. I’m too old.” She was forty-five. “I live in Koreatown; I can get along without English.” She could get along, but she couldn’t get out.

  When they both had work their income didn’t look bad on paper. She made between $1,700 and $1,800 a month, though her long days meant that the hourly rate barely reached California’s minimum wage of $6.75 and omitted overtime, which the law required. He could earn $1,000 to $2,000 a month welding gates and fences, so together they may have taken in nearly $40,000 a year. That was a graphic illustration of the virtue of having two wage-earners and the hazards of being a single parent: At those low wages, single parenthood would have been a prescription for poverty.

  Still, they felt pinched. Los Angeles was an expensive place to live. Public transportation was so bad that they had to own two vehicles, a truck and a car. Their jobs provided no health insurance, so they spent large sums on Korean doctors and dentists
. As illegal immigrants, they got virtually no government benefits (which Nara insisted she would have refused in any case). Moreover, a psychological confinement imposed a mood of defeat. Marginalized, cloistered, and stagnant, Nara simply wanted to go back to South Korea; her husband wanted to stay.

  Jung Hee Lee also felt trapped. A sinewy, diminutive woman with a wan smile, she arrived from South Korea with her husband in 1995; he was on a student visa to study computer science at UCLA. “We sold our house in Korea,” she explained. “We had planned in Korea that if we sold the house, that’s a lot of money, so we could come here and study for about three years comfortably. Both of us would study. We never imagined that I was going to work. It wasn’t in the plan. But when we got here, that money ran out quickly, in a year.” They were stunned by the cost of living. From a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in Korea they descended to a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles. Their two children had beds; the parents slept on the floor.

  She went from bank teller in Korea to waitress in Los Angeles, earning less than the minimum wage and spending hours delicately navigating the slippery floor tiles of a restaurant kitchen. One day, carrying a tray, she lost her footing and fell. Crockery crashed to the floor, and dreams shattered. Her back was injured so seriously that she could not work for a year. Desperate for money, her husband had to drop out of school and get a job—and the college degree was relegated to a distant hope. Jung’s employer did not carry worker’s compensation; she had found a lawyer who had agreed to take only a contingency fee if a lawsuit were successful, a process that was likely to run for at least five years.

  Here again, the family’s income was respectable enough, but the ambitions they brought with them to America had been extinguished. The husband, now a manager for a garment contractor, made about $2,000 a month, much better than most garment workers, and Jung was back waiting tables six nights a week in a Korean restaurant, where tips were often good enough to practically double her $8oo-a-month salary. Nevertheless, the money all disappeared, and they couldn’t save. Without health insurance, their medical bills were huge. The tension in their life ground at their emotions. They would have returned home, but they felt ashamed to do so in defeat.

  “If you look at the wages earned, it’s not bad,” she said. “But the problem is you work long hours. Most of the time you’re at work, and who’s going to take care of the children? So you end up spending about $500 a month for child care, and I don’t have much time to spend with my family or husband. So it ends up, going to work, going home and sleeping, and coming out again. There’s no time to cook so they always have to go out and eat,” she said of her husband and children. That was expensive, and their diet and health suffered as a result.

  “My husband is a salaried man, but he doesn’t have any social life. He has friends, but he can’t hang out with them. He has to come home and take care of the kids. So my husband and I have lots of trouble—arguments. He has no days off. … In Korea, we never argued. I’ve heard from other immigrants that the first five years of immigrant life you and your husband will argue, but if you can get past that you will be together.”

  But “together” was a relative term. Her husband was out of the apartment by 7:30 or 8 a.m. and back about 8:30 p.m., when she was still at work. “I walk in the door around twelve or one o’clock, I open up the door and my husband’s snoring and everyone’s asleep, and I feel like, why am I living? I get very depressed. In Korea, at least we spent evenings together so we’d have things to talk about. But right now we have nothing to talk about with each other. There’s no time to talk, and there’s no content to discuss.” In one respect Korean immigrants are becoming assimilated into America: Their divorce rate is about 50 percent.

  The salvation of immigrants to the United States has almost always been deferred to the subsequent generations. If the parents cannot speak English, the children can. If the parents are confined by long hours and low wages, the children are freed to find a way up along the path of higher skills and education. It’s hard to make comparisons with earlier eras, but in today’s ethnic enclaves the assumptions are not completely intact, the confidence is not entirely unshaken that the next generation will succeed, advance, emerge into the shared sunlight of the country’s prosperity.

  Indeed, when I asked Jung what she foresaw in her children’s lives, she answered curiously; she described how active she had become in campaigning through the Korean Immigrant Workers Advocate to improve working conditions in Korean restaurants. That battle, if won, would make her children’s lives better, she believed. So, I asked, she expected them to be working in restaurants? “There’s no guarantee that they will not be working in a restaurant,” she said sadly. “Of course, I would love to have my children go to Yale, Harvard, Columbia, New York University, and become a doctor, a lawyer, but—right now my son’s dream is to become a police officer. My daughter’s is to become a teacher in elementary school. But in looking at their future employment, who knows? They could end up working in the restaurants.”

  Chapter Four

  HARVEST OF

  SHAME

  These are the forgotten people, the under-protected, the under-educated, the under-clothed, the under-fed.

  —Edward R. Murrow, “Harvest of Shame,” 1960

  If the cinder-block barrack had been filled with migrant workers, the impression would have been less severe. We would have talked with the men and women, joked with them, listened to their stories. We would have been busy with their laughter and leathery faces and weary eyes, not focused so intensely on the crude dark rooms, the rusty bunk frames, the stained and stinking mattresses, the grimy kitchen sink, the torn screens, the row of toilets without partitions. The presence of people would have softened the stark conditions in which they lived. But this was December, and North Carolina’s growing season was over, cut short this year by a hurricane that flooded fields and ruined crops. A remnant of the last harvest—a small pile of dusty sweet potatoes—huddled against an outside wall. Late on a sunny Wednesday, the “camp” was vacant. In the emptiness, the echo of hardship reverberated.

  Like most such camps, this one was way out of sight and hard to find.

  Pastor Tony Rojas had brought us from Newton Grove in a van big enough to negotiate the merciless dirt road that twisted through deep ruts and puddles until it emerged at the edge of a vast field. There, in a weedy lot less than twenty feet from where Thanksgiving yams were grown, stood the building, as dismal as a neglected barn. Long and narrow with a peaked roof, its single story had many doors, each opening into an un-painted cinder-block room resembling a cell. Each cell smelled of mold, was lit by a bare bulb on the ceiling, and contained two or three bunks, not enough for the laborers who crowded in here. The pastor gave the workers clean sheets, he told me through my son Michael, who was interpreting from Spanish.

  A sad scene from this building was hung like an icon of misery on the office wall of Father Tony, as he was known. It was a large color photograph of a young man sitting here on the floor among bunks with filthy mattresses. One day, visiting the office, the man was stunned to see himself depicted in such surroundings. He told the pastor that if his family saw the picture, they would never let him come here again. “The mattresses are nauseating,” Father Tony told us before we saw for ourselves. “They are sticky. They smell disgusting. It is horrible to be there. They prefer to sleep on the floor. They are afraid of getting a disease by sleeping on the mattresses.”

  Father Tony was a native of Colombia in his fifties, a Catholic priest turned Episcopalian. He had a broad brown face that vividly registered all the pain, amusement, outrage, and inspiration that the migrants brought him as he tried to render help through the Episcopal Farmworkers Ministry. They were vulnerable and strong, adrift and steady. At the height of the picking season, he said, twelve to fourteen men were crammed into each twelve-by-fifteen-foot cell, fewer women in their respective cells. Summer was fiercely hot. There was no air conditioning, and not
even a fan, unless a worker happened to bring one with him. But migrants travel light—a pair of shoes, two or three pairs of pants. Men and women are stuffed into a van or a pickup, moving with the seasons from the citrus groves of Florida to the North Carolina fields of cotton, tobacco, green vegetables, strawberries, and sweet potatoes, sometimes to the apple orchards of Pennsylvania and New York, and then back southward again. In late fall, some cut Christmas trees. You can hardly go through a day, much less observe a holiday, without the fruit of their labor in your life.

  The farm owners usually provide housing for the migrants—either barracks like this one, run-down trailers, or dilapidated wooden farmhouses that look like shipwrecks on a horizon of tilled earth. We turned off the main road past a neat subdivision of brick homes decorated for Christmas, and a rutted dirt road led to a pair of decaying houses that seemed abandoned. Screens were torn, doors were half off their hinges, the paint looked decades old; the inside was bare, dirty, gray, and dark. So many workers lived here, Father Tony said, that they slept in the hallways. Years ago someone climbed to the peak of one roof and installed a handmade sign reading, “Motel Six.”