The Working Poor

by David K. Shipler

  When she became the Teach for America supervisor in Washington, D.C., Ms. Henderson made sure the program’s office there served the same purpose. “All 126 of our corps members have a code where they can get into our office twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to use the copy machine,” she said, “and we run hundreds of thousands of copies on our poor little machine every year.” An alternative would have been big personal bills at Kinko’s; many teachers spent a good deal of their own money. Recognizing the difficulty, the Washington public schools began to give each teacher $250 a year for materials, a sum that provided partial assistance.

  “It’s amazing, the money I spend,” said Judith Jacob. “I copy anything I see.” She judged her school library as “horrible, horrible,” so she spent time at a Goodwill book sale. “I almost went blind just looking through and finding books my students would enjoy.” Elsewhere, too, many school libraries are sparsely stocked and scarcely used. At Harris, the library was an attractive room full of students, most of them on computers, but the book collection was unimpressive. The librarian, Geraldine Hart, had received a stack of boxed new books the previous year and was leaving them unopened behind her office door until the District of Columbia school board introduced a new computerized cataloguing system. She didn’t want to put them on the shelves and then have to recatalogue them.

  Schools are full of self-fulfilling prophecies. Schools are where dreams and disappointments come together, where children are believed in or defeated, where lights are ignited or extinguished. In Watts, I asked the math teacher at Grape Street Elementary what problems could be solved with more money. “Practically everything except the trauma the kids are exposed to,” he said. “And with more money we could provide services to deal with that better.”

  A grave distinction was embedded in his answer. Poverty or near poverty is not a problem, it is an array of interlocking problems. If schools were staffed and funded as a gateway to an array of services, as is Dr. Barry Zuckerman’s pediatrics department with its lawyers and social workers, then some of those far-flung hardships might be addressed, and the schools themselves might function better. To an extent, something of the kind is done when schools provide free or low-priced breakfasts and lunches to improve children’s nutrition (and therefore their attentiveness), and when after-school programs serve as day care for working parents.

  The broad impact of that larger role was illustrated on the snowy morning of December 5, 2002, when the D.C. superintendent, Paul Vance, tried to keep schools open. Even while the surrounding suburbs were closing in the face of six to eight inches of accumulation, Vance announced that the city schools would operate, and then, just a few minutes before 8 a.m., he had to reverse himself and close down. Politicians and commentators criticized him for indecision and mismanagement, yet his goals were noble. He did not want to complicate the lives of working parents who would have to choose whether to forfeit pay or leave children inadequately supervised at home. And most children in his system were poor enough to qualify for subsidized breakfast and lunch. He knew—as his critics evidently did not—that many children would go hungry that morning if schools were closed. Two months later in the same city, President George W. Bush submitted a budget that would make it harder for children nationwide to qualify for free meals at school.

  I have often thought that the best way to learn about a country is to visit its prisons, hospitals, and schools. Inside those institutions, a society’s vision and morality are on vivid display against the backdrop of its ideals. In Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol quotes bitterly from Lord Acton, writing of the United States in the nineteenth century: “In a country where there is no distinction of class, a child is not born to the station of its parents, but with an indefinite claim to all the prizes that can be won by thought and labor. [Americans] are unwilling that any should be deprived in childhood of the means of competition.”

  Kozol comments: “It is hard to read these words today without a sense of irony and sadness. Denial of ‘the means of competition’ is perhaps the single most consistent outcome of the education offered to poor children in the schools of our large cities.”2

  The task seems clear enough: to make it possible for Shamika to be a lawyer, for Latosha to write her good thoughts clearly. However, in the slums and ghettos of misfortune, in the striving migrant camps beside the country’s fields, in the dying factory towns of the Midwest and New England, America does not tread softly on her children’s dreams.

  Chapter Ten

  WORK WORKS

  There’s a lot of talent that’s been layered over with years of maybe drug abuse or alcohol abuse or physical abuse, no telling what. But the layers have begun to peel off, and … oh, looks like a little diamond under there.

  —Leary Brock, a former addict

  At first, the job trainer noticed, Peaches could barely maintain eye contact when she spoke. She looked at the floor. Her words were sometimes too quiet to be heard, too halting to be understood. Her face was the kind that attracted photographers and artists who wanted to document suffering, for it bore the ravages of her childhood abuse, her adulthood of homelessness and prostitution. The hard look of hurt had been captured in a portrait drawn by an artist on a visit to a women’s shelter where she lived.

  Gradually during months of employment training, she raised her gaze and found her voice. A fledgling sense of competence and possibility stirred within. She began a journey of recovery, and once she was well along, she looked again at the portrait and was stunned by the face staring back from across a gulf of healing. “It was amazing to see what was there,” she said. “I really looked heavily burdened. There was dark circles under my eyes. You could visually see the weight that was on me, my actual soul.”

  Peaches was fairly typical of those who enrolled at the Center for Employment Training, off Pennsylvania Avenue about three miles from the White House. Many were so ruined that they had to learn the basics of arriving on time, speaking to people, answering the phone, accomplishing a task, believing in themselves. To make that happen, the trainers had to find the light within each person and turn it on. Then, after four to eight months of instruction, every one had to be matched with a decent job.

  Peaches sat at a computer, sliding the mouse, clicking, typing. The instructor, Dewayne Harris, leaned over her shoulder, gently prompting her to create a graphic heading on a document. “Now, click into your text box there,” he said. “No, you don’t want to do that. Delete your whole box. Now select that text. No, don’t paste it. You want to put that cursor inside the box.” Softly, kindly, he corrected and taught. Frustrated, she slapped the table lightly, and he finally took the cursor, made the box for her, and then talked her through the rest of the steps. “When did you last save?” he asked.

  The trainees, or “team members,” were all adults, but they respected an old-fashioned style of hierarchy by calling their instructor “Mr. Harris.” He had come to this job after retiring as a sergeant with twenty-one years in the U.S. Marines, where he had learned lessons applicable here. “I had young marines that everybody’s given up on,” he said. “It was a challenge.” It was a challenge he enjoyed. Like all his trainees, he was black, and he had close rapport with them. He was steady, demanding, and warmly supportive, creating in the large classroom the businesslike atmosphere of a real office where you were expected to come to work punctually, dress appropriately, apply yourself diligently, and produce. Random drug testing was done as well: One strike and you were out.

  The job-training program had started as a simple soup kitchen. In 1970 the Reverend Horace McKenna, a Catholic priest, began to feed the homeless out of a dining room on North Capitol Street, and the organization So Others Might Eat was conceived. As each layer of problems was uncovered, SOME added a layer of programs. Many of those being fed were drug addicts, so in 1975 a treatment program was added. Even after treatment, many still found it hard to get decent housing and move into a productive life, so in 1988 a halfway
house was created where recovering addicts could live for ninety days in a structured setting while they looked for work and garnered support from staff and peers. Housing remained a problem, so the following year a single-room-occupancy building was added for the formerly homeless. Many addicts had trouble kicking the habit in the vicinity of their old temptations, and in 1991, SOME intensified drug treatment by creating a ninety-day program on a forty-five-acre retreat, Exodus House, in West Virginia. Most still lacked the skills to enter the job market, so in 1998 SOME turned an unused Catholic school into the Center for Employment Training, with courses in office skills, building maintenance, and nursing. Trainees were also taught how to write résumés, how to perform in interviews, and how to speak before groups of co-workers.

  “Every team member has to experience a success a day,” declared the center’s deputy director, Scott Faulstick, in recognition of the patterns of failure that had brought the trainees there. “That’s part of the motivational technique. Some have never touched a computer. Turning it on and getting into the program is a success. The first thing the building maintenance instructor has them do is build a toolbox. It’s fairly simple, but it’s a physical sign of their success. Then they get to more difficult things like soldering pipes and hooking up electrical outlets. There’s a lot of fear. That’s a major barrier. It’s like, ‘I’ve never been successful before, why should I be successful now? No one’s expected me to be successful. No one’s wanted me to be successful. No one cares if I was successful or not.’ So there’s a lot of fear about trying new things and breaking out of a shell.”

  One way to crack the shell was a morning routine of brief talks by team members, sometimes on prepared subjects they had to research, sometimes extemporaneously. A great deal of growing took place during the exercise. At first, the experience was excruciating: the awkwardness, the shame, the anxiety, the staring faces of strangers, the expectant silence in the room, the trainee’s quiet conviction that nothing she had to say was worth hearing. Gradually, though, as a sense of community emerged within the team, as the problems and burdens of each were revealed as common to all, the eyes came up off the floor, the words came more clearly, the voices grew steady, the confidence built until adults who had failed again and again were beginning to succeed at a crucial element of life on the job: communicating with people.

  Peaches remembered little speeches on the topic of self-esteem. “There was not a dry eye in the house, I mean from young to old, man or woman, I mean, somebody was saying … ‘I know where you’re coming from.’Just having a forum where you could let it out, and letting it out in a place where there’s no fear…. Crying to myself didn’t get it out.”

  One morning Mr. Harris called his trainees to the conference table for impromptu presentations on less personal, office-related topics. “What does ‘impromptu’ mean?” he asked them.

  “Spur of the moment,” someone said.

  He asked the group for a topic. “Communication between employer and employee,” one suggested, and Mr. Harris illustrated with a concise, one-minute discussion of the utility of good communication in avoiding stress, removing barriers. Then he called on Della, a young woman in a purple and cream pants suit, and someone chose “dress code” as the subject.

  She jumped in nervously. “The importance of the dress code in the workplace,” she began, and then stopped.

  “Don’t just spit it out,” Mr. Harris counseled. “Take a minute.”

  “Part of the dress code in the workplace is to look presentable,” she continued. “Don’t just come in looking any kind of way.” She fell into a long pause, put her hand to her cheeks, to her chin, searched desperately for more ideas. Mr. Harris did not rescue her. “I think,” she said finally, “I look nice, and I just try to.” She sat down to scattered applause.

  “We’re gonna work on that,” Mr. Harris said. “It’s not that easy.”

  There was no false praise in this room, but there was more support than Peaches had ever had in her life. She had arrived “dark and dirty and nappy and argumentative,” she said, using some of the derogatory words ascribed to her as a child. “I would come here and wouldn’t go to lunch because I couldn’t afford to have lunch. I sat here hungry. And Shelley [the support adviser] took it upon herself to say, ‘Wait, you can’t function if you’re hungry.’ And she just went out, got some peanut butter and jelly and some bread. We made a sandwich. Because you can’t function if you’re hungry. That’s going above and beyond … and that Mr. Harris, he walk with you and talk with you. He says, ‘You got something on your mind?’ … When I leave here I can get on the phone and say, ‘Shelley, I come up against this,’ or, ‘Mr. Harris, I come up against this.’ ‘Mr. Faulstick, doggone it, how do I do it? I’m over here and I want to move laterally in this job, and I want to go to school, what do I do? How do I approach this?’ I can always ask. It’s family here. It’s family here. Something that really I have not had. Something that a lot of people here have not had.”

  So, it was a healing process as well as a training process. “I still have some of those demons,” Peaches said, “but I’m feeling much better.” She held up SOME’s latest newsletter. “I actually produced this,” she declared. “This actually went to five hundred people. OK, I can do something. I created this.”

  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.”