The Working Poor

by David K. Shipler

  “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-t
raining 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.”1

  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.”

  At a workbench, men and women were sticking price labels on cans of air freshener, starch, and oven cleaner for a company called Personal Care, which would distribute the merchandise to dollar stores. “We basically put the stickers on ’cause the manufacturer won’t do that,” Blackmon explained. “They’ll make the cans but they won’t put the sticker on. Something that simple.” He stopped at another work station. “This is a project that we do for Dominick’s [a chain of food stores]. Our chairman of the board is the former president and CEO of Dominick’s, so we have a pretty good relationship with them. And they have in-store promotions. When they finish with the in-store promotions … they send us all the stuff that’s been used for promotions, and we inventory it and repackage it for them and send them back to them so they can sell it. It’s been out on display. You can see some of it is still loose, like this bowl and plates and stuff like that.

  “This is an inspection job that we just finished for a company called Owens-Brockway. Now, what happened was they had these fancy bottles made up, and the problem with the bottles is that some of the writing and some of the placement of the language is off center, OK? Also, they had another problem. When you handle the bottles, on some of them the ink comes off. So what we did was a tape test on the bottles. We basically put a real sticky kind of a Scotch tape on it and pulled it off a couple of times to see if the ink came off. If the ink came off or it smudged or the bottle got damaged, we got rid of it. Basically took the top off and got rid of it. This is a good one ’cause it still has the top on. So we’re gonna ship them back the good ones and ship them back the tops and get rid of the bottles that are bad. …

  “Back over in this corner is where we handle our paint. We’ve got a longstanding relationship with Sherwin-Williams paint company where we help them recycle paint. When they have paint that’s what they call old age, it’s been sitting on the shelf two, three years and the solid part of the paint has separated from the liquid part, well, they ship it to us, we dump it in those fifty-five-gallon drums, and then they rework it. They can reuse it. So all this stuff you see over here is all the paint that we’ve dumped for Sherwin-Williams. …

  “This is a project that we’re doing for a company called Kendall Packaging. They actually make these legal storage boxes. And what happened was they forgot to put the buttons and the eyelets on the boxes. So what we’re doing is we’re putting the buttons on. We’re putting that in the corner of the boxes and then we’re tying the string for closing the boxes.… Now, they used to do this in-house, and they decided to job this out to us. We’ve developed a pretty good relationship with them.… We’ve got 150,000 of these to do.”

  Blackmon grew up on welfare in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project, notorious for its drugs and violence; made his way through law school; worked in corporate law; and was then drawn to a law practice in juvenile court, mostly pro bono, which he gave up to train people at Options. He seemed to keep working his way back through symptoms into causes, trying to find the roots. “You don’t walk off welfare,” he said from personal experience. “I mean, you kind of have to run, scream, kick, holler, jump off of welfare.”

  He walked from the cartons and barrels and workbenches into a small classroom, and there he stood, a successful black man from the projects in front of seventeen failed black men and women who wanted to enroll in his ninety-day training program. He made sure they knew where he had come from. He bid them good morning and led them in a churchlike call and response:

  “Everybody ready to go to work?” Murmurs of “Yes.”

  “Everybody repeat after me: I can make change.”

  The group responded softly, “I can make change.”

  “Oh, you can do better. Let’s say it like you really mean it: I CAN MAKE CHANGES.”

  “I CAN MAKE CHANGES.”

  “Or I can make excuses.”

  “OR I CAN MAKE EXCUSES.”

  “But I can’t make both.”

  “BUT I CAN’t MAKE BOTH.”

  Blackmon learned his coaching skills when he played fullback on a football scholarship to Southern Illinois University, and he gave his charges a pep talk as if he truly believed that they could surely win, no matter how far they were trailing at halftime. “What this program is about is helping you help yourself,” he said. “We have absolutely nothing to give you…. This program is about waking up what’s already inside of you, and getting you to see for yourself that there ain’t nothin’ nobody can do for you that you can’t do for yourself.” Then he showed them that they had already used what they had inside. “How you gonna tell me you don’t have any brains if you’ve been able to survive in one of the toughest cities in the world? If you are thirty, forty, twenty, fifty years old, and you’ve been able to survive in Chicago, trust me, you have some brains.”

  The minimum wage they would be paid was worth more than their contempt, he insisted. “The minimum wage has power. It is a starting point. It’s a starting point, $5.15 an hour, forty hours a week, four weeks a month, $824. How many of you get $824 a month in public aid? Nobody’s hand is up. OK? So we ain’t doin’ too bad with the minimum wage, right? If you and your significant other earn the minimum wage, that’s $1,648 a month. How many of y’all get $1,648 a month? We understand each other then, right? Don’t knock the minimum wage. It’s a starting point.

  “How many in the room right now got $500 in a savings account? One person, two people got their hands up. How you gonna be grown in Chicago with kids and responsibilities and you can’t get your hands on $500? Anything could happen. One of the things that you’re gonna learn through this program is the importance of saving money. I’m gonna show you how you can save $10 a week so at the end of the year you have $500. We got to talk about it. You have to save some money. See, the key to saving is not saving a whole lot at one time, just saving a little bit over a long period of time. So we got to talk about that.”

  He wanted them to rally to their own cause: themselves. “This program is about change. It’s about changing your life for the better, and if you don’t want that, this
is not for you. This is not for you. We can’t help you, because we have nothing to give you. Everything you need you already got. We just here to help you recognize that. We just here to help you recognize that.”

  It took only a few minutes with Ricky Drake to see how smart he was. He flipped through his thick black loose-leaf notebook to explain the math and geometry and engineering diagrams, then took me on a tour across the metal floor of Cleveland’s Center for Employment Training, an old factory filled with equipment donated by manufacturers that needed skilled workers. He could run every olive-drab lathe, every drill press and precision grinder. He handled the micrometers and calipers, the tools of his new machinist’s trade, with dexterity. He was two-thirds of the way through a six-month course, a bull of a man charged with so much drive and newfound expertise that it was hard to imagine that he had ever done anything except excel.

  He had, though. Here was his short version of his life: “I came from a family where my father was very strict, and when he disciplined us he had a wooden slat for the boys, one long, one short. And eventually that affected me, and the [military] service thing affected me. And I had to address those problems. And thinking spiritually and with God, I began to say, ‘Well, I can do something better than this and just get ahold of it.’ ”

  As he grew up black and poor, his opportunities did not strike him as dazzling. He was “a little rebellious,” so in 1968 he ran away and joined the army. When the army learned that he was only sixteen, they asked and got his father to sign a permission form, and Ricky went off to the Vietnam War—twice. He worked as a cable splicer, field lineman, and radio operator, which brought him an odd sense of freedom and independence. “I should have made a career out of it,” he said. He conversed with monks, experimented with Buddhism and yoga, and also with marijuana and cocaine to the point where he had to be put in a military hospital for detoxification. In 1973, when he returned to “the world,” as GIs in Vietnam used to call home, he found nothing more than scattered jobs that seemed to evaporate as each one’s trial period was about to end. “Just before you hit ninety days, no job,” he said, “and you go back to the labor pool. They might not have anything in there, and then you might go be a laborer. You might go work on a truck delivering or something, or the next day come down there they just need somebody to do electrical maintenance. It was over and over, over and over. Then when you go apply for a job, what experience have you had? If I had two months of just menial labor and stuff like that, that’s no experience.” His affinity for drugs and alcohol overwhelmed him.