Down the Up Escalator

by Barbara Garson

  Michael asked his friend about his job-search methods, ignored Pete’s evasive reply, and delivered these pointers.

  “The Internet is pretty much how you have to find a job these days. You can’t go out and pound the pavement like we did ten years ago. Then, if you put in five, six applications a day and had decent references and were willing to work in restaurants with high turnover, you could find a job in three, four days. Now you can’t put in applications in person anywhere, unless it’s McDonald’s.”

  Michael’s description of the job search when he first got out of high school reminded me that even ten years before the Great Recession it had already been harder to pick up casual jobs than when I was young.

  Michael described the futile feeling you got from Internet job hunting.

  “For one thing, they never list the name of the company. A restaurant, they’ll just say, kitchen job available; line cook; the pay per hour, the hours, and the skill set that they want—that’s all. You send them your résumé; if they don’t need you, you’ll never hear back from them.

  “Look, you can try the Internet thing,” he said to Pete. “Or you can put in an application with one of the staffing agencies.” (The friend Michael drove to a staffing agency that morning was a single mother who had been laid off from the plastics factory, one of the diminishing number of large manufacturers left in town. She was signing up at an agency for immediate shifts of warehouse work. “It’s the same loading job I sent that father in the shelter to,” Michael reminded me. “It’s hard on your body: the quotas are always going up; but she needs the cash right away.”)

  “But the best place in town for anybody that needs money,” Michael now instructed Pete, “while you’re looking for the job, is go down to XM Radio, take the two-day training course, learn the computer system, and sit there in a comfy seat and talk on the phone all day.

  “He likes talking,” Michael said to me. I’d seen no sign of that.

  “He likes computers.” That might be true. “But he doesn’t think he’d be good at it. But if you only do it for a couple, three weeks, that’s four, five hundred dollars, and that gives you a little bit of money to hold on till you find other jobs.

  “Plus, it gets you back into working again, gives you a schedule, makes you feel good. That’s the thing about a daily job that I really miss. Working on my own ideas for years and sometimes procrastinating—definitely procrastinating—it’s caused me to suffer when I could have been doing something that …” Michael couldn’t quite finish his thought. “They’re always hiring at XM,” he concluded.

  Pete said nothing.

  I asked Michael if many of his friends were “in between things,” like Pete and Bean. He told me proudly about his close friend, Bob. Through his mother, Bob got an apprenticeship with a sculptor who had a commission to build a metal fence—“an artistic fence”—for the city. When the apprenticeship ended, Bob returned to the usual dead-end jobs punctuated by long stints of unemployment. Then, because of the metal-fabricating skills he’d acquired, and through a lucky contact with the Masons, Bob got a job earning $18 an hour for a company that makes natural gas combustion chambers. “It required him to understand schematics, which he picked up like that. Bob is brilliant,” Michael said.

  “He’s had that job for two years. And to see him over that time go from working behind a hotel desk, running the place all night, and only making $8.50 an hour to working his way into a machine shop where they do very high-tech and precise work.

  “He owns his own car that’s paid off. He lives in his own apartment that he doesn’t have to worry about paying for every month because his job covers his bills. He’s got insurance, and everything is completely turned around for him. It’s a rare story. I’m very happy for him. Very proud.”

  To hear Michael talk, you’d think his friends were drug addicts or ex-cons. What his brilliant friend Bob has is a steady job at a living wage. A full-time job at $18.50 an hour is $36,000.00 a year—enough to support a single guy or even a family if the wife brings something in. Yet for Michael it was the epitome of success. Pete thought so too.

  Maybe I have to reconsider the word “hippie” for Michael and his friends. In the 1960s my hippie friends made a conscious lifestyle choice. They dropped out of financially and socially rewarding careers to do something more “meaningful.” That included meaningfully chilling out.

  Michael and his friends seem to have arrived at the hippie ethic from another direction. They don’t have the option of well-paying, steady jobs. But they do have the option of not feeling bad about that.

  Over the course of a long afternoon Michael and I, both great digressers, discussed many things and people. But two men came up repeatedly.

  Ever since our phone conversation, I’d been thinking about the widower who had been living in the shelter with his children.

  “I don’t remember his name,” Michael said, “but I remember he couldn’t be here till seven—which was a half an hour late—because he had to get his kids to the bus stop. He couldn’t leave them at the shelter unattended, you know. So I worked it out for him to where he could get his girls to the bus stop in the morning and be off in time to pick them up there as well.

  “I felt very good about that. That was my satisfaction. But now I think, ‘How was he going to pay rent and food and get the heat and electric turned on on $7.50 an hour?’

  “Something that I feel sick about—and it’s not to look down on anybody who runs a staffing agency, it’s just the business—but a staffing agency gets paid probably $12.00 to $14.00 an hour, and they only hand over $7.50 an hour. That’s almost half the amount we take from these people that go work these jobs that hardly any of us would want to do. But the companies would rather pay us $5.00 an hour, per person, just so they don’t have to deal with them.” Michael sometimes sent out an entire temp crew with its own foreman. No one from the client company had to speak directly to the day laborer.

  “At first I felt good about giving people like that jobs. Then I started to feel bad. I see them drag in at the end of the shift for their checks, and all I see is the number 56. Fifty-six dollars is the check for a full shift. How is someone going to pay rent and utilities on $56.00? So how was I helping him get his children out of the shelter?”

  “Michael,” I asked, “at $7.50 an hour for an eight-hour shift, shouldn’t that be $60.00?”

  “They get a half-hour lunch break.”

  “Oh my God, they deduct for lunch!” I thought about the bleakness of that unpaid break in a warehouse canteen. The chips in the snack machines were probably stale.

  It was I who asked about that single father, but it was Michael who continually brought his own father into our conversation and always with intense emotion.

  “My dad started as a supervisor; now he’s a manager. But they could pay a guy my age, just out of college, half the money they’re paying him. So they’ve been trying to force him out for the last five years.”

  Michael admires his father: “He’s a tough man. He knows how to take it on the chin.”

  But, though he doesn’t quite say it, I think he also feels his father was a sucker. “My dad says I don’t know how to stick with anything. All I know is I don’t want to end up putting in twenty, twenty-five years in a place and have them trying to toss me out on my butt.”

  I hadn’t yet met Mr. Kenny, but out of generational loyalty I wanted the son to understand that people like his father weren’t just saps who played by the rules in a game everyone else knew was fixed.

  “There used to be an understanding between employer and employee,” I began my history lesson. “At the time your father chose a corporate career, no one would have fired a lifetime employee to chisel him out of his pension or to replace him with a kid half his age. When businesses were expanding, they took in the young and kept the old.

  “Sometimes a company man might say to himself, ‘Look what I’ve done: I’ve wasted my life for security.’ But at least
he got the security. That contract was changed behind your father’s back.”

  “Right! I’ve been telling that to my dad for years, and it seems like he just recently realized it. He recently told me he’d be happier working on my brother-in-law’s farm for $10 an hour.”

  Michael was determined to play by different rules yet win his father’s approval nonetheless. “He feels I could do better. He knows I’m capable of more. But at the same time he hates his job and where he’s at. Obviously, his job made him some money,” Michael conceded. “He took good care of me and my sister: he kept up a middle-class life. But …

  “I think he’s changing his position on what I should do. I think he wants me to take my time and find out what’s right for me. He just wants me to cut my hair and make money in the meantime.”

  I smiled at that and Michael did too.

  Before we parted, Michael took us for a ride around town. The working-class sitcom Roseanne, which starred Roseanne Barr, had been created by a fellow who went to Michael’s school. The street signs and working-class house exteriors seen briefly in each episode are Evansville tourist attractions. Next we stopped at Michael and Caitlin’s foreclosed former home. It was on a block of wooden houses a bit smaller, older, and shabbier than Roseanne’s. The house was still vacant, and Michael was visibly distressed to see it so uncared for. Then we drove into a black neighborhood past the employment agency that Michael had managed. The ramshackle dwelling that had housed the agency was vacant and derelict.

  When we stopped for gas, I handed Michael my credit card, but he didn’t know what to do with it. I was amazed that an American male didn’t know how to swipe a credit card at a gas pump. But Michael and Caitlin don’t possess a single credit card, as he reminded me. “We always cut them up.”

  “Ask my dad about credit cards when you talk to him,” Michael advised me. I made a note. “And enjoy the new couch,” he added mysteriously.

  The Pigeon Township Trustee

  We had a free day before our appointment with Mr. Kenny senior. I decided to play detective and track down that single father whom Michael tried to help. All I knew was that his wife had died and that during the time Michael was sending him out on loading crews, he and his two daughters lived in a homeless shelter.

  The YWCA, my first stop, was a shelter for victims of domestic violence. They would never have permitted a man in the residential area, even with two girl children, the receptionist told us. But she gave me a list of local food pantries and shelters.

  We stopped at a men’s shelter where the people sitting around looked like your classic winos. The director couldn’t remember a man coming in with children, and, besides, “it wouldn’t be a suitable place.”

  According to the director, his resident population hadn’t changed with the recession. But in addition to beds for men, they offered meals and the free use of their laundry rooms to anyone who came in during the day. “Many, many more women with children are using these things since the recession,” he said.

  In times of economic crisis or natural disaster the job of scavenging almost always falls on women. In looking for that single father, I was concentrating on the statistical exception.

  After a couple of stops it became apparent that the only Evansville shelter likely to take in a man with two children was the Dorothea MacGregor Family Shelter, run by the Pigeon Township Trustee.

  The township trustee is an elected official who oversees what is still called “poor relief.” According to a brochure aimed at potential applicants, one must, in order to get aid, “be in need of essentials of life” and “be willing to help yourself as much as possible.” If those conditions were met, the Trustee’s Office could provide vouchers (“never cash,” the brochure emphasized) for goods and services like cleaning supplies and dental work.

  The trustee’s drab prefab office was across the street from a cheery yellow house that had been divided into apartments. I asked the receptionist an open-ended question about current relief needs. One recent problem, she said, was that the utilities company, Vectren, had reorganized their records so that they can now spot people who owed back bills in other counties. “So now we’re seeing people who can’t get rehoused because they can’t get utilities turned on in their own name unless they work out a way to pay off a back bill that could be $1,200 to $1,400 or more.”

  Since speaking to Michael, I had become adept at dividing and multiplying by 56—the standard daily wage he paid for a full warehouse shift. I calculated that it would take 21.4 such shifts to pay off a utility bill of $1,200, assuming you didn’t spend any money on food. And surely the utility company would require a new deposit before it’d turn a deadbeat on again.

  “Where I live, the landlord pays the heating bills,” I said. “I’m just beginning to understand that people paying $700 a month rent in Evansville may have to pay $200 a month for utilities.”

  “It might be closer to $300 to heat the run-down, leaky places they’re likely to find,” the woman said.

  She took me in to see the Pigeon Township Trustee, Mary Hart, who had the first really southern accent I’d heard in southern Indiana. Ms. Hart had mastered the art of being both direct and gracious at the same time. And she didn’t mind if I turned on my tape recorder.

  Ms. Hart confirmed that an increasing number of people ready to move into new housing were coming to the township for shelter because they couldn’t get their electricity turned back on. One of her jobs was to negotiate installment plans with the utility company and help applicants work out a budget that would allow them to keep up their payments.

  “Do you sometimes have to tell people you can’t have both utilities and a car?”

  “Worse than that,” Mary answered, “sometimes it’s either pay the rent or pay for the medicine for a sick child. If they buy the medicine, then they fall behind on the rent. And because they’re living paycheck to paycheck, once they fall behind, they can never catch up. And that’s where the township trustee comes into play because we’ll tell them, ‘You keep paying the rent, and we’ll get the child’s medicine.’ ”

  As to the car-or-utilities choice: “We will say, your family can’t afford two cars. But they will almost always need one car to get to work.”

  At the time I was in Evansville, the media was still talking about recent mass layoffs at Whirlpool. I asked Ms. Hart how the trustees plan for something like that. The yellow house could shelter only a few families at a time.

  “We knew a year in advance that there were going to be eleven hundred people losing their jobs at Whirlpool when they moved work from here to Mexico. So we planned for people coming to us. Actually, we haven’t seen the Whirlpool homeless yet, because they gave them a pretty good severance package plus they offered some retraining. We see from the feeder plants first. Not Whirlpool, but those smaller places that supply the rubber gaskets or other parts to Whirlpool. They also laid people off.”

  “Do you really see it that directly?” I asked. “Here’s the layoff, here come the people.”

  “Yes,” Mary said. “We ask the place of last employment. It’s on our application. So we know whether it was a feeder into Whirlpool or Whirlpool workers themselves. A couple of years ago, when the casino business got bad, Casino Aztar laid off about sixty people. We felt the effect immediately; they came through our door right away.

  “It’s the smaller companies,” Ms. Hart said. “One of the staffing companies, Custom Staffing, closed down [that was not Michael’s firm] and merged with another company a year ago. We felt the effect right away. People came in who, they may have found another job for $7.50 an hour, but they may now only be working thirty hours a week. So now with their bring-home pay, they can either pay the rent or pay the utilities, but they can’t do both. Or they get sick. They need a tooth extraction in order to continue going to work. We arrange the tooth extractions.”

  “Ms. Hart,” I said, “everywhere I go here people tell me about $15.00-an-hour jobs that left Evansvi
lle, but I only see $7.50 jobs coming in. How can the trusteeship help a man if, even after he gets full-time work, he won’t earn enough to pay for the basic necessities?”

  “At that point, we may also try to assist him into getting into public housing. If we see his problem is going to become long-term, we try to get them into a housing situation where you pay 30 percent [of their family income for rent]. Our clients take top priority in the public housing situation.”

  But all that does is subsidize below living wages, I thought to myself. And as to moving the deserving poor into public housing, who are you going to move out?

  “We have a great need for affordable housing in this community,” Ms. Hart said, perhaps following my thoughts. “On any given night we will have 456 to 463 on the street, and about a third of them are children. Parks, bus stations, or vehicles.

  “We’ll always have a homeless population because of drug abuse, mental instability, but the others …” I leveled with Mary. It was only those “others” I was interested in. I hope that the trustees’ intervention makes life a little less painful for the children of drug addicts and manic-depressives. But cruel as it sounds, really damaged people are not my focus.

  I told Ms. Hart about the father with two girls who’d found himself in a shelter after his wife died. I also told her about the young man at the temp agency who wanted to believe he was helping that family get back to a normal life by sending the man out on $7.50-an-hour jobs.

  “I know you can’t give me individual names,” I said, “but I was wondering how he made out. How does a man like that get his family out of a shelter and back into a regular home?”

  Ms. Hart said that the trustees had housed more than one single man with children since the recession started. In fact, when I got home, they put me in touch with one whose wife had died. But he turned out to be the wrong man.