TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/091090/0910140.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 13.3 KB | 269 lines

                                                                                LIVING, Page 64

What $152 a Week Buys


For those who must live on the minimum wage, life is no American
Dream

By NANCY GIBBS -- Reported by Janice C. Simpson/New York, with
other bureaus


    In a Pennsylvania trailer park, a mother of three makes a
wish list. She wishes that she lived in a house without wheels.
And that she did not have to embarrass her eight-year-old
daughter by pulling her out of her brownie troop because the
50 cents-a-meeting fee is too high. That food stamps could be
used to buy toilet paper and deodorant. That she could get a
real, professional $30 perm, one that would not wreck her hair.
That her husband could find a union job, maybe in construction,
that paid $6, $7, even $8 an hour. That after eight years of
marriage, they could take a vacation together. That they could
afford more children. "If he had a good-paying job," says Sandy
Wells, 26, cheerfully recalling her 10 brothers and sisters,
"I'd have five children. I love kids."

    Like many other families in similar straits, Sandy and her
husband have some things in abundance. They have a network of
solicitous relatives and faithful friends. They have a strong
marriage, happy kids, low expectations and high hopes. They
have plenty of work ethic. What they do not have is enough
money to live as they would like. It is these families whose
entire household budgets shudder when the price of gasoline
rises by a dime a gallon, whose sons and daughters join the
Army to pay for their schooling, whose jobs are most vulnerable
when the economy crawls toward recession. Savings and security
are unaffordable luxuries; so are adequate health care,
sufficient heat in the winter, a meal in a restaurant, a night
at the movies.

    During the past two administrations, Congress and the White
House argued about raising the minimum wage for the first time
since 1981. Some economists warned that prices would rise;
others were worried that jobs would disappear. After months of
delay and bargaining, last fall both sides settled on a
two-stage increase: the wage rose to $3.80 an hour (or $152 for
a 40-hour week) in April, and will reach $4.25 next year. Some
called it an overdue victory, in an age of glossy neglect, for
the working poor.

    But behind the debate are the families who live the minimal
life. More than 3 million Americans survive on the minimum
wage, and millions more, like the Wellses, hover just above it.
As inflation hummed along at 4% or 5% a year and buying power
eroded, many lost their financial footing and slipped below the
poverty line: a full-time worker at minimum wage still falls
about $2,000 short of the subsistence level ($9,890 for a
family of three). While it is true that most minimum-wage
workers are teenagers or part-time employees, there are
millions more men and women who earn $5, $6 or $7 an hour and
still cannot meet basic needs.

    That leaves families worrying constantly about priorities.
Heat or cough medicine? Books for school or shoes? "You lead
a simple life," says Father John Seymour of Our Lady of Victory
Church in Compton, Calif., where many of his parishioners face
the hard choices every day. "Your main recreation is
television. You eat a lot of rice, pasta, potatoes and beans,
maybe some green vegetables. You take the bus, or you kind of
carpool it, riding with someone and helping with the gas. If
you're pregnant, you don't begin prenatal care until your
seventh, eighth or ninth month, because even at a public health
clinic, it's $25 a visit."

    Which means that everyone pays. Many of the expenses that
fall through the cracks land on the public. A minimum-wage
worker with a car probably cannot afford insurance. If he gets
in an accident, someone else ends up paying, and eventually
everyone's premiums rise. Likewise, babies of women who delay
seeking adequate prenatal care are at high risk for birth
defects and neo-natal trouble. This in turn drives doctors'
insurance premiums up and makes for higher medical costs later
on. Children who leave school early to help support the family
have much less chance of climbing out of the minimal life
themselves.

    This explains in part why so many working parents will go
to any lengths to ensure that their children have chances that
they did not. On the table in the tidy living room of Patricia
Mull's Los Angeles apartment is a World Book encyclopedia. The
shiny volumes cost $1,200, an almost inconceivable amount
carved out of her household budget. Her daughter Lorena is a
junior high school honors graduate who wants to go to law
school, and the encyclopedia, like the tuition for private
schooling, was a high priority, a costly symbol of firm intent.

    Mull earns $4.25 an hour sewing bathing suits and bathrobes.
In 14 years at the same factory, she has never had a raise,
except the last time the state government increased the minimum
wage. "I don't drink coffee there," she says. "I don't want to
spend the money." When the premium for her medical insurance
rose from $6 to $16 a week in 1988, she canceled it. "I can't
afford it," she says quietly. What if she gets sick? "I never
get sick."

    Mull is a financial wizard. "I buy this for one year," she
says, cradling a half-gallon jug of Palmolive liquid soap. She
ducks back into the kitchen and brings out a half-gallon jug
of molasses. "This is for six months. You make pancakes with
it. I buy everything big." Her monthly budget is tightly
knotted around fixed costs: $400 goes for rent, not including
gas and electric bills; Lorena's school, Immaculate Conception,
is $80 a month; $15 goes to Mervyn's department store for
clothes bought earlier; food takes $40 a week; Mull's bus pass
is $42 a month. "I never go to the dances," she says. "I never
go to the movies." An outing usually means church on Sundays.
"I worry about the rent," Mull says softly. "I worry if I can
make the payment in time. I worry if I have enough money left
for other things. I worry about money every day, every night."

    Back in the days when the economy was expanding, the cold
war ending and the peace dividend looming large, Ronald Reagan
cherished a famous fantasy about flying with Mikhail Gorbachev
over the sun-soaked swatches of Southern California, with its
mosaic of turquoise swimming pools and tidy lawns and fat white
garages plump with new cars. "Those are the homes of American
workers," he would proudly declare, describing a Hollywood
dreamland where auto mechanics have summer houses and anyone
can go to college.

    Advocates for the working poor have another fantasy. They
imagine the day when "good jobs at good wages" will be a
national priority, not a much mocked campaign theme. It is true
that a strong economy helps all workers, but even the steady
growth through the 1980s left many behind. The jobs created in
the 1980s were of ten in the lower-paying fields, and in the
absence of union muscle and public support, those jobholders
are on their own.

    For the Wellses in Pennsylvania, the choices are prescribed
by a take-home income of $600 a month, which Al earns making
respirators at a local factory. After five years, he is paid
$5.68 an hour --  which means that the increase in the minimum
wage did him no good at all. Nearly half his take-home salary
goes to rent the 12-ft. by 65-ft. trailer he, his wife and
three children live in and the lot it sits on; $20 is set aside
for the gas he needs to get to the factory. "His working is our
livelihood, so that has to come first," says wife Sandy.
Electricity runs about $40 a month. The Wellses had a phone for
a while, but it cost more than $20 a month, so they got rid of
it. Food stamps worth $200 a month help keep meat on the table,
but if Al works overtime at the factory, the subsidy is reduced.
All the bills are paid with money orders because they do not
have a checking account. "You have to keep at least $10 in your
account to keep it open," says Sandy, "and we just can't do
that."

    Under such circumstances every acquisition entails a
sacrifice, and there is no margin for error or whim. The Wells
children stay home from class skating trips because Sandy
cannot manage the $1.50 for skate rental. "They know the value
of money, my kids do," she says. "They get money, they don't
spend it on candy or toys. They say, `Mom, I want to buy shoes
for school.'" But every now and then, when equanimity ruptures,
the family will splurge. One time last fall, Sandy recalls, "we
paid the lot rent and we had, like, $40 left. It was supposed
to go to the lights, but we just said, let's go to McDonald's."
She smiles at the memory. "The kids thought that was the
greatest thing in the world."

    It is an additional irony that the increase in the minimum
wage may actually leave some families worse off. When household
incomes creep up, many workers find themselves suddenly
ineligible for the food stamps, housing allowances and Medicaid
that have made the difference between mere discomfort and true
desperation.

    An unemployed single mother of two in New York City, for
instance, is eligible for $253 a month from the Aid to Families
with Dependent Children program. She can also get $153 in food
stamps, a $286 housing allowance, a Medicaid card and
subsidized day care for her children while she attends classes
or work-training sessions. The minute she begins working, even
for minimum wage, she begins losing her rent and food benefits
and must worry about day-care costs, transportation to and from
work and medical insurance. Even if the minimum wage were
raised to $5 an hour, or about $10,000 a year, families would
still be struggling to survive. "To me, the support mechanisms
are more important than the minimum wage," says Kenneth
Heilman, a social worker in Armstrong County, Pa.

    Jennifer Cole of Danvers, Mass., was on welfare before she
got married, and she understands dependency. "People talk about
welfare mothers' just sitting around. Well, there's no
incentive for them to work. You lose all your security, your
checks, your medical coverage." The programs that are thought
to support working families like the Coles are out of reach.
She tried to get her daughter Jacqueline, 4, into a Head Start
program but was turned down because the family made too much
money. So Jacqueline spends her day watching videos.

    On the face of it, Jennifer and her husband Jeff appear to
have a perfectly comfortable income. Their combined salaries
-- he is a machinist in the microwave division of Varian; she
is a night clerk for a local food distributor -- total about
$37,000 a year, middle  class by any standard for a family of
four. But since they are ineligible for most support programs,
they face many of the same dilemmas as minimum-wage earners:
the hard decisions, the small indignities and the rough edges
of approximate poverty. "They say we're middle class," says
Jennifer, "but this isn't the way I thought middle-class people
lived."

    The Coles, for example, have acquired skills they never
imagined they'd need, like dodging creditors. Sometimes they
put the electric bill in Jennifer's maiden name and the phone
bill in Jeff's name, then move to another town and do the
reverse. "We owe everybody money," says Jennifer. "It becomes,
`Do we want to pay back $400 we owe his  parents -- they're not
exactly wealthy people -- or do we pay the people who are
chasing us the hardest?'"

    But it is not as though they are spendthrifts. "We don't
clothes-shop," pipes up Jacqueline, an engaging child with
lemon-colored ringlets and blueberry eyes. Jennifer nods in
agreement. "I can't remember the last time I was in a mall."
The couch in the living room is from a friend who bought a new
one; the tables come from her parents, the hutch from his.
"Everything here has a story to it," says Jennifer. The one new
item is a clock on the wall with a picture of the Grateful Dead
on the face. They spotted it one afternoon at a local fair, and
Jeff, a diehard "Dead Head," fell in love. At $15 he resisted
the urge, until Jennifer insisted that he buy it. "Sometimes,"
she told him, "you just got to do something for yourself
because it'll make you feel good."

    For many families, the increased minimum wage will scarcely
be felt at all. But for others, it will at last allow some tiny
luxuries. "It will mean a little more," says Ophelia Ratliff,
a divorced mother of seven in Chicago. "It will mean I can buy
more food." She works for $3.87 an hour doing housekeeping for
the homebound and earns a bit extra as a housecleaner. "I'd be
getting a little more from my work," she adds, "and I might
take on more hours."

    No family is "typical" of the working poor. Families like
the Coles and the Wellses, the Ratliffs and the Mulls serve as
reminders that poverty is ecumenical and its mythology
misleading. They may defy the stereotypes of the dependent
underclass in their pointed commitment to maintaining their
freedom of choice. But there is a thin line between
determination and despair, and for families at the edge there
is always a fear of falling. "Politicians, I think it's all
a game for them," says Jennifer Cole. "They're up there, and
we're down here. But it's not a game for us." Not so long as
winning means just breaking even, one day at a time.