Posted on: Sunday, June 13, 2004
Working poor struggle to afford basics
By Stephanie Armour
USA Today
Cathy Gardner faces difficult choices. With barely enough money to cover her bills plus rent on the home she shares with her brother, she sometimes can't afford to buy food. Other times, she goes without the prescription drugs she takes for depression.
It's a constant struggle, even though Gardner holds a full-time job as a hospital food-service worker, dishing up trays of pizza, pot roast and beef Stroganoff for patients.
"There's a manufactured home selling for $7,500, and I can't even afford that," says Gardner, 54, of Salem, Ore., who earns $1,200 a month. "I have a good job, but I have to choose between buying gas or getting food. It's very hard."
Food server. Home healthcare worker. Grocery clerk. These are the kind of bread-and-butter jobs that once sustained a family with decent benefits and solid wages. Today, these jobs are more likely to bring a life of poverty.
The ranks of the working poor are swelling as more families slip into poverty, health benefits are lost and low-wage employees bear the brunt of many corporate cutbacks. That means more employees — many in service jobs essential to the economy — are working full time, only to find they can barely support their families.
They wait tables at restaurants where they can't afford to eat, wash cars while taking the bus, and care for children but can't afford a sitter.
About 35 million Americans lived in poverty in 2002, which is 1.7 million more people than in 2001, according to census data. The federal poverty threshold for a family of four was yearly earnings of $18,392 in 2002.
Almost 40 percent of working-age poor people were employed, and the percentage working full-time all year increased 45 percent from 1978 to 2002.
"There is a systematic ratcheting down of jobs that once could support a family," says Greg Denier, a spokesman with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. "The real question is, what does this mean for the future of the American worker?"
The fate of the working poor is becoming a major issue for politicians, with union groups and activists now calling for reform. Unions are launching membership drives and protests — part of an effort to preserve benefits and boost pay for service-sector jobs, in much the same way union muscle helped raise the standard of living for manufacturing workers in the mid-20th century.
The rise in low-wage workers is also a catalyst for activists waging campaigns to pass living-wage ordinances, which are local laws that require some businesses to pay employees more than the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour.
The grassroots effort is having an impact: More than 120 ordinances mandating living wages have been passed. In San Francisco, a citywide minimum of $8.50 an hour went into effect in February.
The increase is shaping new public dialogue about poverty in America. Philip Coltoff, chief executive of the philanthropic Children's Aid Society, looks out the window of his Park Avenue South office in New York. Bike messengers, taxi drivers and street vendors hawking hot dogs and ball caps populate the street. These people, he says, are the new faces of the working poor.
Sherry Byrum, 48, feels like there is no way up.
The Spokane Valley, Wash., woman works full time at a daycare facility, earning about $9 an hour, and earns $8.43 an hour providing homecare for a disabled girl. The number of hours she works each week varies; health insurance costs $71 a week.
Economists say there are a host of reasons why jobs that once paid decent wages provide an impoverished lifestyle today.
The value of the minimum wage, in real dollars, peaked in the late 1960s. That means workers today who earn minimum wage have less buying power than in years before.
The inflation-adjusted value of the $5.15 hourly minimum wage is at least 24 percent lower today than in 1979, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit think tank. A full-time worker earning minimum wage would earn $10,712 a year, below the 2002 federal poverty line of $11,756 for a family of two.
"Wages have eroded and haven't risen with productivity," says Jared Bernstein, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. "Many occupations that a decade ago afforded a living wage are now low-wage."
In addition, global competition has intensified profit pressures, leading companies to squeeze wages to cut costs. Unions are not as pervasive as they used to be, which means workers have less clout.
Some economists say immigration has added to the labor force supply, causing downward pressure on wages. Immigration has reduced the average annual earnings of male workers born in the United States by $1,700 over the past 20 years, according to new research by the Center for Immigration Studies.
Although welfare rolls have dropped by more than 50 percent since 1994, many of these former recipients have moved into jobs that pay low wages — compelled by welfare reform in the 1990s that required many who received welfare to work. Many work in home healthcare or childcare.
"Those are jobs that used to be unpaid labor done by women who stayed home. They took care of the children and the elderly," says Marnie Goodfriend of the Service Employees International Union. "They have transferred to the marketplace, but people can't survive on those jobs."
Danielle DaSilva, 25, says change is needed.
DaSilva works part time as a restaurant hostess, earning $6.65 an hour, although she wants to work full time. She is raising two daughters, Jade, 5, and Alana, 2. She owns her home, but is struggling to make her monthly mortgage payments of $815.
Her mother often watches her children while she works, and her children get health insurance through Medicaid.
"It's awful, it's really awful," says DaSilva, of Kissimmee, Fla. "I work very hard, nine-hour shifts a day. I'm not one of those people who wants to leech off the system. But my children have to live off macaroni and cheese and bologna. It's ridiculous."
