Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America (2 page)

A note about the definitions of certain words used in this book: These are my definitions, but I’ll tell you what they are up front.
Poverty
is when a quarter is a fucking miracle.
Poor
is when a dollar is a miracle.
Broke
is when five bucks is a miracle.
Working class
is being broke, but doing so in a place that might not be run-down.
Middle class
is being able to own some toys and to live in a nice place—and by “nice,” I don’t mean fancy; I mean that you can afford to buy your own furniture and not lease it and that while you still worry about bills, you aren’t constantly worried about homelessness. And
rich
is anything above that.

This book is not exhaustive, but it is a collection of some of the emotions and experiences I’ve had while trying to get back to the starting line. Some of these are illogical. Some are counterintuitive. Some are contradictory. That’s because I am a human being, and we are all of those things.

There are also many things that I am not. Instead of attempting to point out how people who are different from me are in many ways far more disadvantaged than I have ever been in every instance I can think of (because that should be clear unless you have the peripheral vision of a racehorse), I will just say this: Here is how I have felt,
as me
: as a relatively young person who is perceived as white, who is naturally sociable, who is intelligent and well-spoken, who was taught well and as a result loves learning things, who is able to lift objects up to fifty pounds repeatedly. And many times, with all of that going for me, I still saw no hope. I cannot begin to imagine how much harder it is for someone who faces more discrimination than I have or who grew up without these basic tools that I am lucky enough to have. Keep that in mind too.

I would lastly like this to be clear: I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about the good things in my life—my loves and interests and friends. Those exist, because—again—I’m human. Those things are common to all humans, and for now you’re interested in the things that are unique to the poor, and how we cope with them. I’ve focused on the things I’ve been most often criticized for in my life and explained the motivations as I see them. I’m here to tell you why
this
person does what she does.

So take a tour with me through some of the aspects of life that poverty impacts and on which poor people are judged: our work ethics (or lack thereof), our sex lives (definitely way too much of that), our coping mechanisms (naughty poor people), our health practices (I know, you still can’t believe that I smoke). And so on. Stick with me. It won’t always be easy, but maybe you’ll learn something about the lives of your fellow Americans in the process.

And truthfully? What I’m really hoping is that you’ll learn something about yourself and that maybe you’ll start thinking a bit differently.

So now, the book. Thank you for being open-minded. If you’ve made it this far (I planted some test profanity in here just to make sure we’re on the same page), you might understand what I’m on about.

It Takes Money to Make
Money

W
hen I tried to come up with my worst, most exemplary terrible job to start off this chapter, I found myself a little bit stuck. Let’s just say I have an embarrassment of riches to choose from. But here’s one:

I was in my mid-twenties, married, childless. My husband and I lived in a small town in the mountains at the time. I was working as a bartender. If you have ever wondered where frat boys go to die, it’s to grown-up fraternal organizations. They have their own members-only bars and pretty much feel like they can do whatever they want inside their members-only walls. And that included, at this place, violating the physical and mental boundaries of those of us serving them their drinks.

During NASCAR races, we would have dozens of people sitting around drinking Bud Light and arguing the relative
merits of Junior. (For the uninitiated, that’s Dale Earnhardt Jr. There is a raging debate about the relative merits of Junior versus his daddy, although both are beloved. If you are in the country and you mention Junior by his given name, you will have immediately outed yourself as city folk.) I had two bosses: One was nearing eighty and mostly just wanted to drink copious amounts of rotgut while pretending to manage the books. The other was in his prime—or at least he’d never lived a day in his life in which he didn’t think he looked amazing. (Really, he was balding and portly and had a molester mustache. Let’s call him M.M. for short.)

M.M. liked to remark on how young I was and then “accidentally” brush against the parts of me that didn’t usually see daylight. He wasn’t there every day, but when he was, I could look forward to being asked every twenty minutes or so whether I’d be willing to service him sexually. The fact that his wife was often within earshot mattered not at all, because
of course
he was only joshing, proving how virile he still was. Except that the women who did sleep with him got the better shifts. Funny, right?

I wasn’t desperate enough to do that for an extra $20 or $30 a day. (There is definitely an amount of money you could pay me to have sex with a skeevy old dude, but I’m fairly certain I’ve priced myself well out of M.M.’s financial reach.) Instead, I’d make my minimum wage and maybe another $10 or $20 in tips, leaving me with a grand total of enough income to qualify me for state aid.

So I picked up a second job waiting tables. The thing about
working for tips is that you’re supposed to always make at least the minimum wage. The federal minimum for waiting tables is $2.13 an hour (some states do have higher minimums for tipped employees, but only about half of them). If you don’t make enough in tips to bump you up to the federal minimum wage of $7.25, the restaurant is supposed to kick in the difference. Corporate restaurants are too protective of their bottom lines to allow a single useless employee, so they typically send waitstaff home as soon as they can. The smaller mom-and-pop places, where there might be only a single waitperson on staff for hours at a time when it’s slow, might have their employees do deep cleaning and other things when there are no customers. So there you are, working constantly but getting paid only $2.13 an hour. No matter how good a waitress you are, you probably won’t make two or three hours’ worth of minimum wage out of tips from your only table in hours. These aren’t the kind of restaurants where generous patrons just take it into their heads to overtip. And if you remind your boss that he is supposed to top you off to $7.25, then you run the risk of finding yourself with reduced hours or fired altogether. So you pretty much keep your mouth shut about that.

My second job: I made $4 an hour or so at that one, because new people get the slow shifts. Hours would go by in which not a single customer walked in. Let me run you through the math on this one: On an average day, I’d work for six or seven hours. I might make $50. Some days were better, some worse. I couldn’t take the busy dinner shifts at the restaurant even after I was trained, because I was at my first job
until the middle of dinner rush and the restaurant needed its dinner staff in the door by midafternoon to prep. Meanwhile, I missed special events like picnics and the like at the bar that I might have made money on because I was at the restaurant.

And this is how it goes. Every time I’ve had more than one job, I’ve missed out on as much cash as I’ve made because of scheduling issues. Getting a second job wouldn’t be worth it at all except for the fact that those special events and extra hours are never guaranteed in advance. If it’s a week with no extra shifts, or with bad weather that keeps customers home, you’re stuck. So you hedge that bet by finding another shitty job.

The most I’ve seen anyone manage at once was four jobs: bartending, dancing, waitressing, and teaching yoga. I’ve held down up to three: tending bar, waiting tables, and working as a voter registration canvasser. It nearly killed me, and I still didn’t break twenty grand that year.

I think that most liberal Americans don’t have too hard a time believing that it’s difficult to make ends meet when you’re making minimum wage. But I also think that people in both parties get hung up on the minimum wage as some kind of miracle line of demarcation—as if making more than the minimum puts you on easy street. Meanwhile, millions of people are making above minimum wage—so they don’t get counted as making the minimum. And do you know what they’re making? Instead of $7.25 an hour, they’re getting $7.35 an hour. Maybe even $7.50! In many places in America—think fast-food restaurants, dollar stores, gas stations—most of the employees make under $8 or $9. And these employees
are not all kids. So when you hear or participate in these discussions about minimum wage statistics, assume that the vast majority of service workers are making within a stone’s throw of minimum wage. Our ladder’s rungs are set close together, and there are so many of them that it takes us forever to climb it. My husband worked for the same restaurant for nearly two years before he broke $7.75. Was he making minimum? No. But the difference between minimum wage and $7.75 is just around $1,040 a year if you’re working full-time, which is pretty rare.

So there you are, working all the time, bringing home so little, and very often getting behind. But your landlord doesn’t care that you’re working as hard as you can, that there aren’t more hours for you to work. The only thing that matters to your landlord is whether or not you have the money for the rent. I’ve had a landlord tell me that I could be turning tricks if I really cared about paying my bills, that clearly the only reason I was broke is that I wasn’t trying hard enough, that he had no patience for people who couldn’t simply get along in life. He actually dispensed all of this as though it were helpful advice rather than a series of insults. And that was
after
the begging, after I’d already debased myself, already explained that my hours got cut for the slow season and they hadn’t warned me in time for me to find another job.

This is my bottom line point about work and poverty: It’s far more demoralizing to work and be poor than to be unemployed and poor. I have never minded going without when I wasn’t working. It sucks not to be able to find a job, but you
expect to be tired and pissed off and to never be able to leave your house when you’re flat broke. Working your balls off, begging for more hours, hustling every penny you can, and still not being able to cover your electric bill with any regularity is soul-killing.

The popular conception of minimum wage workers is that they’re mostly teenagers working part-time. That would be because the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on its website, is pretty clear that about half of workers making the minimum or below are under the age of twenty-five. But that same BLS website will tell you that about half of workers making the minimum or below are
not
under the age of twenty-five. That’s 800,000 adults over the age of twenty-five working at minimum wage or below. Or, if you prefer, about 25,000 more people than live in all of San Francisco.

As I’ve pointed out already, a lot of adults are getting just pennies over the minimum wage—and I’d argue that your average adult does his job, however lowly, a damn sight better than most teenagers. And when you think about how insignificant a raise of even fifty cents above the minimum turns out to be, it’s hard not to feel devalued—as if the sum of your accomplishments as an adult amounts to some nickels and dimes.

But let’s put that frustration aside and talk about what it actually means to make minimum wage.

Working for minimum wage (or, as we’ve already established, close to it) means that making a long-term budget is an exercise in wishful thinking. You just have however much
money you have until you run out, and you pay whatever bill is most overdue first. When I was working in Ohio at a fast-food joint, I’d generally get about twenty-five hours in a week. That was paid at $7.50, making my weekly check $187.50. My husband, working forty hours at the same place, brought home $300. We made about $25,000 or so between us, working every week of the year. That’s a little over $9,000 above the poverty line for a family of two, or an extra $200 or so a week. We made ends meet, but barely. Not well enough to ever really feel comfortable or rest or take a day off without feeling guilty. And we were at the top of the bottom third of households that year, meaning that approximately one-third of the America population is living on the same sort of budget.

Or, for some, a much smaller one. The yearly income of a forty-hour-a-week minimum-wage worker is $15,080. So if you’re paying half of that for housing, you’re left with $7,540 to live on.

Yearly.

That’s $628 per month, or $314 per paycheck, for everything else—food, clothes, car payments, gas. If you’re lucky, you get all that money to live on. But who’s lucky all of the time, or even most of the time? Maybe you get sick and lose your job. Even if you land a new job, that measly $314 is all you’ve got to last you until your paychecks at the new place start up. Or what if, God forbid, the car breaks down or you break a bone?

But all right, let’s increase that salary. Let’s be kind and bump it up well above the median fast-food worker’s pay. If
you’re doing okay, making, say, $10 an hour, that’s $20,800. That leaves you $10,400 to live on annually, $867 monthly, $433 per paycheck. Before taxes. (Which, by the way, we pay plenty of.) Not that $100 doesn’t make a giant difference, but it’s not like you’re rolling around in money like Scrooge McDuck simply because you’re earning better than the absolute least that can be legally paid.

Of course, those scenarios are if you are absolutely jacked, with half of your income going to rent. If we go with the old one-third recommendation, then your disposable income by paycheck rises a bit, to $418 for those making minimum and $577 if you’re at double digits.

So, let’s go with the more generous number. Say you make $10 an hour and you pay a third of that in rent. That’s going to give you $1,066 a month to spend. You pay your utilities and for gas to get to work. Food and household stuff. Maybe you now have $500 left. And that’s assuming, of course, that you have no medical bills or prescriptions or debts. And that’s before taxes.

The truth is that what you’ve got left from all that work you’ve been doing is about $10 per day to spend on anything other than the barest necessities—and that’s based on the premise that you live in a shitty apartment, eat cheaply, and work full-time with no missed days. Then, if you do all of those things and you are unburdened by debt and medical issues, you can do any number of things with your free time! You can rent a movie and buy microwave popcorn. You can drive to the nicer section of town and have fancy coffee. With
$10 a day to spend at whim, the world is your oyster. Hell, you could even buy a can of oysters.

I’m hoping that I’m not being too subtle here, because this is what it comes down to: The math doesn’t fucking work. You can’t thrive on this sort of money. Period. You can survive. That’s it.

—

There is something even worse than minimum wage. It’s called temp work. I bet that the majority of Americans—unless they’ve experienced it for themselves—would be shocked to find out that companies regularly hire temps to work full-time hours, but because they hire these workers through temporary work agencies, they have to pay no benefits and offer no job security. To save a buck, companies will regularly hire such workers for years—
years
.
And they do it because it’s cheaper than hiring labor directly, and they are legally entitled to do so. The laws in this country are so weak that we’re actually way behind South Korea (!) in temp worker protections.

So when financially comfortable people with health insurance and paid sick leave and all kinds of other benefits that pad their wallets and make their lives easier and healthier think that the poor are poor because somehow we lack the get-up-and-go to change our circumstances . . . well, I’m not sure my reaction is printable.

I regularly thank the gods that I don’t have much experience
working in the temp industry. I’ve got friends that do, though, and it’s pretty awful. You get to work for a company full-time, as anything from a janitor to an attorney, but you don’t get any benefits and they sure as hell aren’t telling you to count on keeping this paycheck. They don’t guarantee anything. You might have worked there for years, but as long as they keep hiring you through the agency, they can save on pesky things like raises and promotions. One plant I lived near used to hire a revolving number of temp workers whom they laid off after ninety days—the point at which a temp worker is supposed to get permanent job status. Then after three weeks of unemployment, the plant hired them again.

That factory isn’t in town anymore. It had gotten a break from the local government, making its first years there tax-free. And wouldn’t you know it, after the tax break expired, the company decided that the plant wasn’t profitable enough and closed it. A temporary factory that hired temporary workers.

Who says capitalism isn’t cruel?