Barely Getting By

Humankind is produced in association with WGBH Boston and supported by the Humankind Program Fund.

Additional funding for this series has been provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,

the National Institutes of Health, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the Park Foundation.

What bothers me is that people have a tendency to think of low-wage workers as kind of the others,

or somebody that's so totally different from me and you, or, you know, the general population.

The bottom line is that they're not.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that by the year 2014, nearly half of all of our jobs would be low-wage jobs.

The struggles of tens of millions of Americans who work hard but earn low wages.

This is a Humankind special barely getting by.

I'm David Freudberg.

This is the story of people who occupy the bottom rung of the American dream

and how their battle to scrape by affects the rest of society.

Not the unemployed, but the army of people who go to work, often more than one job,

and are paid so little that they live paycheck to paycheck.

Most troubling is that this population is on the rise.

A trend that threatens to destabilize America.

Yet the presence of poor people is a fact of life we can easily overlook until calamity strikes.

In the aftermath of Katrina, we have seen our fellow citizens uprooted from their homes,

searching for loved ones and grieving for the dead.

These scenes have touched our hearts and moved our whole nation to action.

When Hurricane Katrina slammed America's lives,

America's gulf coast in late August 2005.

It was as if the nation watched a tragedy close up.

But then the camera zoomed out to reveal an entire tableau of people living in squalor.

The scenes were transmitted around the globe where many editorials asked,

how can the wealthiest country in history contain such poverty?

It was a time when the gap between America's rich and poor had widened drastically,

while full-time workers,

earning the minimum wage,

lived below the federal poverty line.

Is today a good news day for America's workers?

Higher wages, better jobs, a new direction.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in July 2007,

celebrating the first minimum wage increase in a decade.

Hourly income for the lowest paid workers would grow from

$5.15 to $7.25, phasing in over two years.

An estimated 13 million workers, or 10% of the labor force,

would see increased paychecks.

But these are the rock bottom earners.

When you add in people making up to just $9 an hour,

still below the poverty line,

we're looking at over 30 million Americans.

They are known as the working poor.

These are workers, mostly adults,

just like the rest of us trying to raise their family.

Beth Shulman is author of The Betrayal of Work.

They're in jobs that all of us rely on.

They are janitors and hotel workers.

They're nursing home workers.

They're child care workers.

They're food processors.

They're educational assistants.

They're security guards.

These people are doing everything.

They're working incredibly hard

and are very skilled at what they do.

Yet despite their toil, many of the working poor are broke.

Frequently they lack health insurance.

If a child gets sick, if they lose their job,

if a spouse leaves,

it can swiftly spell a financial emergency.

They sometimes choose between food and rent

or between medicine and heat.

They are among the growing population,

now up to about 25 million,

who line up, often shame-faced,

at food pantries and soup kitchens across America.

I mean, there's one out of every four workers

that makes less, less than $9 an hour.

So I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I mean, and you're talking about far more children

who are actually in, whether it's poverty or low income.

So you're talking about a third of families

that are basically, don't have enough

to just be self-sustaining.

How do people wind up in a full-time job

whose low pay traps them in poverty?

The question stirs up whatever preconceptions

we may harbor about poor people.

Is their plight the result of bad choices

like not working hard or dropping out of school

or impatiently quitting a job that paid better

or drinking and drugging?

Are they the product of inadequate public schools

or poor parenting or a corporate structure

in which the average CEO takes home 262 times

what the average employee earns?

Or do these workers simply have bad luck?

To find out, I embarked on a series of interviews with my colleagues.

to find out, I embarked on a series of interviews with my colleagues.

to find out, I embarked on a series of conversations

to find out, I embarked on a series of conversations with low-wage workers.

This is a Dunn Brothers coffee shop in Minneapolis.

Here I met a 57-year-old security guard

wearing a t-shirt and baseball cap in his off hours.

His name is Alvin Bui.

He works full-time at a luxury apartment building

earning about $12 an hour.

Take-home pay is about $17,000 a year.

Worked for 29 years milling flour

at Archer Daniels Midland,

but had to retire in 2000 due to a neck injury.

No health insurance now,

but as a veteran, he can use a VA hospital.

Alvin's entitled to a pension,

but it doesn't kick in until he's 62.

Things are obviously tighter than they were.

You know, anytime you go from,

I had a good-paying job, very good-paying job.

You know, when you go from 50 to 17,

yeah, that's huge for a while,

and it was shock for a while.

So you kind of move on, adjust your schedules,

you know.

You do what you have to do to get by, you know,

and I'm just a little bit fortunate than most

because I had a wife that worked, you know,

and so she wasn't affected by this as much.

Alvin winced when I asked if he feels like a victim.

His parents taught him to work hard,

and he says he did since age 16.

But due to the financial reversal,

he's just getting by now.

It could be worse.

Look at the recent spike in home foreclosures across America.

Meanwhile, by almost every economic measure,

the wealthy are going to be the ones

who are getting wealthier.

I mean, all you have to do is look at the pages

of the New Yorker magazine or the New York Times magazine

and see, you know, watches and cars

that are selling for $70,000 or $80,000,

and then also realize so many people are dependent

on the low prices at Walmart in order to get by.

Professor Barry Bluestone is social science dean

at Northeastern University.

He's been studying income inequality for over 35 years.

He says the gap between rich and poor

is currently at levels not seen

since just before the Great Depression.

Now the annual income of the super-rich,

the top 1,000th,

equals the combined income

of the bottom half of all Americans.

I mean, there's just this incredible wealth

that has been generated.

You know, we have more millionaires

and now more billionaires than we've ever had before.

Go back to the period of the robber barons

of the late 1900s.

You have now people who have wealth of that magnitude.

And much of that wealth has just, you know,

wealth begets wealth.

And much of that wealth has just exploded at the top.

I'm not going to begrudge people

even those mammoth billions they make.

But I do worry that if we don't do something

about the tens of millions of families

who are just getting by

or not getting by at all,

we will just continue to have a society

that becomes more and more uneven,

more and more unequal,

and in a sense, more and more unstable.

Are you at all concerned about the gap

between the rich and the poor in the United States?

I'm concerned to a point.

Alvin Bowie, the security guard in Minneapolis.

Because certain people don't have the avenues that I've had.

You know, I grew up blue-collar.

I had a good job for pretty much all my life.

And the concern is, you know,

the concern now is that

we don't have those types of jobs anymore.

You know, and a lot of people are past that.

Education-wise, they can't do some things.

I really think the deck is stacked towards business.

Not so much union, you know, and all that.

I've seen unions tumble quite a ways in the last 30 years.

You know, and I've always been union.

But the concern, yes, I am concerned about it.

I think it's widening.

What effect does it have?

Actually, the effect I think it's having

is a rise in crime.

People will do whatever's necessary

to take care of their families.

Scary.

It's very scary.

It's very scary because a lot of good people go bad.

You know, which is, it's hurtful.

You know, the American dream works if you got money,

which just sounds strange, you know,

because it's not supposed to work that way, you know.

Since the federal government instituted public safety net programs

like Social Security, Medicare for the elderly,

and Medicaid for the poor,

it might seem that people who fall on too hard times

will not fall through the cracks

that they will somehow be taken care of.

But often they just aren't.

Here's another security guard

who agreed to meet me at the coffee shop.

Well, I'm 56 years old.

I work full-time.

I work full-time for a security company

that has a government contract here in the city of Minneapolis.

I have been working for them for a little over four years.

I'm actually a retired police officer.

Gail Cronquist receives a modest pension

from the Minneapolis police,

but she says it's not really enough to live on.

So now she earns $14.63 an hour working security,

putting in 12-hour shifts.

She owns a home in nearby Scandia

where her mother lives.

Her mortgage comes to almost $1,900 per month.

She also has a part-time job driving elderly people

to doctor's appointments and shopping for $10.65 an hour.

Sometimes she's exhausted.

I sort of have to work,

but I am working specifically because of health insurance.

I have, because of my age,

and I have asthma, a pre-existing condition,

I could not get health insurance just as an individual policy.

I attempted to do that,

and could not do that.

So I can get it through the company,

through their group,

but I cannot do it on my own.

They wouldn't insure me.

I was injured on the job in 2005,

was out on work comp for almost a year,

had two major surgeries,

got ran over by a car, basically,

and had to have a knee replacement surgery.

And this was while I was serving as a security guard.

Crazy.

Crazy lady.

Didn't want to leave the public library when it was closing.

Hit me upside the head with a cupped hand,

tried to pop my eardrum,

is what she told the police officers later.

And I went out to get her license plate,

and she got in the driver's seat,

and she ran over my foot and then kept coming,

so it pushed my knee backwards and kind of sideways.

It's a horrible story.

Yeah.

But during that time, I did, you know,

I had to get a job.

I had to keep up.

Normally, the payments for my health insurance

come out of my paycheck.

I wasn't getting a regular paycheck,

and I was getting much less than my normal wages for work comp.

So I let the insurance lapse and could not get insurance.

Are you able to accumulate savings?

No, I have no savings.

No savings?

No savings, no.

At one time, did you?

Yeah, I did.

What happened to the savings?

When I retired, I used my savings to travel,

to buy some toys, to pay off some bills,

and it just went.

I literally have no savings at all now.

So what do you do if something goes terribly wrong?

Do you have any cushion?

No, I have no cushion.

And things have, I mean, you know,

I had the first surgery in April of 2005,

and then the knee replacement in November of 2005

because I fought with them between April and October

with them saying they weren't going to pay for anything

and then them cutting me off totally.

And I finally went to my own health insurance,

got the money from my sister, paid it up,

and then had the knee replacement surgery,

which eventually the work comp insurer had to pay for.

And how are you doing today?

Pretty good.

I mean, it hurts a lot.

I limp because they made that leg a little longer than the other one

when they did the surgery.

What are the hardest costs for you to meet now?

Medical costs, basically, because, like,

I had sinus surgery in February.

And with my policy,

you pretty much have to pay $4,500 out-of-pocket expenses

before they pick up 100%.

And so right now, I'm trying to pay off $4,500 worth of medical bills.

The surgery was around, I don't know, $20,000, something like that.

How do you start to whittle that down?

I'm just paying them, you know, $25, $50 a month.

That's all I can do.

And I don't live that high.

I mean, I take one week's vacation a year.

I don't go a lot of places.

I go out to eat maybe once a week.

I just have to pay my bills.

I mean, at one point, I had to file for bankruptcy in 2005

because of all the medical things and being out of work

and not being able to pay my bills.

So that's also affected me.

Have you ever had to go to a food pantry of some sort?

Yeah, I did when my work comp was cut off, just the one time.

And I was so embarrassed.

I thought I was going to die.

And I never went back again.

I just, I borrowed money from family,

and I just, you know, I ate real basics rather than go back again.

Why was it embarrassing to go to a food pantry?

I've always worked hard all my life, and I've always had money.

And so to not have money and to be that desperate, it just, it was depressing.

It was very depressing and embarrassing.

And, you know, you have to go pretty much within the city that you live.

And I just thought about someone that I knew seeing me there.

You're listening to a Humankind special, Barely Getting By.

I'm David Freudberg.

For more information, check our website, humanmedia.org.

Humankind.

Some low-wage workers are entitled to health insurance,

but many simply can't afford the premium their employers require

or aren't offered any coverage.

Among all the world's advanced economies,

the United States stands alone in not guaranteeing health coverage for all citizens.

We have 47 million people uninsured.

David Schipler in Chevy Chase, Maryland,

is Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Working Poor.

If you're very poor, your children qualify,

you qualify for Medicaid or CHIP, the state child health insurance program.

But if you're working and you're at a low wage,

you do not qualify for Medicaid, by and large.

Therefore, you're either on the private market

or you have to purchase insurance that is offered by your employer.

And many poor people don't do that because they don't feel they have the cash to do it.

Sometimes I think their decisions are wrong.

I met families, when I looked at their budget, I thought,

well, boy, you know, you really ought to be buying this health insurance

because if you get a health insurance, you're going to have to pay for it.

You're going to have to pay for it.

Because if you get sick, you're going to be ruined financially.

And the trouble is that people go to emergency rooms for treatment,

and that's the most expensive place to get health care.

I mean, I knew a man who was without work for a long time,

and he had no health insurance.

He never went to the dentist.

And when he got a toothache, he went to the emergency room.

Now, hospitals are required by law to treat you,

but they can also bill you.

And they billed him until he ran up a debt of about $10,000.

When he finally got a decent-paying job as a roofer,

which put him technically above the poverty line,

his credit report was so badly damaged

that the phone company wouldn't even put a phone in his house

because he had this $10,000 debt.

As one New Jersey, I remember, a janitor said to me,

I don't allow my children to go out during the wintertime.

And I said, gee, why not?

And she said, because if they get sick, I can't afford the $50.

The doctor would charge if I have to take my child to the doctor.

Author Beth Shulman is former vice president

of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.

A lot of low-wage workers, they live in situations that are more stressful.

They live more in crime-ridden areas, areas that places have more lead paint.

There's a whole variety of other things that they're confronting

that many higher-income families are not.

So it's kind of the worst of all.

It's the worst of all in the world where they've got more problems

yet don't have the health care insurance

so that they can actually take care of them and try to avoid them.

And as a result, do they have higher incidence of illness?

They do.

They have much higher incidence of asthma,

much higher incidence of diabetes, a whole variety of illnesses.

And then you think about children.

I mean, if children are sick more often, they lose more days at school,

which I know I have an 8-year-old.

That's a really bad sign in terms of being able to really have,

you know, good academic achievement.

So one of the other things that happens is children fall behind

because they're out more often.

One in six American children is now growing up in poverty,

a higher proportion than three decades ago

and a higher proportion than in other developed democracies.

Author David Shippler.

A young mother I knew named Lisa Brooks worked.

She had a regular job.

She was earning $8.21 an hour.

She had medical insurance.

But at that rate, she was below the poverty line,

and she couldn't save anything.

I mean, every dime that came in went out.

She had to move into an old drafty wooden house,

after which her son's asthma got worse.

Twice he was rushed by ambulance to the hospital.

And for reasons Lisa was never able to sort out,

her insurance company paid for the emergency room treatment

but refused to pay the ambulance charges,

which were $240 one time.

$250 the next.

And Lisa couldn't pay them either because she had no savings,

so they went on her credit report.

When her old car died and she needed a car to get to work,

she went to a reputable dealer to buy another used car,

and the salesman ran a credit check and said,

I'm sorry, I can't give you a loan.

So she ended up at a sleazy used car lot that didn't run credit checks

but charged her 15.75% for a car loan.

And that was a few years ago when rates were higher.

The better...

financial record you have,

the lower interest rate you have to pay.

And so poor people pay a higher rate.

And so here you have a chain reaction of events

where housing contributes to disease

and ultimately contributes to a poor credit report

and a high car loan.

Housing turns out to be more than just a place to live.

It's a key link in the chain reaction of events.

A hospital worker in Boston, Yolanda Mays,

invited me to her home in the inner-city neighborhood

known as Dorchester.

We talked at the table in her kitchen,

which was amazing, given Yolanda's personal story.

Well, this house opened in 2001.

I was one of the first of six tenants to move here.

It was a homeless program.

It was fully furnished.

We had microwaves, dishwasher, washroom,

washing, flatware, sheets, everything.

It was all here?

All here.

Had you been homeless before that?

Yes, yes.

Were you at a shelter at that point?

I was in a shelter, yeah.

So this must have been quite a transition

to go from a shelter to your own furnished apartment.

Yeah, it was. It was a nice one.

Yolanda receives a Section 8 voucher,

part of a federal program that provides housing assistance

to low-income renters and homeowners.

As a result, for her,

two-bed rooms,

she pays rent of $524 a month plus utilities.

But that may rise after a recalculation.

She does not receive food stamps or other benefits.

I work at Mass General as a clinical assistant in chemistry.

I have a daughter, Ashley.

She's 12.

And I have a husband.

His name is Tony.

But, you know.

He doesn't officially live here?

No, he don't live here.

Now, you work in chemistry at Massachusetts General Hospital.

What exactly does that work entail?

What do you do when you go to work?

Some is just logging in.

You type in a blood test that they're ordering.

Then at decant, you spin them down

and get them ready for the instrument to be run on.

So how did you end up in a job like that?

I got it through a program called Welfare to Work

when my daughter was born.

She was born in Alabama and I came back here

and I was on Welfare for two years.

So Welfare to Work, you had been on Welfare prior to you,

when you entered Welfare to Work.

Right.

And was that during the period when you were homeless?

No, I was working when I was homeless.

See, a lot of people would think if you're working,

why would you be homeless?

It was hard to find a place, you know.

I was still looking, going to work, looking in between,

like on breaks, lunch breaks.

After work.

After work, you know, but, yeah.

So how long were you living in a shelter

while working at the hospital?

Maybe a year or two, a year and a half.

Year and a half.

Was that hard?

Sort of, kind of, but I knew I had to do it, so, you know.

And where was your daughter at that point?

She was with me.

Yeah.

Are there other people at the hospital who live in shelters?

Right now, yeah.

There's a few people that live in shelters.

Other employees at the hospital?

Yeah, at the hospital.

Mm-hmm.

Some people end up living on the edge

because they manage their money poorly,

and some anti-poverty programs

formally train clients in financial skills.

But many low-income people have learned of necessity

to stretch their dollars.

Yolanda allowed me to pry a little

into her personal finances.

We get paid weekly.

I get paid every week.

Every week at the hospital?

Every week, yeah.

How much is the check?

Before taxes?

Maybe like six-something.

But then they have my health care,

and dental and vision comes out of it, you know.

Out of that as well?

Out of that as well.

So at the end of the week, you have a...

Like $370.

Is it tough to make it go?

Yeah, it's real tough.

It's real tough.

What's the hardest part?

Probably this gas bill, trying to get it down.

But, you know, I mean, they're all, you know...

But the way I do, the way I pay my bills,

you know, it's hard.

Like, I might not have money,

but I don't really care about that

as long as my bills are paid,

and I don't have to worry about no one turning this off

or turning that off or telling me I got to move

because my rent's not paid.

Do you have any debt?

Credit cards or any other personal debt?

All I have are phone bills that I haven't paid,

but you know what I'm saying.

We all have one of those.

How high is the phone bill?

It's real high.

I'm going to pay it, though.

I'm just waiting, you know.

I'm going to...

I was trying to make arrangements,

but the lady was telling me that I had to give her $50,

and I said, you can't tell me I have to give you that.

I'm trying to pay it, so if we go to court,

I'm sure if I tell them I'm trying it,

they're not going to, you know, so...

It's in the process because I don't want to owe...

You know, I want to pay that, so...

How much is it totally?

It's $700.

Wow.

Do you have a cell phone?

Yes.

I have a cell phone, and my daughter has a cell phone.

Have you ever visited a food pantry as a patron?

Sure.

When I first came back,

when I came back from Alabama,

I went, you know, staying in the shelter,

and like now, I don't really go.

And you have savings of any kind?

Not really, no.

Do you have a bank account?

I have a bank account.

My check goes direct deposit,

but just you can't keep nothing in it,

you know what I'm saying, but...

How much do you have right now in your savings?

Right now in my savings, about $100.

And is that worrisome?

Is that hard?

I don't let none of that worry me.

How do you push those worries aside?

Well, I just leave it to God.

That's...

I go, we go to church, and I pray,

and He answers my prayers, and I really don't...

I don't worry, just sit and dwell on things.

It just...

Things happen for me.

I've been lucky, I guess.

Last year, Yolanda's daughter

was on the school honor roll all year.

And she's thinking of becoming a doctor or a lawyer.

Proud of her?

Yes, baby.

I have a good kid.

I do.

So how are you going to get her into college without savings?

I'm going to have to save, you know,

and I'm going to have to start soon

because she's going into seventh grade,

and like I said, I'm not worried about it at work.

I'm going to save, I'm going to have to,

because that's something she wants to do, too.

You're listening to Humankind.

I'm David Freudberg.

Studio recording by Steve Colby.

Editorial assistance from Thomas Royal.

Webmaster, Brian K. Johnson.

Special thanks to David Safran,

Todd Dahlstrom, and Jennifer Gunderson.

Our program is presented by Human Media

in association with The Network Incorporated.

Program development and support provided by Shart Media.

You can hear,

more episodes of our series at humankindpodcast.org.

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This segment, part one of Barely Getting By,

is Humankind Program number 119.

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