The Working Poor (12 page)

Her back was killing her, and she applied for SSI disability payments through Social Security. She was afraid to get another job while she waited for the decision, lest she undermine her case, so she went back on welfare
and waited and waited. She thereby became typical among low-income laborers who develop back problems, apply for SSI, and don’t work for months while hoping for approval. When Caroline was finally turned down six months later, she got a job at Wal-Mart.

Now the problem took a different form. Thanks to a chiropractor paid by Medicaid, Caroline’s back had improved. But then she got a rude lesson in welfare law: “I just found out I have no medical insurance anymore,” she said desperately one day. She had fallen ill, had seen a doctor, had been given a prescription, and had gone to the pharmacy to have it filled. There she learned that her Medicaid had expired because she had gone to work (Amber’s continued because of her disability). “I didn’t know that,” Caroline declared. She had to pay $11 for the medicine and cancel an appointment for an eye exam the next day. More urgently, “I got to stop going to the chiropractor and everything now,” she said, “and that’s what kept me going to work, because I can’t afford to pay it. I owe him 150 already.”

Wal-Mart offered health insurance, but she found the premiums too expensive. Besides, she couldn’t handle the $250 annual deductible, so she joined the growing ranks of the 45 million uninsured Americans, who included the many low-wage workers passing up insurance that their employers made available. They did short-term calculations that made the weekly cost seem high, without figuring the long-term cost of large medical bills. It was a gamble, and Caroline was lucky. Through the following year her back pain eased enough to permit her to continue working. She drifted along with no insurance and never went for regular checkups and did not get seriously ill.

Anyone who walked all the way around the outside of the Wal-Mart superstore on Route 103 would walk a mile, Caroline said. The place was immense. It sold everything from lawn mowers to ground beef, under-pricing smaller stores that were struggling to survive in the center of town. Its 300 to 330 employees, who came and went seasonally, wore Wal-Mart’s uniform of blue smocks and friendly smiles, trained as they were to be surprisingly helpful to customers.

Mark Brown, the manager, could pay his people more without raising prices, he conceded. He sat at a table in the store’s snack bar, watching the part of the grocery section he could see, listening to the public address system’s calls for help at the registers, his eyes darting around this corner of his fiefdom like a school principal waiting for the next catastrophe. He was
thirty-one, but he looked as young as a college kid and spoke with the twang of his native southeast Missouri. He had come from another store in Georgia and was learning to ski here in New Hampshire.

His employees started at $6.25 an hour, earned an extra dollar at night and another 25 cents “for going to the front end,” which meant working one of the twenty-four cash registers. And if he started them at $8 an hour, say, instead of $6.25, how would that change the economics of the store? “Hmmm. I don’t think it would change at all.” He wouldn’t have to raise prices? “No. We’ve got a corporate pricing structure. And the way we do things, we go out and we check our competition every single week. Every department manager in this store goes out once a week and checks competition, and that’s what determines our prices. We have a core price structure that we set regionally, by areas. Definitely the base price here would be probably higher than what it is in Arkansas, where there’s a cheap cost of living. So it would be higher here, but it would still be standard to this area. And then after they give us that base, then we go out and check our competition, and if we’re gettin’ beat, we lower our prices.”

So there’s enough profit to absorb an increase from $6.25 to $8? “There would be, because if we were having to raise our wages, then evidently everybody else would be too, and if we make sure we’re low enough, our competitors’ customers are gonna shop with us.” Would wage increases have any effect at all? “We’d have to cut corners on other things like, you know, we may not be able to put all the pretty balloons up all over the store. The non-necessities we’d have to cut back on.”

Three days later Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., announced a net income of $5.58 billion for 1999, up 26 percent from the previous year.

Caroline was bouncing from one department to another, from one shift to another, but her pay stayed within a narrow range, beginning at $6.25, going to $6.80, sometimes up to $7.50 if she worked at night. So unpredictable were her hours that she couldn’t work a second job, which would have helped her cash flow. She kept applying for higher positions and kept hearing that she needed a bit more experience.

“I did make Cashier of the Month for November,” she reported happily. “I’ve collected over fifteen hundred dollars for the World War II veterans memorial in Washington. That’s what got me Cashier of the Month.” She also persuaded customers who checked out at her register to buy a total of seventy-two tickets to a Bruins game in Boston to raise
money for the Claremont fire department, and that won her a weekend getaway from Pepsi. She could take herself and three other people to a paid stay in any Marriott she chose, anywhere. “But I have to get there,” she said. That was the catch. So it was going to have to be nearby, someplace that somebody would drive her. Hawaii never entered her mind, not even New York; she considered only places in New Hampshire. “I think there’s one up here in Lebanon,” she said. “If I could get somebody to take me to Manchester, Amber likes to look at the malls. I’ve never been down there. Just to look at things.” In the end, Caroline, Amber, a friend of Caroline’s, and her child drove north to a hotel in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, where they visited a small shopping center in North Conway.

“I bought this,” said Amber. “It’s a lamp. It’s one of those bunny lamps that goes round and round. And I bought a sweatshirt that I took with me on the trip.”

“That jacket I was wearing that was ripped on the side for two years,” said Caroline, “I bought me this winter coat at one of the stores in the mall. Originally it was a hundred-dollar coat, OK? It was marked down to $79.99, but they were having a big discount so I got it for $31.99. So that wasn’t bad.”

Wal-Mart had such a big turnover of personnel that Mark Brown didn’t feel comfortable saying how high it ran. But he was clear about the reasons in the years of prosperity. “A lot of it, I think, has to do with the fact that our economy’s so strong today. You could go anywhere in this town, anywhere outside of town, and you see the signs, ‘Now Hiring, Now Hiring.’ I mean, if they’re not treated right, all they got to do is just walk out the door. It’s very competitive, very competitive.” So Wal-Mart tried to hold people by providing them with a share of the company’s profits. Eighty percent came in stock, the rest in cash, maintained in an account in which an employee began to be vested after a year, and was fully vested after seven.

But this enticement was not working for Caroline. She had taken out a second mortgage, for $19,000, to replace her roof, doors, and windows, and she needed money now. “The way they schedule your hours,” she said, “sometimes it’s ten to seven, sometimes it’s nine to four, sometimes it’s seven to four, sometimes you work later in the evenings, and you never know what day. You don’t always have the same two days off. Like I was supposed to have last Sunday off because of Amber’s recital. I asked for it
off. Well, I got home and later that night there was a message on my phone: ‘Can you please come to work for a while?’ I did. I did. It was overtime. I never said no to them. But why couldn’t they have the decency to pay me a little bit more?”

That was the way the store treated “associates” when the economy was booming. In more depressed parts of the country and during recessions, however, some Wal-Mart managers were accused of forcing employees to work before punching in or after punching out to avoid paying overtime as required by law. “Wal-Mart management doesn’t hold itself to the same standard of rectitude it expects from its low-paid employees,” wrote Barbara Ehrenreich, who worked at a Wal-Mart in Minnesota while researching her book
Nickel and Dimed.
“When I applied for a job at Wal-Mart in the spring of 2000, I was reprimanded for getting something ‘wrong’ on this test: I had agreed only ‘strongly’ to the proposition, ‘All rules have to be followed to the letter at all times.’ The correct answer was ‘totally agree.’ Apparently the one rule that need not be slavishly adhered to at Wal-Mart is the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires that employees be paid time and a half if they work more than forty hours in a week.” Workers were warned against “time theft,” which meant “doing anything other than working during company time, anything at all,” she reported. “Theft of
our
time is not, however, an issue.”
⁴

Caroline never had the overtime problem in her New Hampshire store, but in six Southern states employees filed a class-action suit against the company for ordering them off the clock as their weekly time approached forty hours. Their attorney calculated the benefits to the firm: If each of 250 hourly wage “associates” in a single store worked just one hour of unpaid overtime a week, that would total 250 unpaid hours a week, 1,000 a month, 12,000 a year—and there were over 300 Wal-Mart stores in Texas, producing savings in that state alone of more than $30 million that should have been paid to employees.
⁵

Caroline did not suffer from any violations of law, as far as she could tell, but her career went nowhere. Mark Brown, the manager who liked her, got transferred to Pennsylvania, dimming her prospects for advancement. So after a year and a half at Wal-Mart, she signed up with a temp agency, which found her a $7.50-an-hour daytime job Monday through Friday assembling wallpaper sample books. And she had the pleasure of telling Wal-Mart’s assistant manager that she was leaving for higher pay.

“I’m just hoping they’ll be sorry someday,” Caroline said.

“Because they don’t know who they’re missing,” Amber added. “She’s such a nice mom, and she’s pretty cool.”

After a month the agency tempted Caroline with a job back at the Tampax factory for $10 an hour, the most she had ever earned. She took it, but there was a problem: Procter & Gamble had organized the factory on rotating shifts. One week she left the house at 5:30 a.m. and got home at 2:30 p.m., the next week she left at 1:30 p.m. and was home by 10:30 p.m., and the third she left home at 9:30 p.m. and returned at 6:30 a.m. Putting aside the question of sleep, stamina, and the basic requirements of an orderly life, the “swing shifts,” as they were called, raised havoc with Caroline’s arrangements for Amber. She had rented rooms to boarders occasionally or taken in homeless families so Amber wouldn’t be alone. But these situations never lasted long; Caroline found the people intrusive or bossy or dishonest.

One family staying with her as she worked the swing shifts became difficult, and she kicked them out. “The people were sort of homeless,” she said. “I was kindhearted, you know me, took ‘em in. They had three little kids. He was on probation, a car accident, something…. They were paying $100 a week. They didn’t pay the last two weeks. They said they would stay for the winter. I only intended it to be a short-term thing. The little kids destroyed wallpaper in my house and other things.… On top of that, come to find out, he had got another girl pregnant and had another baby.” Furthermore, they were getting checks from welfare and food from WIC, while he had his own business laying flooring and carpeting. “They make good money,” Caroline said resentfully, “and I’m wondering if they reported it all. They’re not married. People scheme the system like this, and they get away with it.”

Without the boarders, though, Caroline had nobody to look after Amber, so she very reluctantly left the girl home alone during her evening and nighttime shifts. While Caroline was running the machines that put tampons into boxes, she was worrying about Amber, and with good cause. “I don’t think she should be left alone now,” said her pediatrician, Steven Blair, who feared that given her epilepsy and cognitive problems, “she could be in trouble pretty easily.” She could stay home by herself for “a short evening,” he believed, “but I wouldn’t leave her for many hours at a stretch.”

Amber happened to tell her teacher how scary it was being home alone after dark. The teacher was alarmed. “She can’t take care of herself,” said the principal of Claremont Middle School, Donald R. Hart. “She’s fourteen, that’s our concern. No young lady, middle school student, should be left alone at night. She gets scared, she’s had people knock on her door at night. We would still have the same reaction with a normal fourteen-year-old. When you look at statistics when kids get themselves into trouble with drugs, alcohol, sex, it’s after school hours in the home.” So, what did the school do to help? It summoned up a dreaded specter from Caroline’s past: The teacher threatened to report Caroline for neglect. “We have a legal obligation to report if neglect is going on,” said Hart. “We would be breaking the law if we suspect neglect, abuse, or anything like that.”

It was late in October of 2000, the height of the presidential election campaign, and the country seemed consumed by politics. Not Caroline. Her voice trembled with rage and fear as she searched frantically for a way to keep both her job and her daughter. The celebrated New Hampshire primary had long since passed without so much as denting Caroline’s consciousness. She didn’t bother to see any of the candidates as they crisscrossed the state, and, looking back, she was not even sure whether or not she had voted. “I can’t remember,” she said frankly. “I might have been working. I don’t think I did.” And now, even with Al Gore and George W. Bush arguing and preaching and promising intensely on the TV in her living room, Caroline had no spare room in her thoughts for either of those men. “I haven’t really listened to them,” she said. “Right now it’s the least of my concerns. They’re all liars in a way. They tell people they’ll do this or that. I have no use for Clinton, because he did not set a good example by running around with that girl. I think his wife’s a fool to stay with him.”