The Working Poor (24 page)

To avoid hiring angry people, hurried employers look for clues that often amount to stereotypes. Violence has a longstanding place in many
whites’ images of blacks. So, if you are black, if you are a man, if you are large and strong, or if you have a prison record, you are likely to be perceived as a person with a temper, a vein of rage.

Kevin Fields fit neatly into all those stereotypes. He loved to watch wrestling on television, and he was built like a wrestler himself—tall, a beefy 280 pounds, shaved head, small gold ring in his right ear. And when prospective employers asked whether he had ever been convicted of a felony, he told them honestly that he had spent two years in the penitentiary. When they asked him what for, he told them the truth.

“It was assault,” he said. “It was five guys against me, and I had a baseball bat. They threw a bottle up against my car, and it broke, and the girl I was with at that time, the glass splashed on her, and like, hey, that’s very disrespectful, you know? They tell me, ‘Get back in the car before we kick your so-and-so.’ OK, fine. So I reach in my backseat and grab the bat out, and I guess it happened then. When I left, everybody was layin’ there, and then I had the police lookin’ for me. My mother taught me: turn myself in.”

Typically, the employers had a follow-up question. “It always comes up, you know: ‘What if something happened here, what would you do?’ ” Again, Kevin answered truthfully. “I always tell them I’m gonna stand up for myself because I’m a man,” he said. “You know, I ain’t gonna let nobody run over me.” Didn’t he ever think of lying, just a little, and say he’d walk away or stay cool? “No, I ain’t gonna let nobody just do anything to me without me saying anything about it,” he declared. He almost never got the job. The best he could do was to mow lawns.

Some firms automatically reject applicants with prison records, some do not. “In our industry they have to be bondable,” said the head of a Kansas City temp agency. “Bondable means able to handle checks, handle cash, confidential information for the companies.… As far as a conviction for an offense, of course, we ask them why. That usually is an immediate heads-up for us, especially if it’s dealing with anything regarding stealing, anything you were convicted for, anything that would impose a liability issue.” The John Knox Village retirement home and other health care facilities were governed by Missouri law’s prohibitions. “You cannot have a felon working for you who has been convicted of an A or B felony—crimes against persons, property, or any sexual offenses,” said Sharon Eby. No statute prevented Randy Rolston of Victorian Paper from hiring ex-convicts, but “it’s
better just to avoid it,” he said. “We have a company that for $50, they give us their full police records.”

As the economy faltered and the threat of terrorism grew, employers were tightening background checks. In Washington, D.C., nobody with a history of drug use or violence could get hired as a certified nursing assistant, for example, although that course was popular with job-training programs. Because of concerns over liability, building owners grew less willing to overlook the rap sheets of applicants for maintenance jobs— another favorite of training centers. People with prison records could work as day porters or floor waxers, but not at jobs with unfettered access to offices or apartments.
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Some firms even rejected people who had sued former employers for racial discrimination or sexual harassment.

But Bryan Hagin had a different approach in looking for workers at his Burger King. “I have hired people from halfway houses and guys who have just gotten out of jail,” he said. “Guys have come to work with bracelets on their ankles. ‘Who’s doing your monitoring?’ There are a couple of companies around the city that do it. ‘When are you supposed to leave? When are you supposed to be home?’ If you can find that out you can help them along. Some people appreciate it. Most don’t.”

He pointed to a success that began as a simple request from one of his workers who had a friend, a young woman crack addict in a rehab facility. “Look, she just got out of jail,” the worker told Bryan. “She needs a job. Can you help her out?”

“I interviewed her and she seemed like a generally OK person,” Bryan recalled. “She wasn’t like wonderful or anything,” but he hired her as a favor to his employee. At work, he fell into long personal conversations and came to respect the battle she was waging. “She understood that I needed her as much as she needed to work and that I depended on her. When she realized that, she just took off in terms of her abilities. It was really—it made your heart feel good that you were able to pull somebody off the streets. She invited me to her graduation from rehab. She was really proud of herself, and she should have been. It was a really difficult situation for her. She really turned herself around. I won’t say that working at Burger King did that for her, but I think it gave her a great sense of self-worth, and she was able to pick herself up off the ground and get her life together.

“She moved on to a different position in a different company. I still
speak to her from time to time. She’s a receptionist with a real estate firm, and she also does something else, she works for a hotel. She does well. I mean, it’s not fantastic. She’s not working in Silicon Valley, but she’s doing well for where she was.”

In the rough-and-tumble marketplace, then, low-skilled workers can often be rescued by a low-cost gamble, a few minutes of attention and teaching. “One young lady we were about to terminate ’cause she couldn’t get to work on time,” said Hazel Barkley of Sprint. “She’d never ridden a bus” and simply did not know how. So her supervisors showed her. “Now she can read a schedule, she takes the bus, she’s fine.”

In other words, when chance happens to match a needy worker with a hungry and compassionate employer, both can benefit. In mediocre economic times, John Knox Village, the Kansas City retirement home, never suffered from the fact that it stood beyond the reach of public transportation; in a tight job market, the home could keep its 1,000 jobs filled with people who had their own cars. But when the economy flourished, Knox had to dip into the reservoir of inner-city labor, and a critical shortage of personnel erupted. “When the bottom fell out of the labor pool and our unemployment rate dropped below 5 percent,” said Sharon Eby, the human resources manager, “we were just not able to get people, and so openings would just stay open, and from week to week we would run with a hundred openings.” She finally realized that transportation was a major obstacle, and she found the solution in the home’s own fleet of vans and buses that were used to take retirees on outings. She mobilized the vehicles to make runs to and from the inner city.

That kind of stopgap measure by a single company is a Band-Aid, not a cure. It doesn’t heal the economic ailment caused by America’s preference for the automobile; it doesn’t address the long-term disadvantage of the laborer who is too poor to own a reliable car. It doesn’t shift tax revenues away from highways into mass transit. It is a perfect example of the limitations of the private sector’s ability to address a social problem. The solution doesn’t last past the economic boom.

When Bryan Hagin of Burger King said that the only thing he required was a work ethic, he was inadvertently defining the limits of his employees’ possibilities. From flipping burgers, you don’t rise into management, not unless you have a college diploma and a lot of attributes besides punc-
tuality. The hardscrabble route upward has become a rough pathway that can rarely be negotiated without the proper credentials.

The diploma, in Bryan’s view, does not indicate what you know but how hard you try. “When I see someone with a college degree,” he said, “the first thing I think of is: This person’s persistent. To get through college is amazing. And if you’re able to graduate, even if you just have a poli sci degree, at least you got out. And you’re successful. That means you can be successful somewhere else.”

The “soft skill” of persistence, though, is produced by the “hard skills” supposedly learned in school and in training on the job. Nobody who sees herself as incompetent is going to be persistent, punctual, or positive, or have any realistic hope of advancement. Employers complain about applicants who can’t fill out applications, high school graduates who can’t spell “high school,” but they still hire such people—without much likelihood of promotion. Sharon Eby didn’t care that housekeepers and food service workers couldn’t spell. “They’re not having to write on the charts,” she noted. “As long as they can read order changes and those kinds of things, then that’s really what makes the difference.” That kind of job runs no farther than the end of a blind alley.

“I have an issue with a cashier right now,” Bryan said. “Wonderful personality. Guy’s amazing, customers love him. But if he doesn’t have that keyboard to make the change for him, he’s stuck. He just can’t get it in his head.” And sometimes the cash register isn’t available. “Say, for instance, you work at a register and, ‘Hey, Bryan, I need some fives.’ I pop the drawer open. I take some money out and give you some five-dollar bills, and the way I pop the drawer open is I hit the cash key. So the amount is up there but there’s no amount tendered, so they don’t know how much change to give. There’s that hesitation, and you tell them how much it is.… So what have I done? Taught him second-grade math. Bring him problems. ‘Solve these for me.’ ” Customers may love him, but he won’t be a manager.

Nor is he so unusual. Some 55 percent of American adults cannot total the cost of office supplies ordered from a catalogue, nor can they tell when to take medicine in relation to meals as instructed on a label. According to the Department of Education’s 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 43 percent cannot summarize the experience required in a job ad, 34 percent cannot follow directions with a map, and 22 percent cannot figure weekly earnings from hourly wages. Therefore, they cannot
compete on the global playing field. Because American living expenses are high, American workers doing unskilled labor need higher pay than their counterparts doing the same job in, say, Sri Lanka. Unless there is a geographic necessity that the job be done here in the United States, it will rush out of the country down to the lower wage level as inexorably as a river flows to the sea. That’s why recipients of food stamps who have a question and dial an 800 number in New Jersey get answers from somebody in India. That’s why Paul Lillig’s Docusort transmits images of envelopes from Missouri to Mexico, where workers at computer screens type in zip codes to produce bar codes. As the American economy craves more and more workers with skills, those without will have less and less opportunity to move upward.

Studies show that the workers who take advantage of employers’ programs of tuition subsidies and other educational incentives tend to be the workers who already have the most education. It’s as if education were like capital; the more you have, the more you get. Employees who are just coming out of poverty, or who hover on its precipitous edge, rarely have the luxury of planning ahead or calculating the advantages of such benefits with deferred impact as health insurance, life insurance, and retirement plans. “Entry-level people who are working out of desperation or need, they don’t have career goals,” David Bokmiller observed. “They don’t know what a career path is. They’re making minimum wage to eke out a living or support a bad habit—or if they don’t work they go back to jail.… They don’t have their heads in their jobs. They just decide not to come to work…. Their lives are a wreck.” Observing the personal and family problems that often come crashing in on his low-wage employees, Paul Lillig put it another way: “Work is not their number one job.”

Bryan Hagin could usually tell quickly in the interview. “You try to ask the right questions,” he said, “intuition, kind of feel it out. … A good question to ask is, ‘Today’s Tuesday. What’s a typical Tuesday for you? What do you do?’ If they can rattle off six, seven, eight things they do in a row, if one of them’s going to the probation officer, then you know where you need to be. But if one of them’s like, ‘I get off at my grandmother’s house and I go down to the local kitchen and get breakfast or something— or I go down to Manpower and do some paperwork and try to look for some jobs,’ you kind of get a read for where they are, what their ambitions are.”

Then, too, Bryan used his own eyes and tried to make sense of what he
saw. “You look for the visual cues, his body language and things, try to figure out what’s really going on. A lot of times, you can interview someone with their head pointed to the floor the entire time. What does that mean? Does that mean they’re deceitful, or does it mean they’re painfully shy?” Or could it mean that they are full of fear about their inability?

The ten-year-old girl sat on an idle swing, chatting with the caseworker on the swing beside her. “How many times,” the little girl asked, “have you been raped?”

The question came casually, as if it could merely glide into the conversation. The caseworker, “Barbara,” tried to stay composed.

“I said that I hadn’t, and she was surprised,” Barbara recalled.

“ ‘I thought everybody had been,’ ” she remembered the girl saying.

“Her friends talked about it in school,” Barbara observed. “It’s an everyday thing.”

That was Barbara’s introduction to the epidemic of sexual abuse that infests uncounted homes in America. The girl was the first of Barbara’s cases in a mentoring program for children at risk, referred by teachers who saw telltale signs of trouble in their students’ lives. Of the thirteen boys and girls whom Barbara tried to help in a New England town, twelve had
been sexually molested, she said. They usually told of the experience when they were sitting next to her, on swings or in a car, so that they did not have to see the reaction on her face. The ten-year-old was being raped by her father. He was sixty-seven.