By Kimberly McMurray — Philadelphia
“We have to laugh about it, you know? Because if we didn’t, we would spend all of our time crying.” The truth is, this member meeting has been full of laughter, even as their stories break my heart. I am sitting with Angela and Carmen in Angela’s apartment in suburban Pennsylvania. They are sisters. Both unemployed, both single mothers, both waiting for a break.
Angela and Carmen have always been very close. They spend afternoons (just like we are now) sitting in Angela’s kitchen, drinking homemade iced tea, and talking about the world. They lean on each other when times get tough. But what are you supposed to do when the person you lean on is struggling just as much as you are? Where are you supposed to turn?
Angela was laid off two years ago from her job in management. She sends out applications every week but has been unable to find anything. “At first, I only applied to management positions. I would list my salary requirements as the equivalent of what I was making at my last job. Now, I’ll flip burgers. I’ll make minimum wage.” After working hard for her entire adult life, Angela is struggling to survive. Because of bureaucratic red tape, she has not received unemployment benefits for months. She lost her house; she spent her daughter’s entire college savings. She worries about buying food, and in the winter, how to heat her apartment.
“I pray for a job. I cry watching television, but everywhere I turn, it seems like I am up against a brick wall.” But still, Angela serves us iced tea around her kitchen table and she and Carmen try to fight back that black cloud of unemployment and financial strain hanging over the apartment.
Carmen is a nurse. She was laid off two years ago from another job and decided to go back to school for her nursing degree to ride out the recession. Like most people, she believed that healthcare was a recession proof industry. After working hard through the entire program, she passed her boards and officially became an RN. She took a job at a nursing home but was laid off during her training period when she spoke up about the awful sanitary conditions in the facility. “There were bugs crawling on the patients during the night shift. I was trying to take care of them, but I never got the chance to do what I am supposed to do.”
Now, like her sister, she has been struggling to find a job. After investing almost $100,000 in nursing school, she can’t find anything. Every opening she finds requires 2-3 years experience. “I’ll volunteer during the training period, but no one is willing to give me a chance.” Carmen said that she panics when she thinks about the current unemployment benefits extension expiring in November. “In three months, I will have nothing.”
Not nothing, they will have each other. They have a family where everyone tries to come together. But it is hard when everyone is struggling.
By Emmelle Israel - Nevada
I recently met with a member who wasn’t a self-described “fan” of unions. She started working when she was twelve years old and was always a hard worker who had good relationships with her fellow workers and her supervisors. She eventually ran her own successful small business and saw little need for unions if workers could solve their problems with management on their own. But, when she had to move for family reasons and leave behind her small business, she started working in corporate America, and the need for unions became clear.
She worked several different jobs and encountered the same basic problem every time: In a word, employers were “heartless.”
“Employers have all the power. The employees have no power. You’re hung out to dry, at their beck and call.”
When she worked at a daycare center she “loved going to work until management made [work] miserable.” Her supervisor started being out all the time. It was put upon the employee to stay in the classroom even if they were on their break time, even if their shift was over, and even if they needed to use the restroom. Management would not take responsibility.
Private conversations could be made into grounds for firing. At another job, she was helping another worker to get through a rough time in his life. He was going through a divorce and had a history of alcoholism. In order to prevent him from spending his nights alone at a bar, she invited him to go bowling with her and her son once or twice a week. Management interfered in the friendship, trying to cast it as an employee dating her supervisor. Their accusations made it difficult for the friendship outside of work to continue.
Once, she used a whistleblower hotline that a company she worked for had set up as a way to give workers a forum to voice their concerns about unfair and unsafe conditions at their work. She wanted her complaint to be anonymous, but the person on the other end of the line made her give her name, saying that she would be fine. She was called into her boss’s office the next day.
But, the worst example of her powerlessness at work happened when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She took off from work to have surgery, and when she came back, there was all new management. Everything had changed. She could feel the new management watching her like a ticking time bomb. They called her in to squeal on a co-worker who management had hired, knowing that he was an alcoholic. She refused to tell them what they already knew, and she was quickly demoted. There were no policies and procedures that management had to adhere to like they made their employees do. Eventually, she was let go and hasn’t been able to find employment since. And even now, while she’s still unemployed, she sees how employers hire part-time employees on unset schedules, denying them the chance to get a second job that many need to be able to make ends meet.
Although she has survived multiple surgeries for her breast cancer, this member told me that the emotional pain caused by her experiences working for corporate America without a voice in the workplace is far worse. “If you had nothing organized in your workplace, employers can do whatever they want… You need it to be a union position in order to have any say in the workplace.”
She’s not asking for any pity or sacrifices from employers. “The economy is so bad. I understand both sides. I understand budget cuts. But, even with budget cuts, [employers] can still give their employees dignity.” Even in a time of economic crisis, dignity and a voice on the job for workers are two things that employers shouldn’t be able to cut.
By Ashley Keith — Ohio
Like too many other Ohio families, Renee’s is struggling to cover the costs of raising a child with autism in a slow economy. Sometimes even everyday costs are unaffordable. “People need to know that they are one misfortune away from financial ruin,” says Renee. “Families like mine really have to make these tough decisions between housing, marriage, and the needs of a disabled child.” She expects that the new health care reforms will help her family stay afloat by helping cover the costs of out-of-pocket medical expenses, but that is only half the battle.
Like a lot of parents, every year when the stores start stocking more backpacks and fewer inflatable pools, she starts worrying about budget cuts and available resources. However, those concerns are magnified by her son’s special needs. Struggling to cover the costs that her health insurance provider refuses to cover during the summer, starts worrying about teacher layoffs in the fall. “The cost to educate a child with a disability is so high,” she explains. “He is in a class with six children, a teacher and a teacher’s aide. I’m holding my breath that next year things will be ok.”
As states like Ohio try to balance budgets and make strategic cuts, children with special needs may be forced into classrooms that are too crowded and understaffed to serve their needs. Why should Renee’s child, or anyone’s child, suffer a reduced quality of education because of what Wall Street has done to the economy? Where is the justice in requiring our children to pay for their misdeeds?
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown introduced the Local Jobs for America Act to provide funds to state and local government to save and create local jobs, and the passage of this bill may be exactly what parents like Renee need to keep teachers on the job.
Renee’s life demonstrates how we are all connected in this economy, how we are all in this mess together. When we lay off teachers to cut budgets, we jeopardize the future of our children, and the children who are most at risk and vulnerable often have to shoulder more than their fair share of the burden. Investing in our kids is probably the most humane and sound investment we can make, but without legislation like for the Local Jobs for America Act we will soon be shortchanging their future and our own. And in the short run, keeping teachers on the job puts money in the pockets of working people, who will spend it and boost business.
We’ve seen how investing in Wall Street works out. It’s time to get our priorities straight and invest more in our communities and our families instead.
By Eric Cromer — Working America Member, Ohio
The new global economy has become a “race to the bottom” to see which nation is capable of producing the greatest quantity of products with the lowest paid workers. As manufactures save dollars with a non-domestic workforce, the American consumer has seen a steady rise in basic costs for housing, education and health care. American employers and corporations are finally paying the price for their poor decisions, with the highest recorded level of workers who are dissatisfied with their jobs. I have to admit, I’m hardly surprised.
Our great nation transformed from a nation of farmers, frontiersmen, trail blazers, and risk takers into the most envied industrial superpower of the globe after World War II. Our soldiers came home from the war to easily find stable work that would last them a lifetime, with unions setting standards in pay, benefits and safety; this security fueled a housing and baby boom. Today many of our soldiers come home to find a foreclosure note on their door and an anemic job market. Should it be of any surprise that a meager 45% of Americans are happy with their current jobs?
While we are all neighbors on a global scale, should our goal as world inhabitants be to see which countries’ workers can be ripped off the worst? Should we sacrifice all the hard earned lessons of social justice of the past so we can buy that item at Wal-Mart so inexpensively? What would be the result if the pictures of the factory workers from whatever nation that made that inexpensive item you where about purchase where put on the box for you to see the conditions they worked in? Would you still buy if you saw a child working not older than your elementary school student with tired eyes and ragged clothes? What would this child say if asked if she was satisfied with her own job?
It is not beyond the ability of American pride and ingenuity to reinvent ourselves again and become the envy of the world once more. For this to happen again, many things need to change. These changes need to run from top to bottom, including changing the idea of what it means to have a successful business model. Corporations need to be held accountable to workers and our communities again.
As I’ve seen in my own life, working people bear the costs of bad management, while the super-rich walk away with all of the wealth we create. I spent 15 loyal years working for General Motors to start on an assembly line, and finished my career being the last group of elected Union Leaders. We had the very sad duty of helping carve out a closing agreement for a plant that had been around since the 1920’s and helped to sustain a vibrant and middle class community for nearly 90 years. Unhappy employees were not to blame for the lack of product planning and development that brought the demise of a once great American icon. But we sure as heck got blamed for it.
I began a new path in my life and recently completed nursing school because the opportunity to work in a factory like the one that closed its doors seemed like an unattainable fantasy. I took pride in manufacturing a product and building something that people could find a use for, but my pride and that of the other workers did not keep the plant open or prevent housing foreclosures.
We cannot continue to let communities of working families die in America. We cannot sit idly by as board members and CEOs decide that the best thing for our country is to fire all of the American workers as they ship our jobs overseas. When employment security returns, and employers are able to show their employees some loyalty again we will start to see a happier workforce. Then there will be people to buy American-made products again.
By Ashley Keith — Ohio
Walter from Cincinnati once owned a small IT business and used his computer expertise to help people solve their technological problems. He is engaging, intelligent, and understands how to navigate the temperamental waters of computers in an age of constant updates, upgrades, and innovation. Unfortunately, he had to close his business in 2001 because he was unable to compete with larger companies. Since the closing of his business, Walter has had a difficult time maintaining steady employment. He has primarily worked restaurant jobs for the last nine years. For the last two and a half weeks he has worked in the maintenance department for a national retail chain after four weeks of being unemployed. There are so many people in this economy who are working in fields and positions that don’t let them fully use their potential, but Walter faces an additional challenge: he was convicted of a felony 20 years ago.
In a time when foreclosures are making headlines across the country and adult children have to move back in with parents after college graduation, everyone knows the job market is oversaturated. The nation’s best talent is ripe for the picking. Many people will have little sympathy for someone in Walter’s position. Some will say that Walter made his bed, and now he has to sleep in it. But what good does it do any of us to waste the potential of people who have already repaid their debt to society? Working people come in all forms, shapes, sizes, and from various backgrounds.
When we as working families were stronger and better organized, the American Dream was a reality for a lot of us. It actually seemed like anyone could work hard to accomplish their goals, and we were a nation that gave people enormous opportunities to succeed. But today we are living in the Right Wing Dream, created by decades of policies that weakened unions, encouraged outsourcing, and gave Wall Street free reign to cause a re-run of the Great Depression. Now it seems that the American Dream is only available if you have five years of specialized experience, an advanced degree, a spotless past, three recommendations, and a relationship with someone who can open doors for you…and that’s just to get your resume on the top of the stack.
When workers are faced with desperate choices and employers have only one position for every five unemployed workers, people in Walter’s position are some of the first left out in the cold. I often hear people say things like “pay your debt to society” or “serve the time you deserve” when people pick up the controversial topic of our penal system, but when that time is over and that debt is paid what happens next? The issue of job creation is really about what kind of country we want to be. Do we want to be a creative, productive country where we strive to give everyone an opportunity to use their talents, skills and abilities, or do we want to create an underclass of workers who are kept on the margins, just scraping by?
By Kimberly McMurray — Philadelphia
I have heard time and time again that it is insufferably cliché to start a piece of writing with a quote from somebody else. However, I must acknowledge that sometimes a famous dead writer can express an idea far better than I can. Thus, it is with slight trepidation and a full understanding of the risks that I give you a sentence I stumbled upon in Kurt Vonnegut’s Palm Sunday, “What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
In our age of technological decadence, where many people are more connected to their Facebook pages than to their neighbors, Working America goes back to the roots of community organizing. Sure, we send out emails and post on blogs, but more than that, we knock on doors. Every night, Working America organizers interrupt roughly a thousand dinners and tv shows around the country to talk to real people about the economic issues facing the middle class. We sign up members and help constituents write letters to their elected officials. We form connections in communities. This is what makes us strong.
A couple weeks ago, an organizer in the Pittsburgh office named Austin went out for the night. He knocked on the door of an unemployed machinist. The man, wearing a Penn State t-shirt, told Austin how he had been looking for steady work for months but had been unable to find anything. He was experiencing firsthand the plight of the middle class in this economy and understood how isolating unemployment can be, day after day searching for work with no reward. He signed up as a member and thanked Austin for stopping by.
A few houses down, Austin met another man who wasn’t quite as on board with our issues. This man told Austin that without government intervention, businesses would be able to work their way out of this economic downturn and then hire more people. Austin very easily could have walked away after this, taken his clipboard in search of a more supportive person at another door. But he didn’t. “What do you do?” he asked the man. It turned out he was a small business owner. It turned out that just that month he had hired two machinists and was looking for one more.
“Did you know that your neighbor down there is an unemployed machinist and has been scrambling to pay his bills and feed his family for months?” The man had no idea. It was a quiet community, the neighbors didn’t really talk. He told Austin to give that man his number, to tell him to call and he would try and find a place for him at his company.
Austin did. Instead of moving on to the next door, he went back and told the man in the Penn State t-shirt that he might have found a job. The man was ecstatic. He called his neighbor right away and scheduled a time for an interview. Austin went on his way.
Connections are what make a community strong, they save us from the utter isolation of unemployment or personal struggles, they make us invested in creating a better future. You can bet that those two men will never forget the night a Working America organizer stopped by, they even might greet each other now when they pass on the sidewalk.
By a TSA Officer and Member of Working America
I came from a strong working class family. I joined a company that was family owned and treated its employees better than anyone else in town. So, you can imagine my surprise when, years later, I became a Transportation Security Administration Officer…an airport screener to the lay person. If private concerns treated their people well, imagine how much better the Federal Government would be.
I was wrong. The Federal Government is little more than a really, really big corporation that doesn’t want to go under, and crunches numbers instead of listening to people. In its vast size, TSA is top heavy without realizing that the left hand doesn’t know what the rights hand is doing. It’s simply too big to be efficient.
So there are flaws, the biggest one being the lack of collective bargaining rights. Oh sure, we have a Union, but no contract. The official statement of the Government, I was told at orientation, is “we don’t acknowledge a union.” Now that the Union has helped Congress created bill H.R. 1881 demanding collective bargaining rights, everything has been stonewalled. Appointments, committees, votes…all on hold for now. And screeners are hanging in the lurch.
We accrue sick leave but are reprimanded when we use it. We are told we must follow Standard Operating Procedures (SOP), but because they are considered “security sensitive information”, there is no printed copy available for us to read. Instead, we’re allowed one hour a week to log onto government computers and request a disc to look at. When we violate the SOP we again are reprimanded. The SOP is so convoluted even our Supervisors are unclear about it.
Despite a sanctioned Safety Committee, we are the walking wounded. We get hurt lugging oversized baggage, we get bumped and trampled in a crowded airport checkpoint, and get worn down from having to follow protocol of carrying everything to an inspection table 30 feet away, searching the bag then rerunning it through the x-ray. Once, twice maybe. But dozens upon dozens of times a day and the body starts to rebel. Those injured are put on workers compensation and are placed in useless, humiliating places around the airport. Rather than rethink how the checkpoint is laid out, management tries to find newer ways to expedite the passenger lines.
My point is, there’s more to a good job than a good wage and good benefits. Employees must be treated with respect and listened to. When you feel that you’re a very small cog in a very big wheel, you lose your incentive to be your best. If employers don’t value their personnel, they’re missing out on a valuable asset that could so easily be realized.
Tags: occupational safety and health, TSA, unions
By Lynda Hiller — Working America member, Pennsylvania
My name is Lynda Hiller and I joined Working America when an organizer came to my home in Coplay, Pennsylvania. My family has been struggling because of the economy for two years now and when the canvasser came to my door, I felt like someone finally cared. I wanted to share my story.
Only a couple months ago, I started to think that things were changing in America. We have a president who cares about the little people, about the working class. We finally passed healthcare reform, and we were getting close to holding Wall St. accountable for gambling with our economy.
But then, for the second time this year, the Senate went on vacation without voting to extend unemployment benefits. The economy has not improved, and they left those struggling with unemployment with nowhere to turn. That same week, we got a letter from the bank that our house was being foreclosed on.
We originally took a mortgage out with one bank, but at some point, it was sold to a third party. A few years later, we took out a small second mortgage which was then sold in pieces to another financial institution. So now we are dealing with multiple banks as we struggle to keep our house.
We are not frivolous people. We made payments on time as best as we could until I was diagnosed with cancer and started undergoing chemotherapy treatments. During this time, it took all my strength just to survive. I couldn’t write a check, I couldn’t remember the payment schedule. All I could concentrate on was beating the cancer. While I was undergoing treatments, my husband lost his job. Our bills kept piling up, and soon they became unmanageable.
My husband has been actively looking for work for two years now. He has applied to everything he can find, at some places multiple times, but nothing has turned up. We have been surviving on the unemployment benefits.
We have tried to follow the rules and we have taken every step that you can take. We applied for a Home Affordable Modification Program but were told that we didn’t meet the criteria. What are the criteria? It’s still a big secret. We have written letters of hardship. We have talked to every person imaginable at the banks or local programs, but have not seen any action. I have given up my pride and have begged every organization in our time in need. We want to be able to pay. We want to work something out with the bank, but have only found dead ends.
In this terrible economy, it all comes back to Wall Street hurting Main Street. This family needs a miracle. They have hurt us in every aspect.
We have been in this house for five years, if we lose it I don’t know where we will turn. We have had to start over before, and I know that we can again. But no one should have to do that. We are a working class family. We don’t go on vacations, we try not to spend a lot on groceries, but without our house, we won’t have anything. Our elected officials need to start looking out for Main St. and extend unemployment benefits until our economy truly begins to recover.
Tags: mortgage crisis, unemployment
By Ashley Keith - Ohio
Bambi is funny, energetic, hard working … and has been unemployed for three years. Last week, I had the pleasure of talking to her at her home in Canton, OH. We sat on her back porch over-looking her garden of budding tomato plants, peppers and beans, as she explained that she can’t afford these items in the grocery store. So she grows them herself.
Bambi has lived her life doing everything she thought she was supposed to do as a working class mother. She started working as a tow truck driver at the age of 18. She stuck with it for 10 years in spite of the challenges, including dealing with a gun being pulled on her, until one day she was crushed between two cars while working. She suffered severe damage to her right leg, an injury that still limits her mobility and ability to stand for long periods of time. Even with this injury Bambi continued to hold various positions throughout her adult life to support herself and her daughter. She was eventually able to send her daughter to college to become a school teacher.
In spite of applying for countless jobs in the last three years, Bambi hasn’t been able to find work. “I think I’m a few years too young to retire, but a few years too old for most employers to hire me,” she explains. Although Bambi has paid off the mortgage for her home, she still struggles to pay her property taxes because she can’t find work. Bambi’s daughter and son-in-law, both of whom are public school teachers in Virginia, have paid her property taxes for the last few years so that she could stay in her home. As they send these funds to sustain their mother, they worry that their school district will face the same massive lay-offs or cut backs that other school teachers are facing.
Bambi’s experience shows the absurdity of the “conventional wisdom” in so much of Washington.
We are told that people who can’t find work are lazy, but with 6 people applying for every job opening, some of the people who need the jobs the most are bound to slip through the crack. We are told that teachers should be laid off, and we should sell out our kids’ education because we are in a recession. But those jobs are sustaining families and communities and businesses around the country, and what sense does it make to sell out our kids’ education to pay for Wall Street’s crimes?
We hear plenty of stories of bad mortgage deals, and we are often confronted with the argument that we as a society had to learn “lessons” about personal responsibility and living within our means. What about people like Bambi who are responsible, who have lived within their means…unfortunately, even those of us who own our homes can barely hold onto them when work disappears.
Bambi’s life also shows how we are connected. When we can’t find work, we can’t pay our property taxes, and when we can’t pay our taxes schools lose revenue. Cutting education will only make it harder to compete for jobs in the future. It is a vicious cycle, and Wall Street’s recklessness is the root of the problem. Bambi also shows us the solution: we need to have the courage to speak out about what is happening with us, stand together, and hold the people who caused the crisis responsible for what they have done. Otherwise, working families will continue to struggle to make it, fighting over the scraps they have left us.
Tags: unemployment
By Lynne Bolton — Minnesota
Solidarity. In the labor movement, we use that word a lot. In my job, I use it every day. It has become as much a part of my daily language as “hello” or “thank you”.
On Thursday, June 10, 2010, in the Twin Cities Metro area that word becomes more than just a concept. It takes physical shape as 12,000 nurses from the Minnesota Nurses Association begin a 24 hour strike to make sure that hospital CEO’s put patients before profits, and provide the nursing staff needed for safe quality care.
In early May the Working America Twin Cities office joined over 300 Minnesota Nurses at a picket line in Coon Rapids – to show solidarity.
We joined them again a week later in St. Paul.
Shortly afterwards, we went to downtown Minneapolis, and this time not only Working America staff joined in, but so did passers-by.
Solidarity.
At the same time, Working America began collecting petition signatures in support of Minnesota Nurses as they bargained. As hospital CEO’s get richer, nurses were asked to work less hours, receive fewer benefits, and most frightening of all, have their patient load increased, potentially endangering patients. In the 4 weeks that we asked for petitions, over 3,000 Working America members - folks who don’t have the benefit of a union in their workplace, folks who know what it means to work hard to take care of their families - have said “I support Minnesota Nurses”.
And they tell stories. A member in Blaine told us that he had some medical problems. He said “The doctors healed me, but the nurses saved my life”. A woman spoke of her husband who had surgery for cancer spoke about the lack of available nurses for her husband who needed one-on-one care – because they were understaffed. And then there was the woman who was in the hospital for 4 months. Nurses worked overtime to be with her, so she didn’t have to go to assisted living. These members have seen nurses care for them, so they care for nurses.
Then there’s the member in Minneapolis. A young woman who works as a contract nurse and told her agency that no matter how much money they offer her, she won’t work on Thursday.
Tonight I attended a vigil at a church in St. Paul in honor of those nurses. There were many speakers, who were passionate and well spoken in the defense of Minnesota Nurses. They spoke about how these nurses were taking a risk for all of us by speaking out for patients. They spoke of their own personal stories on how nurses have affected their lives. They spoke of the need for the most vulnerable of our population – those that are sick – to keep their dignity as they get well. Most importantly, they spoke of the need for all of us to stand shoulder to shoulder with those nurses tomorrow as they walk that picket line.
Solidarity in the struggle.
(If you live in the Twin Cities Metro Area and would like to join the Minnesota Nurses as they picket, please visit the website for locations. If you cannot join the strike, but want to support MN Nurses, please call a hospital CEO.)
