I come from a generation of planners. We studied for the SATs, went to college, picked a major that would hopefully lead to a career, and ignored the voice in the back of our heads reminding us of the time we wanted to be novelists, or baseball players, or underwater basket weavers. We believed that if we worked hard enough, if we took a 9-5 job that only sort of numbed our souls, we could live a life of relative comfort. This plan included health insurance and rent payments, at least in the short term. But then the American Dream crashed down around us in the form of the Great Recession.
Families are losing their homes. Parents are struggling to put food on the table. Senior citizens are rejoining the workforce in their 80s. In all the heartbreaking stories about unemployment, it is easy to lose sight of the young people who have been affected by this crisis.
Rob majored in finance in college because, well, he was told that there would always be jobs in finance. He graduated in May of 2008, six months after the initial Wall St. crash. Living at home, he spent several months looking for jobs with no avail. Finally, he thought that he caught a break. Rob was hired as an intern for an up and coming finance company. They couldn’t pay him at the time, but they promised him stock options in the company and an eventual job once the market turned around. He spent a year dutifully tracking the markets, staring at spreadsheets, and fetching coffee. Six months ago, the company was sold to a larger finance company that laid-off all the previous employees. Two and a half years after graduating college, Rob is back to square one: living at home, depending on his parents, waiting for his life to start.
In some ways, Rob is lucky. He has parents that he can depend on, a degree, experience. At 19, Herman had a job at a warehouse. After working there for about a year and a half, the warehouse laid-off two full shifts of workers. As most of these stories go, Herman was one of those workers. He doesn’t have kids or a mortgage payment yet, but he was just starting. For the past months, he has been struggling to find a job. He has missed rent payments. He has watched the middle be forgotten about, seen crime go up in his community, and lost faith in his government to help those who are struggling. His story is far too common.
My generation doesn’t deserve this world. We followed the rules, we made an effort, and what we were left with was an economy that collapsed as soon as we touched it. I hope we can bounce back.
In a world where no one joins bowling leagues, where few sewing circles exist anymore, I have written a lot about Working America building communities in neighborhoods. There was the general contractor who hired his struggling neighbor, or the stranger in New York who offered to pay for a young boy’s math tutor. There are the thousands of face to face conversations Working America organizers have with people every night at the door. Bear with me, but I have one more story along that vein. Actually, I have a million stories, but this one happened today.
Last week, ten Working America members met at Angela’s house to discuss the current unemployment crisis and the upcoming elections. Over coffee and muffins, they talked about struggling to make mortgage payments, worrying about buying groceries, and epic battles over life-saving unemployment benefits. They came together from all different situations, but they were all united in struggling with unemployment. They had all been hit by the economic crisis and they were all worried about the future.
But one woman stood out. Liz lost her job a year ago and since then she has been struggling with homelessness. Through the winter, she lived out of her car or, if she was able to scrape the money together, a motel room for a night at a time. Since then, she moved into an apartment and worked on piecing her life together. As of our meeting, she was living without electricity or hot water. Her 16 year old son was sleeping on the floor and she wrapped her own mattress in saran wrap to fight the bed bugs. When she spoke, another member reached out to hold her hand.
A few days later, I met with Angela to discuss today’s event. “I just got off the phone with Liz,” Angela said to me as I walked in her door. She ushered me to the kitchen table and poured me a glass of iced tea. “There must be something we can do for her. I know no one in our group has a lot of money, but maybe if we pool something together…” Angela was in problem solving mode. Although she had been struggling with unemployment for two years, she felt like she could help Liz. Through Working America, she could make one more life better.
Today, our group met again. We talked about the economy, unemployment, and we wrote even more postcards to other unemployed members urging them to vote in their economic favor this election season. And afterwards, Angela presented Liz with some basic necessities that she had collected: towels, dishes, a Halloween decoration for her door.
There it is, another story of community. There was the general contractor who hired his struggling neighbor, or the stranger in New York who offered to pay for a young boy’s math tutor, and now there is the member who bought kitchen supplies for another member to help her get back on her feet.
This week marks my one year anniversary canvassing with Working America. As I reflect back on my year and the thousands of doors I have knocked on, I am reminded of the hard hitting reality of what initially attracted me to this organization.
The reality that all too often in our country the term “working family” is synonymous with single mother. 85% of custodial parents in our country are mothers and 79.5% of single mothers are gainfully employed. Only 5% are receiving TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) according to data released by the US Census Bureau in November 2009. We are not a country of welfare mothers. We are a country of hard working single moms who bear the responsibility of rearing the future of our society.
I watched my mother quit her job at the beginning of the Great Recession in order to care for my terminally ill grandmother. The corporation my mother worked for gave her no options or flexibility to balance the responsibilities that economics and culture caused her to bear. After struggling to find employment, she began working in childcare. Ironically, although prices from childcare are consistently rising at a much higher rate than inflation, she barely earns over minimum wage.
I had to juggle two jobs while helping my family care for my father when he became ill last summer and passed in October. Thankfully, through Working America I was able to take time to grieve and make arrangements. My sister on the other hand, was not so lucky. She works for a large retail corporation and was forced to return to work the same week that our dad died. Now my mother is a single mom raising a teenage boy and a five year old.
So what now? Our unemployment rate is teetering at 10% and state budgets are predominantly cutting services for women and children such as Headstart programs, family planning facilities, adoption services and rape crisis centers. When we take away these services that women and children depend on for their survival, we allow corporate greed to run our country. In PA alone, 70% of corporations don’t pay any income tax at all, while women watch services they depend on get cut, and proposals pass for raising their taxes. These women pay their taxes out of every pay check with much needed money that could be used for necessities such as school supplies, groceries or utility bills.
I have spoken with women who have no electricity in their homes because a home without power is better than no home at all. I have spoken with women who work three minimum wage jobs and still cannot make ends meet because of the sky rocketing prices of childcare. I have spoken with women who have been forced out of the workforce in order to care for ailing family members and cannot find any work to return to once they have lost their loved one.
I watch these injustices plague my mother and every night at the door, I talk to dozens of women dealing with the same issues. My message stays the same, “The solution is simple, strength in numbers. We need to hold our politicians accountable to vote in the best of interest of their constituency. They get to vote on these issues every day. We don’t.”
The working class, or what is left of it, is all too often pushed out of the political process in our country There is no time left in the day and questions of paying bills and buying groceries are more prevalent than what is happening on C-Span. So, I will get up tomorrow and the next day and the next and be proud to take knowledge and action to another mother’s door so she can regain her voice all while making dinner, checking homework and paying bills.
“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.
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 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.
I come from a working class family. I hail from coal miners in central Pennsylvania. My uncles are carpenters. My aunts are nurses. I grew up with a single mother who ran a daycare business out of our home. From a young age, I watched her struggle to make ends meet. We ate pasta four times a week. I knew not to ask to go to sleep-away camp.
I started working for Working America because I thought I understood what it was like to worry about money, to be directly affected by corporate and government officials whose decisions have a profound impact on my life. But in many ways, my family was infinitely lucky. My mom had a job. She worked insanely hard, but because she was able to work from home, she was there for me and my brother day in and day out. In this current unemployment crisis, people are lucky to have any job at all, let alone one that lets them make their family a priority.
Last week, the Philadelphia chapter of Working America held an Unemployment Table Talk where members got together to have an informal discussion about how the unemployment crisis has affected them. The economic meltdown hasn’t left anyone unscarred and everyone there had a powerful story. They lived without healthcare. They worried about making mortgage payments.
But one woman stood out to me–maybe because her blond hair reminded me of my mom’s, or because I could see the tough decisions in her eyes. Cheryl was laid off five months ago from her job at a local factory. In an attempt to cut costs, the factory changed its hours to 6:30-6:30 four days a week. While Fridays off might seem like a dream come true to some, 12 hour shifts don’t work when you are simultaneously raising a four year old and a ten year old by yourself. Who is going to get them off to school? Who is going to make sure they do their homework? When Cheryl couldn’t make the new hours work, she was the first one let go.
Cheryl said that her kids come first. She talked about searching for health insurance for them, while she goes without. Of food stamps and welfare. She talked about her choices, or a lack thereof. Cheryl’s older son needs help with math. He is in public school and as the year draws to an end, his teacher recommended that Cheryl enroll him in a special math tutorial. The problem? The program costs $160 and Cheryl is unsure where her next mortgage payment is going to come from.
I want to help him, she said. School should come first, but he is not going to be able to learn math without a roof over his head. So for now, that money will have to go to the bank. Tough decisions. And where will the mortgage payments even come from when her unemployment runs out?
I can see her constant worry, her struggle, and I am instantly transported to 1995 watching my mom balance her checkbook at our kitchen table. Maybe I was just too young to see her tough decisions.
“Losing your job affects everything in your life. It is not just the money–it affects your relationships, your happiness, your dignity.” It was Saturday morning and I was sitting in the kitchen of one of our member’s houses, drinking a glass of water, and listening to his story. Though heartbreaking and unimaginable, it was a story that I had heard before, in different members’ kitchens, in coffee shops, over the phone in my office in Center City, Philadelphia.
William had been laid off from three or four jobs in the last decade. The company would move out of Pennsylvania, or simply go bankrupt. Once, he called in to a job to tell them he was taking vacation, and they told him to pick up his tool belt because they would be closed by the time he got back. And these weren’t perfect jobs. He would start at $9 an hour, taking the night shift so that he could be with his two kids during the day while his wife was at work. But he would work hard, and eventually make it up to $17 an hour or so: enough to make ends meet.
Inevitably though, he would be laid off and have to start all over again. “You never expect to lose your job,” he said, and I could feel the truth of his words. “And here I was, stuck again, trying to survive.” During his time unemployed, William would send out about 20 applications each week, applying for jobs that weren’t in his industry, just trying to make it into the door. Trying to make it anywhere.
This is a common story. Last week, I met with a man named Harold who drove trucks, or at least he used to. For 28 years, he crossed the country, delivering goods where they needed to go. Two years ago, he was laid off, and with that pink slip he also lost his health insurance while his wife was undergoing cancer treatments. For two years he has searched for a job. He has sent applications out everywhere. He has stood in line for hours because of a rumor that a warehouse might be hiring, his resume clutched in his hands.
Every day I hear stories from families just trying to get by, to find work, to gather up some of the things that they lost. The unemployment crisis has reached every sector of our community. The faces of the unemployed are all around us. They are standing in line at the grocery store, figuring out if they have enough to pay. They are searching online at the local library to find out if their benefits have been extended yet. They are offering me a glass of water on a Saturday morning.
“Losing your job affects everything in your life.” I shivered when I heard those words because I have learned just how true they are.
