Linda Tirado - Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America

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Copyright 2014 by Linda Tirado

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ISBN 978-0-698-17528-0

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For Tom, who cant say I didnt warn him

Contents Foreword By Barbara Ehrenreich

I ve been waiting for this book for a long time. Well, not this book, because I never imagined that the book I was waiting for would be so devastatingly smart and funny, so consistently entertaining and unflinchingly on target. In fact, I would like to have written it myselfif, that is, I had lived Linda Tirados life and extracted all the hard lessons she has learned. I am the author of Nickel and Dimed , which tells the story of my own brief attempt, as a semi-undercover journalist, to survive on low-wage retail and service jobs. Tirado is the real thing.

After my book came out in 2001, I spent over ten years on the road talking about it at union conferences, church gatherings, and mostly on college campuses. I did this partly for the money because I had lost my best-paying journalistic job in 1997, and then a few years later the media decided that writers no longer needed to be paid at all, as if writing involves no caloric expenditure whatsoever.

But I also did it because I was on a mission. People often asked how my work for Nickel and Dimed changed me, and I think they meant how did it make me, as a middle-class person, more aware of the poor. Well, I didnt need that much more awareness since I was born into the lower rung of the working class and managed to re-land in it by becoming a single mother and then marrying a warehouse worker when I was in my thirties. So my stint as a low-wage worker/journalist had only one major effect on me: It moved me from concern about the exploitation of low-wage workersto something more like rage.

I had expected to experience material deprivation in my life at $7 an hour (the equivalent of about $9 today), and I certainly did. The fact that I had some built-in privileges like a working car (I got a Rent-A-Wreck in each of the cities where I worked so I wouldnt end up writing a book about waiting for buses) only made the deprivation part more shocking. Here I wasin good health, with no small children in my careworking full-time, sometimes more than one job at time, sometimes to the point where my legs felt like rubber, and I was living in a dump and dining at convenience stores or Wendys.

What I had not expected was the daily humiliation, the insults and what seemed like mean-spirited tricks. To be poor is to be treated like a criminal, under constant suspicion of drug use and theft. It means having no privacy, since the boss has the legal right to search your belongings for stolen items. It involves being jerked around unaccountably, like the time Wal-Mart suddenly changed my schedule, obliterating the second job I had lined up. It means being ordered to work through injuries and illness, like the debilitating rash I once acquired from industrial-strength cleaning fluids.

And what was most amazing to me: Being a low-wage worker means being robbed by the very employer who is monitoring you so insistently for theft. You can be forced to work overtime without pay or made to start working forty-five minutes before the time clock starts ticking. If you do the math, you may find that a few more hours have been shaved off your paycheck each week by the corporations computers.

But when I made my way from campus to campus, telling my stories about work and urging students to take an interest in all the low-wage workers who were making their education possible every daythe food service workers, janitors, clerical workers, and adjunct facultyI was invariably asked the question that boils down to: Whats wrong with these people? Meaning the workers, not their bosses.

Typically, the questioner would be a frat boy who had taken Econ 101, a course which exists, as far as I can see, for the sole purpose of convincing young people that the existing class structure is just, fair, and unchangeable anyway. If theres nothing wrong with our economic arrangements, then the only remaining question is: Why do these people have children, lack savings, fail to go to college, eat junk food, smoke cigarettes, or whatever else is imagined to be holding them back?

So when I came across Linda Tirados blog about six months ago, I felt an enormous wave of vindication. Evenor, perhaps, especiallyher admission that she smokes cigarettes hit me like a gust of fresh air. She tells what its like to be a low-wage worker for the long term, with an erratically employed husband and two small children to raise and support. She makes all the points I have been trying to make in my years of campaigning for higher wages and workers rights: That poverty is not a culture or a character defect; it is a shortage of money. And that that shortage arises from grievously inadequate pay, aggravated by constant humiliation and stress, as well as outright predation by employers, credit companies, and even law enforcement agencies.

But let me get out of the way now. She can tell this so much better than I can.

Introduction

I n the fall of 2013, I was in my first semester of school in a decade. I had two jobs; my husband, Tom, was working full-time; and we were raising our two small girls. It was the first time in years that we felt like maybe things were looking like theyd be okay for a while.

After a particularly grueling shift at work, I was unwinding online when I saw a question from someone on a forum I frequented: Why do poor people do things that seem so self-destructive? I thought I could at least explain what Id seen and how Id reacted to the pressures of being poor. I wrote my answer to the question, hit post, and didnt think more about it for at least a few days. This is what it said:

WHY I MAKE TERRIBLE DECISIONS, OR, POVERTY THOUGHTS Theres no way to structure this coherently. They are random observations that might help explain the mental processes. But often, I think that we look at the academic problems of poverty and have no idea of the why. We know the what and the how, and we can see systemic problems, but its rare to have a poor person actually explain it on their own behalf. So this is me doing that, sort of. Rest is a luxury for the rich. I get up at 6 a.m., go to school (I have a full course load, but I only have to go to two in-person classes), then work, then I get the kids, then I pick up my husband, then I have half an hour to change and go to Job 2. I get home from that at around 12:30 a.m., then I have the rest of my classes and work to tend to. Im in bed by 3. This isnt every day, I have two days off a week from each of my obligations. I use that time to clean the house and soothe Mr. Martini and see the kids for longer than an hour and catch up on schoolwork. Those nights Im in bed by midnight, but if I go to bed too early I wont be able to stay up the other nights because Ill fuck my pattern up, and I drive an hour home from Job 2 so I cant afford to be sleepy. I never get a day off from work unless I am fairly sick. It doesnt leave you much room to think about what you are doing, only to attend to the next thing and the next. Planning isnt in the mix. When I was pregnant the first time, I was living in a weekly motel for some time. I had a minifridge with no freezer and a microwave. I was on WIC. I ate peanut butter from the jar and frozen burritos because they were 12/$2. Had I had a stove, I couldnt have made beef burritos that cheaply. And I needed the meat, I was pregnant. I might not have had any prenatal care, but I am intelligent enough to eat protein and iron whilst knocked up. I know how to cook. I had to take Home Ec to graduate high school. Most people on my level didnt. Broccoli is intimidating. You have to have a working stove, and pots, and spices, and youll have to do the dishes no matter how tired you are or theyll attract bugs. It is a huge new skill for a lot of people. Thats not great, but its true. And if you fuck it up, you could make your family sick. We have learned not to try too hard to be middle class. It never works out well and always makes you feel worse for having tried and failed yet again. Better not to try. It makes more sense to get food that you know will be palatable and cheap and that keeps well. Junk food is a pleasure that we are allowed to have; why would we give that up? We have very few of them. The closest Planned Parenthood to me is three hours. Thats a lot of money in gas. Lots of women cant afford that, and even if you live near one you probably dont want to be seen coming in and out in a lot of areas. Were aware that we are not having kids, were breeding. We have kids for much the same reasons that I imagine rich people do. Urge to propagate and all. Nobody likes poor people procreating, but they judge abortion even harder. Convenience food is just that. And we are not allowed many conveniences. Especially since the Patriot Act passed, its hard to get a bank account. But without one, you spend a lot of time figuring out where to cash a check and get money orders to pay bills. Most motels now have a no-credit-card-no-room policy. I wandered around SF for five hours in the rain once with nearly a thousand dollars on me and could not rent a room even if I gave them a $500 cash deposit and surrendered my cell phone to the desk to hold as surety. Nobody gives enough thought to depression. You have to understand that we know that we will never not feel tired. We will never feel hopeful. We will never get a vacation. Ever. We know that the very act of being poor guarantees that we will never not be poor. It doesnt give us much reason to improve ourselves. We dont apply for jobs because we know we cant afford to look nice enough to hold them. I would make a super legal secretary, but Ive been turned down more than once because I dont fit the image of the firm, which is a nice way of saying gtfo, pov. I am good enough to cook the food, hidden away in the kitchen, but my boss wont make me a server because I dont fit the corporate image. I am not beautiful. I have missing teeth and skin that looks like it will when you live on B and coffee and nicotine and no sleep. Beauty is a thing you get when you can afford it, and thats how you get the job that you need in order to be beautiful. There isnt much point trying. Cooking attracts roaches. Nobody realizes that. Ive spent a lot of hours impaling roach bodies and leaving them out on toothpick spikes to discourage others from entering. It doesnt work, but is amusing. Free only exists for rich people. Its great that theres a bowl of condoms at my school, but most poor people will never set foot on a college campus. We dont belong there. Theres a clinic? Great! Theres still a copay. Were not going. Besides, all theyll tell you at the clinic is that you need to see a specialist, which, seriously? Might as well be located on Mars for how accessible it is. Low-cost and sliding scale sound like money you have to spend to me, and they cant actually help you anyway. I smoke. Its expensive. Its also the best option. You see, I am always, always exhausted. Its a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and I feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed. It is not a good decision, but it is the only one that I have access to. It is the only thing I have found that keeps me from collapsing or exploding. I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I dont pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing? Its not like the sacrifice will result in improved circumstances; the thing holding me back isnt that I blow five bucks at Wendys. Its that now that I have proven that I am a Poor Person that is all that I am or ever will be. It is not worth it to me to live a bleak life devoid of small pleasures so that one day I can make a single large purchase. I will never have large pleasures to hold on to. Theres a certain pull to live what bits of life you can while theres money in your pocket, because no matter how responsible you are you will be broke in three days anyway. When you never have enough money it ceases to have meaning. I imagine having a lot of it is the same thing. Poverty is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain. Its why you see people with four different babydaddies instead of one. You grab a bit of connection wherever you can to survive. You have no idea how strong the pull to feel worthwhile is. Its more basic than food. You go to these people who make you feel lovely for an hour that one time, and thats all you get. Youre probably not compatible with them for anything long term, but right this minute they can make you feel powerful and valuable. It does not matter what will happen in a month. Whatever happens in a month is probably going to be just about as indifferent as whatever happened today or last week. None of it matters. We dont plan long term because if we do well just get our hearts broken. Its best not to hope. You just take what you can get as you spot it. I am not asking for sympathy. I am just trying to explain, on a human level, how it is that people make what look from the outside like awful decisions. This is what our lives are like, and here are our defense mechanisms, and here is why we think differently. Its certainly self-defeating, but its safer. Thats all. I hope it helps make sense of it.Next page