The down escalator

Low-income families are struggling to pay bills

Lowell Sun

By Stacie Hargis and Robert Forrant
Lowell Sun / April 20, 2008

The recession is coming! The recession is coming! Food prices are going up and all around us people are losing their jobs and their homes. You worry that you might be next. In Greater Lowell, Lucent Technologies recently let go of 5,000 people. Worries over job loss and home foreclosure are on lots of people's minds even at the Sunday dinner table.

According to a report on economic mobility by The Brookings Institution and the Pew Charitable trust "Doing better than one's parents has long been a key element of the American Dream." Their research reveals that upward economic mobility for those born into the nation's bottom economic strata is harder and harder to achieve. According to the report, about 27 percent of all Americans are "riding the tide," making a bit more than their parents, while one-third of Americans are "downwardly mobile" (www.brookings.edu).

However anxious you may get, this is an opportunity to discuss an important issue about jobs and the state of our local and national economies. This conversation concerns everyone and the lead actors are the working poor, thousands of people among us in the Merrimack River Valley who hold the low-wage jobs in food services, child care, and health care that are integral to our community's well being. We need to discuss their right to decent wages and benefits and see just how this issue connects to our larger economic woes.

Working hard, falling behind

Hard-working individuals holding important, necessary-to-our-community jobs can barely pay their heating, water, health insurance, and mortgage or rent working one job 40 hours a week. Many of these individuals work two or three jobs to achieve bare-minimum self-sufficiency.

Think about this for a second. Lots of folks work 55 or more hours a week just to squeak by. Miss work for a week with a sick child, get hurt and miss a few days on the job, and the wolf is at the door.

According to a 2006 report by the Crittenton Women's Union, a Lowell family with two full-time working adults, one preschooler and one school-age child, must make $15.31 an hour per adult to reach self-sufficiency. In a single-parent household, that wage increases to $27.17 per hour. But, how can families in Lowell and the rest of the region be self-sufficient when nine of 15 of the Commonwealth's largest occupations pay average wages of under $15 an hour? On average, three of the largest Massachusetts occupations adding jobs -- cashiers, food preparation and service workers, and food servers -- pay wages of $9.43 an hour.

Besides not being able to provide self-sufficiency for one's own family, low wages affect the region, too. Families often must rely on government supports to make up the difference to fend off cold winter nights and homelessness. And, even though our neighbors are working, our tax base shrinks.

Families are trapped in the category of the "working poor" -- seems like a contradiction in terms -- and no matter how hard they try, it is next to impossible to escape without a better paying job. Running up the down escalator is a hard way to live.

Caregiving work for non-sustainable pay

Human service work is a fast-growing job field, one expected to add 39,000 workers over the next several years. Similar in size to telecommunications, this field currently makes up 3 percent of the Massachusetts workforce. These workers provide direct, hands-on care to individuals at group homes, to seniors, and to clients with developmental disabilities. Social workers who are part of this field often must have a bachelor's degree to be hired.

For a human service worker's average hourly pay of $9, they get to work in difficult and stressful conditions. Do the math. Someone works 40 hours a week to take home barely $300 after taxes. With the price of a shopping cart of food rising, is it any wonder that the Massachusetts Council of Human Service Providers reports the turnover rate in most of these jobs approaches 50 percent?

Justine, a hard-working mother of two, relies on her ex-husband's mother to watch her youngest child during the day and both children at night while she jumps from her first job at a senior center to her second job cleaning offices from 6 p.m. until midnight. When she wakes up her kids to bring them home, her school-age daughter often asks with sad eyes, "Where have you been?" Justine is lucky that she has a helping hand with child care or most of the wages from her second job would go towards such care for her children.

Isreal, a direct care-giver at a group home for at-risk teens, sadly tells the story of having to miss his daughter's first birthday because he was "locked-in" at work. Due to a lack of staff he could not leave work when his scheduled shift was over. Heart-wrenching stories like these unfold day after day across the commonwealth as the working poor struggle to make ends meet by doubling up on jobs.

This second job syndrome results in tired workers who are more prone to injuries and lack concentration. Folks working a second job are also more likely to quit, causing disruptions in staffing. Parents are often unable to attend their children's school functions, missing out on an important aspect of family life. The very people who care for our most vulnerable citizens are barely able to care for their families and themselves.

There is a better way

Human service workers are fighting for higher wages through the Campaign for Quality Human Services in the Massachusetts Legislature. If your family has not yet come in contact with a human-service worker, it is only a matter of time. As we live longer, many of us will have a caretaker. Don't you want someone who can give the attention and care you deserve? Don't you want a caretaker who isn't consumed with two or three jobs? Or has to worry about how to pay for the week's groceries?

The Service Employees International Union Local 509, the largest union of human-service workers in Massachusetts, is helping to lead the legislative effort. The goal is to push for improved quality of care to dependent individuals and an improved quality of life for caregivers. A major component of the Campaign is House Bill 1863, currently in the committee on House Rules, which will provide a $2 an hour increase in wages for covered workers. To see the proposed bill and more information please visit www.seiu509.org.

According to Cliff Cohn, SEIU's Director of Operations, "Human-service workers are uniting to increase standards and training so quality of care will increase in our agencies. We're uniting to support House Bill 1863 to bring more accountability for families and persons with disability. More training will be required for employees in exchange for a living wage. We see this as a win-win for persons with disabilities, families and the people who provide human services."

Separate from the Campaign, but another serious health-care issue affecting our regional economy is sick days. We've been speaking about wages, but paid sick days are a great example of benefits that can add to the quality of life for the working poor. Nearly 1.5 million workers here in Massachusetts don't get paid sick days. A child may get sick or an elderly parent may need immediate care, but these workers don't have any options. These workers, mostly women, face the dilemma of losing a job and valuable income or staying home to take care of family members.

Shouldn't we all have the opportunity to properly care for our families and balance a job? It is time for us to start talking about the right to decent wages and benefits and how this fits into the current recession.

We can raise wages and close the inequality gap by supporting living wage campaigns, supporting unions and helping people to hold onto their assets. This means urging legislators to support the Campaign for Quality Human Services, to back paid sick days, and to do everything they can to save homes from foreclosure.

If reaching the "American Dream" is to own a house and attain self-sufficiency, that dream has become an "American Nightmare" for many, with home foreclosures and low wages affecting a sizable portion of the Merrimack Valley's population. And because generational mobility is becoming a thing of the past, the working poor may only have the promise of poor jobs, poor benefits, and poor working conditions to pass on to their children.

If the tide can make all boats rise, it can also make all boats fall. This is why a conversation about the economy concerns us all.

Stacie Hargis is a graduate student and Robert Forrant a professor in the Department of Regional Economic and Social Development at UMass Lowell. They can be reached at Robert_Forrant@uml.edu.