For Low-Wage Earners, Life Just Gets Tougher

Around the first of each month, when Caryn Manning’s welfare money rolls in and her first paycheck has been cashed, the Simi Valley single mom walks a financial tightrope frayed by shifting priorities.

Without fail, there is enough money to pay the rent and make the monthly installment on her aging Toyota. And she is always able to squeeze out enough from her $5-an-hour job to put food on the table.

But as with low-wage workers everywhere--targets of a heated campaign to boost the minimum wage--the rest of Manning’s world is driven by the kinds of hard choices that confront those who live hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck.

She wants to buy her 3-year-old daughter a new pair of shoes, but the phone bill is past due and her car is threateningly close to needing repairs. She wants her 8-year-old son to attend after-school programs at the Boys & Girls Club, but because she can’t scrape together the $55 a month it takes for the vanpool, he has to stay home.

Last month, short on grocery money, Manning was forced to raid a $30 nest egg she had set aside for a trip to Disneyland, putting the Magic Kingdom out of reach for now.

“It’s not easy holding it together,” said Manning, 30, who clears about $150 a week cleaning up and doing day care at a Simi Valley bowling alley five days a week. Her meager wages allow her to qualify for an additional $495 a month in government assistance.

“For us, it’s paycheck to paycheck, there’s nothing left over,” she said. “But the fact is, there aren’t a lot of jobs out there where I can make enough to support us.”

This is the world of the working poor, a place where anonymous laborers pick crops and polish cars, stock shelves and straighten hotel rooms, often for wages that don’t generate enough cash to keep their families off welfare or out of poverty.

It is a world of no car insurance or health insurance, no sick days or vacation days or time off with pay.

It is a world where each day is heavy with worry that the car will break down or the kids will get sick or that some other crisis will come along and dig an even deeper financial hole.

And it is a world where an intense political battle is brewing, one that pits advocates for the poor against business interests over the fundamental question of how best to lift working families out of poverty.

Labor advocates estimate that tens of thousands of Ventura County households stand to benefit from a proposed increase in the minimum wage, which has held steady in California at $4.25 an hour since 1988.

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On Thursday, the House pushed through legislation to increase the minimum wage to $5.15 an hour over the next 13 months. The 90-cent-an-hour raise is expected to have a tougher time getting through the Senate.

At the state level, a measure likely headed for the November ballot would boost the hourly minimum to $5.75 by March 1998.

Supporters of the ballot measure say that 1.9 million workers statewide, who earn $5.75 an hour or less, would benefit directly from the initiative. And they say the wage hike would ripple up through the labor market, boosting the pay of hundreds of thousands of other low-wage workers.

The measure could especially help workers in such areas as Ventura County, labor advocates and economists say. The county--ranked among the state’s least affordable regions in terms of home ownership--has in recent years experienced a rise in service-oriented, lower-paying jobs as higher-paying sectors have shrunk or vanished.

“We’re talking about starvation wages,” said Richard Holober, campaign manager for Liveable Wage Coalition, the San Francisco-based labor group spearheading the initiative. “We need to send a message that as a society we reward hard work, we don’t punish it. And at $4.25 an hour, that’s punishment.”

But in reality, supporters of the measure acknowledge, few people will be lifted out of poverty by elevating the wage floor as suggested.

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In fact, the proposed hourly minimum for California still falls 50 cents an hour short of lifting a family of three above the poverty line. Moreover, critics contend that such a move could lead employers to hire fewer workers and could spur runaway inflation, putting low-wage workers further behind than ever.

“It’s coming at a very bad time,” said Steven Rubenstein, who recently stepped down as executive director of the Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce. “At this time in our suffering economy, all it’s going to do is hurt the very people it’s meant to help, and that’s the workers.”

In Manning’s case, her paycheck before taxes would eventually rise about $25 a week under the state measure. Her annual salary, at her current 33 hours a week, would still be $3,100 below the federal poverty guideline for a family of three.

“Sure it sounds nice, but it won’t make that much of a difference when it comes to my check,” she said. “It will give me a little bit more, but really it’s not going to help me that much.”

Nevertheless, polls reveal overwhelming support for a minimum wage increase, reflecting what labor leaders call growing frustration over stagnant wages and the plight of working families.

Nationwide, some 3.66 million Americans--about 3% of the U.S. work force--earn at or below minimum wage, and 11 million earn less than $5.15 an hour. Inflation has pushed the purchasing power of the minimum wage to its lowest level in 40 years.

Nearly half of all minimum-wage earners nationwide are older than 25; in California, about 40% of the 1.9 million people who earn $5.75 an hour or less are 30 or older. The numbers are less certain locally, although in 1990 nearly 50,000 Ventura County residents lived in households that earned the equivalent of $6.09 an hour or less.

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But set aside, for a moment, the minimum wage debate and consider the argument from the perspective of Ventura County’s low-wage work force.

For some, the poverty is subtle. For others, making it from one day to the next presents a momentous struggle that weighs heavily on dreams and wears hard on the soul.

Consider 39-year-old Jose Castro. Six days a week, for $4.25 an hour, he scrubs and polishes cars and trucks at an Oxnard carwash until his muscles ache and sweat lathers his brow.

He has been at it 2 1/2 years. There has been no hint of a pay raise, he said, in all that time.

“Every month, the money runs out,” said Castro, sitting on a milk crate outside the house where he rents a room in Oxnard’s La Colonia barrio. “For workers like us, the minimum wage doesn’t add up.”

Indeed, half his $600 a month take-home pay goes toward rent. The rest goes to buy food, pay bills and send money--$100 in a good month--to his wife and four children in Honduras.

When he immigrated 15 years ago, he hoped to save enough money to eventually send for his family. Today, he can barely afford to call home and hasn’t seen them in nearly three years.

“There is no reason that a worker, who has proven himself and proven he is responsible on the job, should have to work for such wages,” he said. “If someone works 30 or 40 hours a week, he should be able to provide for his family without help from the government. But that is impossible on minimum wage. Tell me, where is the justice in that?”

Stevie Tesh knows of injustices and impossibilities.

The 42-year-old mother of three stocks shelves at a Simi Valley Pic ‘N’ Save, earning $4.50 an hour on the graveyard shift. She wants to save enough to get her family off the streets.

Since losing their four-bedroom home a few years ago, Tesh, her husband, Tim, and their three school-age children have been living in a trailer hauled around by an old van with a bad engine.

In fact, her first paycheck a few weeks ago--$85 after taxes for working 21 hours--was swallowed whole by the never-ending struggle to keep the vehicle up and running.

“If I didn’t get welfare, there is no way I could make it,” said Tesh, who passes her days with other homeless people at Rancho Simi Community Park a few blocks from the house she and her husband lost to foreclosure. “Four dollars and fifty cents an hour is not going to get me out of this hole. If anything, it’s going to make a bigger hole where I might never see daylight again.”

It wasn’t always this bad. For a good long stretch, Tim earned enough money working newspaper presses in the San Fernando Valley to support the family by himself.

But when he was injured on the job a few years ago, the family quickly slid down the economic ladder, reduced from a solid, middle-income existence to one dependent on public aid and charity.

Now, they are considering a move to the San Fernando Valley where rental housing is cheaper and a few hundred dollars can move you into a place.

“We were doing great,” Stevie Tesh said. “But when we lost the house, it just kept getting worse and worse and worse. Now we’re getting so far behind, before you know it we’ll never be able to catch up.”

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For Tesh and other low-skilled workers, this is the real tragedy of the low-wage world. For teenagers looking to make pocket change, flipping burgers for $4.50 an hour might be enough. But for families flirting with financial collapse, or those that have already tumbled, there is little comfort in a future that holds, at best, the continued prospect of sub-poverty wages.

“Never in a million years did I think this would happen to us,” Tesh said. “It kills me to see the kids, because their lives are so disrupted. It’s hard on them, and it makes it harder on me when I see how hard it is on them.”

Indeed, the world of the working poor is probably least understood by the children.

Wheeling a shopping cart up and down the aisles of a Santa Paula grocery store, Maria Hernandez endures the onslaught. Her three children ask for ice cream and cookies and fruit juice. Down another row there are calls for sugar-frosted cereal, marshmallows and chocolate topping.

“I always tell them when we go into the store that I’ll buy them a treat if the money lasts,” said Hernandez, 21. “But the money never lasts.”

For the past four years, her 28-year-old husband, Sergio, has been earning the equivalent of minimum wage picking lemons and oranges for piece rate in the emerald valley that unfolds above Fillmore and Santa Paula.

Perhaps no other industry in Ventura County is as riddled with low-wage earners. The average annual pay for a farm worker is $9,102. This would equal about $4.37 an hour if a farm laborer worked a full year, but their mostly seasonal jobs last an average of seven months a year.

To make ends meet, the Hernandezes share a two-bedroom apartment with another family, putting 11 people under one roof. Communal living reflects the kind of alliances forged by those shoved to the shallow end of the labor pool.

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There are other compromises as well. Maria Hernandez said each of her children has a couple of sets of clothes and a single pair of shoes. And though their bellies are always full, she worries that they aren’t getting enough nourishment on a diet of mostly beans and tortillas.

“That’s all we can afford,” she explains, almost apologetically. “If we had just a little more money, it could really help us. I could buy the children more of what they need. Right now, so much of the time, we have nothing.”

Therein lies the crux of the minimum wage debate. In many cases, employers say they would like to pay workers more. But there are profit margins to meet, bottom lines to consider.

Much like the working poor themselves, small-business owners say they walk a tightrope of their own, maintaining a delicate balance between paying the bills and staying afloat financially.

“I’ve talked to a number of growers who say they would like to pay workers more, and in some cases they obviously deserve more,” said Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. “But the fact of the matter is, they don’t generate enough revenue to pay them more. That’s a difficult concept to get across to people.”

Despite record crop production last year, Ventura County growers would be particularly hard hit by the proposed wage increase, Laird said. In agriculture--more so than most other industries--the market dictates product prices.

So although other businesses might be able to pass on the wage increase to consumers, growers say they would have to find other ways to make up added payroll costs. In the long run, Laird said, he thinks a minimum wage increase would probably do workers more harm than good. Although low-wage earners would see their income creep up, inflation would also rise and many workers wouldn’t be able to keep pace.

“It’s great election year politics, but it’s really a cruel hoax,” Laird said. “People are in essence being sold voodoo economics. I don’t think there are going to be any winners, other than those politicians who have the ability to delude people into somehow thinking that there is some benefit to this.”

On that point, there is a rising chorus of agreement.

Claire Hope, executive director of Conejo Youth Employment Service in Thousand Oaks, worries that any boost in the minimum wage will put many of her young clients out of work.

“I think there will be less jobs,” said Hope, noting that the bulk of job referrals offered through her service pay at or near the minimum. “The employers are going to have to cut back, they won’t be able to afford our kids.”

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Bill Plander, whose family owns the Simi Valley bowling alley where Caryn Manning works, and another in Camarillo, said there are a variety of reasons why small businesses like his remain too fragile to simply absorb a minimum wage increase. There are ever-growing utility bills to pay and business licenses to renew, all of which hammer away at profits.

Already, Plander said, the high price of doing business has forced the Camarillo bowling center to the economic margin. And any rise in payroll costs--already the single largest expense--could push the operation over the edge.

Around his businesses, the wage increase likely would translate into fewer jobs, especially for youngsters.

“It’s not a ripple effect, it’s a clean cut,” he said. “It will rip right through here, and the kids are the ones who are going to suffer the most.”

Those in Ventura County who worked to put the minimum wage measure on the November ballot take a different view of the war on poverty.

Starting in January, two dozen volunteers--representing labor unions, advocates for the poor and other interests--collected more than 1,000 signatures as part of the statewide campaign that culminated in mid-April when 772,000 signatures were submitted to state elections officials.

The measure needed the signatures of 476,000 registered voters to qualify for the ballot. A sample taken by the Liveable Wage Coalition revealed that at least 540,000 signatures are valid. No word is expected until mid-June on whether the measure qualifies.

Locally, volunteers said they found widespread public support for the minimum wage increase.

“I think people realize that it’s very hard for working class families to survive today,” said Eileen McCarthy, a legal aid attorney in Oxnard who volunteered for the effort.

“There is something fundamentally wrong about the fact that in the United States, which is supposed to be one of the most developed economic countries in the world, you have people who aren’t participating in this great American prosperity,” McCarthy added. “That is not their existence. Their existence is eking by.”

Ultimately, supporters of the measure acknowledge that they hope the issue has a broader political payoff, one that galvanizes workers and advances a pro-labor agenda.

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“We’ve got to get back to a time where people earn enough money to buy the products they manufacture,” said Vince Ruiz, president of the local chapter of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement--a support arm of the AFL-CIO. “Even with the raise, it’s really not going to get anybody out of poverty. All it’s going to do is give them a little more buying power.”

In truth, what Ruiz and others know is that the low-wage world can be a trap, a treadmill that keeps poor workers running in place and fighting for bite-size pay raises when what they really need is a full meal.

The Rev. Luther McCurtis, who has operated a job placement center in Ventura for the past 27 years, said he tells low-wage workers they need to improve themselves in order to improve their lot in life.

“They need to get into my computer school, or take some college classes, or study real estate or go to night school,” said McCurtis, who sees about 100 job seekers a month at his Ventura Avenue center.

“If you want more, you have to go the extra mile, pick yourself up [by] the bootstraps, make some sacrifices in order to get to the next level,” McCurtis added. “I’m a big believer in prayer, but when you get through praying you need to get up and put legs to your prayer.”

Hanging onto the bottom rung of the labor ladder, Caryn Manning grows weary of the debate.

Sure, she knows that she needs more schooling or training to land a better job and make more money. As a matter of fact, she figures she would need an $8- to $10-an-hour job, 40 hours a week, to be self-sufficient and off public aid.

But as it stands, the tightrope act is treacherous. When her kids are sick, she takes off work and doesn’t get paid for it. When gas prices go up, that takes money out of her wallet and food off her table.

The children’s father pays child support, but Manning said that money goes directly to the government to offset her welfare payments. He and other relatives also chip in to buy toys for the children and give them other things she can’t afford.

“There are a lot of things they would love to have that I just can’t give to them,” she said. “I’m only 30 years old and I definitely want things to improve. But at the moment, it’s too hard to think too far ahead when we’re so busy living every day paycheck to paycheck.”