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News
Street Roots • March 13-19, 2015
Street Roots • March 13-19, 2015
News
you have to explain yourself to anybody
else. As though the poor haven’t been
having children for millennia. Who do you
think is going to work in your restaurants
tomorrow? Your own children? You think
anybody is going to go to the Ivy League
and be a janitor? This is a terrible,
terrible, terrible. On a moral level, it’s a
terrible question to ask. On a practical
level, it’s a stupid question to ask. But,
more importantly, it takes $280,000 to
take a child in the middle class from birth
to college right now. So if you’re going to
start talking to the poor about whether
they have enough money in the bank to
have a child, I’m going to need a certified
letter from everybody saying that they’ve
got $280,000 just sitting around in case of
an accident, in case they lose their job, in
case they have a medical emergency and
they can afford their children in the way
they think their children should be raised.
Living poor
“Hand, to M outh” author Linda Tirado
speaks with Street Roots about her own
experiences living in poverty and the
misperceptions about the working poor
BY JARED PA B E N
STAFF WRITER
n Greek mythology, Sisyphus was
condemned to rolling a boulder to the
top of a hill, an act that required the
greatest exertion, only to have it roll down
again. This pattern would repeat eternally,
and he would never get to the top.
Linda Tirado references Sisyphus in
“Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap
America” to describe the lives of America’s
working poor — always struggling to reach a
comfortable place but never quite getting
there. Her book is about h er own
experiences living in poverty.
“It’s far more demoralizing to work and
be poor than to be unemployed and poor,”
she writes. “I have never minded going
without when I wasn’t working. It sucks not
to be able to find a job, but you expect to be
tired and pissed off and to never be able to
leave your house when you’re flat broke.
Working your balls off, begging for more
hours, hustling every penny you can, and
still not being able to cover your electric bill
with any regularity is soul-killing.”
But, in another way, referencing the myth
of Sisyphus is entirely inappropriate. He
was punished for deceiving the gods on
multiple occasions and sentenced for
committing a crime.
The struggles millions of Americans face
every day are not their fault, Tirado says.
“The economy is not the fault of every
minimum wage worker,” she told m e in a
recent interview. “When 45 million
Americans barely make ends meet, this is
not the fault of somebody who had some
bad luck or made a bad choice that one
time.”
“Hand to Mouth,” released in hardcover
in October, is Tirado’s first book. She landed
the deal with Penguin Books after her
online essay, “Why I Make Terrible
Decisions, or, Poverty Thoughts,” went viral
and was picked up by The Huffington Post,
Forbes and The Nation. Her book is slated
to be released in paperback form in
September.
I
Jared Paben: From reading your book, I
sensed a fairly deep resentment for uihat you
could say were callous employers who expected
more from their staff than they were willing to
pay for. I wonder what messages you might
have for any employers out there who are
reading this interview.
Linda Tirado: Treat your employees like
you would want to be treated yourself. The
problem is that you’ve got folks who are
J.P. I ’m wondering i f you can think o f
any mistakes that you may have made in
your past that would have contributed to
falling through the “porous sponge,”I think
is how you p u t it, into poverty, and, i f so,
what advice would you have for others to
avoid those mistakes.
under pressure from both sides. They have
to hit their margins. We’re increasingly
moving into a quarterly performance
country where it’s all about the
shareholders, this quarter’s performance
and are you showing growth. There is no
room for a decent-sized profit and that being
good enough. You have to be more, you
have to get more. And people are operating
on increasingly thin margins, because the
less we pay people, the less money there is
in the economy and the fewer customers
that they have. So then they have to
squeeze more productivity out of their
employees. And we’re seeing that reverse.
Even Walmart comes out and says, “Look,
our employees are treated so poorly, and
they’re so demoralized, that it’s actually
affecting our sales.” The store-to-store sales,
year-over-year, have been historically down.
And they’re picking back up this year a little
bit, but for the past few years running their
customer surveys have come back and said
‘Look, your stores are never in order, we
can never find employees, your lines are
long. You’ve got 38 cash registers and only
four cashiers are on staff at a given time.
What the hell, Walmart?” And when even
Walmart is saying, “We have to give people
a raise. We have to tell people their
schedules in advance.” Those sorts of things
matter, and they m atter to the bottom line
of companies. So I’m hoping we’re starting
to see a trend where companies will do
what’s best for them, because treating your
employees well is good for the company.
J.P. Actually I ’m glad you mentioned that.
I saw that Walmart is planning to bump half
a million employees up to $9 in April and
then $10 by next February. And then you
mentioned the schedules as well. They said
more control over the schedules.
L.T. Walmart buried the lead there. They
announced marginal wage gains, instead of a
huge quality-of-life step forward, which is
having your schedule two weeks in advance
so that you can plan your life. That is a
giant, giant thing for most working people,
because we’re holding down two or three
jobs, there’s child care, there’s
transportation, there’s one car between two
people and there’s buses to deal with.
Whatever it is, that’s going to be the big
effect The raise that they are giving is
actually catching their employees up from
2008. If they had raised their wages along
with inflation, they would have gotten
already to this point They’re essentially
giving people a raise to inflation plus 50
cents an hour. It’s not a huge wage gain.
You’re talking another maybe $l,000-$2,000
a year for full-time employees. You’re not
even talking about the part-timers who will
make less of a gain. When they’re talking
about that, they’re saying, “Look, aren’t we
generous?” No, you’re not. You’re n o t
You’re making a good business decision and
you do not get cookies for being the last to
the party. Other major retailers have done
this. They’ve been doing this for years.
Costco, Target, all these big employers —
these big-box stores — have been paying
their employees more. Walmart is the very,
very last major employer to really sit down
and look at this. And then they put out a
press conference and they want everybody
to call them good corporate citizens. This is
not good corporate citizenship, this is
incredibly slow business sense.
J.P. Seattle and San Francisco are moving
to a $15 minimum wage, and activists here in
Portland are urging the city to do the same.
Do you see a $15 minimum wage as
substantially improving the lives o f working
poor?
L.T. Doubling the minimum wage? Hell
yes! That said, when it comes to minimum
wage, I would really like to see something
tied to the cost of living. Because what I
need in small-town Utah to survive is not
what I need in a city like Portland or New
York City. A living wage is going to be
different depending on where in the country
you are. And I would really like to see the
minimum tied to a basic living standard so
that everybody who does a full day’s work
can go home, afford to put food on the table
and also afford the time to eat it with the
family.
J.P. I was wondering what message you
may have for the minimum-wage workers who
are reading this interview — the folks who are
working long hours and still can’t regularly
pay the electric bill.
L.T. Stop blaming yourself. The economy
is not the fault of every minimum wage
worker. When 45 million Americans barely
make ends meet, this is not the fault of
somebody who had some bad luck or made a
bad choice that one time. This is nobody’s
fault but the people who are setting up the
system and setting up this power structure
and setting up this economy. Stop blaming
yourself. I don’t know a single minimum-
wage worker who doesn’t wake up in the
morning and think, “Oh my God, how am I
going to get out of this?” and can’t quite
figure it out. That’s happening to everybody
and it’s the thing that I’ve realized since I
wrote the book. I’ve got thousands of
e-mails from people saying “Oh my God, I
thought I was the only one.” You’re not the
only one. It is all of us, and the sooner we
admit that, the sooner we can band together
to make a change.
"It's hard for anybody to sit
down and say, 'This is the one
thing that changed the entire
course of my lif e / because if it
was that easy, nobody would he
poor. We'd just all correct that
one mistake."
J.P. Reading your book, one o f the lines that
struck me the most in the “babies” chapter was
“Let’s stop saying that poor people are
irresponsible parents and start admitting that
society doesn’t seem to believe that i f you are
poor you are entitled to be a parent at all.”
Can you talk more about that?
L.T. So if you go into the comments on
my original piece, one of the most
disturbing to me, and it happened again and
again and again and I still get questions:
“Well, how could you justify having children
when you didn’t have enough money? How
could you justify it?” AS though you needed
a justification to have a family. As though
L.T. You know, it’s hard to sit down and
say, “This is what made you poor.”
Because it’s so many things. It’s so many.
One thing that a lot of people point to is
that I dropped out of college. And, you
know, over the course of your life,
statistically, yeah that’s a problem. You’re
going to make less money; however, how
much money are you going to put into it,
and is that worth it? I graduated high
school when I was 1 6 .1 wasn’t ready for
college. I was taking out a ton of loans. I
wasn’t mature. I wasn’t going to class. I
just wasn’t ready. So I thought, “I’ll just
drop out, I’ll work for a couple of years,
figure out what I want to do and then I’ll
go back.” And that kind of worked out
really poorly for me. You know, there’s
things like I didn’t take the b est jobs, I
didn’t take the most stable jobs. I took
what was available. Now was that a bad
decision on my part? Probably. Maybe n o t I
don’t know. The mistakes that I have made,
in general, have been fairly personal.. And
they’ve been dynamic. It’s easy for me to
point at the thing that made me OK. I sat
down and wrote on the In tern et Bam!
There you go. Everything’s fine. B u t you
know, it’s hard for anybody to sit down and
say, “This is the one thing that changed the
entire course of my life,” because if it was
that easy, nobody would be poor. We’d just
all correct that one mistake.
J.P. One o f the things that struck me most
reading the book was you described it as just
tiring. A llday you’re tired. A nd that just really
affects your whole life, because you’re
struggling to work enough hours and that
you’re just always tired.
L.T. It seems that people underestimate
the amount of work that goes into being
poor. I never really did sit down and track
how many hours I spent chasing this or that
thing. So the other day I thought, OK I’m
going to see what would happen if I needed
to come up with $500. Just say I missed a
week at work and I gotta pay my re n t I
need $500. And it took me seven and a half
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hours of running around to find out that, no,
you can’t get $500, but here’s $150. I t was
eight different programs that I went to. And
those are the sorts of things that you have
to deal with. The logistics of poverty are
what kills you.
If it was just you go to work and you work
really hard all day and you go home,
everybody would be down with that. It’s the
fact that you can’t just go to work and work
eight hours and go home. You go to work
and you work two hours or possibly six
hours, depending on how much your
employer needs you, and then you have to
figure out how to get home after that for
your next shift. And who’s going to pick up
the kids? And when do you have time to eat?
Do you even get to eat today? Do you have
enough money to eat? How much did you
make in these hours and what’s that going
to be for your paycheck at the end of the
week? Do you need to call your bank? Do
you need to call the electric company and
ask for extra time? All of these things are in
your head constantly. It is a constant,
constant logistics struggle. And that’s the
tiring part, that’s the crushing part. There is
no stability to it.
J.P. I had a boss at a previous job who
cared very much about people living on the
streets and she carried canned food around.
When they asked her for money she would
hand out canned food as opposed to money.
L.T. Do they have can openers?
J.P. She bought the ones with the pop tops
th a t d o n ’t need a can opener. I guess I ’m
wondering: What are your thoughts i f you see
someone on the street who asks for money,
giving them money versus donating it to a
shelter versus giving them food?
L.T. If your life is so rough that you’re
having to live on the streets, maybe you
deserve to be drunk once in a while. I think
maybe there’s nothing wrong with wanting
to escape a life that is out of control and a
little bit horrifying. Look, in L.A. on Sunday
(March 1), the cops rolled onto Skid Row,
found a tent, went into it, tore this dude’s
house down around him, tazed him and then
shot him five times. That guy could have
been as drunk as he wanted to be for the
last year and a half and, you know what,
more power to him, I got no problem with
i t What I do have is a problem with people
saying I know better than somebody else
what’s best for them.
When you say, “I’m not going to give you
money because I think you’re going to
spend it improperly,” you’re saying, “You
don’t know how to run your own life. I don’t
trust you th at far.” I would actually say it’s
lovely to give somebody food. It’s lovely to
give somebody supplies, if you’re doing it
simply because they need food or supplies.
If you’re doing it because you’re afraid
they’re going to go out and get drunk, keep
your money and give it to somebody you
think deserves i t
Look, I’m from Utah, which is the land of
non-drinkers and teetotalers. My parents are
Mormon. They don’t normally get drunk on
the weekends. But for somebody who does
have a glass of wine to relax in the evening
to say that somebody else shouldn’t get a
bottle of something, I don’t understand that
See TIRADO, page 12