Between his two jobs, Michael earns less than $16,000 a year; he doesn’t have health insurance, sick leave, or vacation time. He shares an apartment with three other people – a situation he finds stressful – and still he worries at times about making his rent. When he works back-to-back eight-hour shifts for some length of time, Michael has been able to save as much as $500, which he tells me makes him feel quite rich. It also exhausts him. Days later he is still catching up on sleep. Despite his high energy and easy laughter, the dark circles under his eyes give away the pressure he is under. Almost everyone I meet in Southeast Ohio works multiple service industry jobs. In the area, it is common practice in the service industry to hire part-time workers. Locals believe this is intentional. It saves the companies a lot of money when they leave workers without sick time, health care, vacation time, or a retirement plan.
When I asked Michael how he would identify himself by socio-economic class, he said: “I would say for myself, I don’t know, I’m fine. … I don’t consider myself poor. I would say … I guess I would say I am struggling a little bit. I’m fine, I have all my stuff paid, I’m just not in a higher tax bracket. I guess I’m poor but I’m not – for me people who don’t have food are poor. Or, someone who can’t feed their kids, or you might not have running water or even electricity. I would say poor is when you just don’t got anything. I think if you’re poor, you don’t have the right things you need to even survive.”
The reality in Southeast Ohio is that everyone seems to know folks who are in far worse circumstances. For Michael and others, “being poor” means living in homes without running water or electricity or being unable to feed their children. A surprising number of Michael’s neighbors live in exactly this condition. In 2017, Athens County had the highest rate of food insecurity in the state of Ohio. Almost 27% of children in the county lack consistent access to adequate food and about 70% of residents hover around the federal poverty line.6 This sounds stark, and it is. In these circumstances, working families skip meals and/or reduce the size of meals, and/or rotate who gets to eat a meal, in order to make their food last.
Community food banks, once an emergency resource during difficult times, have become a weekly resource for families. As for access to running water, in 2014, when the US Census stopped collecting data on the number of households without running water, 1,000 homes in Athens County (1.5% of the population) lacked full indoor plumbing, while in neighboring Meigs County another 400 homes (1.7% of the population) had no running water.7 Given this context, it might be clear why Michael does not think of himself as poor. The more serious issue is that the federal government does not think of him as poor either. The federal poverty line in 2017 for an individual was $12,060. In that year, 17.6% of African Americans fell at or below the federal poverty line. As you notice, Michael does not.
By working two jobs, Michael earns something below $16,000. He does not have stable work, lives paycheck to paycheck, and struggles to pay the rent on a shared flat. Yet the federal government does not count him among the nation’s poor. This is exactly why it is important to understand the distinction between the federal poverty line and a self-sufficiency income. The Economic Policy Institute self-sufficiency budget puts Michael’s experience in a very different context. As we saw in Chapter 1, the EPI self-sufficiency budget is based on basic monthly expenses in each region of the country. For a single person in Athens County, the budget is $34,545.
Recall from Chapter 1 that the EPI uses the Fair Market Rent (FMR) calculation established by HUD. FMR was established to standardize payments for low-income housing. In any given housing market, about 60% of local housing will be more expensive than FMR. There is a wide variety of housing in Athens County. Yet typical rent for a decent one-bedroom apartment runs between $800 and $1,300 a month – a long way from FMR. In this regard, the EPI self-sufficiency budget, which allocates only $605, is clearly low for the area. However, even using the FMR calculation, the EPI budget is more than twice what Michael currently earns.
I am confident that Michael would be shocked by this self-sufficiency budget. If he accepted the EPI figures as representing a basic standard of living, he would see his income, and his efforts to get by every month, in a very different perspective. Like many others, Michael has normalized his inability to pay all of his bills all of the time, his inability to live alone, to take time off when he is sick or to afford health care. Not only is all of this ordinary to him, Michael is doing better than many around him. Basic self-sufficiency, as a standard of living, is not something he imagines as part of his life – and this suits his employers just fine. What has become ordinary for Michael is both completely unacceptable and unlikely to change.
Certainly, wealth and poverty are relative terms – there will always be someone earning less and someone earning more. Yet hunger and a lack of running water should not be the measure of poverty in any country – and certainly not in one that is among the wealthiest in the world. Michael did not end up in badly paid jobs because he lacks skills or intelligence. Nor because he chose a random “follow your heart” kind of dream. He applied for the entry-level positions that were available to him. If entry-level jobs once gave workers a leg up the proverbial ladder, the reality today is quite different. In the twenty-first century, low wage, entry-level employment often is what holds people in poverty. Part-time service industry work keeps people, and the families they support, in a very stressful and nearly constant economic scramble. Michael tells me he hopes to convert one of his jobs to full-time status soon, but even so he will still need to continue to work part-time at the other. The full-time salary won’t pay his bills, let alone enable him to attain economic self-sufficiency.
The situation is similar for Rose Taylor, a white woman, who has lived most of her nearly thirty years in Athens County. She describes herself as among the more economically privileged in the county and it is clear that her friends think of her as fairly successful. “I have had friends borrow money from me, because they need to pay their rent, or they need food. The majority of my friends, I would say, barely make it every month.” Despite Rose’s desire to help, she finds the situation a little stressful because she too can find herself financially strapped at times.
Rose holds an associate degree and works thirty-six hours a week as a certified nursing assistant (CNA) caring for an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s Disease. Her shift as a CNA is from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. three days per week. If you know anything about Alzheimer’s Disease, you know that there are no “easy” shifts in care giving. Dementia care at any time of day is full of unexpected challenges as well as surprising rewards. Like Michael, Rose especially values working the night shift because it doesn’t interfere with the fluctuating schedule at her second, day job where she spends thirty hours a week doing body piercing. Typically, three days a week she is scheduled at both jobs, which leaves her just enough time between jobs to shower and go for a walk with her “fur child,” a sweet dog that she cares for with her sister.
Rose describes her life as unsustainable but tells me that for now she has to make it work. Between the two jobs, she works sixty-six hours a week and earns less than $23,000 – before taxes. Rose has no benefits at either job. Her income is almost double the federal poverty line. That puts her well ahead of the 12.9% of all women in the country who lived at or below the federal poverty line in 2017. Perhaps most striking