sermon

INTRODUCTION: In the summer of 1996, President Bill Clinton delivered on a pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” He signed into law a bill forcing recipients of welfare to work to receive financial assistance and imposed a five-year limit on how long any one could receive cash from the government. It basically threw four million unskilled women into the labor market.

Two years after the bill was signed – in 1998 – the National Coalition for the Homeless released the results of a study which showed nationwide that it would take $8.89 an hour to afford a one-bedroom apartment; further, the prospects of a typical welfare recipient landing a job paying that much were “97 to 1.”

In that same year Barbara Ehrenreich, a prominent writer, was at lunch with the editor of Harpers Magazine. They were bemoaning the data I just recited to you when Ms Ehrenreich said to the Harpers editor, “How could anyone, much less a mother with children, survive on $6 or $7 an hour?” The editor, Lewis Lapham, shook his head in agreement and responded by saying, “You know what? Someone should go undercover for a couple of years and try to live on that amount, and then write about it.”

There was a moment of silence, then he had an aha moment. He smiled and pointed at Ms Ehrenreich and said, “You!”

When she agreed to do the work and write a book about it, her strategy was to spend one month each in several settings, in which she would find work and then move on to another job the next month. If she was being paid by the week and ran out of money, she would end the experiment in that particular setting and move to the next.

She noted in her book that even though she worked for real, at jobs paying only $6 to $7 an hour, she realized that she was really only “visiting” a world in which millions of other people live their entire lives. Plus, she was White, highly educated, spoke English as a native, always had a “rent-a-wreck” vehicle, and was in a better state of health than many of her low-wage co-workers.

So guess where she started: Florida…in Key West. She began by filling out applications for jobs in such fields as housekeeping, grocery clerking, and fast food. After 3 days of making the rounds, a hotel chain where she had applied for a housekeeping position contacted her. They offered her a wait staff job at the family restaurant attached to their hotel. Its menu: “Polish sausage and BBQ sauce.” She would work the 2-10 p.m. shift and earn $2.43 per hour, plus tips.

Once started, she learned that waitressing was not just taking orders and serving customers, but included all the “invisible” work—sweeping, filling condiment containers, or cleaning out the freezer.

She also soon learned that none of her co-workers were making ends meet. After just weeks, she realized that she would not either. So she added a second job at a well-known national restaurant chain that had three to four times the number of customers as her first job. For two days, she worked both jobs, and then realized emotionally and physically that she couldn’t do it. So she quit the first one, and also rented a small trailer closer to Key West. It was so small in fact that her knees rubbed against the shower stall when she sat on the toilet.

She was still unable to make it financially, so she approached the management of one of the hotels to see if she could also get a house-keeping job, assuming that it would be less strenuous physically than waitressing, which she did. On her first day, she made beds, folded towels, vacuumed, and scrubbed toilets from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. She rushed back to the tiny trailer she called home, showered and hurried to her second job. Once there, she became overwhelmed with an abundance of customers and then had a heated argument with her manager who was bemoaning her inadequacies. She became so upset by the humiliation, that she walked out and wrote about it as follows, “It was a test of myself, and clearly I failed.”

Rather than stay in Key West, she turned in her “rent a wreck,” and jumped on a bus for a 2,000 mile trip from Key West to Portland, Maine. Once there, her first surprise was that there were no low-rent apartments in Portland, Maine. Affordable housing seemed to be clustered in an area about 30 minutes away. She also learned that due to the ending of the tourist season, waitressing jobs were scarce. So she called about cleaning jobs, either home or office, as well as nursing home work.

After two days of applications, employment tests, and interviews, she found two jobs for which she was hired — a weekend dietary aide job at a nursing home for $7 an hour, and a 40-hour, Monday through Friday, housekeeping job at $6.65 per hour.

At the end of the week, she went to pay the first week’s rent, and the manager told her that he had misquoted the rate, and that the tourist season was not quite over, which meant that her rent would be $200 a week instead of the $120 she had originally been told. Given her 7-day-a-week work schedule, she didn’t have time to find another place to live, so she paid the new rate.

Then she realized the loss of the $80 meant she did not have enough for food until payday. So she investigated food pantries and emergency aid, using a pay phone nearby. On the first call to an assistance group, they asked her to explain why she didn’t have any money if she was truly employed and also why she could not find housing at a lower rate?

She called another “assistance” number: They advised her to travel to Biddeford (approximately 20 miles away) between the hours of 9 and 5 – which were the same hours she worked. When she called them, they gave her another number, where they told her that she was in the wrong county and was not eligible for assistance from them.

Finally, after convincing them that she worked 7 days a week, and 8 hours a day, she was offered a food voucher that she could take to the grocery store. She drove over to pick it up and then went to the grocery store, but quickly discovered that the choices were quite limited: She had to choose either one box of spaghetti noodles and one jar of spaghetti sauce; OR one can of vegetables and one can of baked beans; OR one pound of hamburger meat and one box of hamburger helper; or a box of tuna-helper but with no tuna. No fresh fruit nor vegetables, and no chicken nor cheese. For breakfast she was allowed to purchase cereal with milk. Back at her room, she realized that in a time period of 70 minutes, both driving and on the phone, she had acquired $7.02 worth of food, minus the $2.80 it took for the pay phone.

As many of you know, Ms Ehrenreich continued this process from the Spring of 1998 through the summer of 2000 and then wrote an engaging, eye-opening, and moving account of it in the best-selling book entitled, Nickel and Dimed: On not making it in America.

Now all of the things I’ve told you are in a book. And even though some of them took place in Florida, it still seems separate and apart from our life situation – our sitz em leben. Plus, before taking on this project, Ms Ehrenreich was a successful writer, had an earned Ph.D., and was healthy. Too, she knew that if need be, she could opt out of her working poor project any time she wished and have high-paying writing assignments or take a high level job. So in some sense, what she experienced doesn’t seem that realistic…it was a writing experiment, right?

But let’s bring it home…to Florida…to Lee County…to All Faiths. Let me ask you a question? How many of you have been to the University Deli Café which was part of our after service discussion program in June and July? Would you please raise your hand? Okay.

How many of you remember the young woman who waited on the tables there most times – short red-hair, very energetic and efficient? Angie’s her name. In preparation for this sermon, I asked her Friday if she would be willing for me to share her story. She was quite willing.

Guess how many children she has? Four. Two live with their father in Kentucky, and two she brought with her in June when she moved here to start her life over. They are ages 3 and 5.

To move down here, she bought a car in Kentucky for nothing down, and with weekly payments. The first week she was here, she was awakened at 5 a.m. by the sound of a tow truck towing her car away. The fine print in her agreement said that she couldn’t take the car out of state, even though she had made every payment on time. To retrieve it would cost $500, none of which she had.

She had to have transportation. Her mother came to her rescue and gave Angie an older model car of hers. Unfortunately, the license tag had expired that month and before she could manage work, kids and tag agency office hours to secure one, the management where she lives turned her in and that car too was towed! Again, her mother came to her rescue with another car.

Angie has to be at work at 6:30, which means that she has to get her kids up, dressed and ready to go to child care by 6 o’clock. Early one morning week before last, as she was carrying the three-year-old down the steps, she slipped and fell down the stairs, but managed to keep her son from being hurt. But she was bruised and sprained her ankle.

None of which excused her from getting her kids to child care and being at the restaurant to start serving at 6:30. Since she is the only wait staff person working at the restaurant, if she’s not there, either the owner has to come in herself from her other restaurant, or they have to close the restaurant, which they did one Monday recently when Angie was home sick and running a fever…with sick pay or tips.

Now all of that was in a two months period. So when we speak of the working poor, don’t think it’s some label in a book for a bunch of people somewhere in some big city or another state: Think of Angie – whom we know – mother of four, who works at the restaurant we at All Faiths frequented this past June and July. Then multiply her by tens of thousands in Lee County, hundreds of thousands in Florida, and by more than 53 million Americans.

They like Angie are one paycheck from disaster…the working poor who provide service at restaurants whose food they can’t afford…who wash other people’s cars while they take the bus…and who care for the children of others but they can’t themselves afford childcare.

So what does all that mean…for us…here today…at All Faiths? To me, this what faith says…what this community of liberal religious understands its role to be:

To tell the story I related is not a matter of blame. We didn’t cause it, and we can’t cure it. It’s a system in place. We don’t have the portfolio to change the system. That means that our task is to put our finger in the holes in the dike…holes that we can see and reach. We’re not capable of building new dikes nor repairing them. We do what we can, when we can.

For example, on September 7^th, we will have a Harry Chapin Food Bank truck in the parking lot from 9 until 3. We’re being asked to bring canned, packaged and bottled food as well as cleaning supplies and personal toiletry items to put in the truck. Though we don’t have it in the budget, I’m hoping that we can find a way to advertise the fact that the truck is there and people in the community can drop off their food stuffs.

That’s a finger in the dike, right. But it comprises a part of the five million pounds that Harry Chapin distributes every year to groups like the Salvation Army, Big Brother/Big Sister, the Red Cross and scores of others.

Another finger in the dike will take place on Sept. 14^th: Steve and Chris Fisher are going to have a cooking demonstration, as to how in the world they can do the meal for a 100 or so homeless every month at All Souls in N. Ft. Myers, so that some of us might lean about what we can do to join them in their efforts. They will do that at 9 out in the breezeway, and then following the service, we will eat it – all for only $5, and you get to bring your favorite dessert. I’m planning to bring a Cuban sponge cake, with a chocolate base that is to die for. What Chris and Steve are doing is another finger in the dike…which we can also help with. In addition:

That means when we are served, we look those who serve us in the eye and say, “Hello” and thanks. We ask them how are they doing? We treat them as special people doing very difficult work – waiting on us! Ms Ehrenreich said somewhere in her book, “No job, no matter how lowly, is truly ‘unskilled.’” She writes that every job she took on during her sojourn as a low-wage worker required concentration, mastery of new terms, techniques, tools, and new skills.

Courtesy and kindness mean we can be grateful to all those who work in the service industry, and we can count ourselves fortunate to be “served.” That’s the other component of faith at All Faiths.

We will pause now for 7½ minutes of brief questions as a part of our Conversation Café. The Service and Support Council will provide microphones for you to speak into.

[1] A sermon presented August 24, 2008, as the second from the last sermon in “Unitarian Summer 2008” followed by the Conversation Café of All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1904 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL, with the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.