Cash for Clunkers and XM Radio
In the second year of the Great Recession, the U.S. government granted a $4,200 rebate to anyone who bought a fuel-efficient new car and offered up an old one for sacrifice. My husband, Frank, and I brought in our twenty-year-old Lincoln Town Car and drove out with a brand-new Hyundai Elantra. It cost us $13,382, tax included.
Economically, it makes more sense to subsidize an embryonic industry than a mature industry, and public transit makes more environmental sense than private autos. Personally, I hoped for a weatherization/green jobs program to replace the leaky windows in the old industrial building where I live. But you take what you can get.
In our case Cash for Clunkers worked the way it was supposed to. It got a gas-guzzler off the road, and there’s no other way we would have bought a new car. The program brought me a personal bonus besides. My new car introduced me to a father and son in Indiana who had been adjusting to the downturn for a generation before it hit the Pink Slip Club in New York. Here’s how I met them.
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Our new car came with a free trial subscription to XM Radio. Before it expired, several salesmen called offering low-rate deals to continue the service. My husband, Frank, said no to all of them. Then one day he said, “Okay, give me that.” He was won over by a young man who said he knew how to make the discount subscription end automatically so we wouldn’t find ourselves paying the full price when we forgot to cancel it in time.
“I got his number for you,” Frank said when he got off the phone. “I figured anyone selling XM Radio from a call center had to be doing something better before the recession. He says he’d be happy to talk to you.”
“I can’t interview every underemployed American,” I answered ungratefully. Still, I made a call.
“How long will we need?” Michael Kenny asked when I reached him at home on a weekend morning.
“I don’t know,” I said, dithering. “I don’t usually interview on the phone.”
“Why don’t we go ahead and start discussing?” Michael said, amiably taking charge. “If we need to, we can continue on another day.”
“Were you this good on the phone before you started doing it for a living?” I asked.
“Honestly, no, ma’am. Before my last two jobs I was very timid on the phone. I didn’t even like to call and order pizza.”
Before selling XM Radio, Michael, twenty-eight, had managed his fiancée’s uncle’s staffing agency. Most of its clients needed temporary loading crews for warehouses. Michael rounded up day laborers and sent them out at $7.50 an hour. But with the recession, business fell off for its clients (mostly low-end retailers), and the employment agency itself closed down.
The reason Michael might have to rush off the phone that morning was also recession related. He and his fiancée were looking at houses. The couple had been renting a house for the last five years, but the landlord stopped paying on the mortgage. “So we’re faced with a notice to vacate.”
“Oh no! First your job, then your home.”
Michael assured me that it wasn’t a tragedy. “We were already talking about having a child, and with house prices so low it’s a good time to buy.”
Michael’s fiancée, Caitlin, was employed at a franchise print shop formerly owned by another uncle. It too had gone bankrupt. Fortunately, a rival print shop scooped up the machinery, the customers, and the fiancée. So Caitlin had an unbroken employment record. The couple decided it would look good if Michael was also employed when they went to get a mortgage.
“That’s why I took the job at XM,” he told me. He’d originally thought to stay for about a year. But now: “I’ve been there for a month and a half. I don’t think I can take it for that long, honestly.”
“How long did you work at the employment agency?” I asked.
“Five months, I guess. I took care of everything from payroll, getting the temps to the jobs, drug testing [of job applicants], all that kind of good stuff, plus answering the phones, billing. The boss came in for an hour or two to help with the billing, but really to use it as headquarters for the restaurant he owned. That closed too.” Was I phoning a ghost town, I wondered, or were the uncles just jinxed?
I was surprised when Michael said he’d been unemployed for a full year between the temp agency and the call center.
“I’m only talking to you on the phone, but you sound so … employable.”
“Well, I do need to tell you, ma’am, I have ten-year-old dreadlocks that hang down just to my waist. That does turn some employers off, especially here in the Midwest.”
“Are you a Rastafarian?” I asked. I was also wondering if he was black. That might affect his job prospects.
“No, I’m not a Rastafarian. I respect women more than that. It’s a spiritual thing with me. I’m actually a quarter Native American.” (That didn’t answer my hidden question. But he sounded like a white midwesterner.)
“It might be different if I was living in New York,” Michael continued, “but the only jobs that were available to me here that year were fast foods, sandwich shops, stuff like that. And I just wasn’t gonna go in reverse.”
“Well, a call center, isn’t that reverse? I mean, you were managing the employment agency.”
“It is a bit of a reverse,” he conceded. “But I am actually pulling in the same amount of money.” At the call center Michael was paid $7.50 an hour plus $2.00 per sale. He estimates that he averages five sales a day, which brought it to about $72.00 a day.
“But it is a reverse in that I’m … I’m sacrificing some …” For the first time in our conversation, Michael Kenny groped for a word. “At the temp agency I really got a bit of … satisfaction [he found the word] because I was able to help someone find work.
“Like there was a single dad who was staying in a shelter with his two daughters. You could tell he was not someone who normally gets that close to the bottom. But his wife had passed away, and with the economy this time he fell all the way. So I gave him all the work I could … Mostly unloading trucks and moving boxes around. But that guy, he didn’t care what it was. He just wanted to get his daughters out of the shelter.
“When I was able to help someone like that, it was a sense of satisfaction. I don’t really get that out of XM Radio. I’ll be honest with you, eight out of ten people we call, maybe nine out of ten people, it’s kind of like we’re hassling them. I’m supposed to push it and push it. They listen in for that. But I don’t like hassling people. So it’s kind of tough on me. I’ll try to stay till we get a house.”
“Why don’t you buy the house you’re renting?” I asked.
“It’s not in the most beautiful neighborhood,” he answered, “and we want to start a family. But it’s not the ghetto, either.” (Why was I too embarrassed to simply ask if he was black or white? It matters in America; it’s an honest question.) “The identical house next door sold for $35,000,” Michael reported. “They covered the hardwood floors, painted over the gorgeous woodwork, and resold it for $45,000. You could come to Evansville, buy this house, and rent it out.”
“I don’t even know where I’m calling. Evansville, is that near Chicago?”
“No, Evansville, Indiana. I’m literally right across the river from Kentucky.”
“Oops, sorry.”
“That’s all right. I was born in the Chicago area. We moved here when I was three.”
When I asked how his family got to Indiana, Michael launched into his father’s life story. “My dad never went to college. His father left, and he had four brothers and sisters to help take care of. He worked two jobs and finished high school at night.”
Mr. Kenny senior had taken a job with a national-brand food company “for the security.” Michael represented his dad’s thinking about security with emotions it was hard to interpret over the phone. The company had moved his father to Evansville, Michael said, and then downsized, leaving him stranded. So his dad got a job as a supervisor at the Indiana distribution center of a national retailer where he works to this day.
“Dad, he’s been busting his hump working for these corporations for the last thirty-five years,” Michael said. “He’s actually the second-longest employee at this center, and yet they just put him on a night shift to try to force him out of the job. They even threatened to take his pension away from him at one point if he didn’t quit. Someone actually said it to him: ‘We’ll fire you and take it away from you.’ ”
Michael went on with great feeling about the pressure his father worked under. “You know the way a corporation can scrutinize over you. When you supervise four hundred people, they can always find something that one of those people wasn’t doing right that you should have caught. But he still didn’t quit, and they still didn’t fire him.
“My dad, he’s resilient, he’s right-on, but he hates what he does. It’s paid his way—well, the job and credit cards. But it hasn’t got him satisfaction. He finds that in church these days. I’m not going to live that way.”
“Do you think your father would talk to me if I came to Evansville?” I surprised myself by saying.
Michael said he’d ask. A couple of weeks later he reported that his religious, Republican, and “right-on” dad was willing. (He really was a terrific salesman.) So we drove the new little car to Evansville, Indiana.
Michael and His Friends
At Michael’s suggestion we checked into the Casino Aztar Hotel. The casino itself is a numbingly lit and Muzak-filled showboat, moored on the Ohio River. But the adjoining hotel offered double rooms for seniors at $39 a night. The senior discount must have been a real selling point because there were quite a few gamblers with walkers and portable oxygen tanks at the slot machines.
But the Aztar had just been bought by Tropicana Entertainment. A receptionist congratulated us on getting in under the wire. The senior rate was already scheduled to go up considerably, she told us.
“That’s okay by me,” I assured her, especially if it meant that her pay wouldn’t go down too much. She said amen to that and explained that after the last cuts she’d moved her family across the river to Kentucky. But she wasn’t going to find any place cheaper to live than that, she said.
His fiancée, Caitlin, was still working at the print shop, but Michael had quit the XM call center to spend time fixing up the house they’d just bought. It cost $95,000, and Caitlin had put all of the $20,000 that her grandmother had left her into a down payment so that they could get a low, fixed-rate, twenty-year loan. “Caitlin is very good with money,” Michael said. She was determined never to refinance their house. Indeed the couple feared debt so strongly that “we don’t possess a single credit card.”
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We were to meet at the new house as soon as Michael got back from driving a friend to a job interview. Though it was only an eight-minute ride from downtown, it was set in a cluster of old, rural-feeling houses circling a pond. Michael was relaxing on the porch when we arrived.
Michael Kenny turns out to be a blue-eyed, brown-haired midwesterner. The three-quarters of him that aren’t American Indian are Irish and German. As for the dreadlocks, perhaps because he’d warned us or because they were so neatly tied back, the young man who stepped off the porch seemed not only presentable but winsome as he showed us the work he’d already done on the lawn.
“By the way, I found someone who’ll hire me with my hair.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Me. I’m hiring myself.” Michael had designed and was planning to manufacture T-shirts for Deadheads to sell at Grateful Dead concerts. He’d already applied to incorporate the new T-shirt business.
Michael had been a hard-core Deadhead in his younger days, following the band from city to city on their tours. It was among fellow Deadheads that he noticed the fellowship among dreadlock wearers and started growing his. He showed me how the hair was allowed to tangle for months before being separated into the strong “roots” that remain forever untouched. Michael’s roots hadn’t been re-rolled for over nine years. “My energy is carried in my hair. Everything I’ve done in my last decade is with me. Here, pull,” he said, showing me how strong his scalp had become.
One of the things that had impressed Michael about my husband was that Frank had actually photographed Jerry Garcia. “I never saw Jerry myself,” Michael said with regret, “but Caitlin did.”
“You know who else did?” I asked and explained that when I lived in San Francisco in the 1960s, friends had repeatedly tried to drag me over to a house in the Haight where this cool band rehearsed in public and anyone could go in and listen. When I finally went, I ran out screaming, “This is too noisy! I can’t stand it!”
“That must have been before their acoustic period,” Michael said tactfully. Rather than dismiss me as the most uncool person on the planet, he brought his guitar out on the porch and played a couple of Jerry Garcia’s children’s songs. He has a very pleasant voice, and he chose some nice safe songs for me. I liked them.
Michael took me inside to see a photograph of the Grateful Dead in front of their house at 710 Ashbury Street. “Yes,” I remembered, “that looks like the place.”
The guitar playing, the T-shirt art, the laid-back young man on the porch all brought back San Francisco in the 1960s. But Michael Kenny wasn’t just a retro hippie. He was also an up-to-date hippie. The T-shirts he designed with the Dead’s lightning bolt logo were strictly 1960s, of course. But the artwork that Michael was setting out, most by friends, included magnified photographs of microscopic glass cuttings and various up-to-date electronic crafts. It was a lot more skillful than the tie-dyes I remember from the 1960s.
The housewares Michael was unpacking were also contemporary hippie. His things were gathered and artistically embellished from today’s discards, not from the already vintage or collectible. Bohemians of all eras have always preferred the unpolished and the unmatched. It allows them to scrounge aesthetically satisfying furnishings while limiting financial ties to “the system.”
But even though one abjures wall-to-wall carpeting and suites of furniture, some hard currency is always needed. In the 1960s, even on a rural commune, there was always someone who put on high heels and stockings—it was usually a woman, as I remember—and went out to earn cash. In those days one could easily drop in and out of such employments, so we took turns. But Caitlin held one of the rare nine-to-five jobs in her circle. So while she worked a permanent, full-time job, the couple’s less steadily employed friends made the new house their gathering place.
Shortly after I arrived, Bean, a tall, lanky youth, dropped a friend, Pete, off and exchanged a few words with Michael about the set Michael’s group would play that evening at a local pub. He spoke through the kitchen screen door.
“You gotta go to work?” Michael asked.
“Yeah,” Bean said with a sigh, and split.
“Boy, he looks sad,” I said. “What kind of job?”
“He’ll be tossing pizzas for the rest of the night,” Michael answered. Then he said to Pete, “He picked up a double [shift] yesterday. He must really need the money.”
Pete, an old high school friend of Michael’s, had been back in town for two weeks. He was heavyset and also in his twenties, but he already had a former wife who had remarried and moved to Florida with her new husband and Pete’s daughter. With not much going on in Evansville, Pete relocated to be near his child. But after nine months he hadn’t found work in Florida, so he moved back. In his own words, “I’m kind of in between things.”
Michael asked his friend about his job-search methods, ignored Pete’s evasive reply, and delivered these pointers.
“The Internet is pretty much how you have to find a job these days. You can’t go out and pound the pavement like we did ten years ago. Then, if you put in five, six applications a day and had decent references and were willing to work in restaurants with high turnover, you could find a job in three, four days. Now you can’t put in applications in person anywhere, unless it’s McDonald’s.”
Michael’s description of the job search when he first got out of high school reminded me that even ten years before the Great Recession it had already been harder to pick up casual jobs than when I was young.
Michael described the futile feeling you got from Internet job hunting.
“For one thing, they never list the name of the company. A restaurant, they’ll just say, kitchen job available; line cook; the pay per hour, the hours, and the skill set that they want—that’s all. You send them your résumé; if they don’t need you, you’ll never hear back from them.
“Look, you can try the Internet thing,” he said to Pete. “Or you can put in an application with one of the staffing agencies.” (The friend Michael drove to a staffing agency that morning was a single mother who had been laid off from the plastics factory, one of the diminishing number of large manufacturers left in town. She was signing up at an agency for immediate shifts of warehouse work. “It’s the same loading job I sent that father in the shelter to,” Michael reminded me. “It’s hard on your body: the quotas are always going up; but she needs the cash right away.”)
“But the best place in town for anybody that needs money,” Michael now instructed Pete, “while you’re looking for the job, is go down to XM Radio, take the two-day training course, learn the computer system, and sit there in a comfy seat and talk on the phone all day.
“He likes talking,” Michael said to me. I’d seen no sign of that.
“He likes computers.” That might be true. “But he doesn’t think he’d be good at it. But if you only do it for a couple, three weeks, that’s four, five hundred dollars, and that gives you a little bit of money to hold on till you find other jobs.
“Plus, it gets you back into working again, gives you a schedule, makes you feel good. That’s the thing about a daily job that I really miss. Working on my own ideas for years and sometimes procrastinating—definitely procrastinating—it’s caused me to suffer when I could have been doing something that …” Michael couldn’t quite finish his thought. “They’re always hiring at XM,” he concluded.
Pete said nothing.
I asked Michael if many of his friends were “in between things,” like Pete and Bean. He told me proudly about his close friend, Bob. Through his mother, Bob got an apprenticeship with a sculptor who had a commission to build a metal fence—“an artistic fence”—for the city. When the apprenticeship ended, Bob returned to the usual dead-end jobs punctuated by long stints of unemployment. Then, because of the metal-fabricating skills he’d acquired, and through a lucky contact with the Masons, Bob got a job earning $18 an hour for a company that makes natural gas combustion chambers. “It required him to understand schematics, which he picked up like that. Bob is brilliant,” Michael said.
“He’s had that job for two years. And to see him over that time go from working behind a hotel desk, running the place all night, and only making $8.50 an hour to working his way into a machine shop where they do very high-tech and precise work.
“He owns his own car that’s paid off. He lives in his own apartment that he doesn’t have to worry about paying for every month because his job covers his bills. He’s got insurance, and everything is completely turned around for him. It’s a rare story. I’m very happy for him. Very proud.”
To hear Michael talk, you’d think his friends were drug addicts or ex-cons. What his brilliant friend Bob has is a steady job at a living wage. A full-time job at $18.50 an hour is $36,000.00 a year—enough to support a single guy or even a family if the wife brings something in. Yet for Michael it was the epitome of success. Pete thought so too.
Maybe I have to reconsider the word “hippie” for Michael and his friends. In the 1960s my hippie friends made a conscious lifestyle choice. They dropped out of financially and socially rewarding careers to do something more “meaningful.” That included meaningfully chilling out.
Michael and his friends seem to have arrived at the hippie ethic from another direction. They don’t have the option of well-paying, steady jobs. But they do have the option of not feeling bad about that.
Over the course of a long afternoon Michael and I, both great digressers, discussed many things and people. But two men came up repeatedly.
Ever since our phone conversation, I’d been thinking about the widower who had been living in the shelter with his children.
“I don’t remember his name,” Michael said, “but I remember he couldn’t be here till seven—which was a half an hour late—because he had to get his kids to the bus stop. He couldn’t leave them at the shelter unattended, you know. So I worked it out for him to where he could get his girls to the bus stop in the morning and be off in time to pick them up there as well.
“I felt very good about that. That was my satisfaction. But now I think, ‘How was he going to pay rent and food and get the heat and electric turned on on $7.50 an hour?’
“Something that I feel sick about—and it’s not to look down on anybody who runs a staffing agency, it’s just the business—but a staffing agency gets paid probably $12.00 to $14.00 an hour, and they only hand over $7.50 an hour. That’s almost half the amount we take from these people that go work these jobs that hardly any of us would want to do. But the companies would rather pay us $5.00 an hour, per person, just so they don’t have to deal with them.” Michael sometimes sent out an entire temp crew with its own foreman. No one from the client company had to speak directly to the day laborer.
“At first I felt good about giving people like that jobs. Then I started to feel bad. I see them drag in at the end of the shift for their checks, and all I see is the number 56. Fifty-six dollars is the check for a full shift. How is someone going to pay rent and utilities on $56.00? So how was I helping him get his children out of the shelter?”
“Michael,” I asked, “at $7.50 an hour for an eight-hour shift, shouldn’t that be $60.00?”
“They get a half-hour lunch break.”
“Oh my God, they deduct for lunch!” I thought about the bleakness of that unpaid break in a warehouse canteen. The chips in the snack machines were probably stale.
It was I who asked about that single father, but it was Michael who continually brought his own father into our conversation and always with intense emotion.
“My dad started as a supervisor; now he’s a manager. But they could pay a guy my age, just out of college, half the money they’re paying him. So they’ve been trying to force him out for the last five years.”
Michael admires his father: “He’s a tough man. He knows how to take it on the chin.”
But, though he doesn’t quite say it, I think he also feels his father was a sucker. “My dad says I don’t know how to stick with anything. All I know is I don’t want to end up putting in twenty, twenty-five years in a place and have them trying to toss me out on my butt.”
I hadn’t yet met Mr. Kenny, but out of generational loyalty I wanted the son to understand that people like his father weren’t just saps who played by the rules in a game everyone else knew was fixed.
“There used to be an understanding between employer and employee,” I began my history lesson. “At the time your father chose a corporate career, no one would have fired a lifetime employee to chisel him out of his pension or to replace him with a kid half his age. When businesses were expanding, they took in the young and kept the old.
“Sometimes a company man might say to himself, ‘Look what I’ve done: I’ve wasted my life for security.’ But at least he got the security. That contract was changed behind your father’s back.”
“Right! I’ve been telling that to my dad for years, and it seems like he just recently realized it. He recently told me he’d be happier working on my brother-in-law’s farm for $10 an hour.”
Michael was determined to play by different rules yet win his father’s approval nonetheless. “He feels I could do better. He knows I’m capable of more. But at the same time he hates his job and where he’s at. Obviously, his job made him some money,” Michael conceded. “He took good care of me and my sister: he kept up a middle-class life. But …
“I think he’s changing his position on what I should do. I think he wants me to take my time and find out what’s right for me. He just wants me to cut my hair and make money in the meantime.”
I smiled at that and Michael did too.
Before we parted, Michael took us for a ride around town. The working-class sitcom Roseanne, which starred Roseanne Barr, had been created by a fellow who went to Michael’s school. The street signs and working-class house exteriors seen briefly in each episode are Evansville tourist attractions. Next we stopped at Michael and Caitlin’s foreclosed former home. It was on a block of wooden houses a bit smaller, older, and shabbier than Roseanne’s. The house was still vacant, and Michael was visibly distressed to see it so uncared for. Then we drove into a black neighborhood past the employment agency that Michael had managed. The ramshackle dwelling that had housed the agency was vacant and derelict.
When we stopped for gas, I handed Michael my credit card, but he didn’t know what to do with it. I was amazed that an American male didn’t know how to swipe a credit card at a gas pump. But Michael and Caitlin don’t possess a single credit card, as he reminded me. “We always cut them up.”
“Ask my dad about credit cards when you talk to him,” Michael advised me. I made a note. “And enjoy the new couch,” he added mysteriously.
We had a free day before our appointment with Mr. Kenny senior. I decided to play detective and track down that single father whom Michael tried to help. All I knew was that his wife had died and that during the time Michael was sending him out on loading crews, he and his two daughters lived in a homeless shelter.
The YWCA, my first stop, was a shelter for victims of domestic violence. They would never have permitted a man in the residential area, even with two girl children, the receptionist told us. But she gave me a list of local food pantries and shelters.
We stopped at a men’s shelter where the people sitting around looked like your classic winos. The director couldn’t remember a man coming in with children, and, besides, “it wouldn’t be a suitable place.”
According to the director, his resident population hadn’t changed with the recession. But in addition to beds for men, they offered meals and the free use of their laundry rooms to anyone who came in during the day. “Many, many more women with children are using these things since the recession,” he said.
In times of economic crisis or natural disaster the job of scavenging almost always falls on women. In looking for that single father, I was concentrating on the statistical exception.
After a couple of stops it became apparent that the only Evansville shelter likely to take in a man with two children was the Dorothea MacGregor Family Shelter, run by the Pigeon Township Trustee.
The township trustee is an elected official who oversees what is still called “poor relief.” According to a brochure aimed at potential applicants, one must, in order to get aid, “be in need of essentials of life” and “be willing to help yourself as much as possible.” If those conditions were met, the Trustee’s Office could provide vouchers (“never cash,” the brochure emphasized) for goods and services like cleaning supplies and dental work.
The trustee’s drab prefab office was across the street from a cheery yellow house that had been divided into apartments. I asked the receptionist an open-ended question about current relief needs. One recent problem, she said, was that the utilities company, Vectren, had reorganized their records so that they can now spot people who owed back bills in other counties. “So now we’re seeing people who can’t get rehoused because they can’t get utilities turned on in their own name unless they work out a way to pay off a back bill that could be $1,200 to $1,400 or more.”
Since speaking to Michael, I had become adept at dividing and multiplying by 56—the standard daily wage he paid for a full warehouse shift. I calculated that it would take 21.4 such shifts to pay off a utility bill of $1,200, assuming you didn’t spend any money on food. And surely the utility company would require a new deposit before it’d turn a deadbeat on again.
“Where I live, the landlord pays the heating bills,” I said. “I’m just beginning to understand that people paying $700 a month rent in Evansville may have to pay $200 a month for utilities.”
“It might be closer to $300 to heat the run-down, leaky places they’re likely to find,” the woman said.
She took me in to see the Pigeon Township Trustee, Mary Hart, who had the first really southern accent I’d heard in southern Indiana. Ms. Hart had mastered the art of being both direct and gracious at the same time. And she didn’t mind if I turned on my tape recorder.
Ms. Hart confirmed that an increasing number of people ready to move into new housing were coming to the township for shelter because they couldn’t get their electricity turned back on. One of her jobs was to negotiate installment plans with the utility company and help applicants work out a budget that would allow them to keep up their payments.
“Do you sometimes have to tell people you can’t have both utilities and a car?”
“Worse than that,” Mary answered, “sometimes it’s either pay the rent or pay for the medicine for a sick child. If they buy the medicine, then they fall behind on the rent. And because they’re living paycheck to paycheck, once they fall behind, they can never catch up. And that’s where the township trustee comes into play because we’ll tell them, ‘You keep paying the rent, and we’ll get the child’s medicine.’ ”
As to the car-or-utilities choice: “We will say, your family can’t afford two cars. But they will almost always need one car to get to work.”
At the time I was in Evansville, the media was still talking about recent mass layoffs at Whirlpool. I asked Ms. Hart how the trustees plan for something like that. The yellow house could shelter only a few families at a time.
“We knew a year in advance that there were going to be eleven hundred people losing their jobs at Whirlpool when they moved work from here to Mexico. So we planned for people coming to us. Actually, we haven’t seen the Whirlpool homeless yet, because they gave them a pretty good severance package plus they offered some retraining. We see from the feeder plants first. Not Whirlpool, but those smaller places that supply the rubber gaskets or other parts to Whirlpool. They also laid people off.”
“Do you really see it that directly?” I asked. “Here’s the layoff, here come the people.”
“Yes,” Mary said. “We ask the place of last employment. It’s on our application. So we know whether it was a feeder into Whirlpool or Whirlpool workers themselves. A couple of years ago, when the casino business got bad, Casino Aztar laid off about sixty people. We felt the effect immediately; they came through our door right away.
“It’s the smaller companies,” Ms. Hart said. “One of the staffing companies, Custom Staffing, closed down [that was not Michael’s firm] and merged with another company a year ago. We felt the effect right away. People came in who, they may have found another job for $7.50 an hour, but they may now only be working thirty hours a week. So now with their bring-home pay, they can either pay the rent or pay the utilities, but they can’t do both. Or they get sick. They need a tooth extraction in order to continue going to work. We arrange the tooth extractions.”
“Ms. Hart,” I said, “everywhere I go here people tell me about $15.00-an-hour jobs that left Evansville, but I only see $7.50 jobs coming in. How can the trusteeship help a man if, even after he gets full-time work, he won’t earn enough to pay for the basic necessities?”
“At that point, we may also try to assist him into getting into public housing. If we see his problem is going to become long-term, we try to get them into a housing situation where you pay 30 percent [of their family income for rent]. Our clients take top priority in the public housing situation.”
But all that does is subsidize below living wages, I thought to myself. And as to moving the deserving poor into public housing, who are you going to move out?
“We have a great need for affordable housing in this community,” Ms. Hart said, perhaps following my thoughts. “On any given night we will have 456 to 463 on the street, and about a third of them are children. Parks, bus stations, or vehicles.
“We’ll always have a homeless population because of drug abuse, mental instability, but the others …” I leveled with Mary. It was only those “others” I was interested in. I hope that the trustees’ intervention makes life a little less painful for the children of drug addicts and manic-depressives. But cruel as it sounds, really damaged people are not my focus.
I told Ms. Hart about the father with two girls who’d found himself in a shelter after his wife died. I also told her about the young man at the temp agency who wanted to believe he was helping that family get back to a normal life by sending the man out on $7.50-an-hour jobs.
“I know you can’t give me individual names,” I said, “but I was wondering how he made out. How does a man like that get his family out of a shelter and back into a regular home?”
Ms. Hart said that the trustees had housed more than one single man with children since the recession started. In fact, when I got home, they put me in touch with one whose wife had died. But he turned out to be the wrong man.
Meanwhile, it was time to meet Michael’s dad.
Religious, Republican, and Right-On
Michael’s dad, Chuck, is a stiff, sturdy, short man who wore a crisp checked shirt and crease-free jeans. He welcomed us into a three-bedroom, two-bath tract home where everything had its place and hadn’t been put there just for our visit.
The only things lying around were a book on the television and an amplifier left out for Michael. Chuck had recently gotten a larger one to use with his guitar at church.
I sensed that this man had no idea what I wanted with him. It was trusting of him to accommodate his son this way. So I began by assuring him that I don’t use real names and I try to be vague about places of employment. “I’ll probably just say that you work in the warehouse of a …”
“Distribution center,” he corrected me for the sake of accuracy.
“… in the distribution center of a big-box store that I’ll call Big Box.”
“It’s where I got these socks,” my husband said.
“My jeans, my socks, my underwear, come from there too,” said Mr. Kenny. “But it’s an Eddie Bauer shirt. I like nice things, and I don’t like to iron.”
Once Frank and Michael had left, Mr. Kenny fell to talking about his son. “Michael is so smart; he could do so many things.” The father and son were equally wrapped up in each other. “I tell him if he just …”
The phone rang. It was his grandchildren, and Mr. Kenny was soon smiling so broadly that I thought his cheeks must ache.
“Hi, sweetheart. You miss Pawh-Pawh?… Okay, put ’em on …”
While Chuck spoke about report cards with one of his older grandchildren—“That’s an improvement”—I looked around the living room. It was dominated by two large portraits over the fireplace—one of Michael and one of his stepsister, the mother of those grandchildren on the phone. In his early teens Michael had had bird-downy hair that one could hardly resist fluffing.
By the time Mr. Kenny hung up, I was examining the book he was reading, Karl Rove’s Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight.
“Michael and I don’t share political opinions,” he said, “but we share how we love people.”
I asked Mr. Kenny about his work history.
“I’ve never been unemployed since I was twelve years old,” he answered. I knew from his son that Chuck had taken on a lot of financial responsibility when his father left the family. Mr. Kenny gave me a more neutral chronology that included military service (“during the Vietnam War but not in Vietnam”), full-time jobs during an early marriage (“Ellen and I have been married thirty-three years,” he was anxious to tell me about his second wife), a corporate downsizing, a brief return to work for a family business (“owned by a Jewish family that I’d left on good terms”), and finally: “Twenty-four years ago yesterday, I went to work for Big Box, and I’ve been there ever since. I had opportunities to go other places. It’s sort of ironic, because I’m working a strange shift right now. But the reason I never left Big Box is because I was always able to be on days there, which left me the evenings and the weekends for my family and one of my hobbies, which is refereeing soccer.
“With the shift I’m on right now,” Mr. Kenny said, “I can’t referee soccer on the weekends if I want to spend any time with my family.”
“Michael says that you worked all these years for this company and now they’d like a cheaper payroll—that’s Michael’s interpretation—so they put you on a shift they hoped you’d quit.”
“Trying to bring younger people in, forcing the older people out; it’s a constant battle. Fortunately, I’ve been able to survive. I don’t put stock in my own abilities to maintain that employment. I truly believe it’s through the grace of God and the strength and perseverance He gives me to say the right things to the right people.
“I had to tell a vice president once that I’m trying to do my work as if I was doing it for my Creator. If that makes you happy, I’m happy. If it doesn’t, I’ll just go over somewhere else.”
“And yet you’ve stayed?”
“I’ve stayed. I’ve worked under eight facility vice presidents. They average about three years apiece.”
Chuck’s son-in-law and stepdaughter raise two thousand acres of feed corn and soybeans on a farm that’s been in the son-in-law’s family since the nineteenth century. The previous fall the couple had to be in Russia by Thanksgiving to meet the child they were adopting. (The very granddaughter, now two years old, whom Pawh-Pawh just spoke to on the phone.) “But we had a real wet fall, so they got a late start on harvest, and it was all hands on deck.”
“And you helped in the fields?”
“I learned to drive tractors, semis, grain trucks, taking them down to the river to …”
“That smile again,” I said. “It’s almost like your grandchild’s smile.”
“Yeah, and we got to be out there with the grandchildren. Worked long hours; got this camaraderie—my son-in-law, his brother, my best friend, Len, who was a vice president at a paint company who got downsized. Our church people would come out and drive trucks and … I get emotional,” Mr. Kenny apologized, “but friends, church farmers, all came to help. We finished four days before they had to go to Russia.”
“Michael says you’re thinking of retiring and working on the farm?”
“Yes, being a hired hand.”
“It’s hard work, but at least you get to work with people you truly, truly care about. I have good relations with my longtime co-workers at Big Box,” he hastened to say, “but they’re not my family.”
In gross outline, retailers like Big Box import huge shipments of goods from Asia and disperse them in smaller lots from depots around the United States. In the area that Chuck manages, seven supervisors oversee about two hundred hourly associates who sort, mark, and ticket merchandise, then send it back out in the assortments of colors and sizes appropriate for each of their stores in the region.
It occurred to me that most of this could be done on the Asian end without an intermediate stop at a distribution center in Indiana. Maybe it will be eventually. In the meantime, the company had just done an old-fashioned time-and-motion study—how many seconds to open the first flap of this or that carton, how many seconds to unclip a tag, fold a sleeve, and so on. This resulted in new quotas that had already been implemented in other Big Box distribution centers. “They’re already getting it done with less people at lower cost,” Chuck said. “So now the pressure is on us to get up there.”
Along with new quotas the company had instituted a change from a five-day week to a ten-hour-a-day, four-day week.
“Four tens means management’s got to be there 2:30 in the afternoon,” Chuck explained. “And we don’t get off till about 3:30 in the morning.”
“That’s over twelve hours!” I said.
“Right. Management does thirteen hours for the ten-hour shift. If the shift goes overtime, we’re there till five o’clock in the morning. And if they work on Friday, then it’s not a four-day week; it’s a five-day week. And you’ve already worked fifty-two hours. So it’s now sixty hours. So you’ve given them another half week’s work.” Managers don’t receive overtime pay.
Americans work longer hours than people in any other industrial country. We average 20 percent more, for instance, than French or German workers. That amounts to an extra day a week. Not only have Americans been working longer hours since the mid-1970s, but American families have been sending more members out to work. Michael’s mother worked full-time as long as he could remember. Chuck says that in the families he knows at church, both spouses work “except if there’s a problem like unemployment or illness.”
If families are working so many more hours than in the past, why do they borrow so much? I didn’t want to sound as if I were accusing the Kennys of extravagance or poor management. Nor did I want to put my own theories into his mouth. So I broached the subject of debt in as open-ended a manner as I could.
“I notice your son doesn’t have a credit card. He almost won’t touch one.”
“I think Michael has learned from our mistakes,” Mr. Kenny volunteered. “We, like all young families, used credit cards and got into debt.”
“What kind of debt?” I asked. “What were you buying?”
“Just normal expenses. We were saying, ‘Why should the two of us be working as hard as we are and not be able to afford a decent car or computers. Maybe we were keeping up with the Joneses. So you’d put it on your card. Then something would come up; you couldn’t make the full payment, so you’d carry it over.
“There was a point in time when we had a lot of medical problems with our daughter and we had college debt with her: we were living paycheck to paycheck; it was getting to where I was having to wire money for a car payment so it wouldn’t be late.
“At the time we weren’t tithing,” Mr. Kenny explained. “We were giving like 6 percent. And I remember one Sunday morning we were going to a church, and we were sort of having a heated discussion on the way. The kids weren’t with us. I don’t know what they were doing then, maybe just sleeping.
“My wife said, ‘I think we should be tithing.’ I said, ‘We can hardly make our payments now, and you want to increase our giving?’ She said, ‘Yes.’
“Well, that Sunday when we wrote the check, she said, ‘What will it be for?’ I figured it out and wrote the check. And we have never been in need of money since then.”
There was a long pause.
“I’m not saying money hasn’t been tight. But we have not been living paycheck to paycheck since we decided to give God back a tenth of what he has given us.”
“Do you remember what year that was?” I asked.
“It must have been about fifteen years ago because I had heart trouble right after that. They gave me angioplasty.”
“How long since you’ve been out of debt?” I asked.
“Sometime in the last five years. Well, we still owe on our house, of course, and one vehicle and the new furniture you’re sitting on.” He gestured to the couch. “But that was interest-free,” he said, hastening to set the record straight.
“It’s very comfortable,” I said. It must be the new couch Michael instructed me to “enjoy.” “Very comfortable.”
“We had the old one for twenty years,” Mr. Kenny said, defending his purchase. “I could pay this off right now, but I’d have to go into my retirement savings. So I thought I’d just wait to give them the money since I can do it at no cost.”
I could imagine how Michael derided the new couch bought on credit even though at no interest.
“One thing my faith has taught me,” Mr. Kenny declared, “you cannot be a slave to two masters. Only one. With debt you’re at the mercy of your employer. If they say ‘You will do this,’ you can’t say ‘No I won’t: I’ll just leave,’ because you have bills to pay. And if you have bills, you’re subject to the terms that job puts on you. Employers know that.
“But Michael has no debt. Who’s he responsible to? He can pack up and go. If the Lord tells him to go to Nineveh like he told Jonah, he can go. When you’re in debt, you can’t do that.”
What a thought! One’s own son might be called to preach to Nineveh. Michael’s unshorn locks may even be a sign of his readiness, for they make it difficult for him to be tied to an encumbering steady job. But what did this say about Chuck himself? Does he believe that the debt he’d incurred by dutifully taking care of so many people over his lifetime disqualified him from responding to God’s call? It must be terrible for him to feel that way.
I asked Mr. Kenny if the long unreimbursed hours were because of the recession. “Does the company thank you for helping them through their downturn?”
“Big Box is doing extremely well financially,” he asserted. “And they also own Medium Box [a more upscale chain]. We’re just short-staffed.”
Big Box and its parent company were indeed profitable. During 2010, the year I spoke to Chuck, they returned considerable money to shareholders through stock buybacks. The remaining shareholders enjoyed an increased rate of return on their capital while employing several thousand fewer workers. It may be a smaller company, but productivity—the value of output per paid hour—was up, and investors took a greater share of that in profit.
America’s successful firms have traditionally increased labor productivity by giving their employees the most advanced equipment in the world to work with. Some automation may have been going on at Big Box. But at the distribution center, Chuck Kenny increased the company’s productivity by the low-tech means of donating free days of work and by enduring the tension that comes from feeling understaffed.
I recently heard about a Walmart-owned warehouse in Elwood, Illinois, that’s pioneered the practice of paying the loading crews on piecework. If they have to wait for a container, they can take home less than the minimum $7.50 an hour. Someone showed me the pay stub of a man who worked 12.5 hours for $57.81. This primitive form of increasing labor productivity actually militates against efficient scheduling and investment in new machinery. It’s a third-world way of squeezing out profits.
Chuck Kenny is not a complainer. He was unhappy about the way he was being treated at Big Box. He’s also regretful about his own career choices, and at his age these regrets are naturally on his mind. But he only talked to me about them because I asked. I didn’t have to ask, however, to hear about God, the farm, or his grandchildren.
“I never realized being a grandparent was going to be like this,” he said, welling up. “My grandchildren think I’m it. ‘Pawh-Pawh.’ The twins said that even before they said ‘Mimi.’ I’ve always been the one that was down on the floor with them. I’m the one that takes the boys out on the farm, into the woods, down to the creek. Adventures. And Isabella wants to do whatever the boys do.”
The Kennys’ church has a congregation of about a hundred. They’d been meeting in a school gymnasium till the housing bust gave them the chance to get property cheaply. Their new building was being renovated. But the same price decline that benefited the church put the kibosh on the Kennys’ personal plans.
“We were going to build a house on the farm. They gave us three acres, we’d already settled on the plans, and we were just at the point to order materials. But it was 2007, and I just felt uneasy about the economy. We were talking about a long-term financial commitment, but the uncertainty about our jobs, our pensions …”
“Couldn’t you sell this house to pay for building a house on the farm?” I suggested.
That’s exactly what they’d intended, but Chuck Kenny said, “Right now our house is probably worth 40 percent less than it was ten years ago. A lot of people will buy a home and sell it at the right time and make a ton of money. Ellen and I have lived in two other houses before this, but we’ve never been able to do that. Well … that’s the way it goes.
“We like this house,” he said to console himself. “We’ve mortgaged it a couple of times with the kids in school. But by now, I don’t mind telling you, it’s only $895 a month. It would be nice to be near the grandchildren. Nice, but who wants a large new mortgage at the age of sixty? I think we made the right decision not to take on new debt.”
For a lot of our remaining time we talked about Michael—how to get the bright young man well settled. Chuck knew his son’s strengths and weaknesses, and he agonized over the right amount of help a parent should give—the right balance of carrot and stick.
He’d put $5,000 down on Michael’s present car in order to get the monthly payments down to something Michael could afford. “You need a car to work.” At Big Box, Chuck had seen people dismissed as too unsteady because they drove unreliable cars or depended on rides from family members.
“You want to help your children when they’re helping themselves. But when they’re not, you have to start pulling back. Maybe if I had started pulling back a little earlier, he would be a little further ahead right now.”
“We just can’t know,” I said.
“No, you don’t know. I tell him, ‘Cut your hair and get a job.’ He drives me crazy and I push back. But he’s gonna live his life his way.”
“What about Michael’s friends?” I asked. The Kennys had taken in a couple of their children’s schoolmates during rough patches in life like parents divorcing. “I heard Michael tell a friend back from Florida that you can’t just pound the pavement for a job these days. So where should they go?”
“Take the fast-food industry,” Mr. Kenny replied. “You go to work in McDonald’s; you apply yourself; you can get into their management program. Big Box hired several fast-food managers as supervisors because they have experience where it’s fast paced, quick, and very regimented. Those skills are transferable. But first you have to be willing to put on the hairnet and do the work.”
Here’s a man who knows the Evansville labor market. His idea of a career path for a kid like his son starts by putting on the hairnet at McDonald’s with the hope of transferring that discipline to a warehouse management job like the one he started with.
With perseverance and luck or God’s help to say the right things, that young man might move up to the job Mr. Kenny himself holds now—a job where he keeps working longer hours for the same salary. Where, in other words, his hourly wage has been going down. But isn’t each generation of Americans supposed to move up in the world?
His employers hadn’t repaid Chuck Kenny’s loyalty with their own, yet he didn’t have much respect, or at least much hope, for any friend of Michael’s who couldn’t bite the bullet and pursue the only employment opportunities that were really out there: fast food and Big Box.
That doesn’t mean you don’t try to find something better for your own child. After all, “Michael is so bright.” And even if he weren’t, each parent’s job is to help his own particular children to beat the odds.
We went round in circles about what Michael might do till Mr. Kenny took a phone call and returned restless or distressed. It was time for work, and he was headed for a long shift at a place where his staff was under pressure to meet new quotas and he was under personal pressure to leave. Who knew what additional pressure he learned about in that phone call? Chuck Kenny set off on a brilliant fall afternoon and wouldn’t get home until almost five in the morning.
“What Am I Looking at Here in Evansville?”
Our $39 room at the Aztar overlooked the Ohio River. Each morning we’d seen at least one dog walker, but never more than two, on the new downtown promenade. We’d also seen three cyclists using the bike path. With our business just about wrapped up, we decided to check out the redevelopment area.
We strolled the three blocks of Evansville’s newly gentrified Main Street, wondering which empty gourmet coffee shop to patronize. We saw a young woman go into one of them, and Frank caught a glimpse of a union logo on her T-shirt. So we followed and asked her where we could learn a little about the town’s labor history. She directed us to Charles A. Whobrey, president and business manager of Teamster Local 215. A walk farther down Main through the old, somewhat more peopled downtown brought us to the Teamsters headquarters building on Walnut Street.
“What am I looking at here in Evansville?” I asked the lean fifty-year-old as he led us into his cubbyhole of an office. “How could a town have gotten this depressed since Lehman Brothers collapsed?”
“You’re not looking at the effects of just this recession,” he asserted. “So many people here survive paycheck to paycheck, obviously living beyond their means, that when something like this hits … well, let me go back.
“I started working for the union in 1981.” Whobrey’s Kentucky hills accent broadened as he got into his story. “I started in March, and not a month later President Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. Permanently fired the strikers. That doesn’t happen much in American history. Killing PATCO [the air traffic controllers’ union] sent the signal to business—as it was supposed to—that it was okay to get rid of the unions. ‘Uh-oh,’ I said, ‘I have the knack for gettin’ involved right when the wheel’s going into the mud.’ ”
And with unions went wages.
“We used to have plenty of people around Evansville making $15, $21, $25 an hour. Those are people that can survive through a recession.
“Okay, so you take a 15 percent temporary pay cut—like we just gave. Our members could hold out till times got better. But now the middle-class worker starts out in debt. They have nothing to fall back on. So you’re not looking at just this recession, you’re looking at the cumulative effect of at least thirty years that started when I joined the labor movement and Reagan broke PATCO.”
At least Whobrey had recognized a historic turning point when he saw it. I’d covered the PATCO strike as a reporter, and I hadn’t.
The article I wrote explaining the strikers’ grievance—not money, but hours and stress, the same complaints as today’s air traffic controllers—was killed by the paper that assigned it. In its place the Village Voice ran a front-page essay about PATCO in which a hip black journalist reviled those white men (which they almost all were) making $50,000 a year (which they almost all weren’t) who were in a position to tie up the country’s airports (which it turned out they couldn’t).
This was the first time I’d had an article killed. It should have alerted me to how profoundly the entire nation was being lined up against unions. I assumed, instead, that the article wasn’t quite up to my standards. And it wasn’t. For unlike Whobrey, I hadn’t spotted this as the very moment that the wheel went into the mud.
Between then and now, Whobrey’s southern Indiana Teamsters local declined from five thousand to three thousand members. “And we’re doing better than most,” he said.
“One of our guys out of work got a job driving hazardous material, explosives, I think. Anyway, he’s got a hazmat license, but he got $12 an hour and no benefits. Oh yes, they gave him an IRA, and they’ll match anything he puts in up to 6 percent of his pay. What they don’t say is they won’t pay you enough to put anything in. So they don’t have anything to match, and you don’t have any pension.”
In a Monday morning quarterback kind of way, Whobrey and I wondered what would have happened if stronger airport unions had gone out to defend the amateurish air traffic controllers. Would solidarity at the start have staved off thirty years of decline? That kind of speculation is both useless and endless.
It was after five when Chuck Whobrey let us out of the Teamsters building onto an empty downtown street.
“So what you’re looking at in Evansville,” he said, ending where he started, “it’s not the result of just this recession. It’s the effect of thirty years since the wheel went into the mud for American workers.”
Father and Son Philosophies
Whobrey is right. What I saw on the streets of Evansville was not the result of one deep recession but the cumulative effects of a much longer downturn for American workers. But what started that downturn?
From the end of World War II until the 1970s the United States enjoyed a quarter of a century of shared prosperity. Corporate profits rose steadily, and so did the wages of a working class that called itself “the middle class.”
Then the sharing petered out. Between 1976 and 2007, 58 percent of every new dollar of income generated went to the top 1 percent of households. Economists suggest many triggers for the Great Reversal. They fall roughly into two categories.
The majority of economists point to specific pressures on profitability like the oil price shock of 1973 and competition from newly rebuilt Germany and Japan. The argument goes that as the sole industrial power to survive World War II intact, the United States had grown complacent about modernizing while Germany and Japan built almost everything brand-new. As soon as profit rates dipped at home, our alert financiers helped expand competition further by moving money abroad, including some to the countries that would soon become known as the Asian Tigers.
Whichever specific pressures to profitability they emphasize, these economists agree that U.S. profits fell (or started to stop growing) in the early to mid-1970s. By the 1980s employers became serious about cutting labor costs.
A smaller group of economists explain the Great Reversal primarily as a political phenomenon. By the mid-1970s, they say, the lessons of the Great Depression had been almost forgotten—except by a few diehards who’d been waiting for the chance to undo the New Deal. By the 1980s this group, buoyed by neoliberal sentiment, was powerful enough to elect politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who weakened unions at home and made it easier to move work abroad. These and subsequent administrations redistributed wealth upward through tax “reform” and, in the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century, through privatization, deregulation, and the end of capital controls. In other words, a political sea change freed capitalists to act as they always would if you remove the restrictions.
To oversimplify the differences only a little: one side says they did it because they had to; the other side says they did it because they could.
My own view is that real challenges to profitability surfaced in the 1970s. But the balance of political power determined that these many-faceted economic problems would be tackled primarily by cutting labor costs. There would be no more sharing of the ups and downs.
However complex and debatable the causes, it’s clear that starting around the mid-1970s, the wealth gap widened while hourly wages stagnated or declined.
If couples wanted to maintain homes like the ones they were raised in, they borrowed and/or took second jobs. This left many families with both unmanageable children and unmanageable debts.
Chuck Kenny accuses himself of trying to keep up with the Joneses. But I don’t think Chuck was trying to keep up with the Joneses next door. He was trying to keep up with the Joneses of a generation earlier. Since his father had deserted the family, Chuck’s image of middle-class life may have come from television. But for most Americans—white Americans, at least—those imaginary TV families of the 1950s were statistically real.
A blue-collar worker like William Bendix in The Life of Riley could own a modest home, buy a television (far more costly for its time than a computer today), take his family on camping vacations, and send a boy to college in preparation for a job that would pay better than his father’s and actually existed.
A professional or middle manager like Chuck Kenny could own a ranch home, take more expensive vacations, trade a car in every few years, then send the boy and the girl to college. For unless you were incompetent or unlucky, your earnings gradually increased over the course of your working life.
That had already begun to change when Chuck Kenny entered the workforce. But it’s hard for any of us to appreciate how a gradual decline affects us day to day.
Mr. Kenny knows that things haven’t turned out as they were supposed to. Even on two incomes, he and his wife couldn’t put two children through college and then glide into a debt-free retirement. But after 150 years of objectively moving up, we Americans perceive of our country as a land of opportunity. Each couple is bound to think that its personal stagnation rests on personal limitations or mistakes.
Other people bought and sold houses at the right time, Chuck reminded me. And he had opted for the security of a large corporation when he might have stayed with that small business where they wouldn’t get rid of an older worker just to lower the payroll.
Chuck worries that Big Box is after him because he can’t cut the mustard anymore. He’d mentioned to me, almost in a whisper, that he doesn’t take to the computer the way the young people do. He must also have the unavoidable suspicion—this must be difficult to express, even to one’s wife—that he hasn’t achieved all he might have because he’s just not a top-notch individual.
The Kennys may indeed have failed to grasp opportunities that would leapfrog them over others. But their basic economic mistake was to assume that salaries, house prices, and savings would gradually increase over the years. In other words, the Kennys fell behind because they didn’t fully grasp that they weren’t going to get ahead.
But adjusting to downward mobility would have required a midlife course correction that’s inimical to Americans of their generation. As I’ve said, down is an un-American direction.
Their son, Michael, on the other hand, was born on the down escalator. Since childhood he’d watched his parents running to stay in place. His mother had recently managed to keep her job when her company merged with another organization and downsized. She now supervises more people and works longer hours for the same money, Michael told me. Both at home and at the staffing agency Michael saw employers raising quotas and beating down wages. It has been going on as long as he can remember.
In this long and one-sided class war, Michael Kenny has declared himself a noncombatant. You won’t catch him struggling to maintain a higher standard of living on a declining wage. And what sort of fool borrows to get things he can’t afford now, when his future income is bound to be the same or lower? Michael won’t flail like his father to maintain a middle-class lifestyle; he’ll go with the flow.
However frustrating it is to his parents, his neo-hippie lifestyle makes sense. “Do your own thing” can be a comforting mantra when you can’t afford matching furniture anyway.
A Different Generation Gap
There’s an obvious generation gap between Chuck and Michael Kenny. They’re father and son, after all. But there’s another kind of generation gap between these Indiana folks and the Pink Slip Clubbers of New York.
When factories started closing or moving abroad in the 1970s and 1980s, we were told not to worry. Yes, some blue-collar workers might have to be pensioned off. But the rest of us would become “information workers” in the “postindustrial society.” The important thing was to acquire the skills of the future.
The four Pink Slippers prepared themselves appropriately for careers in symbol manipulation. Yet Feldman, the graphics man, worked for many years as an hourly temp. Like teaching French literature by the semester or writing computer code by the line, not only do you take home less as a contingent worker, but you’re outside the company and somehow outside the society.
The other three Pink Slippers did brain work that requires a great deal of initiative and involves too much interaction with people here to be easily outsourced to some other English-speaking country. Still they had seen their real pay stagnate and some benefits, like pensions, fade away.
Something bad has been creeping up the occupational ladder. First it hit blue-collar workers like Duane; then it hit pink-collar office workers like his wife. The college educated appeared to be keeping a couple of rungs ahead of it. But starting in the late 1990s, real income has been falling sharply for people with college degrees—so far excluding PhDs. You might say that the Pink Slip Club members were a generation and a half behind (or ahead) of the people in Evansville. But it was catching up to them even before the downturn.
So far none of the Pink Slip Four has found a new job. Many employers are loath to hire people who’ve been out of work for a long time; some say so explicitly in their job postings. But assuming things pick up and businesses begin hiring, what will their jobs look like, feel like, and pay like when the recession recedes?