INTERDEPENDENCE AND THE WORKING POOR

ALICE Is Our Neighbor

Who is ALICE? Who is ALEC?

She is the young woman who washes your dishes at that fancy restaurant.

He is my grandfather who didn't plan for retirement and is working as a greeter at Walmart.

He is David, the formerly well-off middle-aged manager who is deemed expendable.

She is Susan, the McDonald's service worker who takes your order.

She is Sheronda, the woman down the street who has just lost her job.

They are our children, who are living hand to mouth after having made some bad choices.

He is Jamal, the worker who makes only $8.25 an hour.

They are our neighbors.

She and he may be you and me one day, if we are not there already.

There are reports that suggest that almost half of us will be working but living in a financially shaky situation for some period of our lives.

The United Way commissioned a six-state study in 2014 to determine how many households in those states, including Florida, were living in the gap between the poverty line and what the United Way terms the "survival line," earning more than the official U.S. poverty rate but less than the basic cost of living in those six states. They discovered that 44 percent of the households in Florida's Central West Coast experienced financial hardship, while only 15 percent were technically under the poverty line. The cost of living in this seven-county area — labeled a "survival budget" or "basic cost of living" — ranged from $49,777 to $53,300 for a family of four. The average gap for ALICE and ALEC ranged from $4,000 to $8,000 below that threshold.

If you were to go about your daily errands in Bradenton, Florida, where I live, or in the town or city where you live, you might not suspect that one of every two people you encounter does not make enough money to meet the basic cost of living there. Fifty percent are not earning what they need to live. For those dining in Panera, the percentage is probably less. For those shopping in Walmart, the percentage is probably more.

How about your community? How many people there live on less than a survival budget? The issue is not just that a large number of people are the working poor but that we as a society are dependent on their labor. So the working poor (ALICE and ALEC) are those who wait on us in restaurants, who are our secretaries and public school teachers, who cook our food, who serve us in stores, who fix our cars, who grow our food, who clean our offices and homes, who landscape our public spaces, and who work on our highways. We are economically interdependent with them, and the well-being of all of us is tied up in everyone's being able to live decently. We are interdependent, and increasingly many of us are living payday to payday.

What Does Economic Instability Feel Like?

Though we are born with different abilities and into divergent circumstances, we are essentially interdependent. Our economic interconnectedness turns malicious when our natural solidarity is so shattered by disparate conditions that some are deprived of what they need to survive and flourish. Let me tell you a story: Joe got a job with a small firm that laid tile for floors and bathrooms. He learned how to do it well. When work was slack, his boss would have to give him time off. Because his income was not steady, he decided to start his own company. He had his own tools and borrowed money to buy a used truck and other equipment. His workmanship was high quality, contractors gave him more jobs, and he was busy.

Joe, his wife, and their children lived in a home they rented from a citrus grower. His landlord offered him a job on weekends in exchange for free rent. Joe took him up on it and was starting to pay down his loans with the money he saved on rent.

After six months his landlord demanded about $10,000 in back rent.

"Whoa! What are talking about? We agreed I would work for you weekends in exchange for free rent!"

"No. You must have misunderstood me. I never said that."

Joe, very angry, with expletives said: "You sure did! And I don't have $10,000!"

The landlord said, "If I had intended that, I'd have given you a written agreement. The only written agreement is the one where you will pay me $1,480 per month rent. Since you have not paid, you will have to move."

The next day Joe was driving to a job and had an accident that totaled his truck. His insurance did not include replacement coverage. He could not work without the truck. His few savings were gone quickly. Without a job, Joe, his wife, and their children were homeless.

It can happen that fast. One calamity can destabilize a household that is living paycheck to paycheck. It can reverse even a hopeful story. The series of events in Joe's family situation indicate the tightness of our interconnection. What might have been merely an inconvenience to the financially stable became a matter of being able to make a living for Joe. The health and education of his whole family depended on Joe's truck and the trustworthiness of their landlord. The thinness of the margin on which Joe's family was living reveals the fragility and importance of the interconnections.

Other calamities can revolve around the impact of an accident that causes an injury; of being out of work; of having a spouse close out a joint banking account and abandon the family; of sudden medical crises; of being physically exhausted as a result of working multiple jobs, which results in being prone to accidents at work or to explosive outbursts against supervisors. The scenario of being one paycheck away from poverty is one that both the poor and increasingly the middle class know first- or at least secondhand.

Those poised to address this precariousness from a policy perspective tend to be removed from such risk themselves. Former Florida governor and presidential candidate Jeb Bush relayed the facts of the matter to an audience in Detroit on February 3, 2015, saying that "two out of three American households live paycheck to paycheck. Any unexpected expense can push them into financial ruin. We have a record number of Americans on food stamps and living in poverty." Ironically, it was Trump, the wealthiest candidate of all, who went beyond facts to strike an emotional chord with the white working poor, for whom these statistics are a distressing reality.

ALEC Is Us

There is a new poverty that surpasses what we have known to this point. The sheer quantity of widespread economic insecurity and soaring levels of income inequality are unlike anything since the Great Depression. This exacerbates our fear of what may happen to us in the future. "How much risk do I face?" we may ask ourselves. Mark Rank and Thomas Hirschl have answered that question. In an article titled "Calculate Your Economic Risk," they report that nearly 60 percent of Americans between the ages of twenty and seventy-five...