This is the toughest part of the month for Sarah Robinson, the final week, when the futility of her simple but responsible home budgeting skills becomes painfully evident.
The stack of bills, arranged in order of due date in the top left drawer of her worn French Provincial dresser, is seven deep. By the time her next paycheck arrives, still a week away, they’ll all be past due. Her meager recompense will barely cover half of them.
And somewhere, she knows, computers in the accounting offices of utility companies and department stores already are revving up to spit out new bills, with her name showing prominently in the envelope window, the second that June finally rolls around.
“I got the pile down to this,” she said, pulling the current bunch from among her underwear. “But by the time I get this pile down, it’s time for paying rent. Then I have a new pile.”
“Four twenty-five an hour,” she said, getting to the source of her consternation, “it don’t add up to much.”
Robinson makes the lowest hourly wage allowed by federal law–$4.25–as a home care provider for the elderly. If Congress and President Clinton ever get beyond their election-year bickering and approve new minimum-wage legislation, she would see her pay increase by 90 cents an hour over the next two years.
It would be greatly appreciated. An extra 30 bucks a week would allow her to knock another couple bills off the stack. But in reality, it would do very little to alter life for Robinson, 46, and her 10-year-old son.
In some ways Robinson, a high school graduate whose fate is tied to a history of hard work, low-paying jobs, company downsizing and a major personal crisis, epitomizes the declining economics of those on the fringes of the work force.
Government leaders on each side of the debate in Washington have attempted to get political mileage out of predicting dramatic repercussions–good or bad–for the working poor if the wage is raised. But the day-to-day reality suggests a subtler picture:
The minimum wage doesn’t truly support anyone. Rather, it is but one in a patchwork of income sources whose ebb and flow determine how impoverished a worker is from month to month. Certainly it would take far more drastic measures to significantly alter the existence of Robinson and other minimum-wage workers. According to the most recent U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics, about 3.4 percent of the hourly work force in Illinois–66,000 people–earn minimum wage. An additional 5.7 percent, or 97,000 state residents, earn less than minimum wage because their income is supplemented by tips or commissions.
It is the absence of expensive, personal emergencies; the reliability of Robinson’s second job cleaning homes; and government support from food stamps and Social Security that is more critical to Robinson’s living conditions than would be an extra few dollars from her hourly employment.
Even with a rise in the minimum wage, Robinson still would be fending off utility cut-off notices with promises and nominal, good-faith payments. She still would be holding to her vow to never, ever buy anything that’s not on sale. She still would be responding to her son’s excessive youthful cravings with her mantra, “I buy you what you need, not what you want.”
This is life on minimum wage, and after five years of surviving it, Robinson is resigned that, as things stand, she never will catch up. She does not ignore her bills, but she rarely sends a full payment–and she no longer feels guilty about that. Her No. 1 rule in handling the books is to never open a bill until you’re ready to pay it. “Why get upset before time?” she says.
Robinson’s two-bedroom apartment in a stately, brick six-flat in Chatham exudes order, a place where it would seem rules such as “Don’t play in the living room” are strictly enforced.
The apartment has never been without heat or lights, she says. And her son, Charles, she insists, doesn’t know he’s poor. “He doesn’t understand because he has plenty of food to eat.”
Robinson, a short woman with medium-length hair and a wide smile whose tired eyes are the only giveaway of her age, is buoyed by a spiritual faith far more secure than her financial outlook.
In a good month, with plenty of work and few emergencies, she might bring home $410 from two, biweekly paychecks, $250 from cleaning homes at $50 a day, and $350 from Charles’ Social Security check, which he has received since his father, Robinson’s fiance, died in 1991. That’s just over $1,000 a month–$12,000 a year, if her good fortune were to hold up that long.
Her monthly expenses easily exceed that. More than half is eaten up by rent and utilities alone.
Food stamps, which amount to $100 to $200 a month, depending on how much income she reports to the public aid office from the previous month, cover groceries, if she diligently hunts for bargains. A shopping trip–usually taken by bus (she doesn’t own a car), but sometimes with a lift from her sister–requires visits to as many as four grocery stores.
Rent would be $500 a month if Robinson didn’t tend the front yard, pull in the garbage cans, collect rent, sweep down the steps, change lightbulbs and perform other odd jobs. She only has to pay $325.
Robinson’s predicament has come about not because of lack of initiative. She has always worked. The day after her bus arrived on the South Side from Prairie Court, Miss., in 1969, the summer after she graduated high school, her cousin took her to fill out a job application at a mail-order warehouse. She was hired on the spot to help with shipping.
But that first job was a precursor to an unstable employment history that has been marked by a variety of entry-level clerical positions that have been the first to be axed when times get tough.
The mail-order company moved to Texas. Later, a scrap metal company where she worked streamlined and moved to the suburbs. More recently, a law firm in the Loop–which offered her hope of advancement–joined with another firm and took only two records clerks with it. Robinson was third in line.
“Each time I lost a job, I had to start at the bottom and work my way up,” she said. “And when I get just enough room where I can breathe, that job is phased out and I have to start over again.”
None of this mattered as much as it did five years ago, when Charles’ father died.
Before her son was born, Robinson was flexible and more able to get along on low-end wages. When she became pregnant in 1985, she and Charles’ father, whom she had been dating for seven years, were engaged. He insisted she stay home with the baby while he supported the family on his salary from the U.S. Postal Service.
In the midst of this financial security, her fiance died of a heart attack at age 44 in 1991. Beyond the emotional hardship she and Charles endured, the economic impact was devastating.
Around Christmas 1994, having lived off temporary jobs, unemployment checks and a modest savings, she heard about an opening at Help At Home, an agency that assists elderly people who need care in their homes.
It has turned out to be a job Robinson enjoys. But it takes its toll. Four mornings a week, she spends three hours in the morning with Miss Lillian, a spirited woman in her 90s. She spends three afternoons at the home of a couple in their 70s. On Mondays she cleans up a beauty salon in the community. The rest of the time is spent cleaning homes.
It means lots of bus travel for her, and several afternoons home alone for Charles, with frequent phone calls from Robinson.
“I’m working all the time,” she said. “And when I’m not working, I’m usually sleeping.”
Recreation amounts to an occasional late-night video and a trip with Charles once or twice a month to Pizza Hut or McDonald’s.
A wire bookshelf in the living room is full of novels by her favorite authors–Andrew Greeley, Stephen King, Sidney Sheldon– that she ordered from a book club and has never had time to read. Her last vacation was at Thanksgiving when she took a week off to visit her mother in Prairie Court. She didn’t get paid that week and it threw her off for months.
There are times, amid this daily grind of penny-pinching and working like a dog, when it becomes necessary to be fiscally irresponsible, Robinson concedes, whether to avoid physical affliction or mental anguish.
Take last summer, during the heat wave.
“With the summer we had, I ran the air-conditioner (a window unit in the dining room) non-stop,” Robinson said. “I said, `I’m not going to worry about it.’ “
The result was an electric bill at the end of summer that exceeded $300, which Robinson is still trying to pay off.
Then there’s the $2,000 dining-room set she bought on credit just before Christmas. Her explanation is that the table was on sale for 40 percent off and she had lined up a full-time job cleaning a Methodist church that would have helped her meet the $100 a month payment. The job fell through.
But the more compelling reason is far less elaborate: Her previous dining room set was 25 years old and ragged.
“I had patched those chairs and patched those chairs and I refused to patch them again,” she said emphatically.
Some might call it foolish. Robinson calls it self-preservation. And she does not expect the minimum-wage bill to help beyond that.
“One of these days I’ll have a decent job paying decent money,” she said, “even if I have to go back to school to get it.”
