Jerry Longoria
‘Waging a Living’
Produced and directed by Roger Weisberg
PBS
Aug. 29, 2006
By Alexander C. Kafka
“Hustling backwards” is how Barbara Brooks, a 36-year-old single mother of five in Freeport, N.Y., describes her situation. Raised as a young child in abusive homes, sexually abused further while living in a juvenile detention center where she now works as a counselor, she scrapes by on $8.25 an hour plus a number of government services.
She works toward an associate’s degree at a community college, excels at her job, and gets a raise, but the $450 gain per month is more than wiped out by $600 lost in government aid. She wants to get off welfare, but her financial life is quicksand. “The more money I make,” she says, “the harder it gets.”
Brooks is one of four people featured in Roger Weisberg’s exceptional—and devastating—documentary, Waging a Living, part of the "P.O.V." series. In a low-key verite style, he and his East Coast and West Coast teams bring into view the trials of the working poor that author Barbara Ehrenreich and others have explored so effectively in print. Weisberg explains in a statement that the program follows up his recent Ending Welfare as We Know It. “We succeeded in getting millions of Americans out of the welfare system,” he writes, “without getting them out of poverty.”
Brooks, a full-time student and full-time employee, says that, with the kids, she gets maybe three or four good hours of sleep a night. We follow her as she scrambles to the check-cashing store to get the close to $200 she needs for Claritin and Cortaid for a son with breathing problems—she’s lost her Medicaid because she earns too much.
Things look up for her when, after getting her associate’s degree, she moves to a $15-an-hour job, with benefits, at a private nursing home. We sit in on her 90-day evaluation, in which, aside from the money, simply the praise from her new boss brings Brooks to tears. She tells that same boss soon after that she needs to lessen her hours to go back to school part time and earn her bachelor’s. “I believe that, through education, everything is going to change,” Brooks says. Heading off to classes again, she sure looks like she means it, and we sure hope she’s right.
Jerry Longoria, a 42-year-old security guard in San Francisco gets by on $12 an hour. A recovering alcoholic and drug user, he pays $530 a month in rent, has $30 in his pocket, and $10 in the bank, toward a long-dreamed-of trip to North Carolina to visit his two teenage children, whom he hasn’t seen in nine years. He works part time, in addition, at a center advising homeless people, which he says he’s happy to do because he was once homeless himself. His clothes are from Goodwill and Thrift Town. He marches with the security-guard union, aiming for a better contract. The guards eventually do get better medical benefits, but their raise? Twenty-five cents an hour. Still, maybe it’ll mean he won’t have to choose between rent and insurance.
“Nobody owes me anything,” he says he has realized in his rehabbed maturity. “I needed to work for it.” Not long after, though, he loses his job because of a disagreement with his boss, and his salary sags from $12.75 to $10.50 an hour in the new job his union got him. It’ll take eight years for him just to get back to his recent salary, he figures. Usually well groomed, carefully dressed, health conscious, and perennially optimistic, he says in a moment of discouragement, “Shoot, I’m making less than when I first started. It just doesn’t seem right. ... Some people’s dreams get torn down.”
Mary Venittelli, a 41-year-old single mother of three in southern New Jersey, had a stable middle-class life until she and her husband split in a bitter divorce. All she can find now is a waitressing job at $2.18 an hour plus tips. Some nights, she says, she might bring home $30 and hand $28 of that over to the babysitter. She loses her car and is in danger of losing her home. She owes thousands in lawyer’s fees and has $15,000 in credit-card debt. In a bitterly humorous moment, she and her friend contemplate Venittelli’s pre-approved platinum Visa-card offer. Her friend warns her about putting her Social Security number on the application. “What are they going to do,” Venittelli says, “steal my identity? Please do.” Her long hours are taking a toll on the kids, especially her son Quinn, who’s acting out like mad. She goes to a food pantry in a neighboring county, she says, “because I don’t want to run into anyone I know.” Things look up a little when she meets a guy, a barber, who has Christmas presents for Mary and the kids and some time and attention for Quinn.
Jean Reynolds
Jean Reynolds, a 51-year-old nursing assistant in Keansburg, N.J., supports three children, including her cancer-stricken daughter Bridget, two of Bridget’s four children, and two other grandkids. Her ex sends no support. After 15 years working at the same nursing home, she’s hit maximum pay, $11 an hour, but that doesn’t stop her from helping the union organize her coworkers. Reynolds has no health insurance and is drowning in bills, including the hundreds of dollars monthly that Bridget needs, and isn’t always getting, for medication and treatment of the metastasized thyroid cancer that threatens her life in her late 20s. Evicted, with seven dependents, Reynolds turns, in desperation, to the government for help, and gets it, for now, because of Bridget’s illness. “They said, ‘Go home and have a good Christmas,’ Bridget explains matter-of-factly, “because it’s more than likely my last.”
Reynolds goes to church weekly to light a candle to St. Jude because, she says, “my life is impossible.” Of God, she speculates “not that he’s forgotten me, but that he’s neglecting me.” “I’m handling human beings,” she says in quiet indignation, “and I’m being paid less than garbage men.”
Weisberg and his crew seem to have won the confidence of their subjects, who let them into some of the most delicate moments of their lives. The filming and editing are smart, lean, and subtle. For instance, as Bridget and her mom discuss the medicine Bridget’s not getting because they can’t afford it, she quietly and diligently scrubs the kitchen of the well-kept home—controlling, one supposes, one of the few things in her life that she can.
Missing, deadbeat dads are a constant, and facts about the relative incomes of single moms, as compared to couples, as well as other data, quietly emerge on the bottom of the screen. For instance: Thirty million Americans make less than $8.70 an hour, the official poverty level for a family of four; housing costs have tripled since 1979; real hourly wages for male workers in the bottom quintile have decreased 5 percent since 1973; and in 1997, only 37 percent of custodial mothers received child support from nonresident fathers.
What the statistics add up to, or rather don't, Reynolds puts succinctly: “There’s no American dream any more.”
