Poverty Is Complex : Poor Share Work Ethic, U.S. Dream

Gilbert Maxwell, exemplar of the work ethic, is dirt poor. Even in America, land of opportunity, a strong back and steady job are often not enough.

Since high school, he has worked at King Shrimp Co., a sprawling factory here on the south Georgia coast. Although he began as just another pair of hands peeling shrimp, in 10 years’ time he has advanced to the cleanup crew that scrubs the factory’s smooth, steel conveyors.

Dressed in yellow rubber overalls and heavy black boots, he sprays a jet of water that scatters the discarded shells and waste. It is wet, smelly work, and his turn on the night shift ends at 2 a.m. But cleanup is one of the company’s better-paying jobs, $5.17 an hour--about $10,800 a year.

Grim Reality

By the gauge of federal standards, that income means that the Maxwells--Gilbert, Pauline, the two older boys and the young twins--fall $3,400 below the poverty line for a family of six. In grim reality, it means that in last year’s unsuccessful finesse of unforeseen debts, the finance company sent a man from Jacksonville to repossess the family Chevrolet.

“Pauline cried when the car went back, but I told her it was only material things,” Maxwell, 27, said, adding a workingman’s saw: “The money comes slow and goes fast.”

America’s able-bodied poor, people like Gilbert Maxwell, are largely a working poor, not the slugabeds so often assumed. There are 35.3 million poor in this nation, and most of them are people society does not ordinarily expect to hold jobs. They are too young or too old or too sick or single mothers with toddlers afoot.

But of the others--those without any obvious obstacle between them and the workplace--more than two-thirds do work. That is something frequently overlooked in one of history’s most difficult and enduring debates: whether poverty, like some moral distemper, is largely the victim’s own fault.

Now is an especially important time to note that so many of the poor work--and work hard. Since the election of Ronald Reagan, while budget cuts have whittled back most every social program, the old debate has been cast in particularly vexing terms: Americans are not only asking if the poor are lazy, but also whether federal help makes them so.

Societies have long struggled with the first part of that question, sifting their poor into the good and the bad, providing charity to some and a hard time to the rest. The ancient Greeks at one time threatened the idle with the death penalty. English “poor laws” of the 1600s permitted the stoning of vagrants who refused to work. In 19th-Century America, the poor were often shuffled into workhouses, where the able-bodied could be isolated from temptation and forced into labor.

Inevitably, the sorting continues, and now there is that second issue to trouble policy-makers as well: Could it be that social programs actually have made poverty attractive?

On one side of the debate are arrayed followers of a liberal tradition that began with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and continued through Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. They reject any suggestion that the poor are responsible for their own plight, and point out with alarm that there are now 11 million more poor than in 1978. More than one in seven Americans live in poverty, the highest rate in 20 years.

Social Narcotic

Their opponents no longer number only doctrinaire conservatives convinced that poverty is fair punishment for the slack of spirit. Rather, they are a mix of Republicans and Democrats who have grown frustrated with social programs. They are convinced that federal aid not only fails as a cure for poverty, but often acts as a kind of social narcotic, sapping people of their self-sufficiency.

Such critics have found a compelling advocate in President Reagan, who makes the distinction between the “truly needy,” or helpless, and the able-bodied, whom he believes are better off without government aid. If the poor are of sound body, he said, federal help only blunts their ability to bounce back.

“The main goal in any of these reductions is still aimed at correcting those abuses that . . . allow people who do not have real need . . . imposing on their fellow citizens for sustenance,” the President said when he cut back on anti-poverty spending in 1981.

But a careful look at the poor--by surveys, by anecdote, by statistics--shows that all this anxious sorting uncovers relatively few loafers. The work ethic of the poor is in place. Those below the poverty line are a close, if distressed, reflection of those above it.

A Los Angeles Times Poll, for instance, revealed that poor persons’ attitudes about work largely reflect those of everyone else.

By a margin of nearly 3 to 1, both the poor and non-poor believe that people have an obligation to take care of themselves rather than depend on government.

Jobs Meeting

“You want to have a good turnout at a meeting, the best thing to do is say it’s about jobs,” said Sandra Brooks, social worker in a Baltimore high-rise housing project.

By a margin of 78% to 16%, The Times found, the poor believe that “working hard and doing what is expected of them” is more important than “personal pleasure.” The margin of the non-poor is 64% to 28%.

“Once a year, on our anniversary, Effie and I get away from the five kids and spend a night at a motel,” said William Mack, 28, a dishwasher in the Brunswick, Ga., high school.

Listening to those who live it, poverty is far more complex than some line dividing the fit from the feeble or the slack from the keen.

If some of the poor are lazy, far more are simply snakebitten. The paths into poverty are as complicated as life itself. Chance is a spectacular player, prudence an inconstant companion.

One of those bitten badly is Ola Reynolds, lean-faced and 26. She grew up poor in rural Florida, and poverty has stayed with her like a birthmark. In the ninth grade, she met Ray. He made her pregnant that year and four times more. He came and went from her life as he pleased.

Blue Roadrunner

“I don’t know exactly what it was,” she said of the man she married, then divorced. “He drove a blue Roadrunner and blue is my favorite color.”

Ola has been a motel maid, a gardener in a plant nursery, a worker at a chemical company, a welfare recipient. She and her five children get by these days on $249 a month in food stamps and the $4 an hour she makes at a packing house, weighing the breading for frozen fish.

From each paycheck, $33 goes to the doctor who set baby Reneesha’s broken arm after she flipped off the bed. The rest of the money spreads thinly across too many bills. Dinners have sometimes been no more than mayonnaise sandwiches.

“Better I’d never met Ray,” Ola said.

Another is Kenneth Jones of Baltimore, whose first inkling of money trouble came as a rumor around the office: “Reduction in forces, people called it.”

A father of four, he had always tried to make the right moves. He went to college and studied accounting, but at graduation he landed no job. Too inexperienced, employers said.

Then a friend told him they were hiring at Amtrak. It was not college man’s work, but it paid all right, $5.60 an hour.

Started as Trackman

Kenneth started as a trackman, replacing heavy wooden ties. Then he was a machinist, and then the company let him bid on an office job. In time, he was making $29,500 a year, writing reports that went all the way to Congress. Finding his way to Amtrak seemed a flash of luck.

But he has not worked since the layoff 15 months ago and, at age 33, his pride is papered over with welfare checks and food stamps. There is a leak in the dining room ceiling that he cannot afford to fix. The children’s aquarium is down to a single fish.

At a city job-placement center where he is something of a star job candidate, he is also among the saddest of cases. He has pretty well given up on getting a job as good as the one he lost. His grip on the middle class, once firm as a fist, has been easily wrenched open. Now he wonders how far he must fall.

“Every chance at a job turns out just to be a tease,” said Kenneth, sturdy as a spike and thoughtfully well-spoken. “Meanwhile, my life is going by and my kids are growing up poor.”

His new problem is too much experience: “They tell me, well, you’ve got an impressive work record here, and, oh, you’ve got a degree too; we wouldn’t feel right offering a $12,000 job to someone of your caliber and credentials.”

Illness Brought Poverty

Then there is Bubby Guest, a Brunswick, Ga., junkman, poor because he is sick. Poverty set upon him to stay while he was lying beneath a burned-out jalopy.

High blood pressure was causing unbearable headaches, and neither the pills nor the needle seemed to help. He was pulling out a transmission when he closed his eyes, hoping to ease the pain. He came to much later, and there remains a hole in his life that he can’t quite remember.

“Been two or three years and I haven’t worked since,” said Bubby, 40, a shy, beefy man who barely parts his lips to talk. “Time was, I worked most any kind of job, mechanic, construction, cutting wood. No more, not with these headaches.”

These days, he keeps an eye on daughter Missy, age 4. Sometimes he takes the old Mercury for a drive and searches through other people’s garbage. He found an old fan that way, and it only needed oil to get it going.

Food stamps are of some help, but the Guests are not eligible for welfare. Georgia, like half the states, refuses to aid two-parent families.

“I’d have to leave Bubby to collect,” said Geraldine Guest, 47. “And that would be a heartbreak.”

So she makes beds at the Oleander Motel over on Glynn Avenue. The salary is $3.35 an hour, the minimum wage.

“On a good week, when the rooms are full and there’s seven days’ work, I can make $100, even $110,” she said proudly, grateful for the job.

Poor Man’s America

Ola, Kenneth and Bubby are all anecdotes in a poor man’s America. They are out there with welfare chiselers and wobbly men on street corners with bottles in their hands. There is a poor person to serve as evidence for most anything. Policy-makers sometimes fetch them from obscurity, using their stories to commend a social program or to condemn one to oblivion.

Scholars attempt to go beyond the anecdotes, but the research is perplexing: If only there was some way to unwind a person’s present and past, to measure gumption against frustration, to balance opportunity against inertia. Each situation is intricately knotted--part economics, part sociology, part soap opera.

What if Ola and Ray had not kissed that night in Winter Haven, Fla.? What if Kenneth’s first job had been in a growth industry instead of the railroad? What if there is a cure for Bubby’s headaches in the sample bag of the doctor in the next town?

Still, there is some pattern to the statistical weave.

Numbers tell much about the poor in general, if not in particular--who they are, how they became poor, how long they will stay that way.

Living in poverty, for instance, is often thought to mean living off the dole or welfare, the federal program formally called Aid to Families with Dependent Children. But only one-third of the poor collect AFDC. Of those, 66% are children.

Snares Young, Old

The poor are a far larger group, remarkable for their diversity. In 10 years’ time, fully one-fourth of the nation slips for some time into poverty, studies show. It snares the young and the old, the hearty and the lame, the wicked and the virtuous.

Census data from 1983, the latest year available, shows the poor have a general commitment to the workplace: Excluding the elderly, the disabled, students and mothers with children under age 6--persons society does not ordinarily expect to hold jobs--more than two-thirds of the heads of poor households do work at least part-time, including 77% of the men and 55% of the women.

“The numbers show that poverty is far more a problem of job availability than work ethic,” said Sheldon Danziger, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, which compiled these statistics from census data. “Obviously, there are some bums out there. But, mostly, people are working or looking for work.”

Another problem is that many workers simply are not paid much.

In 1983, nearly 4.5 million full-time, year-round workers earned less than $6,700, then the poverty threshold for a family of two, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Another 6.5 million earned less than $9,999, below the poverty line for a family of four.

Of these low-paid workers, 1.8 million are poor. The rest sidestep poverty only because more than one person in the family has a job.

$3.50 an Hour

Jackie Flanagan, cloth cutter in a Baltimore rag factory, makes only $3.50 an hour, and wonders if work is worth the trouble. The monthly take-home pay, about $506, is only $25 more than she received from welfare.

She started the job last December. Five lively youngsters, ages 3 to 11, were driving her stir crazy, and the characters on the afternoon soap operas had become more familiar than real life.

“I watched those stories so much that I dreamed about them,” said Jackie, 33, a round-faced woman who speaks almost in a whisper.

Her routine now is to rise at 5:30, lay out the children’s clothes, wash and dress the littlest ones. Then she makes lunches before leaving the children with the next-door neighbor.

The subway takes her downtown. From there, she catches either the No. 23 or the No. 15 bus. Both go down Franklintown Road, and it is a short walk to the factory. At 8 a.m., she starts slicing rags from a bolt of cloth.

“I enjoy the work,” she said, her voice betraying her uncertainty. “The people are nice. They let you go on break when you feel like it.”

Pleasant or not, the job is hard on her budget. She pays her neighbor $50 a week for baby-sitting. She also pays $8.50 a week in carfare.

No Medicaid

Worse yet, the job offers no health insurance. Because she is no longer on welfare, the state will soon take away her Medicaid card. Every flu and cough the children catch will mean less money for groceries.

“Marcia, the 3-year-old, has asthma,” she said, the worry clear on her face. “I didn’t know working would end up costing me money. Mentally, I want to keep working. Financially, I don’t know if I can.”

Economists sometimes examine poverty as if it had two doors--one an entrance, one an exit. They want to classify how people generally get in, how long they stay, how they get out.

To a great extent, the answers are obvious.

For a family headed by a man, the biggest problem is loss of wages--his or his wife’s.

This, for instance, was true for Gilbert Maxwell, the cleanup man in the Georgia shrimp factory. The Maxwells were not always poor.

For a few years, Pauline made beds at the Holiday Inn. Together, they earned more than $20,000. They had begun looking for a house in the country, where the four boys could play in the woods and Gilbert could build a machine shop out back.

“Really, by now we ought to have that house,” he said.

But one afternoon last year, a sharp pain twisted through Pauline’s chest while she was standing out front, gabbing with her cousin. She fell to the ground, stunned and confused. Heart attack, she mumbled, and she was right. Friends rushed her to the hospital.

The 25-year-old mother lay in intensive care for three days. The Maxwells will not break loose from poverty until the doctors say she can work again.

Loss of a Man

For families headed by women, however, the biggest problem is not loss of a job but loss of a man. The trap door into poverty opens with divorce or separation or a birth out of wedlock.

Barbara Hollins, a Brunswick, Ga., welfare mother, knows much about this, for she has had two marriages, two divorces, three great loves, six children and a lifetime of hopscotching back and forth across the poverty line.

“Until men change and they want to support these kids, there’s always going to be women like me,” Barbara, 36, said in an angry monotone, shushing her two youngest ones, Gregory, not yet 2, and Destiny, just 6 months.

In her version of a turbulent lifetime, things looked so much better when she was 18. She had started junior college, and every day a handsome man named Roger carried her books home from school. He doted on her and she loved it. He did not lose interest until she told him she was pregnant.

The couple were married under the shotgun gaze of Barbara’s mother, and it made an awkward beginning for a young pair who preferred other plans. Both worked off and on at jobs they did not like. They argued about money. Barbara had a second baby. The marriage lasted four years.

Perfect Setup

So she was a perfect setup for John, who said a woman’s place was in the home and a man’s on the job. He planned to join the merchant marine and promised to give her $1,000 a month. Mostly, she said, he gave her two more babies and several dreary years. Barbara vowed never to be fooled again.

That Alfonso entered her life and remains there still, contributing so little money, is something of an embarrassment to her. He is the father of the babies at her feet, and he gives her but $25 a week. She depends on welfare and food stamps to get by until she finishes a course in clerical work. She hopes to be a file clerk.

“I have high blood pressure, and the doctor told me the birth control pill is too risky,” she said apologetically, as an afterthought to her story.

Poverty researchers wonder how long people like Barbara Hollins, Jackie Flanagan, Gilbert Maxwell and the rest will stay poor. Is poverty often a long-term affliction?

The question has two correct, if very different, answers.

On one hand, most people who tumble into poverty during a 10-year period are short-timers, according to researchers at the University of Michigan. By age, sex and race, they reflect the population as a whole. Two-thirds stay poor less than three years.

No Children

Joanne Harper, for one, is poor for now but probably not for long. She has moxie and smarts--and no small children.

For nearly a decade, she worked bridge construction, carrying steel and running a machine that smooths concrete. Then, last December, she quit.

“I was getting so nervous up there, too shaky to go on,” said Joanne, 47, a husky, red-haired woman separated from her husband.

She lives in Baltimore with her two teen-agers, in the same neighborhood where she grew up, It is like a little Peyton Place, she said. Everybody knows everyone else’s business.

That is one reason she will not apply for food stamps. Hard times are so humiliating. People see you go into the food stamp office, then they see you at the grocery.

Years back, during another bad time, she took the stamps and she was always afraid she would be spotted. She stopped going to Food Town and began shopping at Steve’s Supermarket, way up on Charles Street.

“I can understand how people feel,” she said. “It bothers me when I see them with the food stamps, buying meat and real butter.”

But, then, unlike many of the poor, Joanne has resources. She has some savings to draw upon, and she has some skills and a strong work record. She expects to hire on as a maid when the new Sheraton opens downtown.

“I’ll get a job soon, no problem,” she said confidently.

Others Mired

But if there are a great number of short-timers like Joanne rotating through poverty every 10 years, there also is a group deep-stuck--enough of them, actually, to be a slight majority in any single year of that decade.

These deep-stuck poor require not just a temporary boost back up, but long-term support--and even guidance on how to maintain a foothold.

“These tend to be the people you’d expect--the poorly educated, blacks, unwed mothers,” Harvard economist David Ellwood said.

The work ethic of this group also is harder to grasp. It is often complicated by disability of the body or spirit, and the very momentum of failure.

At times, the long-term poor seem buffeted amid the gear work of some diabolical Rube Goldberg contraption: She got pregnant so she quit school so she never learned fractions. He was laid off so he robbed a store so he went to prison. She never worked so she has no experience so she can’t get a job.

“I never knew what that word ‘location’ meant,” said Linda Phillips, 31, a Baltimore welfare mother enrolled in a remedial course about how to look for work. Job applications had always confused her.

“All that word means,” she said, “is they want the address.”

Federal Fix

By and large, the many criticisms of the welfare system involve the long-term poor. It is argued that, for them, government assistance has become a way of life. They are addicted to a federal fix, their submission complete.

One of the leading critics is Charles Murray, author of the controversial book “Losing Ground.” He complains that poverty programs have given the poor the wrong signals, suggesting to them that the system is to blame for their plight and welfare is a respectable alternative.

“To someone who is not yet persuaded of the satisfactions of making one’s own way, there is something laughable about a person who doggedly keeps working at a lousy job for no tangible reason at all,” he wrote.

In some cases, the argument is undoubtedly true. If some welfare mothers are badly prepared for the workplace, others simply weigh the pros and cons of a job and decide it is not worth the toil. Going on welfare seems to them a sensible personal and economic choice.

Traditional Mother

For Nancy Papadopoulos, a nimble-witted Minneapolis divorcee with a year of college, work would not be hard to find. But a job is not as important to her as being a traditional mother to her three boys.

“If I put my kids in day care, it’s like making them work a job,” said Nancy, 29, emotion caught in her throat. “The little one cried when I left him, and they were too tired to eat when I got them home.

“I want my boys to grow up with my morals and my beliefs, not some other lady’s. I want them to know I bnvv them.”

Welfare benefits vary from state to state, depending on the state contribution. Minnesota is relatively generous, and each month Nancy gets a $611 check and $124 in food stamps. She pays only $96 rent for a federally subsidized town house that might ordinarily cost four times that. The Catholic school on York Avenue allows her oldest boy to attend for free.

$2,000 a Month

“I’d probably need $2,000 a month to make getting off welfare worthwhile,” she said. “So I really shouldn’t work unless I get an excellent job.”

So, inevitably, there is much conjecture about how often a steady welfare check keeps the Nancys of America from a job. It is another of those questions that require mind-reading for a certain answer.

There are indications, however, that Nancy Papadopoulos is actually in the minority--that most welfare mothers would prefer to dress each morning and head out the door.

Nearly half the states, including California, have been experimenting with some kind of “workfare,” requiring welfare recipients to participate in intensive job searches, and sometimes community work, in return for their checks.

The Times Poll shows that 59% of the poor have a favorable impression of workfare, 33% have not heard of it and only 3% have an unfavorable impression. In fact, the poor endorse the idea slightly more than the non-poor.

Similar results have been noted by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp., a nonprofit group that has been evaluating the workfare programs.

Finding Child Care

“The mothers’ main problem is finding child care,” said Judy Gueron, the group’s executive vice president. “And if they find child care, then the question is whether they pay out more in carfare and day care than they make.”

But welfare mothers usually are considered the most motivated of the hard-core unemployed. Often their problem is simply getting a start.

There are others who have dodged in and out of the workplace, and employers consider them the riskier hires. Largely, they are men. Generally, they are unskilled. Frequently, they have taken to the ways of the street.

Karl Marx called the worst of such people “social scum.” To De Tocqueville, they were “rabble.” Dickens described them as “the dangerous classes.”

These days, the catchall term most often used is the underclass. It refers to a miasma of welfare-dependent women, street hustlers, petty criminals, the homeless and others who have drifted from society’s mainstream.

“It isn’t just that they’re poor,” Richard Nathan, a poverty expert at Princeton and a former official in the Richard M. Nixon Administration, said of the underclass. “It is that they are hard to love and hard to help. It is the people who threaten us.”

Mishaps, Misdeeds

Experts are not quite sure how to define the group, let alone measure its size. Estimates most often range between 2 million and 5 million. Like the others in poverty, they each have a story, theirs most often a webbing together of mishaps and misdeeds.

Among them is Donald McDuffie, 28, who once labored for seven steady years as a furniture mover. Then he argued with the boss. “I quit” is what Donald says when he gets angry.

He moved to Minneapolis, where he has relatives. When another job did not come easily, he became a foot soldier for a bad bunch dealing in phony prescriptions. Each time he got some painkillers, he took home $50.

From that, he moved on to forging stolen payroll checks. He got them from a buddy later killed in a dice game over on DuPont Avenue. In the last batch Donald signed, there were eight checks that would have netted him $713. Instead, they got him a year in jail.

Out of prison since August, he lives on a monthly $199 general assistance check from the state. He has looked for work at Honeywell and Control Data and the other big companies. He has been to the factories and the warehouses and the filling stations.

“I go to a lot of places and the first thing they ask is, do I have a criminal record,” said Donald, a well-muscled man sagging in a torn sofa. “Well, I tell them the truth because honesty is the best policy. But then I feel the vibes, like they don’t want anything to do with me.”

Chances Scarce

Second chances are scarce.

“If push comes to shove, I’m going back to what I did before,” he said. “That’s right. I won’t be the man on the bottom all the time.”

These anecdotes and the people who tell them go on into the millions, 35.3 million actually. In America, the poor are primarily victims of the very things that bless others--luck and love and children, the fragile gifts of body and mind, the sheer unpredictability of life itself.

Those most vulnerable are the elderly, the disabled, the poorly educated, mothers abandoned by their husbands or lovers, workers brushed aside by the nervous hand of the economy.

There are poor people even harder-working than Gilbert Maxwell and others more hooked on welfare than Nancy Papadopoulos. There are those more proud than Joanne Harper and those more defeated than Bubby Guest.

But whatever their problems, a slackness of spirit is rarely at the root. Most of the able-bodied poor want to work--and do so. Most share the dreams of an industrious nation. Most want to fit.

They are people like us, their poverty the icy curve on a hazardous road.

POVERTY IN AMERICA

THE POVERTY LINE

The poverty line is a threshold the government uses to decide whether people are poor. It is adjusted each year on the basis of changes in the Consumer Price Index. Individuals and families with incomes at or above the threshold are not considered to be in poverty, while those with incomes below the threshold are.

As income to measure against the threshold, the government counts only cash, such as the amount of welfare a person gets. Some argue that non-cash benefits, like food stamps, ought to be counted, thereby decreasing the number of people who are officially poor. At the same time, the government does not discount the taxes people pay. Some say that taxes should be deducted, thereby increasing the number of people who are officially poor.

Assets, such as a car or a savings account, are not counted. Nor are debts, such as medical bills, deducted.

The Census Bureau uses the poverty line as a benchmark to calculate the nation’s poverty rate, or the percentage of Americans who are poor. It cautions that people surveyed by its census takers tend to underreport their income.

THE POVERTY THRESHOLD

$per year $per week $per hour Individual 5,400 103.85 2.60 Couple 6,980 134.24 3.36 Family of four 10,610 204.04 5.11

ANNUAL POVERTY RATES

In Percent

1964 19.0 1965 17.3 1966 14.7 1967 14.2 1968 12.8 1969 12.1 1970 12.6 1971 12.5 1972 11.9 1973 11.1 1974 11.2 1975 12.3 1976 11.8 1977 11.6 1978 11.4 1979 11.7 1980 13.0 1981 14.0 1982 15.0 1983 15.2

Source: United States Bureau of the Census

Times researchers Nina Green and Lorna Nones contributed to this story.