Building the Dream on Overtime

Carmela and Alberto Gonzalez have created their version of the American dream: their own home, a daughter in college with her eye on a teaching career and another in parochial school. But theirs is a time-and-a-half dream, funded by the overtime both work whenever they can.

“If I didn’t have overtime, it would be terrible,” said Carmela, a 37-year-old mother of three. “My daughter’s at university. I pay a baby-sitter, and I pay for school for my other daughter.”

Despite the booming economy, many families are using overtime to finance middle-class lives. Although pilots, nurses, telephone operators and paramedics are protesting forced overtime, other workers are taking second jobs or volunteering--even competing--for every hour of work they can get.

The preservation of overtime pay was a key issue that propelled Los Angeles area bus and rail operators to walk off their jobs in a strike than ran from Sept. 16 through Oct. 17.

“To maintain a standard of living, people are working longer hours. Most people don’t like it but feel forced to do it,” said Art Pulaski, executive secretary-treasurer for the California Labor Federation.

Carmela Gonzalez knows long days--and nights.

She gets home from work around noon, giving her a couple hours to clean the house and get dinner ready before she drives to one school to fetch her 6-year-old son and another for her 12-year-old daughter. After dinner, she does the dishes and helps her kids with homework.

Sleep? Gonzalez rolls her eyes.

She tries to get to bed by 7. Or 8. Either way, her alarm goes off at 1, just in time to make her 2 a.m. shift at a food processing plant in Vernon, where she earns $9 an hour. Her shift is supposed to end at 10:30 a.m., but if she’s lucky there will be enough work for her to get an hour or two of overtime.

Her husband, a delivery truck driver, also puts in as many hours behind the wheel as he can, typically working 10 to 12 hours of overtime each week.

“It’s a rat race. That’s what we’ve created for ourselves, and we’re grappling with the consequences,” said Barry Broad, a Sacramento-based lobbyist for the Amalgamated Transit Union.

Broad also serves on the state Industrial Welfare Commission, which implemented AB 60, the law that went into effect Jan. 1 reinstating time-and-a-half pay for work after eight hours a day for most private, nonunion, hourly workers in California.

“The reason 130 years ago that labor started the eight-hours-a-day movement was not to increase people’s income through overtime but to limit their day, to give them a life. And it’s something we still need to aim for,” Broad said. “People shouldn’t need to work all the time in order to live.”

In California, 25% of workers reported putting in more than 40 hours a week in 1997, said Enrico Marcelli, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and a visiting scholar at UCLA.

Nationwide, 19.5% of full-time hourly employees worked more than 40 hours a week in 1999, said a new report by the Employment Policy Foundation, a Washington-based research group funded by business. The average was 11 hours of overtime a week, up more than an hour since 1979.

Of more than 7 million workers holding down two or more jobs in 1997, 41% said they needed the money to meet regular household expenses or pay off debts, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.

Over the last decade, increases in hours worked have far overshadowed increases in wages in contributing to family income gains, said a report released in September by the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-backed research organization based in Washington.

The typical middle-income, married-couple family worked 3,600 hours in 1998, up 182 hours from 1989, the EPI said. That additional work is responsible for 73% of the typical family’s income gains over the decade, said EPI senior economist Edith Rasell.

“What we’ve seen in the U.S. as a whole is incomes for many people have been stagnant or falling, so many people are making up for that by working longer hours,” Rasell said.

During the same period, the purchasing power of the average California family of four declined by $1,069, said a report released in September by the California Budget Project, a research group based in Sacramento.

Despite low unemployment rates and tight labor markets, average incomes and hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, were lower in 1998 than a decade ago, the report said. And the poverty rate and the share of the work force employed at poverty-level wages are higher.

A family of four with both parents working full-time needs at least $44,700 a year to sustain what California Budget Project Executive Director Jean Ross called a “bare bones” existence in the Los Angeles area, and that assumes they can find a two-bedroom apartment for $749 a month.

Miguel Neria, a machine operator who makes $9.87 an hour, figured he spent $6,000 of the $20,000 he earned last year on rent on the two-bedroom Huntington Park apartment he shares with his wife and their sons, 8 and 10.

“When you factor in food and clothes, things get very expensive,” Neria said in Spanish, through an interpreter.

Neria works as much overtime as he can, grateful for the extra four to six hours a week he often gets in summer. Orders for the prepared salads his plant makes slow after Labor Day.

“When you don’t have the overtime, you have to spend less on food and clothes,” he said. “We may get lucky and have an increase around Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

With a daughter in college at San Diego State and a son close behind, Gary Hoobler is eager for every bit of overtime he can get. A delivery truck driver for Miller Brewing, Hoobler figures he averages five hours of overtime a week, more in summer than in winter.

“You have to have that,” said Hoobler, 49, of Simi Valley. Without overtime, “I’d be looking for another job. You can’t survive without it.”

When the California Conference of Machinists asked its 70,000 members about priorities in a recent survey, negotiating contracts for overtime pay that kicks in after an eight-hour day as opposed to a 40-hour week was at the top of their list, said Matt McKinnon, executive secretary-treasurer.

“I think people have become more and more dependent on second jobs and overtime pay,” he said.

That’s a risky proposition, said Nancy Langdon Jones, owner of NLJones Inc., a financial planning service in Upland.

“It’s lucky if you can get it,” she said. “But I sure don’t think you should count on it.”

Overtime can evaporate for a variety of reasons, including a change of ownership, a slowdown in business or an economic downturn, Langdon Jones said.

Jack Irving, a machinist and union officer on the docks in Wilmington, said he and many of his co-workers have come to count on regular overtime, some of them working six days a week at least twice a month, boosting $31-an-hour wages to $80,000 annual incomes.

“I’ve raised four children and my wife has not been forced to work for a living,” said Irving, 58. “She’s been able to stay home, but it’s been because of working the overtime I have.”

At the food processing plant where Carmela Gonzalez drives a forklift, union representative Rene Castro helps mediate arguments over who gets overtime.

“It’s not extra money,” Castro said. “They budget themselves on that, so what you end up having is disputes about who’s entitled to those hours of work.”

Despite her grueling schedule, Gonzalez said she likes the night shift because it gives her more time with her children and the opportunity to put together a fairly regular family dinner.

“Lots of people rely on long hours and increasingly off hours [working nights and weekends] to maintain their income or manage child care,” said Karen Nussbaum, director of the Working Women’s Department of the AFL-CIO, which recently found that 15% of members who are mothers worked overtime.

“This is one of many best-of-bad solutions that working families settle for,” Nussbaum said.

By the end of the week, all Gonzalez wants is sleep, but sometimes she picks up a Saturday shift instead. “Some weeks, Friday gets around and I’m just totally exhausted and I want to go to bed,” she said. “It’s just day by day.”

*

Lisa Girion can be reached at lisa.girion@latimes.com.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Expanding Workweek

Incomes have risen for five straight years, but much of those gains have come from an increase in hours worked, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-backed research group. Percentage of Californians who reported working more than 40 hours a week in 1999:

*

Gender

Men: 32%

Women: 16%

*

Education level

Less than high school: 14%

High school, some college: 21%

College or more: 39%

*

Birth status

Foreign-born: 20%

Native-born: 27%

*

Income level

Poor: 14%

Not poor: 28%

*

Note: Workers, ages 16 to 64, include those who received earnings for at least one hour of work per week. Poor includes those who reported earning less than 200% of the federal poverty level.

*

Source: This information was compiled for The Times by Enrico Marcelli, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and a visiting scholar at UCLA. Marcelli derived the percentages from the Current Population Survey (Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau).

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Multi-Tasking

In September, 7.5 million workers had two or more jobs, a slight decrease from last year. A survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that four out of 10 people worked more than one job to meet regular household expenses or pay off debts. This was particularly true for women with a family to support, 64.5% of whom gave that reason, compared with 49.5% of men with families to support. Reasons for working two or more jobs:

Meet regular household expenses: 30.9%

Other reasons: 16.6%

Enjoys the work of the second job: 14.5%

Pay off debts: 10.5%

Save for future: 8.7%

Extra money for special purchase: 7.9%

Get experience or build up business: 7.7%

Help a relative or friend: 3.2%

Researched by NONA YATES/Los Angeles Times

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics