The Other Side: Me and ‘Maid’ and Joe Manchin

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive
by Stephanie Land
Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, NY
Copyright © 2019 by Stephanie Land

A reality for so many, and something that Joe Manchin doesn’t have to worry about: “One of the greatest things about a willingness to get on your hands and knees to scrub a toilet is you’ll never have trouble finding work.” [Emphasis added]

Every once in a while, a book comes along that offers us a unique opportunity, a chance for some much-needed reflection – self-reflection for me, who knows what it will spark in you. The subtitle of “Maid” is “Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive.” Thanks to “Maid,” I found myself looking back through the accumulated haze of forgetfulness to once again inhabit my childhood poverty, to better appreciate my parents’ perseverance and determination to work as hard as they could, past pain and exhaustion. I can’t ever forget our kitchen cabinets stuffed with tuna and sardines my mom bought on sale, the cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli she knew I could easily heat up for lunch or dinner for me and my brother when she was working an additional catering job, and my father was trying to sleep — getting ready to work from midnight to eight. Packages of chocolate and vanilla Royal pudding passed for a special dessert — easy to make on the stove with some milk, stirring ever so slowly but constantly.

I imagine few Americans remember who Michael Harrington was. But thanks to him, for a while at least, many became aware of the concept of two Americas. In 1961, he wrote about The Other America. I grew up in that other America, with my parents and brother, and later our sister and about a million roaches sharing a small three-and-a-half room apartment in a working-class section of the Bronx. Mine was a second-generation poverty. And I know well my mother’s will to survive. She was born in an asylum, her mother terribly mad, and soon dead. Her father, an illiterate immigrant from southern Italy, was overwhelmed and ill-prepared for single parenthood, and shipped her off to an orphanage and her siblings to foster homes. Later, she too found herself living with one unenthusiastic foster family after another. My father’s father died when he was young, and by nine he was working after school to help support his family. They did everything they could to make ours an easier life.

In some ways, “rich” and “poor” have lost their usefulness. Some of those who used to be rich have become obscenely wealthy. It hardly illuminates to lump Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos with your run-of-the-mill millionaires, and “poor” now seems pejorative, used to belittle, a criticism, and worse, a call to invoke the meaningless statistics our government uses to deny the working poor the benefits that could make life a bit more feasible. Minimum wage so significantly fails to approach a living wage. Here in Berkshire County, there are so many working for wages that scarcely provide the money necessary to pay rising rents.

What makes this gap so intractable and frustrating is that those “with” scarcely know what life is like for those “without.” And each and every day, as Stephanie Land’s “Maid” makes so clear, if they are to survive, “without” America has little choice but to serve “with” America for low wages. “With” Americans have come to rely on help in so many ways: “without” Americans take care of their children, clean their bathrooms, mow their lawns, grow their gardens, walk their dogs, shovel their snow, and on and on and on. While those who serve not only do those jobs for the wealthy, but then have to go home and do it all again for themselves and their families.

I can remember working as a handyman/caretaker at $3 an hour for some recently arrived multi-millionaires from the city. As part of the deal, I lived across the road in an old farmhouse. They wouldn’t replace their old push mower, and I can vividly remember, after a full day mowing several acres, getting a call at eight that night asking if I’d drive to the supermarket to get them some yogurt. I asked myself whether what I was imagining was worth serving out the rest of my life in a small cell in maximum security penitentiary for … Instead, I sang “Jump down, turn around, pick a bale of hay” as I drove to the supermarket. Do you think Joe Manchin has ever had to do that dance? Or search the menu for the cheapest meal when eating out with friends?

Maybe because of my childhood, I had no children. But I can easily appreciate Stephanie Land’s dilemma. Because along with doing some fairly miserable work, she and so many poor Americans have to suffer a dreadful combination of crippling parental guilt and ongoing public humiliation: “Being poor, living in poverty, seemed a lot like probation — the crime being a lack of means to survive.” [Emphasis added]

Not having enough ricochets through the family. Having grown up in the Depression, my father was under the delusion that the Communist Party could bring sweeping changes and social and economic justice. He spent years working as a dedicated underpaid union organizer and editor for the Daily Worker, unaware or unwilling until the invasion of Hungary to see the Party’s subservience to the Soviet tyrants. Ironically, it was after he left the Party that he suffered the worst. The FBI went to every employer who was willing to hire him, and he was quickly fired. It took him years to find work as an overnight editor at the New York Post. My mother worked days as a waitress in a restaurant near Times Square, then as many nights as she could for a catering company. Those jobs at least provided the opportunity to glean some of the food about to be thrown out, and when her boss wasn’t looking, to divert a small portion to her large pocketbook.

Not making enough, not having enough is so terribly debilitating. But all that hardship is made worse by the crippling continuing sense that you’re failing your children.

Shame comes in all shapes and sizes. I can still remember Assembly Days in my public school – the once-a-week school-wide morning meeting requiring boys to wear a white shirt and tie. I had only one white shirt, a slightly too large hand-me-down from my father. Washing clothes then wasn’t as easy as it is now. The machines were three floors down in the basement, accessible only by walking outside and going down the alley, guarded by the super’s slightly psychotic German shepherd. The super was already opening my father’s mail and keeping track of him for the FBI and was convinced that any day we might attempt to overthrow the government by force and violence. Laughable if you knew my gentle father, who read several books a day and couldn’t change a tire.

Several times before I was trusted with the quarters and the laundry, my mother couldn’t get around to washing the shirt and I was the only kid sitting there amongst the entire school with a colored shirt. I’m embarrassed to recall how much pressure I put on her to ensure I could sit there anonymously and unnoticed, how I transferred my shame onto her. It wasn’t it her fault, after all. I was unaware of how many burdens she already shouldered; how it must have hurt to add yet another failure to her already large list.

As for Stephanie Land, she was living with her boyfriend Jamie in a trailer, each paying $150 a month for rent. She was working at cafes, at a doggy daycare, selling bread at farmers’ markets, and cleaning her friend’s preschool once a week for $45. Until she got pregnant. At first, Jamie urged her to abort, but when she refused, he shifted from opposition to ambivalence. Slowly, after the birth of their daughter Mia, their relationship deteriorated and Jamie turned increasingly abusive.

When she raised the issue of taking Mia to live with her father, and presented him with an estimate of the child support she’d need, Jamie flew into a rage: “‘I’m not gonna pay you child support … You should be the one paying me … You’re not going anywhere … I’ll take her so fast it’ll make your head spin’ … releasing a yell of rage as he punched a hole through the Plexiglas window on the door … My hand trembled while I dialed the domestic violence hotline.”

Now she needed immediate housing, had to balance caring for an infant with finding work to support them, then fighting for primary custody. While low-income housing seemed to make sense, it was difficult to find. And so, “My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter.”

Unfortunately, in America today, accepting help is an admission of failure writ large. Whether it’s aid from the government or help from nonprofits, there is a continuing burden to prove you actually need and deserve help.

Why would we treat the victim of domestic abuse — a single mother caring for a one-year-old — as a drug-abusing criminal? When Land talks about “probation,” this is what she means: the homeless shelter required unscheduled urine analysis tests, random checks to ensure that dishes and floors were clean, and that food wasn’t left on kitchen counters. She had to agree to a 10 p.m. curfew, and that she wouldn’t have overnight visitors. Her income was checked every month with a detailed accounting of what came in and what was spent.

And this is what poverty did to her: “My reflection in the mirror showed a rail-thin figure … overworked but without any money to show for it, someone who couldn’t afford a fucking burger. I was often too stressed to eat, and many mealtimes with Mia were just me watching her spoon food into her mouth, thankful for each bite she took. My body looked sinewy and sunken, and all I had left in me was to cry it out in that bathroom.

“Years ago, when I thought about my future, poverty seemed inconceivable, so far away from my reality … But now, after one kid and a breakup, I was smack in the middle of a reality that I didn’t know how to get out of.” [Emphasis added]

Multiply Land by more than 10 million:

Forget the stereotypes; Stephanie Land worked as many hours as she could as a landscaper, cleaning the toilets and floors of houses, always aware of the dire consequences of missing a paycheck. Without any backup, parents or family with money to save them: “No one was swooping in for us. It was just Mia and me.”

“Maid” shines a light on what it’s really like to not have enough, and what the social service system requires of someone who all of a sudden finds herself in deep crisis, emotionally exhausted and bewildered. There’s much to be learned from Land’s battle to protect her daughter. And even though everything she did was to protect Mia from her abusive father, and fight for custody, she had to battle against the inherent bias of the court system.

IF you haven’t had to ask for help feeding your family, or accept federal aid for food, here’s what it can feel like: “I was grateful for programs that fed my family, but I’d also carry back home a bag of shame, each time mentally wrestling with what the cashier thought of me, a woman with an infant in a sling, purchasing food on public assistance … What they didn’t see was the balance, which hovered around $200 depending on my income, and that it was all the money I had for food … They didn’t see me eating peanut butter sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, rationing my morning cup of coffee to make it stretch. [Emphasis added]

Her Port Townsend community is a lot like ours, with a seasonal, tourist-based economy, and many folks who depend on second homeowners. Not a lot of what Land calls “normal” jobs with single-mom hours. Luckily, her childcare grant provided daycare for half the day. Land turned to cleaning houses, spending her days with the dust, dirt, and grime of others. No wonder we often associate the poor with the dirty.

Enter Senator Joe Manchin, he of the Manchin/Sinema duo forcing the Democrats to scale back programs that can make a monumental difference for the working poor, the hungry, and the un- and under-employed, while steadfastly refusing to tax the obscenely rich who — with high-paid accountants, attorneys, and lobbyists — routinely manage to create and utilize new tax breaks. The Senator Manchin who seems dedicated to blocking several programs designed to strengthen the safety net by insisting that proposed social programs rely on “means based testing with means testing guardrails/formulas on new spending.”

As Peter Beresford put it more than 10 years ago in the UK Guardian: “What means testing generally means is a lot more bureaucracy. This is quite likely to eat up any apparent savings … Means tested benefits aren’t actually fair. It has long been known that large numbers of needy people tend to miss out on such benefits. Either they don’t know about them, they don’t realise they are eligible for them, or perhaps, particularly important, they are reluctant to claim them.

“This is because they have increasingly been encouraged to think of receiving benefits as meaning being dependent and ‘not standing on their own two feet’. This is especially well known about older people and can result in them encountering health and other problems from under-claiming, which ultimately increases costs, as well as failing to ensure their access to entitlements.”

So what’s in the proposed Build Back Better Act, which Manchin and Sinema are so concerned about, and which the Republicans regard as another step toward socialism and gross governmental overreach:

“This bill provides funding, establishes programs, and otherwise modifies provisions relating to a broad array of areas, including education, labor, child care, health care, taxes, immigration, and the environment.

For example, the bill provides funding for

• management of the National Forest System
• job placement and career services
• safe drinking water, energy-efficiency, and weatherization projects
• electric vehicles and zero-emission, heavy-duty vehicles
• public health infrastructure and supply chain resiliency
• housing, rental, and homeowner assistance programs
• cybersecurity programs
• tribal infrastructure, housing, environmental, and health programs
• wildfire prevention, drought relief, conservation efforts, and climate change research
• small business assistance and development
• transit services and clean-energy projects in low-income communities
• infrastructure and administration of the Department of Veterans Affairs

Additionally, the bill establishes programs to provide

• up to six semesters of free community college
• free child care for children under the age of six
• free universal preschool services
• health benefits for eligible individuals who reside in states that have not expanded Medicaid

The bill also includes provisions that

• establish a methane fee for certain petroleum and natural gas facilities
• expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing, and vision care
• provide certain aliens with a path to permanent resident status (e.g., those who entered the U.S. as minors)
• provide up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave
• restructure and increase the tax rates for certain corporations and high-income individuals (e.g., individuals with income over $400,000)
• require the Department of Health and Human Services to negotiate maximum prices for certain brand-name drugs under Medicare

These are programs that will help real people. Stephanie Land can help us all understand what they might mean: “I’d hung a small calendar on the wall. It was filled with appointments with caseworkers at organizations where I could get us help. I had looked under every stone, peered through the window of every government assistance building, and joined the long lines of people who carried haphazard folders of paperwork to prove they didn’t have money. I was overwhelmed by how much work it took to prove I was poor.”

Two Americas, two realities, two different sets of challenges. Manchin, a multi-millionaire who makes his money in the coal business and raises a small fortune from pro-business lobbyists is dead set against reinstating a fair tax structure, closing the loopholes that Congress has provided to allow the wealthiest to shelter their fortunes.

As Fredeka Schouten put it: “Manchin, whose vote is crucial to passage of President Joe Biden’s domestic policy priorities in an evenly divided Senate, has holdings valued at between $1 million and $5 million in Enersystems, Inc., the coal brokerage business he founded, according to his most recent financial disclosure form that covers 2020 activity.

“And last year, he made more than $491,000 from his Enersystems holdings, the filings show. That’s more than twice his $174,000 annual Senate salary. ‘Manchin is a walking conflict of interest,’ said Craig Holman, a lobbyist for the liberal watchdog group Public Citizen.” [Emphasis added]

Open Secrets estimates Joe Manchin’s wealth at between $3,473,070 to $11,773,999. It would take Stephanie Land working 347,307 hours at $10 an hour to match that lower figure.

Manchin wrote to explain his refusal to go along with what the Democrats call their reconciliation human infrastructure bill: “I cannot accept our economy or basically our society moving towards an entitlement mentality … Since the beginning of this reconciliation debate, I have been consistent in my belief that any expansion of social programs must be targeted to those in need, not expanded beyond what is fiscally possible.” [Emphasis added]

To Senator Joe Manchin, means testing is a principle, a policy designed to ensure money isn’t wasted on those who don’t deserve support. Stephanie Land is the exact opposite of Senator Manchin’s imaginary entitled free-loader.

And the very saddest thing about the ill-founded stereotype that seems to motivate him to almost single-handedly deny help for millions, is that so many of Joe Manchin’s own constituents need exactly the relief Manchin is blocking – pre-K classes so parents can go to work; a cap on childcare costs; paid family need; Medicaid expansion, a cut in prescription drug costs.

Yes, ironically, Manchin is saying “no” to families in West Virginia. The West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy reported that recent census data showed that “People across West Virginia — particularly West Virginians of color and those with low incomes — continue to face dire economic hardship as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, making the need for bold action at the state and federal levels clearer than ever.

“An estimated 278,734 West Virginians lived in poverty in 2019, for a total poverty rate of 16.0 percent. While poverty declined by 1.8 percentage points from 2018, West Virginia’s poverty rate is still 3.7 percentage points higher than the national average, making it the 6th highest rate among the 50 states.

“West Virginia’s median household income was an estimated $48,850 in 2019, $16,862 below the national average. While West Virginia’s median household income increased in 2019, adjusting for inflation, West Virginia still had the 2nd lowest median household income among the 50 states.” [Emphasis added]

The West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy continues: “More current data from this summer show a sharp rise in hardship across West Virginia:

• 11.8 percent of adults reported that their household sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat in the last seven days
• 17 percent of adults with children reported that their kids sometimes or often didn’t eat enough in the last seven days because they couldn’t afford to
• 19 percent of adults who live in rental housing reported that they were behind on rent, and 6 percent are behind on their mortgage payments
• 29 percent of all children in West Virginia live in a family that is either not getting enough to eat or is behind on housing payments”

Nationwide, the United States has a far greater problem with income inequality than many of the most advanced economies:

One of my first jobs here in the Berkshires was working for Berkshire Community Action Council, the official anti-poverty agency for the county. I organized food cooperatives and community gardens, and, amongst the middle-class folks looking to eat healthy food and save money by buying in bulk, I got to know some of those we call poor in towns across the southern Berkshires.

Many were like my mother: proud, hard-working, and despite all the many challenges, committed to do the best for their kids. To this day, I remain amazed at where my mother came from and where she ended up. As a child, my mother had a dreadful stutter, and a disobedient streak that labelled her incorrigible. But she never stopped fighting for her better self. In between her waitressing shifts, she began night school, and so we were in high school at the same time. Then, when I defied the guidance counselor who urged me to go to trade school and luckily, by the slightest of margins, qualified for free tuition at City College, my mother started college classes at night. She ended up a school librarian, then an elementary school teacher. And all through her life she was one of the most generous people I’ve known. When we finally got a used car, she drove my father nuts by insisting they give a quarter tip to the person who pumped the gas, cleaned the windshield, and checked the oil — reminding us that we partially survived those lean years on tips she got as a waitress.

And, as “Maid” shows, for all the difficulties she faced, Land’s deepest dream would never die. From the time she was a young girl, she wanted to be a writer. She imagined herself in Missoula, enrolled in the University of Montana creative writing program. With the help of several government programs, a Pell grant which provides financial aid based on need to low income students, the TBRA (Tenant Based Rental Assistance) program which subsidizes rental costs, and LIHEAP, which provides poor families help paying their energy costs, she was able to go back to school. Despite all the hard work as a cleaning lady, Land was always living on the edge, with only $275 for child support and less than $300 for food, along with housing and energy subsidies. She was still responsible for the significant costs of car insurance, phone, and internet.

The Democrats hope to give people like her some room to breathe, some space to fulfill their potential. And “Maid” offers a real-life example of how these programs can help the many millions of Americans who clearly deserve our help.

As Steve Rattner explains: “When it comes to overall ‘social spending’ – everything from child tax credits to Medicare – the United States ranks near the bottom. Across all levels of government (federal, state and local), total outlays on these needs are about one-fifth of our gross domestic product. While that’s not far off of what Canada and the United Kingdom spend, it’s wildly short of other major European countries, particularly France, Italy and Germany.

“Zooming in on what benefits we provide to families and children, the picture is just as grim. While France spends about $8,400 per year on education and care for each child 5 years old or younger, we spend just $2,600, putting us last among major countries. Even compared to all 38 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we look poor – near the bottom behind countries like Latvia and Hungary. Other metrics are just as poor. While every other major country offers paid maternity leave – the United Kingdom ranks first at nearly 40 weeks and other countries are typically at a dozen weeks or more – we provide none.”

Much like the COVID-19 virus, low wages, poverty, exhaustion, and being over-worked and undervalued infects and slowly ravages a community. Here in the South Berkshires, it’s increasingly apparent how the combination of low-wage service jobs and rising rents have depressed the local economy, deeply affecting young people here, who more and more realize a productive future is unlikely to be found in the community where they’ve grown up.

Despite the great sadness of “Maid,” there’s also the uplifting realization that there was no extinguishing her gift. And so it was that the writer in Land came to work with her; storytelling made the exhausting near-constant labor more tolerable: “These visualizations or hypotheses I made about clients were what got me through days of personal dread, fatigue, and loneliness. The imagined occupants of these houses walked around with me. I saw them sitting up in bed at the dawn of a workday, using a wet washcloth in the shower — the one balled up on the floor, which I gingerly handled, even with gloves. They also left traces of themselves and their actions. I could see them standing at the kitchen window, drinking their morning coffee, while I wiped away the ring their cup had left behind.

“Though I never met or spoke to any of them, though many did not know that I existed … These people gave me something to look forward to, people to hope for and want good things for other than myself.” [Emphasis added]

My mother served people for years, then marshaled the energy to attend classes, do homework, write papers. Then spent years bringing out the very best in her students in an inner city elementary school. Poor kids. From families without.

There are more than 37 million Americans like Stephanie Land:

As for me, I couldn’t read Land’s story without connecting my own idiosyncratic dots; there’s me and “Maid” and Joe Manchin.

Let me just leave you with this. We all need to see and acknowledge and appreciate the many millions among us living without. And we all need to do something about it. The poor are young and old, white and black and brown, and live in our cities and in the country.

It took a while for Land to find her voice: “I wished I’d had the courage to speak up for myself, to speak up for millions of others who were struggling through the same hardships as I was: domestic workers who worked for minimal pay, single parents. Instead I hid.” [Emphasis added]

Along that hard way, she gained that courage. Lucky for you and me, she’s not hiding anymore. And we can hear her story, and learn from it.