This diary is by Working America's Philadelphia member coordinator Kimberly McMurray and is crossposted from our Main Street blog.
I come from a working class family. I hail from coal miners in central Pennsylvania. My uncles are carpenters. My aunts are nurses. I grew up with a single mother who ran a daycare business out of our home. From a young age, I watched her struggle to make ends meet. We ate pasta four times a week. I knew not to ask to go to sleep-away camp.
I started working for Working America because I thought I understood what it was like to worry about money, to be directly affected by corporate and government officials whose decisions have a profound impact on my life. But in many ways, my family was infinitely lucky. My mom had a job. She worked insanely hard, but because she was able to work from home, she was there for me and my brother day in and day out. In this current unemployment crisis, people are lucky to have any job at all, let alone one that lets them make their family a priority.
Last week, the Philadelphia chapter of Working America held an Unemployment Table Talk where members got together to have an informal discussion about how the unemployment crisis has affected them. The economic meltdown hasn’t left anyone unscarred and everyone there had a powerful story. They lived without healthcare. They worried about making mortgage payments.
But one woman stood out to me–maybe because her blond hair reminded me of my mom’s, or because I could see the tough decisions in her eyes. Cheryl was laid off five months ago from her job at a local factory. In an attempt to cut costs, the factory changed its hours to 6:30-6:30 four days a week. While Fridays off might seem like a dream come true to some, 12 hour shifts don’t work when you are simultaneously raising a four year old and a ten year old by yourself. Who is going to get them off to school? Who is going to make sure they do their homework? When Cheryl couldn’t make the new hours work, she was the first one let go.
Cheryl said that her kids come first. She talked about searching for health insurance for them, while she goes without. Of food stamps and welfare. She talked about her choices, or a lack thereof. Cheryl’s older son needs help with math. He is in public school and as the year draws to an end, his teacher recommended that Cheryl enroll him in a special math tutorial. The problem? The program costs $160 and Cheryl is unsure where her next mortgage payment is going to come from.
I want to help him, she said. School should come first, but he is not going to be able to learn math without a roof over his head. So for now, that money will have to go to the bank. Tough decisions. And where will the mortgage payments even come from when her unemployment runs out?
I can see her constant worry, her struggle, and I am instantly transported to 1995 watching my mom balance her checkbook at our kitchen table. Maybe I was just too young to see her tough decisions.