alabama possible from the alabama poverty project

Researcher Documents Plight of “Wage Gap” Families

Robin Oliver

Birmingham Post-Herald

June 4, 2004

It’s Friday of spring break. Quentina Slaton sets down the tray of pancakes and milk and slides into the plastic booth at McDonald’s next to 4-year-old Dante.

Her youngest son grabs eagerly for the plastic foam breakfast tray, while his more reserved older brother, 6-year-old Jordan, carefully moves the second plate of flapjacks to his spot across the table. The three pancakes with little plastic cups of syrup are a big weekly treat for the boys.

Slaton, 35, skips breakfast today. The single mother of two isn’t even having a cup of coffee while her boys eat. For one, she prefers Chick-Fil-A. More important, though, she won’t waste even a dollar of her tight budget on a treat for herself.

A clinical lab assistant earning $10.32 per hour, Slaton falls into what sociologists refer to as “the wage gap.” Pulling in just over $21,000 in annual gross income, she doesn’t qualify for any state or federally funded aid. Still, according to studies conducted by Alabama Arise and the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, she needs between $12.80 and $15.20 an hour just to get by.

“I have to really budget,” Slaton said. “They’ll say, ‘Mommy, can we go to the zoo?’ and I have to say, ‘No, we’ll go to the park again today.’ There isn’t enough for anything extra. … Sometimes I get behind on what I have to pay.”

In 2003, Alabama Arise released a report called “The Self-Sufficiency Standard for Alabama,” which calculates expenses in each Alabama county to determine the living wage needed for various family types. Appleseed published a report earlier the same year called the “Alabama Living Wage Study – Economic Self-Sufficiency: The Minimum Cost of Family Support in Alabama.”

Officials with both organizations said the reports should raise awareness about the wage gap and help change policies that hurt people like Slaton.

Researchers agree that Alabama’s unbalanced tax structure and its low aid limits result in a large number of workers who cannot support their families on their net incomes.

Some of their solutions include changing tax laws, providing education and training resources for workers in the gap, using self-sufficiency standards to recruit companies that pay living wages, and raising the aid limits and minimum wage. Barbara Evans, executive director of the consumer group Alabama Watch, said one of the biggest hurdles in finding help for people in the gap is the public misunderstanding of state aid.

There is an assumption that people who get welfare abuse the system and are living well on tax dollars, she said.

In 2002, Alabama had the lowest maximum benefit for family assistance, or welfare, in the country. Recently, the state raised the benefit, improving its rank to 44th nationally.

In Alabama, for a single parent with two children to qualify for family assistance, her income cannot be more than $215 a month. If the parent worked more than five eight-hour days a month, she would be over the limit. If she makes $200 a month, the state will send her a monthly check for $15.

If she makes more than $1,654 a month, or about $9.54 an hour, she cannot receive food stamps. If she is eligible, the maximum amount she receives is $371 a month, and toiletries and over-the-counter medications cannot be purchased with food stamps.

“We don’t make the claim that we’ve gotten them to the point that they can have a manageable lifestyle through these programs,” said Joel Sanders, director with the family assistance division with the state Department of Human Resources. “We are fully aware that people who qualify for our maximum payment have to be ingenious to survive on that.”

Adrienne Glispie is far above those aid limits. The single mother of two children, ages 1 and 3, works as a medical secretary making $13.50 an hour. With little family support, it isn’t rare that Glispie falls short in paying her monthly bills.

“I’m even thinking about picking up extra work to try to make it,” Glispie said. “I just don’t know what I would do with the kids if I worked nights.”

She said that to pay her day care bill, “I have to let other things slide. I’ll be late on the utility bill or the water bill. … I think where we suffer a lot is on food. I’m not able to cook a four-course dinner (with meat, two vegetables and bread) but once every two weeks.”

To explain why someone like Glispie, with full-time office work, still struggles, Arise outlined the basic costs in its study. A single parent with an infant and preschooler living in Jefferson County needs: $613 a month for housing (includes utilities); $795 a month for child care; $351 a month for food; $233 a month for transportation; $233 a month for health care (includes insurance premiums, co-pays and prescriptions); $222 a month for miscellaneous expenses; $423 a month for taxes (after deducting credits for child care and dependents; includes sales, payroll and occupational taxes).

All of that totals a living wage of $16.30 an hour, or $2,869 a month.

Glispie is far under that wage, but she is above maximum requirements to qualify for family assistance, food stamps or Medicaid. This is the wage gap.

Arise’s study claims a family of four, with two adults, a preschooler and a school-age child needs $40,940, or $9.69 an hour per adult, to live in Jefferson County. A single mother or father with an infant needs $25,863, or $12.25 an hour, to be self-sufficient, according to the study.

An adult with three children ages 2, 4 and 6 would need to be making $20.46 an hour or $43,205 annually.

Sanders said the good news, at least for taxpayers, is that it is always better to have a job than to live on welfare and food stamps in Alabama. The low family assistance payment guarantees that anyone who can work will do so rather than living off welfare.

Jo Dohoney, professor of sociology at Samford University and former director of the Alabama Poverty Project, said she doesn’t consider that such good news.

“(The welfare system) ensures, contrary to the myths people have, that any old job is better than welfare,” Dohoney said. But those coming off welfare, she said, are doing so with jobs that cannot sustain a family, and they are likely to end up back in the system.

The Welfare-to-Work program, passed on a federal level in 1996 and put into ef- fect in 1998, was intended to help people leaving welfare gain skills needed to move toward self-sufficiency. The funds for the program were scheduled to run out in September, but the Bush administration withdrew what was left of those funds in February. The Jefferson County Welfare-to-Work program is now closed.

Slaton had never been a welfare recipient. In 1986, she joined the U.S. Navy, where she served until 1999. It was in the service that she met her now ex- husband. They had two children before separating when Dante was a newborn. Not long after, she got orders that she would be shipping out to an offshore station in Japan. She would have to find a temporary custodian for her children or leave them with her estranged husband.

Slaton said she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving them behind.

“I still regret it every day that I got out, because it’s so hard,” she said.

When she left the service, she moved back in with her mother in Birmingham and began looking for work. She had worked in health care in the Navy, but it was a few months before she could find a steady job. While she was living with her mother, she tried applying for aid.

“I didn’t qualify for food stamps because I have a car that is paid for,” Slaton said. “They told me, quote, ‘Well, if you get hungry, you can sell your car.’ ”

Sanders said vehicles no longer count against eligibility.

Before the rules changed, though, Slaton had found work. She moved among departments several times at St. Vincent’s Hospital before landing a higher hourly wage.

Slaton lays none of the blame on her employer, which she said has been supportive all along. In 2001, she was able to begin taking classes at Lawson State Community College so that she could eventually enroll in a registered nursing program. St. Vincent’s pays Slaton’s tuition in exchange for 18 months of service to the hospital for every semester completed.

Slaton has finished her prerequisite courses and hopes to enroll this fall in the R.N. program. If she completes the program and passes her boards, she will be promoted from her lab assistant job to an R.N. position at St. Vincent’s, earning more than $20 an hour.

In the beginning, though, the cost of childcare took more than half of her paycheck, and she was close to walking away from the work and the school funding when she found Childcare Resources.

The Jefferson County agency administers a childcare assistance program funded by the Department of Human Resources. Slaton makes too much to qualify, but a second program funded through United Way and private donations was able to help Slaton with 40 percent of her childcare costs.

“I was boo-hooing when I went to them,” Slaton said. “I told them, ‘If you guys aren’t going to help me, I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ ”

In February 2002, Jordan and Dante were accepted into the program. Slaton was able to go to school during the day and work the 2-to-11 p.m. shift at St. Vincent’s. Her mother cares for the children at night after getting off her own job at Regions Bank. Mary Weidler, a policy analyst with Alabama Arise, said one of the goals of the Self-Sufficiency Standard report was to help privately funded programs like the child care supplement that Slaton receives set guidelines and recruit donors.

More than that, though, both Arise and Appleseed hope the report will be used as a counseling tool in schools and career centers, as a guideline for eligibility in state-funded programs and an aid in changing legislative policy.

Ideas for bridging the wage gap and helping families reach self-sufficiency place responsibility both on the individual and the government.

“One thing would be to make sure high school counselors are well educated about what it takes to support a family,” Weidler said. “Children in Alabama high schools need to know what it takes to live and what kind of training they need to make a living wage.”

Weidler also said city and county governments should use the report to review wage scales among government workers. She did not cite any Alabama cities where wages were below par but said government should lead the way in evaluating salaries to make sure it pays a living wage.

Salaries among state employees average $43,672, according to a study by William Ashmore, executive director of the State Employees’ Insurance Board in Montgomery.

“I do think its incumbent upon companies to pay a fair wage for the work that a person does,” she said.

John Pickens, executive director for Alabama Appleseed, wants to take the liv- ing wage issue beyond education and corporate accountability to the Legislature. He supports raising the minimum wage and raising the levels of eligibility for aid in Alabama.

The U.S. minimum wage is $5.15 per hour. A federal bill was introduced in 2000 to raise that figure by $1 per hour, but it did not make it through the Senate. Some cities outside of Alabama have set local minimum wages higher than the federal limit, but no ordinance addressing the wage has been introduced in Birmingham.

The aid eligibility levels in Alabama have gone up recently, and the Department of Human Resources does not expect those figures to go up again soon.

“It doesn’t seem right for people who walk to work and try to provide for their family to have their only option be jobs that will not provide enough to support their family,” Pickens said. “We should be able to pay workers at the lowest level at least enough to meet their basic needs.”

Not everyone agrees with such measures, though.

“You can’t legislate wealth,” said Craig Garthwaite, chief economist with the national Employment Policies Institute. “You can tell an employer how much you’re going to pay someone, but you can’t tell them who they are going to hire.”

He said raising minimum wage would lead to a great deal of unemployment. “You want to help families with children, but you don’t want to do it in a way that is going to push them out of jobs.”

Garthwaite said his agency supports earned income tax credits for working parents at the state level.

Jim Williams, a Samford University professor and head of the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama, said Alabama first needs to restructure the tax system to make it more balanced.

“Our tax system is very punitive on lower income people,” he said. “Our income tax hits people at a lower income level than any other state.”

Alabama starts taxing a family of four at $4,600. In Mississippi, that same family doesn’t pay taxes until it reaches an earned income of $19,000.

Plus, Williams said that nearly 100 percent of the income for a struggling family is spent on taxable goods. Meanwhile, wealthier Alabamians save a percentage of their money and pay sales tax on a smaller percent of their income. The percentages of income hit by sales, property and income taxes should be balanced among all income levels, he said.

Weidler said other ways to bridge the gap at the state level are to recruit companies that pay wages at or above self-sufficiency levels; to subsidize education and training programs for workers in the wage gap; or to create living wage mandates at a local level.

Arise is focusing on educating the public. Appleseed is working on legislation to help small businesses provide better insurance.

Meanwhile, Slaton gets up every morning, takes her children to school and preschool and heads off to class, then work, then home to study before catching a few hours of sleep.

She said she thinks part of the problem is that stories like hers never get told, and even when they do, few listen.

“A lot of times, if people would just listen at the different agencies and investigate a little bit, they might be able to help you or find someone who can.”

She could be only two years away from becoming an R.N. and finally being able to take her children to the zoo over spring break.

“It seems like forever,” she said. “But they (Dante and Jordan) keep me sane. They keep me going.”

Robin Oliver can be reached at 325-2370 or roliver@postherald.com Amy Voigt can be reached at 325-2369 or avoigt@postherald.com