What $152 A Week Buys

By NANCY GIBBS

In a Pennsylvania trailer park, a mother of three makes a wish list. She wishes that she lived in a house without wheels. And that she did not have to embarrass her eight-year-old daughter by pulling her out of her brownie troop because the 50 cents-a-meeting fee is too high. That food stamps could be used to buy toilet paper and deodorant. That she could get a real, professional $30 perm, one that would not wreck her hair. That her husband could find a union job, maybe in construction, that paid $6, $7, even $8 an hour. That after eight years of marriage, they could take a vacation together. That they could afford more children. "If he had a good-paying job," says Sandy Wells, 26, cheerfully recalling her 10 brothers and sisters, "I'd have five children. I love kids."

Like many other families in similar straits, Sandy and her husband have some things in abundance. They have a network of solicitous relatives and faithful friends. They have a strong marriage, happy kids, low expectations and high hopes. They have plenty of work ethic. What they do not have is enough money to live as they would like. It is these families whose entire household budgets shudder when the price of gasoline rises by a dime a gallon, whose sons and daughters join the Army to pay for their schooling, whose jobs are most vulnerable when the economy crawls toward recession. Savings and security are unaffordable luxuries; so are adequate health care, sufficient heat in the winter, a meal in a restaurant, a night at the movies.

During the past two administrations, Congress and the White House argued about raising the minimum wage for the first time since 1981. Some economists warned that prices would rise; others were worried that jobs would disappear. After months of delay and bargaining, last fall both sides settled on a two- stage increase: the wage rose to $3.80 an hour (or $152 for a 40-hour week) in April, and will reach $4.25 next year. Some called it an overdue victory, in an age of glossy neglect, for the working poor.

But behind the debate are the families who live the minimal life. More than 3 million Americans survive on the minimum wage, and millions more, like the Wellses, hover just above it. As inflation hummed along at 4% or 5% a year and buying power eroded, many lost their financial footing and slipped below the poverty line: a full-time worker at minimum wage still falls about $2,000 short of the subsistence level ($9,890 for a family of three). While it is true that most minimum-wage workers are teenagers or part-time employees, there are millions more men and women who earn $5, $6 or $7 an hour and still cannot meet basic needs.

That leaves families worrying constantly about priorities. Heat or cough medicine? Books for school or shoes? "You lead a simple life," says Father John Seymour of Our Lady of Victory Church in Compton, Calif., where many of his parishioners face the hard choices every day. "Your main recreation is television. You eat a lot of rice, pasta, potatoes and beans, maybe some green vegetables. You take the bus, or you kind of carpool it, riding with someone and helping with the gas. If you're pregnant, you don't begin prenatal care until your seventh, eighth or ninth month, because even at a public health clinic, it's $25 a visit."

Which means that everyone pays. Many of the expenses that fall through the cracks land on the public. A minimum-wage worker with a car probably cannot afford insurance. If he gets in an accident, someone else ends up paying, and eventually everyone's premiums rise. Likewise, babies of women who delay seeking adequate prenatal care are at high risk for birth defects and neo- natal trouble. This in turn drives doctors' insurance premiums up and makes for higher medical costs later on. Children who leave school early to help support the family have much less chance of climbing out of the minimal life themselves.

This explains in part why so many working parents will go to any lengths to ensure that their children have chances that they did not. On the table in the tidy living room of Patricia Mull's Los Angeles apartment is a World Book encyclopedia. The shiny volumes cost $1,200, an almost inconceivable amount carved out of her household budget. Her daughter Lorena is a junior high school honors graduate who wants to go to law school, and the encyclopedia, like the tuition for private schooling, was a high priority, a costly symbol of firm intent.

Mull earns $4.25 an hour sewing bathing suits and bathrobes. In 14 years at the same factory, she has never had a raise, except the last time the state government increased the minimum wage. "I don't drink coffee there," she says. "I don't want to spend the money." When the premium for her medical insurance rose from $6 to $16 a week in 1988, she canceled it. "I can't afford it," she says quietly. What if she gets sick? "I never get sick."

Mull is a financial wizard. "I buy this for one year," she says, cradling a half-gallon jug of Palmolive liquid soap. She ducks back into the kitchen and brings out a half-gallon jug of molasses. "This is for six months. You make pancakes with it. I buy everything big." Her monthly budget is tightly knotted around fixed costs: $400 goes for rent, not including gas and electric bills; Lorena's school, Immaculate Conception, is $80 a month; $15 goes to Mervyn's department store for clothes bought earlier; food takes $40 a week; Mull's bus pass is $42 a month. "I never go to the dances," she says. "I never go to the movies." An outing usually means church on Sundays. "I worry about the rent," Mull says softly. "I worry if I can make the payment in time. I worry if I have enough money left for other things. I worry about money every day, every night."

Back in the days when the economy was expanding, the cold war ending and the peace dividend looming large, Ronald Reagan cherished a famous fantasy about flying with Mikhail Gorbachev over the sun-soaked swatches of Southern California, with its mosaic of turquoise swimming pools and tidy lawns and fat white garages plump with new cars. "Those are the homes of American workers," he would proudly declare, describing a Hollywood dreamland where auto mechanics have summer houses and anyone can go to college.

Advocates for the working poor have another fantasy. They imagine the day when "good jobs at good wages" will be a national priority, not a much mocked campaign theme. It is true that a strong economy helps all workers, but even the steady growth through the 1980s left many behind. The jobs created in the 1980s were of ten in the lower-paying fields, and in the absence of union muscle and public support, those jobholders are on their own.

For the Wellses in Pennsylvania, the choices are prescribed by a take-home income of $600 a month, which Al earns making respirators at a local factory. After five years, he is paid $5.68 an hour -- which means that the increase in the minimum wage did him no good at all. Nearly half his take-home salary goes to rent the 12-ft. by 65-ft. trailer he, his wife and three children live in and the lot it sits on; $20 is set aside for the gas he needs to get to the factory. "His working is our livelihood, so that has to come first," says wife Sandy. Electricity runs about $40 a month. The Wellses had a phone for a while, but it cost more than $20 a month, so they got rid of it. Food stamps worth $200 a month help keep meat on the table, but if Al works overtime at the factory, the subsidy is reduced. All the bills are paid with money orders because they do not have a checking account. "You have to keep at least $10 in your account to keep it open," says Sandy, "and we just can't do that."

Under such circumstances every acquisition entails a sacrifice, and there is no margin for error or whim. The Wells children stay home from class skating trips because Sandy cannot manage the $1.50 for skate rental. "They know the value of money, my kids do," she says. "They get money, they don't spend it on candy or toys. They say, 'Mom, I want to buy shoes for school.' " But every now and then, when equanimity ruptures, the family will splurge. One time last fall, Sandy recalls, "we paid the lot rent and we had, like, $40 left. It was supposed to go to the lights, but we just said, let's go to McDonald's." She smiles at the memory. "The kids thought that was the greatest thing in the world."

It is an additional irony that the increase in the minimum wage may actually leave some families worse off. When household incomes creep up, many workers find themselves suddenly ineligible for the food stamps, housing allowances and Medicaid that have made the difference between mere discomfort and true desperation.

An unemployed single mother of two in New York City, for instance, is eligible for $253 a month from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. She can also get $153 in food stamps, a $286 housing allowance, a Medicaid card and subsidized day care for her children while she attends classes or work-training sessions. The minute she begins working, even for minimum wage, she begins losing her rent and food benefits and must worry about day-care costs, transportation to and from work and medical insurance. Even if the minimum wage were raised to $5 an hour, or about $10,000 a year, families would still be struggling to survive. "To me, the support mechanisms are more important than the minimum wage," says Kenneth Heilman, a social worker in Armstrong County, Pa.

Jennifer Cole of Danvers, Mass., was on welfare before she got married, and she understands dependency. "People talk about welfare mothers' just sitting around. Well, there's no incentive for them to work. You lose all your security, your checks, your medical coverage." The programs that are thought to support working families like the Coles are out of reach. She tried to get her daughter Jacqueline, 4, into a Head Start program but was turned down because the family made too much money. So Jacqueline spends her day watching videos.

On the face of it, Jennifer and her husband Jeff appear to have a perfectly comfortable income. Their combined salaries -- he is a machinist in the microwave division of Varian; she is a night clerk for a local food distributor -- total about $37,000 a year, middle class by any standard for a family of four. But since they are ineligible for most support programs, they face many of the same dilemmas as minimum-wage earners: the hard decisions, the small indignities and the rough edges of approximate poverty. "They say we're middle class," says Jennifer, "but this isn't the way I thought middle-class people lived."

The Coles, for example, have acquired skills they never imagined they'd need, like dodging creditors. Sometimes they put the electric bill in Jennifer's maiden name and the phone bill in Jeff's name, then move to another town and do the reverse. "We owe everybody money," says Jennifer. "It becomes, 'Do we want to pay back $400 we owe his parents -- they're not exactly wealthy people -- or do we pay the people who are chasing us the hardest?' "

But it is not as though they are spendthrifts. "We don't clothes-shop," pipes up Jacqueline, an engaging child with lemon-colored ringlets and blueberry eyes. Jennifer nods in agreement. "I can't remember the last time I was in a mall." The couch in the living room is from a friend who bought a new one; the tables come from her parents, the hutch from his. "Everything here has a story to it," says Jennifer. The one new item is a clock on the wall with a picture of the Grateful Dead on the face. They spotted it one afternoon at a local fair, and Jeff, a diehard "Dead Head," fell in love. At $15 he resisted the urge, until Jennifer insisted that he buy it. "Sometimes," she told him, "you just got to do something for yourself because it'll make you feel good."

For many families, the increased minimum wage will scarcely be felt at all. But for others, it will at last allow some tiny luxuries. "It will mean a little more," says Ophelia Ratliff, a divorced mother of seven in Chicago. "It will mean I can buy more food." She works for $3.87 an hour doing housekeeping for the homebound and earns a bit extra as a housecleaner. "I'd be getting a little more from my work," she adds, "and I might take on more hours."

No family is "typical" of the working poor. Families like the Coles and the Wellses, the Ratliffs and the Mulls serve as reminders that poverty is ecumenical and its mythology misleading. They may defy the stereotypes of the dependent underclass in their pointed commitment to maintaining their freedom of choice. But there is a thin line between determination and despair, and for families at the edge there is always a fear of falling. "Politicians, I think it's all a game for them," says Jennifer Cole. "They're up there, and we're down here. But it's not a game for us." Not so long as winning means just breaking even, one day at a time.

With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/New York, with other bureaus