HUFFINGTON
11.11.12
NO WAY OUT
not get to most of the jobs.
“They’d ask me, ‘Can you get
here?’ and I’d be looking at the
bus schedule,” she says. “I’d tell
them, ‘I’ll figure it out.’ A lot of
temp places don’t even want to
hire you if you don’t have a car
an d you have to take the bus. If
you call a temp agency and say,
‘Do you have any jobs on the bus
line?’ they will flat out say, ‘No,’
and hang up on you.”
The agency that hired her for the
job at the Amazon plant cut her a
break. She started on the morning
shift, which required that she arrive by 6 a.m., but that was impossible given the bus schedule. The
boss offered flexibility.
“She told me, ‘Whatever time
you can get here, that’s when you
start,’” Smith says.
She started last spring. Since
then, she has earned about $500
every two weeks, saving as much
as she can toward securing an
apartment. She has investigated
the motels that have become de
facto housing for low-wage service
sector workers, but rejected them
as a trap. Most would absorb
most of her pay, leaving with her
with almost nothing toward the
security deposit she needs to get
an apartment. The one motel she
could afford — one that charges
$125 a week — sits in a neighborhood known as Red Bank, which
is devoid of bus service, making it
impossible for her to get to work.
Back in her Atlanta days, she
was making $26 an hour. Now,
she is at the bottom of the American wage scale, but she celebrates
this as a beginning.
“Seven twenty-five an hour is
better than zero,” she says. “I’m
going to work, and if I have to
continue to walk, I will. I will do
whatever I’ve got to do, except get
on my knees or lie on my back. It’s
tiring, it’s frustrating, it’s rough,
but you’ve got to crawl before you
can walk.”
This is the thought that drives
her as she leaves the abandoned
house and heads for the bus
stop, trudging through the muggy
southern Tennessee air.
She is working night shifts
lately, so she makes this trip in
the mid-afternoon. On a recent
day, she is wearing a faded and
too-big black T-shirt bearing pink
letters: “MOTIVATION 101.” She
got it out of the donated clothes
closet at the Community Kitchen.
A purple backpack is slung over
her shoulder, holding the ID card
that gets her into the Amazon
plant, the debit card on which her
paycheck is deposited, her driver’s
license, her Social Security card.