HUFFINGTON
11.11.12
NO WAY OUT
only $8.50. He gave up the duplex apartment for a bedroom in
a rooming house. For the last five
years, he’s been making $7.25 as a
driver for a door company.
“Backwards,” he says. “It’s
devastating.”
When the door company shut
down in April, he found himself
needing food stamps and an unemployment check. Merely figuring out how to apply was bewildering, he says.
“It’s still sinking in,” he says. “I
don’t know what to do. I don’t know
where to go. I’m not accustomed to
begging and relying on others.”
He went everywhere he could
reach by foot in search of another
job, he says. He stopped in at hotels
downtown to ask about building
maintenance or valet parking positions. He showed up at construction offices and courier services.
Most of the time, he was turned
away and told to apply online.
“Me being a truck driver, I’m almost computer illiterate,” he says.
On this day, Stinson takes the
bus to the Career Center to check
job listings. He sits in a waiting
room and stares at the orange
walls until a caseworker emerges
and calls his name. She shows him
three active listings, the maximum
he is allowed to see each time.
One is a full-time job for $9.50
an hour driving a delivery truck
for Dr. Pepper and Snapple. The
loading dock is less than two
miles from his house. The bus
doesn’t go there, but it’s a manageable walk, he says.
But this employer will only take
applications online. When the
caseworker helps him navigate to
the Web page using a Career Center computer, the site shows only
jobs in Louisiana and Texas, and
not the position in Chattanooga.
The second listing is for a parttime position, driving a school bus
for about $9 an hour, from a spot
that is more than three miles from
his house and far from the bus.
The third one is a warehouse position at the Amazon plant. It pays
more than $10 an hour, but it’s a
shift job that ends after midnight.
He could take the bus out there,
but how would he get home?
“It seems like every move you
make, you run into a bigger obstacle,” he says.
Friends with cars have offered to
shuttle him to and from work, but
he does not see that as sustainable.
“They’ll do that for four, five
days,” he says. “Then they’ll start
saying, ‘Well, I’ve got something
else to do today.’”
What he has to do today is the
same thing as most days: Try to