This Fight is Our Fight: The Battle to Save Working People. Elizabeth Warren
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Gina is the modern-day version of my mother: years ago, she stayed home to raise the kids, but now she’s a breadwinner who works long hours for a major retailer. In fact, Gina is better educated and has more work experience than my mom did. Truth be told, she’s also a lot feistier. But unlike my mother, Gina can’t earn enough to put dinner on the table without help from a food pantry. My mom found a way to save us, but the odds are stacked much higher against Gina and her family.
EVEN HARDER
When America’s middle class is under assault, there’s pain everywhere, but much of that pain rains down harder on black and Latino families.
The evidence of this assault is especially clear when it comes to homes. Homes are good indicators of stability: when a family has its own home, the kids can go to the neighborhood school and the parents will usually take time to meet the neighbors and maybe even work together to spruce up the playground. Tiny condos and center-hall colonials, triple-deckers and Cape Cod farmhouses—homes are the tangible sign that a family is living the American dream.
Michael had the dream.
He was ready to tell me his story. Unlike Gina, he said, Sure, use my name—Michael J. Smith. Use my picture, too. I’m out there.
Michael is African American, married, and in his fifties. He’s a big guy, solidly built, with large hands. His smile is soft and almost sweet, and his voice is deep and reassuring; the gentle rhythms of his speech evoke his early years growing up in the South. For decades, Michael has been very involved in his church. More than once, he said to me, “It truly is our faith that keeps us going.”
When Michael’s family moved from Atlanta to the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago in the 1960s, his family and church held him close. There were gangs in his neighborhood, but Michael stayed on the path he believed in—God and family—and he never made a big decision without praying on it first.
As Michael tells his story, he warms up to all the good memories. In his twenties, he got a good job, married his high school sweetheart, and had three kids. They divorced, but he remarried soon after, and he and his wife, Janet, have a daughter named Ashley. From the first paycheck he ever took home, Michael started saving to make a down payment on a home. He and Janet bought their first home in Richton Park, a suburb of Chicago. As Michael put it, he always wanted “a neighborhood that was safe, that I could raise my children in, that was fenced in in the front and the back.” He particularly wanted his kids to have a yard to play in.
He kept those dreams front and center. Michael had a good job with DHL delivering packages and loading planes. Sometimes he was called on to do a lot of heavy lifting and there was pressure to get things done quickly, but he describes his time at DHL as “the most satisfying work I’ve ever done.” Janet worked at Chase for twenty-seven years, and she was proud that she had never missed a payment on any bill—ever. They kept right on saving, and after a few years Michael moved his family again, first to Hazel Crest, a predominantly African American suburb, and then to Homewood, which was more diverse.
When Michael spoke to me about the move to Homewood, he said, “We thought that we could do a little better.” But he and Janet didn’t jump right in. “We thought about it, prayed about it, looked at the numbers, and we had more than enough.”
Michael talks about the house he and Janet bought like it’s a beloved child. He tells about the three arches at the front of the house and about the pine trees in the backyard. He also wants me to know about the hedges out front where robins built a nest every spring. “We never clipped the hedges while the robins were there,” he notes. “They like their privacy.”
His conclusion: “We had kind of a great American story.”
Then the crash of 2008 hit and the bottom fell out. In the space of a few months, DHL eliminated 14,900 jobs—including Michael’s.
After sixteen years on the job, he felt like he’d been run over by one of his own trucks. Frantically, he spent the months that followed looking for part-time work wherever he could find it. But no one was hiring, and he quickly understood that he had no chance of getting a full-time job that paid as well as his old one and offered health insurance. By this time, Janet was no longer working at the bank, and Michael’s unemployment checks didn’t cover even their basic expenses. In the blink of an eye, Michael’s whole world had turned upside down.
A lousy mortgage made a bad situation worse. Michael and Janet had started out with a plain-vanilla, fixed-rate thirty-year mortgage. They weren’t in the house long when a mortgage broker talked them into refinancing, which meant that they agreed to take on a complex mortgage. Michael now realizes that it was a great deal for the bank, but not so much for his family. Once the mortgage payments ballooned and he lost his job, it was the kind of double blow that almost no family can survive. Somewhere in his heart, Michael knew that his family was doomed. Even so, he held out for as long as he could.
Ashley was now in high school and deeply engaged in her music, playing both the piano and the viola. Michael told me that when it was time to go to school in the mornings, “We did not need to wake her up, because she was so passionate about her instruments, she’d get up on her own.” Ashley was beginning to dream that she could pursue a music career; someday maybe she could play with a major symphony orchestra. Michael and Janet paid for extra music lessons for their daughter. “It was important to us to keep her encouraged and inspired,” Michael said. To make ends meet, they sold one of their two cars, as well as some of Janet’s jewelry. Michael even sold his wedding ring.
While they cut their expenses to the bone, their financial situation kept sliding downhill. Michael looked everywhere for work, taking anything anyone offered. They kept scrambling, but the numbers just wouldn’t add up.
Then the phone rang. Did Michael want to come back to DHL? The company was hiring back twelve people. That was twelve out of nine hundred former employees from his branch. Michael was sorry about the other people, but it felt good—very good—to be one of the chosen twelve.
The offer seemed like a godsend—a good job doing work he loved. And somewhere down deep, it felt like respect as well. It meant that someone like Michael who tried hard and did a great job would be rewarded for the extra energy he put into his work.
But the story turned out a little differently. This time DHL wasn’t offering him his old full-time job with benefits. This time he was offered part-time work, no guaranteed hours, no benefits.
Welcome to work—twenty-first century–style.
Yes, the job moved Michael from “unemployed” to “employed” on the government statistics. Yes, he had a paycheck. Yes, he was grateful.
But Michael didn’t fool himself. “I knew right away it wasn’t enough, because my mortgage was too much for me to pay. It was not enough to sustain myself and my family.” He shook his head. “It was just an unbearable situation.”
As Michael and Janet spiraled toward foreclosure, they desperately tried to work things out with the bank. With hindsight, Michael reflected on how the broker had persuaded him to take on the new mortgage: “I felt like I had been scammed.” At one point, he considered suing, but he backed away from the idea after he thought about how much money it would cost to hire a lawyer and how fast his home was slipping away.
Finally