economic self-sufficiency.
The situation is similar for Rose Taylor, a white woman, who has lived most of her nearly thirty years in Athens County. She describes herself as among the more economically privileged in the county and it is clear that her friends think of her as fairly successful. “I have had friends borrow money from me, because they need to pay their rent, or they need food. The majority of my friends, I would say, barely make it every month.” Despite Rose’s desire to help, she finds the situation a little stressful because she too can find herself financially strapped at times.
Rose holds an associate degree and works thirty-six hours a week as a certified nursing assistant (CNA) caring for an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s Disease. Her shift as a CNA is from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. three days per week. If you know anything about Alzheimer’s Disease, you know that there are no “easy” shifts in care giving. Dementia care at any time of day is full of unexpected challenges as well as surprising rewards. Like Michael, Rose especially values working the night shift because it doesn’t interfere with the fluctuating schedule at her second, day job where she spends thirty hours a week doing body piercing. Typically, three days a week she is scheduled at both jobs, which leaves her just enough time between jobs to shower and go for a walk with her “fur child,” a sweet dog that she cares for with her sister.
Rose describes her life as unsustainable but tells me that for now she has to make it work. Between the two jobs, she works sixty-six hours a week and earns less than $23,000 – before taxes. Rose has no benefits at either job. Her income is almost double the federal poverty line. That puts her well ahead of the 12.9% of all women in the country who lived at or below the federal poverty line in 2017. Perhaps most striking is that after state and federal taxes, Social Security tax and Medicare tax, Rose’s income is less than $17,083 – and this is without any form of health care. Like Michael, she is above the poverty line of $12,140 but below the area standard for self-sufficiency income of $34,545.
With an after-tax income around $17,000, it’s easy to see why Rose cannot afford to live alone – even though she works over sixty hours a week. If she became lucky enough to find a decent one-bedroom apartment for $800 a month, Rose would need to spend $9,600 per year on rent. Flats on the higher end ($1,300 a month) would cost her $15,600 a year. In order to get by, Rose shares an apartment with her sister, who juggles three part-time jobs – two as a nurse and one helping her mother at a diner. Rose and her sister tend to work opposite days/shifts which enables them to share custody of their “fur child.” The dog provides great companionship for quiet walks in the woods, which have become an essential source of emotional support. “Life is incredibly stressful,” explains Rose, “and the stress never goes away.” Even without a crisis, life is a constant struggle for enough money, enough sleep, enough ease.
Rose has been trying to put money away each month. She tells me that if she can build a financial cushion, she’ll be able to catch a break. What would catching a break look like? She tells me it would be staying home from work when she is sick or having time to do something she likes. Yet the ability to put a little money away each month depends on nothing going wrong – and something always seems to be going wrong. Last month, her savings were completely wiped out because she needed tires for her car. “It often feels like I’m doing really well. I have like a little tiny bit of savings. But then something happens, then it’s like, oh, now I have to start all over again.” As she talks, it’s easy to see the deep exhaustion in her face. Rose’s life is itself a contradiction: on the one hand she calls herself “lucky” because she could afford the tires and thus keep working, yet on the other hand, in her daily life, she doesn’t feel very lucky. This is life in the struggling class.
“I recently went to the dentist. I have to have dental surgery next week, and I don’t have dental insurance. And so, it’s going to cost me like $600 to fix my tooth, and that’s something that like I wasn’t planning on obviously. Stuff like that stresses me out and it makes me like want to work more. But, at the same time, I need to protect my mental health as well. I manage anxiety a lot. I manage depression as well.” Low-wage work exacts a high human cost.
Like many other folks working very long hours at multiple part-time jobs, Rose has no health insurance, sick time, or retirement benefits. “I had Obamacare last year. I tried to sign up again but ended up taking hours on the phone. I just didn’t have time to like figure it out. Then the deadline passed. It was tricky because of my two jobs and two different incomes, and there was like a lot of questions.” She’ll try again next year but for now she’s planning on taking out a medical loan to pay the dental bill. Rose reflects for a moment and says: “It’s not even like a thing to ask about health insurance [when looking for work]. I know people that only have one job, they manage a bar or manage a restaurant, and they sometimes don’t even have health insurance, I want to say like 50% of the time.” Businesses with fewer than fifty employees have no legal obligation to provide health insurance. It’s no wonder that medical loans are a thriving industry. We’ll look at those carefully in the next chapter.
Rose is smart, hardworking, and broke. She describes her current level of work as unsustainable but even so she cannot afford the basics of being able to live alone, pay for car repairs, and cover medical bills. Rose worries about the future. “I don’t need food stamps, but there have been times in my life where I’ve considered getting food stamps, but, as of right now, I don’t need them.” Rose pauses for a moment and takes a breath, “but if I were to ever have a child or have anybody else depend on me, that would have to be a possibility.” It isn’t an easy thought. It is a desperate one. Without access to reproductive health care – including abortion – an unplanned pregnancy would end her ability to work and force her and her child more deeply into poverty. As we will see in later chapters, for low-wage workers, marriage does not always offer a way out of poverty.
The experiences of Michael and Rose in Southeast Ohio are familiar to others living in the area. Like millions of others, they are caught in economic quicksand. For low-wage workers, it is impossible to work your way out of poverty. Without paid sick time, just a bad case of the flu will throw their ability to keep a roof over their head into question. More than 1,200 miles away, at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, things are both quite different and remarkably similar.
Standing Rock Sioux Reservation
When I land in Rapid City, South Dakota, on September 12, 2017, more than forty-eight wildfires are burning in Montana; they would go on to consume more than 1,295,000 acres before being contained a few weeks later.8 Hundreds of miles from Montana, the fires were turning the South Dakota sky to ash. On my way to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the northeast, I pass mile after mile of sunflowers – most of them damaged or destroyed by drought. For most of the drive, the car radio picks up only two stations: one playing country music and another broadcasting a Christian preacher. As I pass the enclave of Timber Lake on the Cheyenne River Reservation, the radio picks up Standing Rock’s station, which plays a mix of community news, pop, rock, and traditional tribal music. And for the first time in hundreds of miles, my phone picks up a Wi-Fi signal, also coming from Standing Rock.
Although American Indian tribes are sovereign nations, the status of Native peoples in the US remains both unclear and precarious because a great deal of US policy rests on foundations of genocide, treaty abrogation, racism, and repression of tribal histories.9 The US reservation system was initially established along the lines of concentration camps under a colonial occupation. Today, the far-reaching occupation includes geographical displacement, ongoing disregard for Native rights, appropriation of tribal land and resources, destruction of natural resources, contamination of Native land and water, prohibitions against religious practices, as well as geographic and political isolation.
The entire Midwest region was shaped by war and broken treaties that continually forced Plains Nations into smaller, more desolate areas, often separating cultures from their most sacred sites.10 The Great Sioux Nation is composed of Seven Council
