The Tom Tomorrow panel on the front page struck a nerve with me today.
It brought back memoires of my time in poverty and what heard from the “experts” and pundits who tried to tell me then that I was not “poor”.
This is the by product of a wasteful, destructive right wing ideology that measures people not in their potential but in their possessions. This ideology that measures poverty by possessions saying you are not poor if you have stuff. Well, I had stuff and I was poor.
I wasn't born poor but before I was out of childhood and able to fend for myself, my family had become poor. I never blamed anyone for that, never thought that if we had a different set of rules or leaders, my family wouldn’t have become poor. I just chocked it up to bad luck and the way things happen. But then, I was a child and didn’t fully understand what had happened to us. All I knew is that we went from having three cars to having none and from having more than we needed to getting “gift baskets” from the local church to get us through Christmas.
When I graduated high school, I joined the military and then using student loans and grants, I went to college. Soon after I started, our government, in the name of balancing a budget and reducing taxes, cut the grant program. As a result, when I left college, I had a massive student loan debt and no real assets. By the way, the government budget never did get balanced.
For the next 2 to 3 years, I tried to find work while living on the dole. I received $450.00 per month, of which $200 was for rent. If you rented a place cheaper, they cut that allowance to the amount you actually paid. After six months of leaving school, my student loan fell due and I was required to pay $40.56 per month every month until it was paid off in full (this was the minimum payment and you don’t have to be a math whiz to realize the debt would never be paid off at that rate).
The dole was a unique form of humiliation that I wish absolutely every right winger could enjoy. Its purpose was not to lift you out of poverty. It was not to help you get a job. It wasn’t even to keep you alive long enough so you could help get yourself out of poverty. Its purpose seemed to be to keep you poor and unemployed forever.
On the dole I was not allowed to go to school. I was not allowed to work for any wage, no matter how small. At first, you were allowed to earn up to $50.00 per month without losing your benefits; the idea being that you could gain work experience and be motivated to seek full employment. But the same right wing government that had eliminated student grants a few years earlier, now eliminated this earning potential. Apparently, this $50 bucks only encouraged laziness and rob us of the “incentive” to work. While on the dole, I knew that at any time I could be kicked off. I learned to grovel whenever my “case worker” demanded we meet to “discuss my options” (code words for “get the hell out of this province”).
During this time of living in a $200 a month apartment, I had use of a working stove and a refrigerator. These belonged to the building. I had a colour TV. This was several years old and was given to me by my brother, who had a job and had just bought a new one. I had some of my parents old furniture. I had my clothes, some bedding and towels; also from my parents. The apartment also came with a phone (before cells), a radio and a stereo (yeah for records. CD’s were a luxury I couldn’t afford). All of these were several years old and were gifts from family.
After several years of hopeless job search, I moved across the country to find work elsewhere. I started working with an insurance company as a “contract” worker soon after arriving. Contract work was a very popular means of hiring and still is. A contract worker got minimum wage, was given no benefits and never got a raise. A contract worker could also be terminated at any time without reason and without severance.
As no payments were made for unemployment insurance, pension or health benefits, on termination, if you couldn’t get a new job quickly, it was back on the dole as you as didn’t qualify for UI benefits. As a result, you made damn sure you kept your crappy, minimum wage job, no matter what the cost.
There is a funny irony about being poor; it often costs more to work than not to work. When I was unemployed, I bathed once per week to save money on hot water; I could wear clothes with stains or holes because they were still functional. I could adjust my eating schedule so I could save money on food. I walked every where to save the bus fare and I washed my clothing in my shower and hung them up to dry to save the cost of using machines. My old sneakers were fine, even if my feet did freeze in the winter.
All this changed when I started working. I had to wear presentable clothing including a pressed white shirt, tie and pressed business pants. These had to be dry cleaned. I had to buy shirts, ties and shoes. I had to take the bus to get to work, no option as it was too far to walk or bike (even if I had one). I had to pack a lunch. If I didn’t my next meal after breakfast wouldn’t be for another 10 hours. I had to shower every day, so my hot water bill jumped. Despite making minmum wage, I had to pay payroll taxes which took 23% of my earnings before I got a dime.
About a year after I started work, a newly elected right wing government, decided subsidies for mass transit was a waste of money and eliminated them. As a result, the cost of riding the bus steadily climbed from .75 cents to $2.50 in a few years. At the same time, this same government eliminated a number of taxes that mainly targeted the wealthy.
During this time, if asked, I would admit that I had a fridge, a stove, colour TV, furniture, VCR, radio, stereo and use of a washer/dryer. None of it was new, none of the appliances were mine and most of what I owned were gifts. The one product I actually purchased during this time was a clock radio so I could get up in the morning. It costs $5.00 because I wanted “a good one”. I got it at a thrift store and had it for 10 years.
My having these things did not mean I was not poor. It did not make it any easier to make ends meet or cost me money better spent elsewhere. The simple fact is, when you live in a consumer society that mass produces extremely high quantities of such goods, these goods are going to be extremely cheap. TV’s, phones, refrigerators, stoves, CD players, radios, VCR’s and DVD players can be found for next to nothing at garage sales, online sites or thrift stores. Millions exchange hands free of charge as gifts, give-aways or toss outs. Every dumpster at any apartment building will inevitably have furniture, TV’s or electronics being tossed. If you have the skills, just about any appliance can be made usable again.
Conservatives will say that I wanted a free ride and am complaining because I wanted to “suck on the public teat longer” but that was BS then and it is BS now. I didn’t take on a large debt to get a college education to live on welfare. I didn’t travel across the country to take a contract job at minimum wage because I was lazy. I wanted to work and the irony was that I had to work harder and sacrifice more to achieve that goal than I have had to do for any other goal since.
What did I want from the government? What kind of “hand out” would I have liked? I would have appreciated it if the government had not cut education grants or continued to fund education so tuition didn't keep going up every year. That way, I could have stayed in school a little longer and gotten a higher level of education. I would have liked it if the government had deferred repayment of student loans until a decent paying job had actually been obtained. I would have liked it if the government had passed legislation tying minimum wage increases to the cost of inflation, or mandating that employers had to pay contract workers a regular salary increase for length of service. I would have really liked it if the government had had continued to subsidize mass transit.
Over the years, building on increasing experience and knowledge, I have succeeded in getting out of poverty and am now living a good life. It took years and would have been faster if I didn’t have to struggle against a right wing ideology that insisted any sort of cooperative effort for providing greater opportunity to the many over the enrichment of the few was communism.
Those years spent in poverty were years wasted for the right wing governments that seemed determined to keep me poor. I wasn't the consumer that they claimed I was. I bought little to nothing for year after year. Instead of being a consumer, a "job creator" for manufacturing, investment services or banks, I was survivor' living on the scraps and refuse of my society. In the end, even by their own warped standard, I was poor.