In Rhode Island, we talk a lot about unemployment. We talk about the numbers and the rates, we talk about our awful state ranking. But what is often missing from the conversation are the voices of the actual Rhode Islanders who are going through this crisis, who are struggling each and every day to find work, who are worrying more and more about how they’re going to pay the bills or keep their homes.
I am currently working on a project called Where’s the Work? that is focused on sharing the stories of some of these Rhode Islanders. For the next month, I will be posting periodically with short summaries of the experiences of a number of unemployed Rhode Islanders from different walks of life. While obviously such posts can’t come even close to expressing the breadth and depth of our unemployed crisis and its challenges, I’m hoping to at least begin to paint a clearer picture of what so many of our fathers, daughters, friends, and neighbors here in Rhode Island are going through. I’ll start today with the story of Adria, an energetic and kind Providence mother with whom I’ve had the privilege of speaking several times in the last few weeks.
Adria has been looking for work for six months. And when Adria says she’s been looking for work, she really means it. “I’ve been applying anywhere and everywhere. I’ve applied to places that I wouldn’t even have thought of applying to. But I need a job.” Adria sends in between 25 and 30 applications a week, every week. “I’ve never refused a job, even a part-time job. I’d prefer full-time, but you take what you can get right now.” Previously she was working for a temp agency, but now, she says, “Even the temp agencies don’t have jobs.”
Unemployment has been tough on Adria, both financially and emotionally. “I’m supporting seven children, three kids under five, and our family has definitely had to cut down on spending since I was laid off,” she says. “I spend my unemployment benefits on bills; my husband’s income goes to rent and food. There’s nothing left. We pay for what we absolutely have to, and everything else has been eliminated.” Adria cut off the cable. She cut off the internet. “I mean, I like my Verizon Fios, but I can’t afford it anymore. So I can’t do any of my online applications at home. I’d love to be able to work on them in the evenings, after the kids go to sleep. But I can’t.”
The strain of these tough decisions is evident. “I was going through depression. You know, searching for a job all day, telling my kids they can’t have this or that. I don’t like seeing my bills pile up; I like to be on time with my bills. I even had to go to my doctor and get some medicine to help me not get too down. It’s really stressful.”
If Adria’s husband lost his job, too, she doesn’t know what they’d do. She’s been homeless before—five years ago—but she’ll do anything to keep from going back. “Oh no, I’m not going back to that shelter. I couldn’t stay there more than one night. They’re terrible places, especially for children.”
What Adria really doesn’t understand is how there can be an unemployment crisis when there is so much work that needs to be done in Rhode Island. “There are so many jobs out there that need doing. We need people to fix up all these abandoned houses. We need people to clean these filthy buses. I have a friend who broke her car on a pothole. Had to pay $600 out of her own pocket, but nobody’s working on our roads.” Adria signs. “The State of Rhode Island doesn’t do anything to help you. I’ll tell you what, if you put us mothers in charge, we’d get a lot more done.”
Adria wouldn’t dream of giving up. But she’s worried—worried for the present, but particularly worried for the future. “We’re not gonna have a retirement. We’re not gonna have anything for our children or our grandchildren. I want my kids to have jobs. I don’t want them to have to struggle like I am.”
I know it’s a social faux pas to say it, but since the door was opened in the article and its directly relevant to the topic (and every non-progressive reader is surely thinking it anyway) – unless you are earning over half a million a year, having seven kids is financial madness and really, really irresponsible. It’s not like we’re an agrarian society and we need the farm hands to harvest crops. Raising kids in an urban or suburban environment is extremely expensive in 2012, and that’s not exactly a secret to anyone. Was she still having kids while she was homeless, and directly after? It sounds like that was the case. I know my household couldn’t possibly support more than 3 or 4 children, and we’re in the top 5-10% of earners. Just saying – people ultimately need to own their situations and take some individual responsibility. Even if the job market isn’t their fault, there are factors they do directly control. She claims the state does nothing to help her, but she admits to getting unemployment and other benefits from the state, and those amounts of social assistance must be monstrous due to her number of children.
I see this as essentially blaming the victim. I certainly don’t see the connection between her children and the apparent lack of work.
As far as dependency allowance, it is really not that much and can be found online.
Your weekly benefit rate will be equal to 4.38% of the wages paid to you in the two highest quarters of your Base Period. By law, a maximum weekly benefit rate is determined annually. It is equal to 67% of the average weekly wage of all workers covered by the Employment Security Act. Your weekly benefit rate remains the same throughout your benefit year.
Effective 7/1/12, our minimum is $43.00 and maximum is $551.00, not including dependency allowance.
If you have dependent children under 18 years of age you may be entitled to a dependency allowance. Handicapped children over 18 may also qualify for the allowance.
The dependency allowance is limited to 5 dependents and is equal to 5% of your weekly benefit rate for each dependent. There is a $15 minimum per dependent.
Assuming she’s getting the maximum benefit, her dependency allowance is roughly $138 / week. It is up to the beholder if that amount is “monstrous.”
Source.
I never blamed her for being out of work, and I didn’t attempt to draw any connection between her being out of work and having such a high number of children. Where do you get this stuff from? Certainly not from my post.
My very simple point was that people in rocky financial situations (e.g., being HOMELESS) aren’t being financially or socially responsible by having a huge number of children they in all likelihood won’t be able to support. Before somebody decides to have a child, he or she should have a firm basis to believe that they will be able to financially support them. That was apparently not the case here.
Maybe this is blasphemy to say on this blog, but when you scratch the surface of these types of cases, you typically find that the individual is the most responsible party for his or her own situation. I’m not claiming that there is no poverty cycle, or that her kids would have the same opportunities as Mitt Romney’s kids, but obviously she made a lot of highly irresponsible choices along the road that led to astronomical fixed household costs that very likely wouldn’t be met without significant state assistance. If I had seven kids, I’d be unable to pay my bills as well, and I probably earn a lot more than her family does.
Her situation is that she’s out of work. Two working parents can support 7 kids – the fact that they can still pay their bills right now is proof of that. If she had a job, they’d obviously be making even more money and be able to support them better. You are painting a picture of an irresponsible person to suit a very particular narrative – namely that the poor are to blame for being poor.
Oh, if she’d only limited her pregnancies. Oh, if she’d only invested in Apple a decade ago. And on and on.
What we really have here is a hardworking AND responsible person who, though searching endlessly, just can’t find employment.
They pay their bills as wards of the state on various forms of government assistance into the indefinite future. Two low-income parents are very unlikely to be able to support 7 kids well in an urban or suburban environment, and it leaves essentially no margin of error for one parent losing a job, a bad economic turn, or other unplanned situations. Denying that her difficult situation was at least partially caused by irresponsible choices she made is defending the indefensible for ideological reasons.
It’s okay to sympathize with people, even irresponsible people, and I do sympathize with the woman in this story. There are certainly factors beyond her control in play and she is at least trying to get a job and make ends meet, which is more than some in similar situations. Nothing indicates that she is a “bad” person. But the very plain reality to anyone who isn’t stretching a narrative to its breaking point and ignoring all inconvenient facts to advance a progressive agenda is that homeless and low-income individuals are being irresponsible by having a large amount of children that they in all likelihood will not be able to support without heavy state assistance. I base this not on any moral or classist sentiment but on simple math.
“You are painting a picture of an irresponsible person to suit a very particular narrative – namely that the poor are to blame for being poor. ”
I haven’t painted any picture – the facts are not in dispute and were supplied to me by the narrative painted by the article itself. That is all I have used to draw some very narrow and obvious conclusions. I’m not making anything close to the broad points you seem to think I am because you’re defensive on this particular issue.
No one contends that having children is not a financial burden, or that the parents are not responsible for bearing this burden. That is a truth, obviously.
But the truth is lost in your conclusion that having many kids is the hallmark of financial and social irresponsibility. Your assertion that having 7 kids is proof of this is entirely subjective, based on nothing more than your claim that, for you, it wouldn’t be possible. Such interjection is entirely unwarranted, in addition to being utterly irrelevant and inapplicable.
You’d first be obligated to show how her choices and yours diverge from each other (and why), which requires much more information than we have here. You’d also have to show somehow that she planned from the beginning to saddle herself with 7 kids.
Serious consideration of your comments reveals they are very far from being either narrow or conclusive.
It’s not subjective at all. It is entirely objective and based on simple finances. I know another family with seven kids, and it has presented no problem for them because they are multi-millionaires and can provide for every one and then some without state assistance, even in the event of a downturn or if the mother was out of work for a time. They live within their means, as everyone should be responsible for doing.
This woman is a much different story. Based on the facts in the article which are not in dispute, she already had a large number of children, became homeless, and then kept having kids as she was homeless and immediately after. That itself is incredibly irresponsible. She was knowingly bringing more hungry mouths into the world to feed and clothe and raise while she was already having severe difficultly providing for herself and her existing children. So the state doled out more and more assistance, forcing other people to pay for her irresponsible life choices and support her kids on top of their own. It’s nice that she’s trying really hard – it really is – but she is the one most responsible for creating such a dire situation in the first place. What her household expenses must be in supporting seven children boggles the mind – no wonder she needs such government aid. What was her plan in having so many kids? I don’t know whether it’s worse whether she had a plan or not.
So in your eyes only the wealthy should be able to have children?
Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody is saying that.
“You’d also have to show somehow that she planned from the beginning to saddle herself with 7 kids.”
Sorry Nev but you just crushed your own argument with that one sentence. What’s less responsible, planning to have 7 kids while not being financially secure or having 7 unplanned kids while not financially secure. While by itself it’s not an indictment of their parenting skills, it sure an indictment of their financial planning skills. The fact that she had three more kids after having been homeless shows serious irresponsibility. All that said, I’m sure there are many stories of responsible individuals that have been sent to the unemployment lines. I just don’t think that was the best example.
DogDiesel and RightToWork:
I respect your commitment to encouraging challenge and debate on this site. In this case, I don’t want to engage with your inaccurate assumptions about the life of an incredibly hard-working and responsible woman whose experiences you (or most anyone who hasn’t spoken to her or been through similar circumstances) can’t possibly understand; I just want to ask a question.
Would you be willing to not engage in personally-directed attacks on the subjects of this post-series?
If the answer is no, that is fine. It just means I will stop posting these stories–because while folks agreed to have their stories shared here, I don’t feel comfortable allowing anyone to receive so much insult from the two of you. It’d be a shame, in my opinion–and probably many others’–but that’s your prerogative.
But I don’t think my request is very much to ask, so I thought I’d give it a shot.
I will make an effort to adhere to your request but when you hold someone’s personal experience up on a political blog as an example of what’s wrong with the state of affairs without acknowledging the mistakes they themselves have made, it becomes hard for people like me to understand. I have raised two wonderfully productive children. My career path took a hit back early on when we had one child. I spent two days of a week long seminar at the old Employment Security office in a training program before I walked out, hit the bricks, and took a lesser job. Worked there for two years until I got back on my career track. Qualified and took advantage of WIC by the way. Once I got back on my feet, we had one more child and completely out of fear of the unknown, made a conscious decision to not have anymore kids. As a result, we were able to share the cost of their college educations. The last graduation was in 2006 and we’re still paying. I know different times economically. Sorry but seven was just an unfathomable number to me.
This is a strange request on a political blog. So it’s okay to publicly use an individual’s private hardship to advance an overtly political agenda, but it’s not okay for readers and commenters to investigate the other side of the coin and discuss whether that person is partially responsible for their own situation based on the facts supplied in the article? I thought it was an unwritten rule that if you hold yourself out publicly in this way then you accept a certain level of public scrutiny.
One word for Adria and hubby…..Condoms!