THE BILLBOARDS AROUND ORLANDO, Florida, call Kissimmee "the affordable place to live." Take I-4 south and look for the Disney World exit, then drive in the opposite direction. There, behind the souvenir shops and motels, live America's working poor. It's not a bad neighborhood. The lawns are mowed, and the kids can play safely in the street. Anybody who wants a job can find one: Orlando was one of the nation's top five cities for job growth last year, with 40,000 new positions. Only 10% of the area's residents live below the poverty line.
All this is small comfort to Terri Yates. Last year, working full time, she took home about $10,000 as a cabdriver. This year she expects to do better. But even with Terri working six-day weeks and her husband Philip driving a cab all seven days, they still can't scrape together a down payment on a house. Terri's 1985 Pontiac needs radiator and clutch work; Philip is still paying $160 a month on a 14-year-old Mazda pickup. "I'm making less money than ever in my whole life, and I'm working more," Terri says. "I have no life. The only thing that holds me together is my children. But I can't even afford to send my daughter to the dentist for a cavity." Terri is proud that she has never been on welfare, but she feels little kinship with the politicians who extol workers like her. "I feel lost," she says. "Now everything goes up but people's wages. Either you're rich or poor."
When Capitol Hill revolutionaries vow to lift millions of Americans off the dole and into the work force, this is where they would land first, among the more than 10 million Americans who hover one rung above welfare on the nation's "ladder of opportunity." These are people who tiptoe between paychecks and have no savings, who ride the bus to the discount stores, who sell their plasma until their veins scar, who don't bother to clip coupons for Cheerios because the generic version is still cheaper, and who can be wiped out by even a minor medical problem.
Last week their position looked more precarious than ever. The Labor Department reported that despite the exuberant stock market and mild inflation, real wages keep on falling. For the lowest-earning 10% of workers, the weekly paycheck averaged $225 last year, a 10% drop since the late '70s after inflation is taken into account. It means that more people than ever are working full time and still living below the poverty line of $15,141 for a family of four. Millions more are scraping by, just one broken refrigerator away from crisis. Says Labor Secretary Robert Reich: "If we don't take steps to begin to reverse the trend for so many workers who are sinking in this new economy, we will be paying a high price as a society."
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