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USA: Low-Income Seniors Struggle For Jobs
By AG, The Detroit News
September 28, 2004
In Detroit, at least 40 who want to work are on waiting list for subsidized positions.
DETROIT - Routine bills were piling so high that Marilyn Williams borrowed $30,000 against her home to help get them under control.
Even then, the 64-year-old widow found it difficult to keep up. The $1,400 she receives monthly in Social Security and pension checks barely covers the necessities.
So last year Williams did what many low-income seniors have done before her: She went back to work.
For about four hours a day, Williams helps others look for work at a Detroit jobs center. It is a federally subsidized minimum-wage assignment that helps her cover expenses like her energy bill, which routinely tops $200 a month.
Williams is less bothered that she had to return to work at this point in her life than she is fearful that next year she may have no job at all.
She has good reason to worry.
The Senior Community Service Employment Program, a federal initiative for low-income people over 55, is under budget fire. The Bush administration and Congress cut $6.5 million from the program's budget this year and added restrictive rules that will put some seniors out of work. In 2000, 78 percent of the program's participants were 60 or older.
The program's $439 million budget is less than it was in 1998. Seniors around the country are already feeling the impact of the budget trims and new rules.
In Detroit, at least 40 low-income seniors are on the waiting list for subsidized jobs through the program, said Paul Bridgewater, executive director of the Detroit Area Agency on Aging, one of the organizations that run the program.
Williams, and a quarter of the 115 people currently enrolled in the Detroit program, could lose their part-time, minimum-wage jobs in July under new rules that place strict time limits on their employment.
Under the Bush administration, the U.S. Department of Labor is shifting the program's focus from government jobs toward getting more seniors into private-sector work, which often pays higher wages.
But the program's budget cuts make it impossible to offer seniors the job training needed for those jobs.
Further, they are competing with the rest of the nation's unemployed for jobs in the private sector.
Rising costs for food, medicine and housing easily outstrip the resources for millions of seniors on fixed incomes. More than 10 percent of those 65 or older live in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. There are 3.6 million of them nationwide.
Adding to the problem, seniors are working for a minimum wage that hasn't gone up in seven years. In that time, the cost of living has gone up about 18 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Starting in January, premium costs for most Medicare beneficiaries will rise to $78.20 monthly - a 45 percent hike in three years.
"If not for this job, I would have to move into subsidized housing - if they had a spot for me," Williams said.
The senior jobs program has essentially remained flat even though the elderly are a rapidly growing demographic group and work has become more difficult to find for everyone.
Detroit retiree James Phillips, 75, is among those on the waiting list for a work assignment. He pays $170 of his $584 monthly Social Security check to live in subsidized housing. What's left doesn't go far.
"I'm low-income and barely surviving," said Phillips, who helped manage furniture stores when he was younger. "I need some kind of supplement to help me out of the bind I'm in."
Phillips said he can't trouble his eight children, all of whom live outside of Detroit.
"They don't know my condition. They all have responsibilities, too," he said. "They never thought I'd be caught in a rut. They feel there is nothing Dad can't do."
Williams doesn't have the option of calling on a family member.
In 1999, she retired early from her job as a secretary in Detroit's 36th District Court to tend to her mother, who had suffered a head injury.
"I dedicated myself to her, and why not? She took care of me," Williams said.
At the time, her husband worked for DaimlerChrysler. But Williams' modest lifestyle collapsed when he died unexpectedly within months of her mother's death.
With no kids and her brother recently hospitalized for dementia, Williams knows she needs help.
"You don't know the effects of something until it's you," she said. "I don't have anyone to turn to (at) all."
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