Public Employee Press


Poverty Fighters
Part 2 of a series on the growth of poverty in the city and the role of
DC 37 members in aiding the poor and fighting for change.

NYC Food Stamp workers help 1.1 million, but...
Hunger persists

Frustration on the frontlines

By JANE LaTOUR

Walk into any Food Stamp Center in any borough of New York City and you’ll see people waiting. Clients must sign in when they enter the buildings. Then they wait. Young and old, the infirm with canes, babies in strollers, they sit in the crowded, overheated rooms. Posted signs tell them, “NO LOITERING.”

Frustration is evident and it’s not limited to the applicants. The city workers who face the clientele across the intake counters are feeling immense pressure as they struggle to keep up with the human tide of needy applicants.

They believe in their jobs as frontline poverty fighters. Their work puts food in the stomachs of 1.1 million New Yorkers who — without these members of Clerical-Administrative Employees Local 1549 — would face gnawing hunger every day.

Jeanette Bagby used to dream about her job. Her recurring nightmare was that her clients wouldn’t get their Food Stamps.

Bagby has been working at Food Stamp Centers for 19 years out of the 30 she’s been with the Human Resources Administration. An Eligibility Specialist, she was recently transferred to a unit where she double-checks paperwork for errors in new cases and those that are being recertified.

Prior to that, she interviewed clients daily. She has high blood pressure, but found that “The work was stressful. Cases back up. The centers are understaffed and the workers have a lot of pressure because there are so many cases they have to process. It’s totally impossible, but we try,” she said.

Frazzled providers
Local 1549 Shop Steward Jewel Hannah represents Bagby and her co-workers at the Food Stamp Center in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. During her 20 years on the job, she’s been involved in almost every part of the cumbersome application process. Getting all the information that’s required and deciphering the different scenarios that affect each applicant is a major reason why the process takes so long. “Sometimes it takes three phone calls to reschedule a client,” Ms. Hannah explained.

But telephones are scarce in the giant agency, and so are interpreters. Vital equipment is often broken. “The computers go down. The copy machines aren’t working. This all adds to the time it takes to process the paperwork and multiplies the stress on employees,” said Bagby. “We need our own phones!”

The Food Stamp Center in Coney Island lies at the end of a bleak corridor that abuts the boardwalk.Eligibility Specialist Sharon Pilgrim-Glude has worked there for four years. She and her husband are raising five children, from eight to 23. To get to work, she travels an hour and a half. Like Hannah and Bagby, she feels the weight of the understaffing.

“I love my job because I like helping people,” said Pilgrim-Glude. “But sometimes you would like people to acknowledge that you are doing something beyond the call of duty.”

Before she became a Grievance Rep in 2002, Kathleen Newallo worked as an Eligibility Specialist at Food Stamp centers. Her career at HRA goes back to 1982. She has witnessed the long and overwhelming buildup in pressure on the people who deliver the services.

“People here are very concerned about the clients,” she said. “But when we look at it from the workers’ side, we can see what they’re up against. The number one problem is that they’re short of staff. They’re taking in clients from the minute the doors open to the minute they close.”

Assistant Clerical Division Director Eddie Gates expressed frustration with the agency. “We've met with the HRA about understaffing and the lack of equipment,’’ he said. “Apparently, in the 20th centruy, they think Food Stamps workers don't need telephones!’’

Recently, the frustration amongst the ranks of Food Stamp applicants was documented in a two-year study conducted by the Urban Justice Center. Their report, “A Better Recipe for New York City: Less Red Tape, More Food on the Table,” was released Jan. 18. The research shows that while 1.1 million people are receiving Food Stamps, another 760,000 New Yorkers are left out — eligible but not getting Food Stamps.

“The working poor are especially likely to miss out on Food Stamp benefits. As a result, the city is losing approximately half a billion dollars in federal aid each year,” says the study. The red tape and delays of the application process are the number one reason why more of the working poor don’t enroll.

The average benefit is $112 a month, but many payments are far less. When low-paid workers take off time to apply, they lose a day’s pay. Typically, these workers have to sacrifice two and sometimes three days of already low wages to secure their Food Stamp allotment. Regular recertifications cost them additional days of work and further reduce the net benefit — literally taking food from their mouths.

Another reason clients cite for non-participation is the stigma involved in receiving the benefit. Under the Giuliani administration, the process of fingerprinting every participant 18 and older was implemented. The effect of “finger imaging,” as the agency euphemistically calls it, is to criminalize hunger and poverty. To walk in the shoes of a food stamp applicant, imagine having to get fingerprinted before your next trip to the A&P.

Lost opportunities
Despite the heroic efforts of the staff, here’s how the Food Stamp system adds up today: Understaffing and inadequate equipment make for long waits. Long waits and loss of pay create frustration. Result: 760,000 New Yorkers who need Food Stamps, don’t get them, and go hungry.

The economics of hunger add injury to the insult. The income cutoff for Food Stamp eligibility is 130 percent of the federal poverty line: $16,237 per year for a family of two in 2004. According to the Urban Justice Center, of the 760,000 New Yorkers who were eligible but not receiving Food Stamps, three out of four were actually living below the poverty line.

Over 40 percent of those with some income had to spend more than half of it on rent alone, not including utilities. Getting the average Food Stamp allotment would have raised their total household income by 20 percent. Instead, these people must make do without adequate nutrition.

And in the United States of America, 13 million of the people going to bed hungry every night are children.