Public Employee Press

Poverty Fighters
Part 7 of a series
Plunged into poverty

By JANE LaTOUR

Like thousands of other women, Theresa Ramos Villega is trapped in poverty due to circumstances beyond her control. A brutal act snuffed out her young husband’s life last September. Since then, she and her six children have been forced to face life without Jerry Villega, a loving husband and father.

Now, in addition to coping with her intense grief and depression, she has to learn a new calculus — how to survive on a single paycheck.

Maintaining a family of seven on a clerical worker’s salary in New York City is more than a matter of severely limited choices and empty hours alone — it’s also filled with daily challenges that would tax the brain power of most people. Consider the choices facing Theresa and other women living in poverty: In the face of an eviction notice, how do you find an affordable apartment? How can you fill a food basket without exhausting your disposable income? How do you pay for school books and clothes for growing kids when rent and food use up most of your meager budget?

Theresa, a shop steward at Metropolitan Hospital, has a union to turn to. Clerical-Administrative Employees Local 1549 has responded to her plight with generosity and warmth.

Her poignant story, her plight and her tears, is just one of thousands. Single parenthood is one of the biggest causes of poverty. Low wage work — women trying to survive on the minimum wage — is another root of the problem. The Bush administration’s “jobless recovery” has cut opportunities for female job seekers, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

The poverty rate has risen over the last two years nationwide, but it seems to have fallen off our list of priorities. Who speaks for the poor? Jim Wallis, convener of Call to Renewal, a network of churches and faith-based organizations working to overcome poverty, argues that we need to redefine the issue as one of growing inequality in the United States, one that increasingly affects working families.

The needs of women struggling to maintain families on their own with low-wage jobs must be placed on the national agenda. While every civilized industrial nation offers a package of support for families, the United States ignores the lives that Jim Wallis called “the demographic most unrepresented in U.S. politics.”

Societal support lacking
The advocacy group Legal Momentum recently told a Congressional committee that poverty rates for women in the United States are much higher than those for women in other wealthy countries. They challenged the legislators to reduce poverty and the gender gap by finding fiscally responsible ways to broaden social welfare programs.

Theresa Ramos Villega and her children deserve a life of dignity. Allowing them to survive only through a crushing struggle in the midst of the wealth that surrounds them is unwise and unconscionable.

Theresa Villega plans to return to work at Metropolitan Hospital in April and hopes to return to college in September, so that eventually she can boost her income. But she will have to find a way to pay for child care for her new daughter, Jerri Lynn Marie, born on Dec. 27, named after the father she will never meet.

Policies to support affordable housing, increase public support for childcare, and cut the cost of education, are some of the necessary ingredients to place a sturdy economic floor beneath the feet of hard-working women and families who are struggling to survive. As for now, when they do, it is all to their credit. When they don’t, they and their families — and society — pay a huge cost.