Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [11]
Ted Kennedy started the fight in the Senate, filing a bill in August 2002 to give unemployed workers an extension and to save Jeffcoat and the other one million American workers who ultimately lost their benefits. Then the late Paul Wellstone of Minnesota introduced a bill to extend benefits and save “exhausted workers.” Hillary Clinton joined Kennedy and Wellstone in a compromise bill. Clinton and Oklahoma Republican Don Nickles finally passed a watered-down bill. DeLay wasn’t even buying the Nickles-Clinton compromise. The most powerful member of the U.S. House believes unemployed workers are deadbeats waiting for a handout. He warned that “they would have unlimited unemployment compensation” so they could “stay out of work for the rest of their lives.” The “people’s House” refused to act.
NOT ONLY DID DUBYA BUSH say nothing. He did nothing. “None of the Senate bills had any backing from the White House,” said a Kennedy staffer. “We even called the Department of Labor for help and got no response. The fact is that had the White House weighed in, this would have been taken care of before December.”
The fact is that until December the administration let the House have its way. Our compassionately conservative president gave Tom DeLay the hit-away sign, and Julia Jeffcoat got clobbered.
Jeffcoat is a buoyant woman, optimistic, full of nervous energy she burns up by talking a lot. It’s evident she’s not the hottest hire in the Philadelphia job market. Since her first child was born twenty-five years ago, she has moved from one low-paying job to another—never earning more than $6.80 an hour. But she managed to patch together enough work to survive, until she lost her job as a security guard at Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium. That was about the time the city’s unemployment rate hit 7 percent.
You wouldn’t want Jeffcoat’s résumé any more than you would want her luck. “I first started out at Bryn Mawr,” Jeffcoat said, without cracking a smile. No joke. She worked at the elite women’s college just outside Philly. “I was serving food to rich kids. They’re really rich over there. I was in food preparation.” She was sixteen and stayed on at Bryn Mawr until she was nineteen, when her daughter was born. Then she tried door-to-door sales and took a stab at returning to school while working an eleven-to-seven night shift as a nurse’s aide. She worked as a street vendor, then, in the mid-nineties, she met someone who hooked her up with security work at “the Vet.”
She worked Eagles and Phillies games, she worked concerts. In December 2002 the stadium’s security firm, Contemporary Services, laid her off. She had been working for $6.75 an hour—$14,000 a year, assuming she got in forty hours a week. When you work events, it’s hard to get your forty hours, she said. None of the jobs she held ever provided quite enough money to support her daughter or the two sons born after she left Bryn Mawr. The children ended up living with their father. When her unemployment checks stopped, Jeffcoat was evicted from her one-bedroom apartment. She’s out of work, out of money, and out of luck.
Her sixteen-year-old lives with friends. She lives with relatives. Jeffcoat works two days a week cleaning and stocking a small store for which she earns $60—under the table. But the “job” is actually Muslim compassion disguised as employment; call it “faith-based” unemployment compensation. The store is owned by an Egyptian couple and is so small they can easily manage