Being a media critic is a sweet gig. But it’s deceptively easy, while traversing the byways of countless news sites and blogs, to get caught up in the media bubble of the big story of the day or week and lose sight of a larger picture.
Today we would like to give credit to northern New Jersey’s Herald News for painting just that picture. In a special project this week, the paper published the results of a month-long experiment in which reporter Tom Meagher went undercover as a low-wage laborer to record life among Passaic County’s working poor. In an area where 17 percent of the population lived below the federal poverty line last year, he aimed to show “what life is like for people starting over in Passaic County: the thousands of new immigrants who arrive each year, or people who’ve lost jobs.”
It’s an old story idea — as old as George Orwell’s “Down and Out in London and Paris,” first printed in 1933 — but it’s a good one, and Meagher pulls it off. In the project’s centerpiece, Meagher (with cowriter Suzanne Travers) tells the story of his tough, eye-opening month in sparse, direct language.
Leaving nearly everything behind with his fiance in Brooklyn, he sets off with $424 and a backpack full of clothes, catching a jitney shuttle bus to Paterson, “depressed to be alone and scared of what’s ahead.” He starts making pay phone calls and searches for a room to rent, meanwhile burning in the hot summer sun. But he doesn’t buy sunblock, already concerned about his dwindling reserves: “I don’t have a car to check out apartments, and every phone call or jitney ride chips away at my wad of cash.” He finally finds a place, but then is told it won’t be available until the next day:
I take the jitney to see another place. No luck. It’s 5 p.m., and I don’t know where I’m going to sleep yet.
I start to panic.
I find a payphone and call my fiancee, Ginger, almost in tears. I’m scared and dejected. The heat has sucked the life out of me. I’m sore and sunburned and my legs are so chafed I can hardly walk. I spend $1.79 for dinner at White Castle and start calling hotels.
And this is only the first day. By the next, “too spent to look for work,” he only has $110 left.
After applying to about 20 businesses, Meagher finally finds work with the temp agency Brickforce Staffing, which transports him (for a fee) in a crowded rickety bus to perform assembly line-type work at different warehouses and factories. He makes between $5 to $8 per hour. Over the next several weeks, he endures life as a member of the working poor: working as a radio “blares commercials that advertise a life out of reach,” thinking about food all the time, allotting himself $5 a day to live on after taxes and rent.
He also introduces us to his coworkers, including Julio, who in a previous life was a financial analyst and accountant in Peru but now illegally works two jobs, too exhausted to feel lonely. (A separate profile of Julio is the best of the rest of the “A Temporary Life” package.)
What “A Temporary Life” reveals is not the shocking scenes of the poor in sudden crisis that a Hurricane Katrina brings about, but something more hidden: the grinding, everyday poverty of little hope. It’s the kind of story that we wish the crime-focused major dailies of New York would do more often.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.