The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Homeless Unemployed

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RICK LINDSAY, unemployed man: A year ago I had a job making $24,000 a year, and now I have nothing. We were in, you know, the process of buying a house -- the whole shot -- and one day they just -- somebody just pulled the rug and it all fell down.

ROBERT MacNEIL [voice-over]: They are called the new poor -- those paying the personal cost of the recession. How are they faring and who is helping them this Christmas?

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MacNEIL: Good evening. For many Americans this is the hardest Christmas season in memory. More than 12 million people remain officially unemployed. Those who pinned their hopes on Congress passing special jobs legislation were disappointed this week. Congress went home for Christmas without passing any jobs-creation bill. Those proposals were jettisoned at the last hour to avoid a presidential veto and to pass a spending bill to keep the government running. A large percentage of the unemployed have been that way so long that they're no longer eligible for unemployment benefits. Tonight, a documentary look at what that experience is doing to the lives of people who have known only security and prosperity before -- the so-called new poor. Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, some of the new poor have taken on the road, heading west or south in search of a job and a better life, and thus far found neither. Others have held fast where they are, trying to hold on until the plant or the business hires them back or another job becomes available until the recession and their hard times blow over. They're still holding fast. For both, Christmas 1982 will be a grim one spiritually as well as physically, even as private individuals, churches and charitable groups have mounted special efforts to help. Altogether they form a picture of this Christmas that shows both the kindest and cruelest faces of our society -- a picture producer-cameraman Philip Garvin captured in two reports, one from Canton, Ohio, the other from Denver, Colorado. Robin?

MacNEIL: In some parts of the country, where the climate is mild enough, tent cities have sprung up, and many families will be spending Christmas that way this year. But further north, the winter makes outdoor living impossible. For the first of our two reports tonight, Phil Garvin went to Denver, Colorado.

MacNEIL [voice-over]: For thousands of unemployed, the only hope was to drive west, to cities where, rumor had it, there were plenty of jobs. But in states like Texas, jobs have dried up so now workers are attracted to places like Denver, Colorado. With its 7.4% unemployment rate and its massive downtown building projects, this city looks like a good bet, and if you have the proper skills, jobs are available. But with outdated job skills, many newcomers can't find work. Penniless and homeless in freezing winter weather, they seek help at emergency housing like this Catholic-sponsored Samaritan Shelter. The line starts here at noon each day for the six to eight beds that become available every night. Inside, 160 men, women and children share the ground floor of an abandoned Catholic high school. The shelter opened November 8th in response to the rapidly rising number of people who were living on Denver streets. The shelter admits the homeless starting at 6 each evening. It fills up by 7 p.m. and the doors are closed. No one can come or go until early the next morning. Everyone must be out by 8 a.m. You're expected to look for work during the day. Once admitted to a bed, that bed is yours for up to 28 days. After that you must find another place. Samaritan Shelter, like all shelters in Denver, is full every night. Most of those waiting outside will be turned away. The director and assistant director of this shelter are Dave Vaughan and Terry Sharp.

DAVE VAUGHAN: We do have people here that people would consider winos and derelicts. We do have those kind of people here.

REPORTER: But the majority?

Mr. VAUGHAN: But the majority are people that are out of work and are in the process of trying to find a job. But it's awful hard when you don't have the resources.

TERRY SHARP: We have a great deal of the new poor, so-called; people that haven't been on the street before, people that have came here from, say, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan -- people that have got -- that have been in employment and for whatever reason they've got laid off. At any given time there's an estimated 1,250 to 1,500 people on the streets of Denver. Right now there are somewhere between 650 and 700 beds available. We hope someday nobody will have to be on the street.

Mr. VAUGHAN: The goals of this Samaritan Shelter right now are to provide the basic needs of people, which is food, shelter and clothing. We feel that if a person has a place to come in, take a shower, wash his laundry, that he can go out in the morning and present himself in a better light to an employer.

MacNEIL [voice-over]: At Samaritan Shelter families eat before the single men and women. Twenty-seven-year-old Rick and Lori Lindsay came here with their two-year-old child after spending several nights in their car. For this family this is the first time in a shelter.

RICK LINDSAY: I got out of the Navy in 1977, moved to Houston, Texas; lived down there for approximately five years, did real good down there; got laid off last March, and then I've been traveling the country looking for a job.

LORI LINDSAY: He said, well, we're going to have to go to the shelter, you know, to put a roof over Andy's head until we can get a job and get a place to live, and I just -- I didn't want to, you know. Just though of living with other people, and it's going to be crowded and I just thought, well, all these diseases are going to be going around. I didn't really want to, but we had to.

REPORTER: Did you ever in your wildest dreams think you'd have to live in a shelter?

Mr. LINDSAY: No. Never in my mind. See, when we first got married I was financially secure -- a couple thousand in the bank; everything was going good. A year ago I had a job making $24,000 a year, and now I have nothing. We were in, you know, the process of buying a house -- the whole shot -- and one day they just -- somebody just pulled the rug and it all fell down.

MacNEIL [voice-over]: There's an equal mix here of new poor like the Lindsays and the old poor, people who have always known only day labor and a life of drifting and uncertainty.

REPORTER: Why did you come here?

SHELTER CLIENT: For an adventure.

REPORTER: What do you mean?

CLIENT: See what Denver was like.

REPORTER: You're not here just for a job?

CLIENT: No, not really. I need a job, but I'm not ready for a job. I'll work if I can.

MacNEIL [voice-over]: Others are victims of cuts in government programs.

FORMER CETA WORKER: I was on a program that was set up for low-income people, or people that didn't have too much education. The program was named CETA. It was the CETA program. After the CETA program ran out I was left holding the bag because I didn't get enough training.

MacNEIL [voice-over]: Each night at 6, anybody who had been here the previous night and hasn't found new lodging checks back in, gets meal tickets for dinner and breakfast, and is told how many of their 28 days they still had left.

SHELTER WORKER: You got seven days left, Mr. Kendall. So, you know, just try to --

MacNEIL [voice-over]: The demand for beds and other social services has increased dramatically with the coming of the new poor. The squeeze is particularly tough on the old poor who have always relied on shelters like this one. On this night 20 people were turned away.

SHELTER WORKER: We have room for eight people, okay? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

INTAKE WORKER: Okay, you guys, if you have any weapons, you have to check them in. Make sure you take a shower. You've got to take a shower.

CLIENT: Knife, too?

INTAKE WORKER: Yeah, knife, anything. You got two tickets. One's for breakfast and one's for dinner. Without them tickets you won't be able to eat. You'll also get a blue ticket and that's for clothing. You need socks, jackets or anything, check with Liz here. She'll take care of you.

LIZ: I'll see if I can find you something.

MacNEIL [voice-over]: Single men live in this dorm, each getting his own bed assignment. Newcomers often have a tough time finding their beds. This man from North Carolina spent over half an hour looking for his cot. Single women have a smaller dorm, and families like the Lindsays have a separate area. It's not private, but it's away from the men's dorm.

Mr. LINDSAY [voice-over]: I'm poor. I have no money in the bank, you know? All I've got is a suitcase full of clothes and an old, beat-up car. That's all I have to my name. We both grew up in, you know, I guess you would consider middle-class American families, and when my parents were my age they had a brand new house, were driving a brand new car. My dad had a secure job; that was the way the system worked. So we grew up thinking, well, that's what's going to happen to us. We're going to get out of high school; we were just going to be just like our folks and get a steady job, work for the same company 'til the day I retired. It's like I turned into a bum, which is not the point at all. I just took, you know, I just took a dive, like a million other people out there.

MacNEIL [voice-over]: But Rick is anything but a bum. Joined by two other shelter residents, he leaves before dawn each morning to get a good position on the labor pool lineup. This is an agency which sends workers out to employers on a first-come, first-serve basis. With permanent jobs so hard to find, the new poor are taking the day labor jobs which used to be the old poor's main source of income.

Mr. VAUGHAN: There are an awful lot of people I know at the temporary job market that, you know, just live day by day. They don't want a permanent-type job. So now you have the new poor that come in, and they're more skilled, more intelligent, they're better educated. So they tend to get the better jobs.

MacNEIL [voice-over]: At daybreak Rick got a job unloading a truck at the minimum wage of $3.35 an hour. Even if he worked at that rate fulltime, he couldn't save enough to rent an apartment for his family. So whenever he can't get day labor or whenever he has earned enough for his family's necessities, he looks for permanent work.

There are six other shelters in Denver. One of these, the Sacred Heart, houses only families.

UNEMPLOYED FATHER [at Sacred Heart Shelter]: We could go on welfare right now. The wife's pregnant, we got two kids. We could go on welfare; you know that. But it's just the object is -- we left that place back East to come out here to look for work, you know? That's why we left out there. There ain't no jobs in Michigan. There's nothing, man. I mean nothing. They got guys with four and five years of college pumping gas. Can you believe that? Diggin' ditches. Sweeping floors.

The President has made everything so hard they've just -- everybody's just giving up. And there's a few left that want to try to make it. They got a lot of will. They got a lot of will to survive. And I'm going to make it. I'm going to make it. I'm going to go out; I'm going to get me another job on a farm if I have to. But I'm going to make it. I'm going to get -- Reagan ain't going to get me.

MacNEIL [voice-over]: These families can stay in this shelter for two or three weeks. In that time they should find jobs and more permanent housing. There's a fulltime social worker here to help them so that it's more than just food and shelter. But none of these people has skills which are in demand in Denver. This is especially true of 38-year-old Al Allison, a UAW union worker from Michigan who headed west looking for work with his two-year-old daughter.

AL ALLISON, ex-UAW worker: I got laid off due to the fact that they've just had such a cutback on their orders. Anybody under 10 years got the ax. We got divorced right around the time that I stopped working. I think that, you know, more or less complicated matters as far as our family life went, too, you know? I mean, money has -- plays a part in everything, really, in life. And like the old saying goes, you can't live on love. So --

REPORTER: Someone needs to give Al Allison a job.

Mr. ALLISON: Not necessarily. They don't need to give me a job. I mean, if they give me an interview, look at my references, you know, and put me to work, I'll show they don't have to give me nothing, you know. I mean, I've never had a job in my life, you know, that I didn't feel I earned, you know?

REPORTER: How much money do you have right now?

Mr. ALLISON: Right now?

REPORTER: Yeah.

Mr. ALLISON: Exactly zero. Right now.

REPORTER: You don't have a dollar in your wallet?

Mr. ALLISON: I don't have a dime.

MacNEIL [voice-over]: Having literally no money is a double problem for Al Allison. First, he can't support himself and his daughter; second, if the state social service agencies found out he couldn't take care of her, they might take her away from him and put her in a foster home.

Mr. ALLISON: I enjoy my daughter, you know. I love her very much, and she counts first. That's why I took her with me, you know. The bad thoughts are some social worker or something might come to the door with a big old cop and say, "Hey, you know, you're not supporting your daughter. I'm going to take her away from you." Like, well, you see them on TV shows or something where the guy's coming home and finds out they've taken his child away from him, you know, stuff like this. Well, I'm not involved in nothing like that, you know, but I mean just the thought of somebody -- I don't know what I'd do without her. I mean, she's the only thing I got left, you know, really. After losing my job and everything.

It's like being a veteran, too, you know. All right, I was in Vietnam in '69. Just like the country didn't care about you when you was in Vietnam, I don't think the country cares about what's happening to people today. I don't give up hope of getting a job, you know, or anything, but, like, when I walk into those job service offices or in an employment agency or anything, you know, I go in there with the attitude -- and I'm reminded, hey, you know, when I walk out of here I should have something today. I've always got one thing to fall back on, though, right now, you know, which I've been holding off to do. Like I say, I haven't got a cent in my pocket right now, but there is one way I know I can always, you know -- if I have to make it up to her that way, I can always sell that car, you know. And that's the only thing I got to fall back on, really.

REPORTER: What's the car worth?

Mr. ALLISON: What's it worth? Maybe a hundred bucks.

LEHRER: From Denver, producer Philip Garvin took his camera to Canton, Ohio, a city of 110,000 people some 50 miles south of Cleveland. He wanted to see how a city in the heavy unemployment belt of the Midwest was coping as a city, as a community, with the special demands and pain of this particular Christmas.

LEHRER [voice-over]: In Canton, the unemployment rate is 15.9%. Plant closings and layoffs are a way of life here. Nearly everyone still working has a friend or relative unemployed. Many plants are closing for at least three weeks over the holidays. There is a tradition here of generosity, especially at Christmas. But this year there are many more in need and fewer able to give. At the Baptist temple and in churches and charitable organizations all over town, the people of Canton seem to have responded to the challenge.

MINISTER: As you know, here in the city of Canton there are many, many people unemployed, and one of the things that we have done to try to help people in this congregation and folks that have a real need -- we have asked them if you have a skill -- it may be a carpenter; it may be a painter; it may be some other skill. We would like, if you are interested in work, where you would like to work and you have a skill and would like to use it, if you will register out in the north hall, we will continue to compile this list, and then people who have need for that, we'll place it in their hands.

1st WOMAN [unloading Christmas Gifts]: It's super heavy. It's got all kinds of canned goods and everything in it.

LEHRER [voice-over]: Canton's Christmas-giving peaks five days before Christmas here at the United Way building. On this day thousands of dollars' worth of food, clothing and toys are contributed by individuals, churches, corporations and civic groups. Before the day is over these goods will be distributed to hundreds of families all over town. It's the Adopt-a-Family program, and this year it will serve five times the number of families helped last year. The community Christmas committee finds families in need and matches them up to individuals or groups who want to provide a family with food and gifts for Christmas. Volunteers deliver the gifts so recipient families can remain anonymous. This group adopted a family by collecting funds and gifts at their local office of GE Credit.

GE CREDIT EMPLOYEE: Well, instead of having a Christmas exchange this year, we took the money we ordinarily would have had for that and donated it and adopted a family. And they have three little children. We bought them toys and clothes and then the unit itself donated canned goods. That's what's in the great big box -- canned goods, ham, everything for Christmas dinner.

2nd EMPLOYEE: At least us buying them toys and some new clothes and stuff like that, they'll be excited. In a way I wish could be a little mouse when all the stuff gets delivered today and see their happy faces and that, because their parents probably won't have that much money to buy them things for Christmas.

3rd EMPLOYEE: Lots of kids from Park Center Bowling Alley. They collected all this stuff; they brought in, collected it for the families.

LEHRER [voice-over]: The head of the Christmas committee is Debra Batchelder.

DEBRA BATCHELDER: The need is just much greater this year than in any other years, and the community has responded in abundance. They have done just a tremendous job. Many of the people that we have been getting this year have never had to ask for help before, and this is first time. They are recently unemployed or, as some people call it, the new poor in the community, and they are in need of help this year so they have been coming to us, reluctantly in some cases.

LEHRER [voice-over]: Businesses all over Canton have held drives to collect food and gifts for the needy. At the AAA headquarters, employees had a competition.

AAA EMPLOYEE: We decided that because of the extremely high need for food this year that we would simply have a competition here in the club -- divide the employees into two teams alphabetically, and the winning team that brought in food based on pounds would receive a half-day off. As it turned out, both teams differed by about 90 pounds, and we raised 2,600 pounds of food. So both teams were given the day off, and the food went to the Salvation Army to help the needy in the area.

SALVATION ARMY OFFICIAL: Our response here in Canton has been tremendous. The people have rallied to help us with the need that we have so much that a man walked up to our kettle out at Mellot Mall and made a contribution of $4,000.

LEHRER [voice-over]: Canton's Palace Theater is the base for another charitable activity -- the Jaycees and the local fire department have collected thousands of toys and invited 500 families to pick up a shopping bag of gifts.

VOLUNTEER: We all got together and made it one big project where we all got together, had people donate toys. A lot of these toys here are new, and there were some people just bought brand new toys and brought them in so Christmas would be a little better this year for those that's not working. But these are hard times and it is a blessing right now to have a job. And because we are blessed with a job we feel like this is our blessing right here, giving to the needy.

2nd VOLUNTEER: Without toys for Christmas there's no Christmas for kids. This'll make a big difference because they didn't have anything and now they will.

LEHRER [voice-over]: At radio station WHBC, Canton's deejays have joined in the promotion of the Adopt-a-Family program.

WHBC DEEJAY: That's Phil Collins with an old Supremes song, "You Can't Hurry Love" on 1480, WHBC, 15 minutes past 10 o'clock; Ray Heximer on the radio, 36 degrees outside. You know, you can't hurry love, but you can help out a little bit during the Christmas season.You listen to this and it'll tell you how you can.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Christmas. A special time to share with your family. But there are many families who will have nothing this Christmas unless you help. The Christmas committee hopes that you will adopt a family, perhaps provide the makings of a Christmas dinner and clothing and toys for the kids. Families in need come in all sizes, and you can help a little or a lot. Call the Christmas committee at 456-5691.

LEHRER [voice-over]: Back at the United Way building, volunteer workers are loading the last of the food and gifts to bring to the adopted families. Mrs. Leland Cope is one of these workers, but she is also head of the Hunger Task Force.

Mrs. LELAND COPE: The Hunger Task Force is an on-going, a year-round. We have families -- churches and organizations scheduled through the Hunger task Force to give through the month of April and May. People get hungry other than just in December and November, which is the traditional giving time.

Okay, let's go, folks.

LEHRER [voice-over]: Mrs. Cope brought about $500 worth of food and gifts to a family that has been out of work for two years.

Mrs. COPE: Hello! How are you?

UNEMPLOYED WORKER: Fine.

Mrs. COPE: Merry Christmas.

WORKER: Thank you very much.

Mrs. COPE: We're from the community Christmas committee.

WORKER and SPOUSE: Thank you.

Mrs. COPE: I'll be back in just a second.

WORKER: My unemployment ran out, and, like I said, it'll be two years in March since I worked. In the plant where I worked now there's no hope of going back. They've moved out of town. And there are no -- I've been everyplace with an application in, and most of them, if you do get an application in they want a younger man. And the job situation is just so poor in this town that we had to apply for ADC. We get $381 a month and $225 of it goes for rent for the house. And the rest of it we try to divide up among the utilities, and there just is no money here for Christmas. We really appreciate this. It does mean the difference of a bleak Christmas or a merry Christmas for the children.

WORKER'S SPOUSE: It's just a hard feeling. I mean, I have a six-year-old. In his life Santa Claus -- and when there's not a present underneath the tree, he just wouldn't understand. He just thinks that -- you can't tell him that, well, Mommy and Daddy buys it, because it's not true. There is a Santa Claus.And I just don't want his hopes broken. In his eyes, there's nothing under the tree, there's no -- and he feels that he's been let down.

WORKER: What I want for Christmas is a job. That'd be the most important thing to me. If somebody's call me on the phone and say, "Hey, we got a job for you tomorrow. Can you start right away?" I'd say, yes, and that'd be the happiest day in my last two years.

Ms. BATCHELDER: Everyone is worried that they might be laid off next, but right now they're saying, "I still have the money; I am still employed. There is somebody else right next door or my friend or my brother or sister who is unemployed, and I want to help them. Even though I may be laid off in another month, I have it now and I want to help."

MacNEIL: That's all for tonight. For all of us at the MacNeil-Lehrer Report, may I wish everyone in our audience some joy this holiday. Good night, Jim.

LEHRER: Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: We'll be back on Monday night. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.