Tripping Over Your Bootstraps
This interview with Linda Tirado first appeared in the Australian online Publication Spook Magazine (now-offline) in November of 2015 under the title ‘The Evening I Met Linda Tirado, An Honest Voice For The Working Poor’.
I had wanted to meet Linda Tirado for a long time. In 2013, Tirado responded to a question posted on an online forum regarding poor people and their seemingly poorer decision-making skills. What Linda wrote went viral, and by the end of 2014, she had a book deal and was promoting said book ‘Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America’ on Late Night with Bill Maher.
In 2013 I finished what ended up being just under a year receiving Centrelink’s Newstart allowance. During that time I found myself employment in the forms of a (poorly) paid internship, a casual job, then something permanent part-time so I could stop receiving any form of payment. Relatively, I spent a short amount of time on Newstart though the experience was no less frustrating.
Though ‘Experience,’ I realise, implies environments happened upon and those environments fostering observational thought. It doesn’t accurately describe the assumptions made there about your character and the administrative errors. It doesn’t imply the minefield that casual conversation becomes. The experience was evasive. The experience can’t be accountable for its actions.
On my first read of Linda Tirado’s viral post these lines stood out:
‘Poverty is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain…Whatever happens in a month is probably going to be just about as indifferent as whatever happened today or last week. None of it matters.’
During my time on Newstart, I wrote this gem in my diary: ‘I wish I could watch my life from the couch like a TV show.’ A depressing statement revealing nothing but the turn my way of thinking took during that time.
When I saw Tirado was coming to Australia, I reached out to her on Twitter, and as it turned out, hearing other people’s experience on public aid has been almost all she’s been doing while on her book tour. I caught up with her the week of her appearance on Q&A (The same episode of Zaky Mallah’s attendance), and we talked over pasta about the opportunity she has been given to be an honest voice for the working poor.
“In America, we have 45 Million people living in poverty. Every one of those millions thinks that they are personally failing — which isn’t possible — but because people largely have a feeling of self-determination they perceive it as their failing,” Linda begins after I ask her what the linking experience is amongst those reliant on government benefits that she meets. It’s my only attempt at a professional sounding question. Glancing at the scribbled notes sitting on top of my Library copy of Joan Didion’s Political Fictions, I am suddenly anxious at the thought that what I want to say will come out childish.
Instead, I bring up workplace politics, micro-managing, and corporate values. So why don’t companies get the memo that treating their employees fair is only a good thing? Tirado looks at me in surprise, “Such good questions! You’re not asking me what it’s like to be poor,” she laughs before answering, “You can tell an employer knows science if they ask you what you think. The people experiencing something are the experts. People who work in fast food know this. There are so many moments of understanding the small changes that save time. But workers know if they tell their boss nothing’s going to change. The mark of a good boss is not only do they value your humanity, but are they smart enough to realise that you have a contribution to make. It’s pretty stupid to spend millions on a system, test it in one place, it goes well, and then say, ‘Well it will go great everywhere,’” Tirado pauses and asks quizzically, “How do these people run the world?”
We exchange stories about the many specific frustrations that relying on public aid in western countries like Australia and America makes one privy too. Unsurprisingly, the ‘Welfare Cheat’ and ‘Dole Bludger’ stories are not dissimilar in the way that one kick in the gut doesn’t hurt more than the next. There is a comparison that I had not been aware of that Tirado highlights to me though. I was told by Centrelink to keep reporting my income even when I tried to explain I was financially stable. Realising I was probably going to be entitled to $10 here and there for a while, I opted to stop reporting (If you don’t report, you don’t get any money). Eventually, I got the official letter ‘due to YOUR lack of reporting…’ When someone wants to paint you as the bad guy, sometimes they hand you the brush and make you do the painting too. I can thank Centrelink for that life lesson.
“I actually might be a felon” Tirado offers in sympathy, “Because in America if you’re going between states you have to make sure your benefits stop from the previous state. If you double dip that’s a felony, so I called the state of Ohio saying ‘Please stop giving me money.’ My new caseworker in Utah would ring even, and nothing worked. I couldn’t use the money that Ohio was sending me in error, and of course, I look like the Welfare cheat. I begged them to stop. I took time from work to sit on hold on a long-distance call, which I paid for. As it turns out, the reasons for administrative errors like ours are things like twenty case-workers being assigned to 250,000 cases.”
There it was, the banal answer. I think of the mother and her kids I saw turned away from a Centrelink office because it was fifteen minutes until closing time. I think of Tirado saying ‘Assholery’ on Q&A, and I feel somewhat assuaged.
I need to say the childish thing though. It’s not a question but a narrative embedded in the psyche of the working poor. The narrative is about the man, and the man keeping everyone down. The man smokes cigars and laughs with the other men. These men are all white, and they are greedy pigs. You might know this narrative, I think of them in a skyscraper boardroom, but maybe your setting is different.
“There are those stories, but they’re largely true,” Tirado says, noticing my surprise that she didn’t question my sanity. “They’re only told to frame the world in a way that makes sense to you. It’s easier to think there is evil on the other side of deprivation. The truth is rich people get together to run their businesses, and those businesses benefit them, people they know and the industries they’re in. You have to wonder if such atmospheres even allow for rational thinking towards the impact they’re having.”
You have to wonder. After paying for our meals, Tirado talks with a charming rapidity as she chain-smokes walking down the street. “Being able to pay for someone else’s meal means the world to me,” she says as we sit for a drink. “Society is what you make it. The question I’ve always asked is, ‘Is the society I want to live in one that lends someone $10 because they’re broke ‘til payday?’” She pauses to light another cigarette, “And, yes it is.”
