Maybe Maurice shows up at your front door today. He showed up at mine two weeks ago, and he returned a week ago, and last weekend he was there again, with the usual rake in his hand and the usual urgency in his eyes.
“Can I rake your leaves?” he asked the first time.
I looked up at the big trees in my front yard, which still held most of their leaves.
“Too early,” I said. “If you rake them now, there’s still more coming later.”
“I’ll come back,” he said.
When he showed up the second time, there were still too many holding on by a thread.
“I need the work,” Maurice said. “Can you promise me you’ll let me do the job when the leaves are all down?”
When he showed up last Sunday, we agreed on a price and he went to work. This is what he does now. He lives not far from me, and he has a wife who works on the housekeeping staff at a high school in Northeast Baltimore, and they have two elementary school children who are fortunately covered by their mother’s health plan.
Families measure their fortunes this way now. Monday in Washington, D.C., Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski took to the U.S. Senate floor to introduce the Auto Assistance Ownership Amendment. This is aimed at saving jobs in the auto industry, but is merely a piece of a much larger problem, as the Department of Labor reports the nation’s unemployment rate at a 14-year high.
“Our economy is in shambles,” Mikulski said. “People are losing their jobs. They’re losing their life savings. They’re losing their homes. … This session of the Senate should not be called a lame duck. We should neither be lame nor should we duck the big issue facing our country.”
Maurice was a forklift operator for a food distributor until about six weeks ago, when he was downsized in the new American economy. The latest U.S. unemployment number is 6.5 percent. In Maryland, helped by proximity to Washington and government jobs, it is about 4.5 percent.
In the auto industry, it is about to go through the roof, and the fallout would be everywhere.
“One out of every 10 jobs in America is auto-related,” Mikulski said. “Already this year, the U.S. auto industry has shed 110,000 jobs.
In Maryland, about 500 jobs have been lost this year due to the closing of automotive dealerships.”
As Mikulski and everyone else knows, it goes far beyond the auto industry. Around here, we have Legg Mason, the big money managers, recently cutting one-third of 147 people at its capital management unit. Boscov’s is closing all three of its mall stores around here, meaning the end of 394 jobs. Circuit City’s closing three Maryland stores, and Tweeter is closing seven.
As Andrew Cannarsa of The Examiner reported last week, the Maryland Retailers Association has told members not to expect any sales increases for the holiday shopping season. It’s the first time in more than two decades that they’ve heard such news, but
everybody knows why: Housing’s a mess, wages are stagnant, jobs are slipping away.
Such as the job once held by Maurice, who stood there with a rake in his hand instead of a forklift steering wheel. This is what he does for money now. He rakes people’s leaves from their yards, and he bags them, and then lugs them somewhere to be carted off in Department of Sanitation trucks. He is 49 years old, and he goes from one house to the next.
At my house, he started raking leaves about 1 in the afternoon, and every so often I’d ask him whether he needed something to drink.
“No, thanks,” he said.
He started out wearing a coat, but this was soon gone. Followed by a sweater. The afternoon sun gave way and twilight arrived. The temperature dropped. Sometimes when I looked outside, Maurice put his coat back on, and sometimes he took it back off.
I put on the front lights so he could see better as he took the damp, sodden leaves from the ground and stuffed them into big green bags, 30 of them, 40 of them, and then hauled them to the backyard so they could be carried away.
Monday in Washington, Mikulski told senators it was time to help all those people like Maurice.
“We’ve helped the sharks and we’ve helped the whales,” she said. “Now it’s time to help the minnows, the little guy, and the American consumer.”
At my house, Maurice finally stopped when he ran out of leaf bags. It was six hours since he’d started, and he lugged 50 or 60 bags from the front yard to the alley behind the house. The bags were pretty heavy. Maurice is 49 years old. This is what he does now.
