Brice Stanislaw currently works on an as-needed basis as a driver for Mosaic Car Service. He makes roughly $10 an hour.

It’s something he can do while he looks for a steady job after losing his last one as a housekeeper for Bronson Battle Creek.“Working at the hospital at $10.98 was the most I’ve ever made, I think, which is kind of sad,” said Stanislaw, who is 46 and has lived in Battle Creek since 1979.

Stanislaw is one of at least 11,340 people in Calhoun County who work in what some economists call "bad jobs" — occupations that pay bottom-rung wages with few if any benefits, irregular schedules, and little or no hope of advancement.

Such jobs are far more common than most of us realize. At least one in every five workers (out of about 55,980) in Calhoun County toils in a job where the median wage is less than $12 an hour. The median means exactly half earn more and half earn less.

Since federal guidelines say a family of four needs a wage of about $12 an hour to live above the poverty line, the data show that thousands of workers in Calhoun County may not earn enough to let a family escape a life of struggle.

Even worse, about 7,000 of those people work in jobs with a median hourly wage of less than $10 an hour, their status captured in government data reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The story is much the same elsewhere in Michigan. Even in Washtenaw County, home to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a county that perennially posts one of the lowest jobless rates in the state, about 17 percent of all workers labor in jobs paying less than $12 an hour median wage.

Many such employees — fast food workers, parking lot attendants, shuttle drivers — are among the most susceptible to losing a job to automation. And many such jobs are held by people of color, who also face challenges of housing instability, lack of transportation options and more.

Where they are

Nor are such workers hidden from us. They’re everywhere.

They care for our elderly as home health aides, at a median wage of $11.44 an hour in Calhoun County, and for our children in daycare, where the median hourly wage is $9.68.

They serve us meals in restaurants ($9.57) and mix our drinks in bars ($9.45) and wash the dishes after we leave a restaurant ($10.53).

They style our hair ($9.34 an hour), work the registers when we buy things ($9.48), handle our laundry at the dry cleaners ($10.39), check our coats and take our tickets at events ($9.20).

In short, middle-class life co-exists with a poorly paid class of workers who perform essential tasks, who keep the wheels of modern life turning, but who don’t earn enough to approach a middle-class existence.

And the presence of so many low-wage jobs with few, if any, benefits puts a burden on government, nonprofit entities and others to provide food, health care and other goods and services that most middle-class workers earn enough to obtain on their own.

As of September, one in five adults ages 19 to 64 in Michigan was covered by Medicaid, which provides health care to low-income people.

Defining the problem

Brad Hershbein, an economist with the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, said the problem of bad jobs gets more notice today because the problem is growing as the American economy evolves and income inequality widens.

“There’s always been low-wage jobs with minimum benefits,” he said. “It just seems that there are more people in them now. And the reality is that slightly more people appear to be stuck in them than in the past because the number of middle-income jobs that did have benefits, often that were unionized, many of them in manufacturing, that share of jobs has declined.”

And, while it's one thing for a new worker to start out in such a job, Hershbein said, it's another thing entirely for a worker to be stuck in one in his 40s.

“If you start off at McDonald’s and you’re earning $9.25 an hour, if you’re still earning $9.25 an hour two years later, that’s a bigger problem for me than the fact that there is a job that exists at $9.25,” he said. “There should be a pathway to get out of it."

But climbing the ladder to a better life seems to be more difficult than in generations past.

“There seems to be a little less mobility than in the past,” he added. “We’re getting more and more data from different researchers indicating that people's mobility to climb the ladder, both in absolute wages and also relative to a previous generation, that’s been declining.”

Stanislaw has worked a variety of low-paid jobs, doing landscaping, driving some Amish people, selling for car dealerships.

To make end meet, he also mows lawns in the summers, and he sells things, something he started doing in 1999. He was unemployed and on food stamps. There was a bad snow storm that year and no snowblowers around, so Stanislaw went of Craigslist, bought snowblowers in other cities and resold them for a profit in Battle Creek.

“I was like ‘Oh, I’m pretty good at selling stuff.’ and then it just started growing,” he said.

While he still had the job at Bronson, that paycheck would go to his bills. Anything else he earned on the side would go to gas, snacks and visits to the chiropractor.

“I would always dream about having my own used car lot,” Stanislaw said.

The plight of these bottom-rung workers got a lot more attention as this year's election season heated up.

In September, Michigan lawmakers adopted bills that would gradually raise Michigan’s minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2022, which kept them off the November ballot.

But Republican lawmakers have approved measures that would gut those bills in the lame duck session, pushing back the $12 an hour minimum wage until 2030. Gov. Rick Snyder signed those measures into law on Friday.

Midtown Detroit and Flint in October saw protests by hundreds of people demanding raises to $15 an hour.

Amid those arrested at the McDonald's protests in Detroit were former gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Rashida Tlaib, who would be elected to Congress the next month.

El-Sayed later said, “Nobody should have to work 40 hours a week and still struggle to make ends meet. Nobody should have to work multiple jobs to afford to care for their children and live a dignified life.”

Falling short of middle-class expectations

The contrast with middle-class expectations is stark. Not only do many middle-class jobs pay two, three, or four times the minimum wage or more, those jobs come with benefits that bottom-rung workers only dream about.

“You will find that almost all employers offer health care benefits, vacation time, holiday pay, sick time, personal time, disability insurance, all of those are pretty standard now,” said Mary Corrado, president of the American Society of Employers, a nonprofit association based in Livonia that conducts annual surveys on what benefits are offered at hundreds of local employers.

Such "fringe" benefits typically make up about 30 percent of total compensation costs, she said.

With Michigan’s unemployment rate low by historic standards, some employers have had to go beyond even those basics and offer new fringe benefits, like letting employees telecommute instead of coming into the office.

“You’ve got some of these new benefits like elder care and chiropractor care,” she said. “You’re seeing that trending up as well because of the economy.”

And, for the workers most in demand, companies do even more.

“Tech workers right now are in such high demand they can pretty much dictate what they want from an employer,” she said. “In the past, part-timers were excluded from benefits that they didn’t legally have to provide. And because of the way the market is right now we’re seeing more benefits being offered to part-timers.”

Few pathways out

There are two broad approaches to helping bottom-rung workers. One lies in enhancing the skills of poorly educated people so they can move into better jobs.

Michigan Works! Southwest, a workforce development and employment agency, does a lot of that work in Calhoun County.

A lot of the organization’s services are aimed at what it calls the ALICE population, which stands for "asset-limited, income-constrained employed."

It's the “men and women of all ages and races who work but still struggle to bring home enough to cover household needs,” Michigan Works! Deputy Director Jakki Bungart-Bibb said in a statement.

“The ultimate goal for all of our programs is to provide services that help both the unemployed and underemployed job seekers secure long-term employment that provides or has the potential to provide a living wage,” Bungart-Bibb said.

More than 43,000 people visited the Michigan Works! Southwest service center in Battle Creek at 200 W. Van Buren St. and more than 4,000 registered to receive additional services such as training and skills upgrading.

The other approach accepts that many people in the poorest jobs may be stuck in them for years because of poor educational backgrounds and other challenges and tries to make bad jobs better.

Steven Dawson, a workforce consultant and fellow with the New York-based Pinkerton Foundation that focuses on the plight of disadvantaged children and families, said the reality is that many workers will never gain the necessary skills to escape low-paying jobs. He argues that society ought to make such jobs get better through raising the minimum wage, making it easier for workers to join unions and similar measures.

Many of those stuck in bad jobs, he notes, suffer from family or housing instability, lack of transit options, poor education backgrounds and a host of other challenges. For such people, getting a little more in their paycheck, or getting a few more benefits like paid sick days, may be a more immediate way to help.

He believes many workforce training programs are based on unrealistic expectations.

“This narrative arc of single mom on welfare going to community college and getting a nursing degree and moving out to the suburbs, that’s what really rings the chimes of the people who design the policies and run the programs,” he said, “whereas what most low-income job seekers need is not mobility but stability.”

One reason for optimism: Today’s tighter labor market — the national unemployment rate of 3.7 percent is the lowest in almost 50 years — may see employers forced to overcome an aversion to raising pay and offering benefits even to the lowest-level workers.

Indeed, the federal government reported this week that job openings in the United States hit a high of 7.1 million — a sign that employers may have to start offering more pay and benefits to attract candidates.

“The longer the market stays as tight as it is, the more we’re going to see changes made,” Dawson said.

That is something that Michigan Works! is attempting to address as well. The state of Michigan’s Workforce Development Agency has a Going Pro Talent Fund, which awards companies that train, develop and retain employees.

In 2017, Michigan Works! Southwest assisted 40 companies in obtaining awards adding up to $1.4 million from the Going Pro Talent Fund, which went to the training, hiring and retaining of a thousand workers. This year, the organization helped 51 companies, but the awards have yet to be announced.

Job inconsistency creates cycle

The problem with temp agencies is that getting hired on by the companies you are sent to work for isn’t a guarantee.

For Marc Burns, 34, that and the fee that the agencies take from his paycheck made it hard to get out of the rut.

“It’s really hard because you’ll get caught up on bills and start trying to get money put aside,” Burns said. “Then you don’t have anything, you don’t have an income, so any money you have, if you have money saved up, you burn through it fast before you can get another position.”

He worked for DENSO through a staffing company once being paid a little more than $9 an hour and later found out that, before the staffing company took its cut, he would have earned a little over $14 an hour.

“It’s really hard to make any type of living on it,” Burns said. “At the time, I had a $570-something rent, plus water, gas for my car, insurance for my car, it was really hard to make ends meet. I was just really happy...my fiance at the time had a decent paying job, so that actually helped.”

Sometimes the temp agencies work out, however. Burns got a job at Benteler Automotive in Galesburg as a welder. He was hired on as permanent staff and, by May of this year, was earning $18.83 an hour.

He's since been laid off.

Before Benteler, Burns was used to lower-paying jobs, working in manufacturing, for Kohl’s, for Meijer to make ends meet.

Burns recently enrolled in the Workforce Development Agency’s Trade Adjustment Assistance program with help from Michigan Works!. He’ll be getting his welding certifications at Kellogg Community College.

“I’ve always had to take the entry-level positions and work my way up, and I’ve always been able to get so far, but then I have to stop because that’s as far as I can go because I don’t have the experience or certifications or the next type of welding they want,” Burns said. “They’re not willing to train. They’d rather bring somebody else in who already has that knowledge or training.”

Burns is hoping that once he gets these certifications, he’ll be able to get more secure jobs without having to work his way up from entry level again.

“Battle Creek itself I’ve noticed has gone down really fast lately because there are no jobs other than the manufacturing jobs, and they’re just dead-end jobs and barely let people get by,” he said. “So I’m hoping that raising minimum wage helps a lot as far as the economy and helps people get where they need to be.”

Contact Battle Creek Enquirer reporter Natasha Blakely at (269) 223-0114 or nblakely@battlecreekenquirer.com. Contact Detroit Free Press reporters John Gallagher at (313) 222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com and Fiona Kelliher at fkelliher@freepress.com.

Looking for assistance?

Michigan Works! Southwest can be contacted at (269) 660-1412 or found at 200 W. Van Buren St. in Battle Creek.