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56 ˜ A Work of Hospitality, 1982–2002
are a fast car, in the fast lane, to find a corner where you can sleep until the sun
breaks forth in the sky.
Or perhaps today is a lucky day. We have twenty thousand homeless people
in Atlanta. In the wintertime with our winter shelters, we have five or six thousand
places in churches, in basements, in other buildings for night shelter.
Sometimes at the city shelter, we’ll put three hundred people in the old city jail.
Or at the women and children’s shelter at First Iconium Baptist Church on
Moreland Avenue, we’ll put 175 people in a gymnasium. And you’ve worked all
day, a lucky day. You go down to the church shelter, and you’re given some food,
and you lie down on the floor on a mat, not on cardboard!
You’ve got a chance for a job, for a repeat ticket out of the labor pool. You
want to get some sleep. It’s early, it’s only ten o’clock. You lie down in the muffled
moans of the night shelter, moans of parents separated from their children,
of nightmares that grasp and hold you, in a room with thirty people coughing
and sniffling and crying. You cannot sleep.
It’s five o’clock in the morning now. Most shelters close, and people begin
to look for work. Forty percent of the homeless people in Atlanta, Georgia, work
regularly. People who are poor work. People who are homeless work.
At the Open Door Community we have a breakfast program. This afternoon
I learned that we served three hundred people there this morning. We generally
serve about 250. We almost ran out of grits. We serve a good breakfast:
grits, boiled eggs, coffee, oranges, multivitamins.
When I was speaking of the college professor and the lawn mower, I wanted
to tell that story because it is so reminiscent of me when I began fifteen years
ago working on the streets of Atlanta. I did not know that one thousand to three
thousand people every morning must make a difficult decision when they seek
work, when they leave a shelter or a cat hole or an abandoned automobile or an
abandoned building. If you get day labor, you lose your access to the soup
kitchens, so you make a choice, “Shall I eat today, or shall I work” I didn’t know
that. When I found out that homeless people were forced to make that choice
between food and work, we started the Butler Street CME Church breakfast.
For thirteen years now we have been serving breakfast in the basement of that
church in downtown Atlanta.
A labor pool is a modern slave market. It is where people who are desperate
for work go in the dark, dark hours of the morning. If a contract comes to a
labor pool for a job that’s worth ten dollars an hour, the labor pool becomes a
labor broker, and says, “I will accept you for this job. You come up here, and I
will pay you $4.25 an hour.” The labor pool, a private enterprise, gets the market
value of the job minus the $4.25 an hour.
In Atlanta, for instance, we send many, many hundreds of people out from
the labor pools into neighboring counties to collect garbage. We have a county
just north of Atlanta, Gwinnett County, that will not allow public transporta-