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Hospitality to the Homeless ˜ 57
tion, and that works hard to keep African Americans and poor people out, but
that still has the regular work we need poor people for. Who in the hell is gonna
empty the garbage can So they bus and truck people out of labor pools in the
morning to collect the garbage, and then get them out of the county in the
evening by the time residents get home from work.
Now after sleeping on a sidewalk it’s difficult work to empty garbage. It’s
difficult work any time of the day or night. It is difficult work after sleeping in
a night shelter. It is difficult work! But think what it would be like when, so
often, as you are on your way to work, someone passes you in a car, rolls down
their window, shoots you a bird, and yells, “Why don’t you get a job, you lazy
bum! You worthless freeloader!” The work becomes even harder. For students it
would be as though you were on your way to class, having spent the night, not
in student housing, but outside. And it had been raining. You were cold and wet
and your books and papers soaked and ruined, and your professor looked at you
and said, “Why are you coming to class, you dumb student You’ve got an IQ
so low, I don’t know how you got into Denison University.” It is that level of oppression,
pain, and marginalization that greets the homeless as they walk
to work.
This morning, when I was flying in to Columbus, Ohio, from Atlanta, I
looked out a window and saw a golf course. This was before lunch, and on that
golf course I saw a whole bunch of these little golf carts running around and
great big grown men with a little stick, chasing a little ball. Now how come they
aren’t lazy bums What are these qualified, strong, gifted people doing out here
before lunch playing golf
A friend of mine, who works out of a labor pool named Temporary People,
was very upset one morning at five o’clock because he couldn’t get a job. I said,
“Why not What happened” He said, “Well, I got sent on a construction job a
couple of days ago, and when I got there they told me to go down into this hole
to do some digging. The hole had not been reinforced in an adequate way.”
Cave-ins cause a lot of injury and death on construction jobs, I learned through
this conversation with my friend. He told the supervisor that he would not go
down in the hole, so they told him to sit and that he would not get paid one
penny. At 6 a.m., when he was leaving Temporary People to go to this construction
site, he had accepted a brown-bag lunch with two baloney sandwiches
on white bread, a soda, and chips for three dollars. They also charge $1.25 for
transportation to the site and back. When he returned he owed the company
more than five dollars, and he had lost a day of his life. He had no redress.
One morning a number of years ago I was sitting in a labor pool. It was late;
usually the labor pools are most active between 4:30 and 7:30 in the morning. If
you’re not out by eight o’clock, your day is pretty close to finished. I was sitting
in the labor pool, and I was just amazed. One man turned to another at about
8:30 or nine o’clock, and said, “Well, I guess my day is over.” He knew in that