In the land of commuter killers, Salud Garcia’s trek is so tough she deserves a gold medal at the finish line every day.
She left her home in Reseda before dawn, took a bus to a train, then another bus, then another. More than two hours later, when she arrived at her workplace near Los Angeles International Airport, it was just around 7 a.m.
“I ran to the bathroom and went to work,” said Garcia, a dishwasher at a food catering company that serves airlines.
After get off work, Garcia is sometimes lucky enough to get a ride home from a co-worker. But typically, she reverses her commute, which means working eight to nine hours and then spending a few more hours on the road.
California is about to be hit by an aging population wave, and Steve Lopez is riding the wave. His column focuses on the benefits and burdens of aging and how some people challenge the stigma associated with older age.
What makes this all the more striking, or heartbreaking if you will, is her age.
“I’ll be 81 in August,” Garcia said. She told me she wouldn’t benefit much given her age, but she wanted younger employees to “retire with dignity.”
I heard about Garcia from a Unite Here Local 11 spokesperson while researching a column about workers unable to retire. I know a lot of people who keep working because they want to, but I want to know people who keep working because they have to.
The rent is too high. Retirement funds are depleted or non-existent. Social Security can’t pay the bills, and the kids and grandkids need help. For all these reasons and more, people continue to work, often in physically demanding jobs.
Last summer I visited a Early morning picket lines, At another United Here site outside the Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica, six of the 23 housekeepers, dishwashers and other employees who asked for better contracts were in their 60s and two were in their 70s.
“My knees hurt,” said Jose Ayala, a 67-year-old dishwasher who told me he works two jobs, a total of 13 hours a day, to support his Culver City apartment. A family of four.
A few years ago, I was researching a book about retirement, and I’ll never forget seeing a man in his 70s working at a big box store near Knott’s Berry Farm. He was somewhat disfigured from cancer surgery, and he told me that his feet hurt because he stood for hours a day staring at the self-checkout counter.
He retired once, but with dwindling funds and rising costs, he had to return to work, and he didn’t know when he would be in a good enough financial position to retire again. When I contacted his wife about a year later, she told me that her husband finally retired but died shortly after.
Salud Garcia, 80, right, takes a break after walking the picket line. Experts say there has been an increase in workers over 65 and in their 70s.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
“The number of people working over 65 and even over 70 has increased,” said Nari Rhee, director of the center. retirement security plan at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
But finding a job is not easy, she said, in part because of ageism — especially in the tech field.
Lee said half of American workers have no retirement benefits beyond Social Security as private-sector pensions have all but disappeared. Even if employers offer 401(k) plans, “most low-wage workers won’t choose to join because they can’t afford it. … The system is really failing American workers, especially at the lower end of the labor market.”
Garcia has worked at her current job for more than 30 years, earning just over $21 an hour through a health care plan and 401(k) plan, as well as other benefits provided for by the terms of her contract. But the agreement expired nearly two years ago and negotiations have been slow to progress.
Her employer, an airline catering provider, sent me the salary schedule and benefits package for its more than 500 employees, along with a brief statement. The report states in part that Flying Food Group “creates hundreds of jobs in the Los Angeles area, offering generous wages and benefits while providing a modern, safe work environment for all.”
Unions beg to differ, pointing out Many discoveries Over the past few years, city, county and state agencies have argued that safety standards and compensation requirements have not been met. Last August, the state labor commissioner fined Flying Food Group $1.2 million, accusing the company of failing to rehire 21 California employees — 18 of them in Inglewood — who were laid off during the pandemic.
To be fair, Feiliang’s salary and benefits are pretty good. Just factor in housing costs and other expenses, and many employees end up commuting long distances and working while older and sicker. According to the union, 34 of Garcia’s co-workers at her workplace are 65 and older, including 14 who are 70 and older.
In addition to $25 an hour, one of the union’s goals is a pension plan. My first thought was yes, everyone wants pensions, but they are in the past. And many businesses operate on razor-thin margins, so higher wages could lead to fewer jobs.
But we cannot let profit-making employers or governments off the hook for the steady decline of seniors into abject poverty. When I interviewed New School economics professor Teresa Ghilarducci last year for a column about hotel workers, she said pensions and lowering the Medicare age would go a long way toward easing their burden.
Salud Garcia’s day includes several hours in traffic and eight or nine hours at work.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
I’m going to hazard a guess that none of these ideas are currently considered feasible, but in written testimony Earlier this year, Girarducci told a U.S. Senate committee a stark view of what she called America’s “grossly broken” retirement system, which is shamefully lagging behind countries that have failed their elders.
“By international standards,” she said, “poverty rates among older Americans are very high: 23% of older Americans are poor; in Canada, the poverty rate is 12%; in the UK, the poverty rate is over 15%; in France, The figure is 4.4%; in the Netherlands (whose pension system is consistently rated as one of the best in the world), only 3.1% of older people are poor.
Garcia is doing well, but only because she keeps working. She told me that she and her late husband had separated years ago, and that for a time she worked two jobs to support her children, one of whom died of a heart attack in her 30s.
One night, 14 hours into the day, outside her apartment in Reseda, I noticed Garcia was limping. She said her left knee had been bothering her from the long hours emptying the food carts that flight attendants were pushing along the aisles of the plane. Garcia said she shoveled dishes into the dishwasher, which sometimes leaked, leaving her standing in a puddle.
Garcia shares the house with her 40-year-old son, Brigido, and splits the bills.
“Never give up. As we know, life is hard. We have to prove to everyone that we can do it,” he said.
That was the spirit his mother carried one day on the Inglewood picket line. Garcia led her colleagues out into the streets during their lunch break, holding up signs and calling for a new contract.
“One day I asked her, ‘Why don’t you retire?'” said Rafael LeonThe Flying Food dishwasher representative I met in 2015 and later became a union representative was living with his family in a converted garage. “She said, ‘Son, if I leave this job, it’s a death sentence.'”
She told him she was fighting for younger employees because they would benefit the most.
As Garcia told me:
“I want to see this through. We will fight to the end.
If you work late out of financial necessity or know someone who does, please let me know at steve.lopez@latimes.com
