By Kathryn Skelton,Staff Writer

Stephanie Jones-Negron volunteers at the Good Shepherd Food Pantry every Tuesday morning and has for seven years.

She enjoys the familiar faces and helping people, but the real draw is free groceries.

At the end of each three-hour shift she takes home enough to feed her young family for a week.

Volunteers pick from food in the back of the former pharmacy that isn’t put out for clients, such as the slightly dented cans, the opened sacks of sugar and an endless supply of sauerkraut for which the women trade recipes.

Jones-Negron’s husband works full time. They have five boys and rent her grandparents’ house in Minot. Their youngest, Sammy, 6, is autistic.

“We’ve been paycheck to paycheck for so long, and that’s never how I wanted to live,” she said. “It’s very scary. You pray that your vehicle lasts, you wait for your tax return.”

Volunteers like her aren’t so different from the people they serve.

Every month, 600 families come to the Lisbon Street pantry for a cardboard box or two filled with food.

One in every five of those families has a working parent.

“It’s really a struggle for people in the middle,” said the pantry’s executive director, Joyce Gagnon. Instead of the working poor, she calls them “the working hungry.”

In Maine, one in every four families doesn’t make enough to cover basic expenses, according to the Maine Center for Economic Policy. The center has calculated livable wages at, for example, $30,520 for a family of three.

So people go without. They work harder – Maine has one of the highest rates of second-job holders in the country.

Or they ask for help. About one in three households recieving food stamps in Maine has a working adult.

That figure is the same for households getting other types of state welfare from the Department of Health and Human Services.

In half of the homes with Section 8 rental vouchers from Lewiston and Auburn housing authorities, people who can work have jobs.

They’re just not earning enough.

More than half of the jobs in Maine don’t pay enough for one parent to support one child. That would take an hourly wage of at least $13.94, as figured by the Maine Center for Economic Policy, a group that bills itself as a nonpartisan research organization involved in social issues.

That wage is based on 2002 data, said Executive Director Christopher St. John. He’ll update it with 2004 data this summer, and by all early indications, costs have gone up.

Three years ago, MCEP found singles needed $8.77 an hour to cover basic expenses.

On average, nearly 80,000 people in Maine – 13 percent of all workers -earn less than that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

They may work as dishwashers, cashiers or fast-food cooks.

The average hourly wage in all industries in Maine is a seemingly high $15.60, but that is skewed by fewer well-paying jobs. Half of people actually earned less than $12.78 an hour in the last wage measure, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Both figures, the average and the median, are the lowest in New England and several dollars below the national average (see chart).

“People often manage until an event,” said St. John. Illness, an accident, divorce or a similar “economic jolt” can really change the picture, he said.

The Maine Development Foundation uses a slightly different measure to gauge the number of working poor.

In 1995, when 65 percent of jobs paid what it considered livable wages, the foundation set a goal of improving that rate considerably over 10 years, calling it vital to personal health, morale and the state economy.

At last measure, it was up to 66 percent.

Persistently low wages mean that more people here hold more than one job, said Craig Freshley, principal consultant at Good Group Decisions and a researcher behind the annual Maine Development Foundation reports.

Almost 8 percent of Mainers held multiple jobs in 2003, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to 5.3 percent nationally.

That figure speaks to quality of life, Freshley said. “That translates to parents not being home for their children, that translates to not being available for volunteer activities and community service. It also translates into not taking time to exercise.”

The fact that so many Mainers are struggling to get by will come as a surprise to many of those who aren’t, said St. John, of the Maine Center for Economic Policy. It goes to the invisibility of the issue and to people’s ability to blend in and make do without.

“I think there’s a fierce desire not to be identified as poor,” he said.

In one part of Lewiston, that label is hard to avoid.

The city’s so-called Empowerment Zone – a downtown area bordered by Lisbon Street, East Avenue, Webster Street and the Androscoggin River – includes the poorest neighborhood in the state, according to the U.S. Census.

Half of the households in Tract 201 had annual incomes below $11,450.

Alyson Stone is the new head of Empower Lewiston, the federally funded group focused on improving life in that zone. The agency has spent about $500,000 toward projects such as a new community center and a resource guide of where to go for help, but people still struggle.

“People oftentimes are feeling as though they’re being judged as sitting at home, watching TV and collecting their Social Security checks, and not doing anything else,” said Stone.

The perception: “They’re not trying. They just aren’t motivated. They don’t want to work.”

At the food pantry on Lisbon Street, Executive Director Gagnon hears lots of reluctance from people who approach it as a last resort. A family new to the area recently sought help at the pantry. The couple had bought a house, and husband and wife both worked until she was abruptly sidelined by a car accident.

He was going to work each day without lunch so their two children would have enough to eat.

“I think a lot of the public’s perception is that these people have done it to themselves,” Gagnon said.

She tells young families that it does get better, and she speaks from experience. She stayed home to raise her two sons when they were young. Just going to McDonald’s, she tells others who are struggling, was a big deal.

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