Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, May 14, 1995                   TAG: 9505170005
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: B-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: NORA ZAMICHOW LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES                                LENGTH: Long

$4.25 AN HOUR MAKES SURVIVAL A STRUGGLE

This is life on minimum wage.

Pineda, 27, earns $4.25 an hour. Toiling from 6 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. as a janitor, he takes home $155.29 a week, well below the poverty level. He is a member of the working poor, whose invisible hands scrub toilets, wipe dried coffee off desks, sew zippers, eviscerate chickens and flip burgers.

In this world, priorities are constantly being recalculated: Pay rent or buy groceries? Risk having the utilities turned off or take an ailing child to the doctor? Survival means weaving an elaborate tapestry of makeshift financial measures, such as buying a refrigerator on installment payments swollen with interest or paying fees to a check-cashing company because you don't have enough money to open a bank account.

It is not a world children understand. Pineda's little girl, Lourdes, recently fixed her big, brown eyes on her father and asked him, ``Papi, why don't you buy me skates or Nintendo? Is it that you don't love me?''

Congress has not raised the federal minimum wage from $4.25 in four years. California's has been at that level for seven. President Clinton, contending that ``nobody can live on just $4.25 an hour,'' in February proposed raising it over two years to $5.15. Unless action is taken, he said, inflation will push the purchasing power of the minimum wage to its lowest level in 40 years by 1996.

If Clinton has his way, Pineda's before-taxes check would eventually rise by $36 a week. How would he spend it?

``I would buy vitamins for my children,'' he said, without skipping a beat. ``I would buy the food they want.''

The children's pleas rip through Pineda like a knife. He is trying to work a second job, moonlighting during the day as a mechanic. It means he gets little sleep. But he has grown used to his schedule.

Until two weeks ago, he and his live-in girlfriend, Maria Hernandez, 22, also a minimum-wage janitor, had been able to eke out a living. But Hernandez, who is three months pregnant, is under doctor's orders to stop working because she suffered severe pains and began bleeding after several hours of emptying office wastebaskets. Neither she nor Pineda get medical benefits from their employer.

The family now depends entirely on Pineda's gross salary of $8,840 a year. He hopes to earn another $300 a month as a mechanic, working in his South-Central Los Angeles front yard. That would be $3,600 a year if he's lucky. He pays $13 a month for beeper service so customers will be able to reach him easily.

Business has been slow. Late last month, Pineda netted $250 for overhauling an engine. Apprehensive about paying the rent, the couple again postponed buying a maternity dress for Hernandez, whose clothing cuts uncomfortably into her belly.

``I'm worried because I don't know how we are going to make it on his income,'' said Hernandez, a quiet woman whose anxiety is etched in her dark eyes. Although the children are Pineda's from a previous marriage, she cares for them as if they were her own.

Clinton administration officials estimate that 11 million people - 71 percent of whom are over the age of 20 - make less than $5.15 an hour and would benefit from a minimum wage increase.

Academic studies on the effects of a higher minimum wage are divided. Many Republicans contend that raising the minimum wage would kill jobs by discouraging employers from hiring new workers. But mainstream America may view an increase with more sympathy. A Los Angeles Times Poll in January found that 72 percent of Americans favor a minimum-wage increase, with 24 percent opposed. Clinton contends that a higher minimum wage would encourage more people to get off welfare.

Pineda is already determined to pay his own way. A proud, stocky man - here legally, like Hernandez - he scoffs at accepting food stamps because he believes he can support his family.

So we make sacrifices, they say. So we don't do everything we'd like - at least the meals we put on the table are from money that we've earned ourselves.

Pineda's family lives in a one-story three-bedroom house shared with his brother's and cousin's families, or a total of six adults and five children. Each family pays $330 rent and has its own bedroom, a room large enough for one double bed. As if by an unspoken rule, the kids take the bed and the adults sleep on the maroon carpet.

Pineda's son, Herman, doesn't understand why their lives are so different from many of his friends, whose fathers work for higher wages. Pineda fears that Herman, a bright, energetic, round-faced boy, is bored. Often he is angry that he cannot go to the movies or play arcade games. When he rides a bike, it's a borrowed one. When he plays Nintendo, it's at a friend's house.

Lately, Pineda has tried a new strategy: ``You can go to the movie, but then you can't eat later in the week - what do you prefer?'' Herman always opts for dinner but the tactic pains his father.

Pineda and Hernandez, both from El Salvador, met in Los Angeles two years ago. Neither speaks fluent English, an obstacle in the quest for higher-paying jobs. She came three years ago, joining her mother and sisters here after her father, a soldier in the government army, was killed, she said. Almost immediately, she landed a job as a janitor.

Her past follows her. Every month she sends $150 to her grandmother to take care of her 4-year-old son. ``Mommy, mommy, send for me,'' the boy pleads with her on the phone.

Pineda, a government soldier at the age of 14, has been here eight years. Like many immigrant workers he has held various jobs: carpenter, assembly line worker in a shoulder-pad factory, and mechanic - a position that enabled him to earn his highest wage, $8 an hour. But the garage closed after a car fell on a fellow mechanic, crushing his chest, and it was discovered that the shop owner had no insurance.

On a recent Saturday Pineda drove to Nix Check Cashing Co., where he paid $9.80 to cash his biweekly paycheck. This time, he decided to forgo getting a lottery ticket, which he buys when he feels more flush.

There was no way to make the numbers work. An anticipated pay increase negotiated by his union, which will push him to $4.60 an hour in July, seemed negligible. Health insurance won't kick in until 2000. ``I'll be dead by then,'' he said, smiling.

In addition to the rent, he owed a monthly payment of $110 to an appliance store for a new refrigerator. His installment plan would drive the total price of the fridge to $3,100, far higher than its value, far too steep for his tight budget.

Pineda is proud of the refrigerator, a huge gleaming beacon next to the chipped, tin-foil-covered four-burner stove. Should he return to El Salvador, he will take it with him, he said.