LIVING BELOW $15
‘Do you need somebody to talk to? I’ll be here all night’
Read the stories of workers who are trying to cope with the challenges of the minimum wage in Sunday Business, Section F.
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Quite often, Angela Brock is the first person you see as you walk through the glass doors of Four Allegheny Center on the North Side. She’s the security guard stationedbehind a desk.
The building is 10 floors of glass and steel that house programs offering intensive psychiatric care, and Ms. Brock, 56, sees a lot of regulars — staff members who work in the building and those who come seeking treatment. She greets many by name. Her interactions vary. People are often kind and polite. Sometimesthey can be difficult.
For example, one woman, a regular in the building, usually entered with an attitude. “She was always veryrude,” Ms. Brock recalled.
Ms. Brock couldn’t figure it out. One night, she had reached her limit and decided to find out what was going on. She confronted the woman about her rudeness and asked, “Do you need somebody to talk to? I’ll be here all night.”
It was an empathetic approach, forged through years of struggle. Ms. Brock has faced plenty of adversity. She’s in recovery — “I’m 28 years clean,” she said — and understands that visitors to the building can be weighed down with personal problems. In this instance, the approach eventually softened the woman’sattitude. Ms. Brock discovered she had recently lost both of herparents.
“I’ve been through a lot,” Ms. Brock said. “My life has changed. … I can see addiction, I can see mental health problems. Because of my own personal experience, I’m more compassionate. I try to stay kind and polite, and sometimes I go beyond my call of duty to help people because they’re in a crisis. It makes me feel good about myself, to make somebodysmile.”
Her security job has other challenges. When the weather warms, people sometimes use drugs near the building’s entrance. Ms. Brock tells them to leave, and they usually comply because she doesn’t approachthem aggressively, she said.
And then there’s COVID-19. Early in the pandemic, her hours werecut in half. She returned to fulltime work in July, she said. She considers herself and her colleagues in the security business as front-line workers, putting their health at risk during a major health crisis. “We greet you, we escort you anywhere you go in the building,” she said. “If somebody comes here without a mask,I give them a mask.”
Ms. Brock works the 3 to 11 p.m. shift Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Thursday and Friday she works from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. On a recent Tuesday shift, a colleague called in sick, so she worked a double shift. “It’s mandatory,” she said. “If it’s mandatory, they should compensate us for it, give us an incentive. There’sno overtime pay.”
Her pay now is $14.60 an hour. “You have to learn to budget your money,” she said. “Thank God I’m married, so there’s another income in the house. Otherwise, I couldn’t makeit on my own.”