Upward Mobility- A dream or myth?

Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, delivering the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address, recalled growing up in the small Iowa town of Red Oak and working the biscuit shift at Hardee’s to pay for college. Ernst, 44, cited her own striving as proof that opportunity is available to any American who wants it.

“You just need the freedom to dream big and a whole lot of hard work,” she said.

Brandi didn’t see the speech. Neither did any of her co-workers. They had never thought of the biscuit shift as a parable. Hardee’s is a job, and paychecks come out every other Wednesday. Trina Starkey, who is 18, spends hers on rent and ramen noodles. Emily Abell, who is 20, buys diapers. Brandi, who is 31, drives around Creston with a bank envelope to pay her bills, including a stop at Leslie’s Dance Emporium to cover her daughter’s tumbling class.

Of the 17 employees at the Hardee’s in Creston, only two use the job to pay for college. “One day, I hope to teach biology or chemistry,” says Chrystal Patten, 19, who works the evening shift and attends the local community college. But she’s the exception. The rest are working to live. Almost all rely on some form of government assistance, such as food stamps or Medicaid. Some have made a career out of a low-wage job that two decades ago was considered temporary and transitional. Like Bobbie Lyons, the biscuit baker, who started at Hardee’s when her daughter was in the sixth grade; now, that daughter is 20 with her own job as a security guard.

After Ernst won her Senate seat last year, she cast Hardee’s as part of her improbable journey up. “It’s a long way from Red Oak to Washington, from the biscuit line at Hardee’s to the United States Senate,” she said.

If hard work is the answer, Brandi agrees.

“I was raised to work, not sit around on my ass,” she says. “Sitting on your ass ain’t gonna get you nowhere.”

The question she often wonders is, where will work get you?

There is no longer a Hardee’s in Red Oak — it closed years ago — just as there is no longer an economy where part-time ­fast-food jobs are remembered as a stop on a journey. But the biscuit ovens at the Hardee’s in Creston, 50 miles east on Highway 34, are still firing up every morning at 5.

Hellsangel wrote:Social mobility? You are confusing it with economic upliftment, Comrade.