Ending Poverty As We Know It: Guaranteeing A Right To A Job

8 The Working Poor

8 The Working Poor The working poor remain America’s glaring contradiction. The concurrence of work and poverty is contrary to the American ethos that a willingness to work leads to material advancement, and it negates the prevalent view that the cause of poverty among adults capable of work is deviant behavior, particularly a lack of commitment to work. —Levitan, Gallo, and Shapiro, Working but Poor The usual first response to poverty has been to advise the poor to work. But if the poor are already working, what’s the next response? The next response is usually silence. One of every four workers in the United States, around thirty million workers, earns less than “poverty-level wages” or the hourly wage necessary to sustain a family of four even at the official poverty threshold .1 This percentage of workers earning “poverty-level wages” has remained at around 25 percent since the 1970s.2 If you add the thirty million people who are making poverty-level wages to the fifteen million to seventeen million unemployed and underemployed , you can begin to see how the lack of work at a living wage impacts our country.3 The relationship between work and poverty forms the core of our national problem of poverty.4 And millions of people who work are directly impacted. There are at least four important reasons to care about the working poor. First, more than half of the working poor live in families with children. Second, the nine million or so working poor counted by the government show only a fraction of the real working poor if a more realistic definition of poverty is used. Third, there is a significant likelihood that someone you know is already in or going to spend some time in this category, including one out of every three people between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-seven. And fourth, the working poor are the fastest growing segment of our population.5 71 72 Chapter 8 As the Wall Street Journal reported in the mid-1990s, even before cutbacks in the welfare program that put many more poor people to work, more than half of the poor lived in households where someone was already working.6 Most of the poor in the United States live in working families. Millions of poor people work. The working poor are everywhere, yet many of us don’t see them. Most of the working poor labor in the same buildings as us and frequently visit our neighborhoods, even our homes. They clean and maintain our offices, they pick up our trash, they serve us our meals, they serve and clean up our stores and restaurants and hotels and malls, they ring up our purchases and restock our shelves, they cut our grass, they guard us, they answer our phone calls, they make our copies and run our errands, they care for our children and our parents and elderly relatives. They are everywhere. Some have cars; many take the bus. Want a good idea of the lowest-paid working poor in your community ? Look at the people gathered at the downtown bus stop in the dark in the morning and in the dark in the evening. Or watch as the restaurants and fast food places and shopping centers close for the night. The end of welfare has put many people to work, but many still remain poor. The director of the Atlanta Community Food Bank reflects on the end of welfare in that city: “There’s been a 50 percent drop in welfare recipients, but we’ve seen a 30 percent increase in need at the food bank.”7 Journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich has done a remarkable job of capturing what the lives of the working poor are like. Ehrenreich entered the low-wage workforce to find out what former welfare mothers would experience as welfare reform kicked in. In Nickel and Dimed in America: On (Not) Getting By in America, Ehrenreich describes how she got a job at a restaurant that paid her $2.43 an hour plus tips.8 (Believe it or not, paying a waitress this way is perfectly legal.)9 Ehrenreich spent a lot of time working with the poor, waiting tables and sharing breaks. What did she learn about how the working poor live? You might imagine, from a comfortable distance, that people who live, year in and year out, on $6 to $10 an hour have discovered some...