Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They're Not.

[Recursion]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/magazine/americans-jobs-poverty-homeless.html

Focusing on jobs made more sense back when our production capacity was much lower

The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines a “working poor” person as someone below the poverty line who spent at least half the year either working or looking for employment. In 2016, there were roughly 7.6 million Americans who fell into this category. Most working poor people are over 35, while fewer than five in 100 are between the ages of 16 and 19. In other words, the working poor are not primarily teenagers bagging groceries or scooping ice cream in paper hats. They are adults — and often parents — wiping down hotel showers and toilets, taking food orders and bussing tables, eviscerating chickens at meat-processing plants, minding children at 24-hour day care centers, picking berries, emptying trash cans, stacking grocery shelves at midnight, driving taxis and Ubers, answering customer-service hotlines, smoothing hot asphalt on freeways, teaching community-college students as adjunct professors and, yes, bagging groceries and scooping ice cream in paper hats.

America prides itself on being the country of economic mobility, a place where your station in life is limited only by your ambition and grit. But changes in the labor market have shrunk the already slim odds of launching yourself from the mailroom to the boardroom. For one, the job market has bifurcated, increasing the distance between good and bad jobs. Working harder and longer will not translate into a promotion if employers pull up the ladders and offer supervisory positions exclusively to people with college degrees. Because large companies now farm out many positions to independent contractors, those who buff the floors at Microsoft or wash the sheets at the Sheraton typically are not employed by Microsoft or Sheraton, thwarting any hope of advancing within the company. Plus, working harder and longer often isn’t even an option for those at the mercy of an unpredictable schedule. Nearly 40 percent of full-time hourly workers know their work schedules just a week or less in advance. And if you give it your all in a job you can land with a high-school diploma (or less), that job might not exist for very long: Half of all new positions are eliminated within the first year. According to the labor sociologist Arne Kalleberg, permanent terminations have become “a basic component of employers’ restructuring strategies.”

Home health care has emerged as an archetypal job in this new, low-pay service economy. Demand for home health care has surged as the population has aged, but according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 2017 median annual income for home health aides in the United States was just $23,130. Half of these workers depend on public assistance to make ends meet. Vanessa formed a rapport with several of her clients, to whom she confided that she was homeless. One replied, “Oh, Vanessa, I wish I could do something for you.” When Vanessa told her supervisor about her situation, he asked if she wanted time off. “No!” Vanessa said. She needed the money and had been picking up fill-in shifts. The supervisor was prepared for the moment; he’d been there before. He reached into a drawer and gave her a $50 gas card to Shell and a $100 grocery card to ShopRite. Vanessa was grateful for the help. She thought Bayada was a generous and sympathetic employer, but her rate hadn’t changed much in the three years she had worked there. Vanessa earned $9,815.75 in 2015, $12,763.94 in 2016 and $10,446.81 last year.

To afford basic necessities, the federal government estimates that Vanessa’s family would need to bring in $29,420 a year. Vanessa is not even close — and she is one of the lucky ones, at least among the poor. The nation’s safety net now strongly favors the employed, with benefits like the earned-income tax credit, a once-a-year cash boost that applies only to people who work. Last year, Vanessa received a tax return of around $5,000, which included earned-income and child tax credits. They helped raise her income, but not above the poverty line. If the working poor are doing better than the nonworking poor, which is the case, it’s not so much because of their jobs per se, but because their employment status provides them access to desperately needed government help. This has caused growing inequality below the poverty line, with the working poor receiving much more social aid than the abandoned nonworking poor or the precariously employed, who are plunged into destitution.

[zipplewrath]

1. capitalism is failing

I've read that a few times, and while I think it is a bit of overstatement, or hyperbole, I think there is more truth there than capitalists want to acknowledge. The nature of capitalism involves winners and losers. The winners gain power and the losers move towards powerlessness. The winners tend to protect their positions, regardless of need or achievement. Ultimately, the nature of capitalism is that the winners will drive a society (inclusive and exclusive of a country) into the ground to defend their position. The moralists tend to claim that Rome collapsed because of depravity. That's not exactly true. It collapsed because economically, the ruling class refused to acknowledge that they were failing. They blamed it on everything except themselves right up until it all collapsed. Yes, that is a broad simplification. But the basic elements of it are both true, and demonstrable. The investment class new the collapse of
'29 was coming, but where in it right to the end hoping to get out the last dollar. 2008 was no different. Those that knew were focused on figuring out how to make the last buck, not stop it from happening. There have been academic studies, using experiments, where people were told that a collapse was coming, and roughly when it was coming. But they self defined winning as getting the last buck, not avoiding the collapse. Hoover famously said that capitalism was perfect, except that capitalists were too greedy.

In this country, basically a "family" needs to be making roughly $60 grand a year, with benefits. If they aren't, they're playing a risky game in which sooner or later, they'll be in a hole in which they cannot escape. Yes, it varies by region and circumstance. But $23k isn't close. In certain areas such as NYC it can be more like $110. Until we can figure out how families, or as they tend to call it "house holds" can be ensured of these kinds of incomes for doing work, capitalism will always have serious problems. The "winners" have to agree (willingly or otherwise) to "share" he fruits of their corporate or business structures the true fruits of their endeavors.

[qazplm135]

3. laissez-faire capitalism is failing

managed capitalism is working just fine in parts of Europe.

Folks call it socialism, but the reality is it's just managed capitalism, or capitalism with socialist flavoring.

[qazplm135]

2. it would but for two things

1. destruction of the minimum wage rising with productivity
2. destruction of the pension system

You look back to the 50s and 60s, and even a janitor could reasonably have a shot at both making enough money relatively speaking to have a decent life (get a home, give kids a chance at a better life, etc) and maybe a small pension that didn't lead to cat food cuisine in their old age. Not saying it was perfect, but it was feasible.

Now we have a minimum wage untethered to productivity for over a generation, and pensions are about gone.

[Recursion]

4. That was also based on a forced labor shortage, though. It only worked for white male HS graduates

I don't like the over glamorization of those days. Yes, a single high school educated white man could support a family, but a high school educated woman couldn't.

[procon]

5. Maybe that's why socialism is growing in popularity.

Low wage and unskilled workers will never achieve economic equality based on their work efforts alone. The government steps in to bridge the gap and sustain our society's given norms. As members of that society, we provide the necessities of living to those who will otherwise never have more than the bare minimums of existence, because we all benefit from their labors.

[BigmanPigman]

6. We need real wages and UNIONS!