Working Poor

In our modern Capitalist society, it is assumed that the more work a person performs the better off they will be financially. This naturally leads to the assumption that poor people are simply too lazy to improve the quality of their lives. In her article, Marlene Kim states, “Schiller, for example, believes that the working poor are poor simply because they do not work enough hours. If they worked full-time year-round, he argues, they would lift themselves out of poverty” (Kim, 1998:65). We have a tendency to believe that if you are able-bodied, there is no excuse for not working full-time, and anyone who is in poverty is there by their own design. After watching the film Two American Families, and doing other follow-up research, I am inclined
to disagree with this notion. Both the Neumann and Stanley families work hard to escape the poverty cycle throughout the course of the documentary (from 1991-2013.) They start off fairly optimistic that they can someday escape the poverty, despite the setbacks they had experienced. Terry Neumann says in the beginning that “Our expectations were— I thought, you know, you find the man that you like and get married and have a family and get a house, a little white picket fence, you know, all those little fairy tale type things… Some of it came true. But some of it, as far as the bumpy roads, I didn't expect, either. You know, I knew they weren't going to be all peaches and cream, but you don't think of all the bad things when you're younger” (Casciato, Hughes, & Moyer, 2013). Many people strive for this ideal “American Dream.” However, it becomes difficult to achieve this dream with wages being just enough to survive, and adding the outsourcing of jobs to help companies to save money (making them less available to the average American worker.)
Bill Moyer says in the documentary that, “When [we] met the Neumanns in the early ‘90s, American manufacturers had already begun chasing cheap labor to non-union states and Mexico.
Of over 40,000 good-paying jobs lost from Milwaukee in the preceding decade, about 4,000 were from Briggs and Stratton. One of them was Tony Neumann’s” (Casciato, Hughes, & Moyer, 2013). This mass job loss devastated not only the Neumann family, but similarly overwhelmed families all over the city of Milwaukee. The loss of high-paying and stable jobs make it so that people are no longer able to readily save money, living paycheck to paycheck (and making things such as buying a house nothing more than a mere pipe dream.) In the article “The Working Poor: Lousy Jobs or Lazy Workers” Marlene Kim states that “the cause of poverty among those who work is more complex, and due to inadequate jobs that fail to provide full-year or full-time work or to jobs that pay wages that are too low. Bane and Ellwood, for example, argue that even if they worked more hours, the working poor would remain poor” (Kim, 1998:65). Countless families need multiple incomes to be able to afford day-to-day life. Oftentimes, this can only be accomplished through the employment of multiple parties. In You May Ask Yourself, Dalton Conley cites statistics from a 2013 Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Dual-income families are now the majority. Both the husband and wife were employed in 59 percent of married-couple families, just dad was
employed in another 31 percent, and 7 percent had just mom work” (Conley, 2011:550). Both of the families in Two American Families were dual-income, and even the Stanley children were contributing income as well with their lawn care service. However, despite all of their efforts, they were still unable to break their cycle of poverty.
Listed on the website for the United States Department of Labor, as of June 2009, $7.25 is the current federal minimum wage for any covered, non-exempt worker (“U.S.
Dept. of Labor”). This equals out to about $15,000 a year for a full-time minimum wage worker and is why it has often been referred to as a “starvation wage.” As of January 1, 2016 the minimum wage in Colorado was raised to $8.31, but still is not enough to support a family on (“Minimum Wage”). For a person who is trying to live off of a minimum wage salary, it can be difficult or even impossible to get out of poverty. There is a noticeable deficit between the amount of money that is earned, and the cost of living. In the article “Can 2 Parents, 2 Kids Live On Minimum Wage?” Fred Imbert states that data from both the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and a number of other sources, “that the average cost of living in the U.S., excluding discretionary spending, is more than $65,000 a year for a family with two adults and two children.” (Imbert, 2015). It is easy to see where this financial discrepancy would cause problems for a family, especially if both parents are working full-time (or even multiple jobs) for a minimum wage paycheck with very few
benefits.
According to R.L. Borosage and K.V. Heuval, “Twenty-five million Americans are in need of full-time work, wages are declining and one in six people lives in poverty, the highest level in fifty years” (Borosage & Heuvel, 2011:11). These numbers represent how dismal and prevalent poverty currently is in our society. Despite their desire to work and make a better life for themselves, the people who make up this statistic cannot seem to break free from the poverty cycle. The problem itself is not necessarily that these people are lazy, but that the jobs, pay, and benefits available to them are insufficient to maintain a way of life that is not considered “poor.”