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
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
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