Category Archives: Working poor

California Wage Increase

About being poor, Working poor

In the LA Times yesterday, I read a news article on how California is working towards approving the minimum wage increase to $15.00. For us in this class, this seems like great news considering we know that no one can survive just on the current minimum wage anymore. However, for business owners all over California this is serving as a huge problem. Moving the wage from $10.50 to $15.00 means that their prices need to go up and staff needs to be cut in order to continue paying staff members of their restaurants and businesses. This has been a repetitive cycle for many business owners who just cannot afford to pay their workers higher than they already are unless they have a higher demand for their business and raise their prices. But, the problem I see in this article is not what happens to those who lose their jobs from the wage increase, it is the fact that these owners have people already making $15.00 an hour and cannot afford to pay them even more. It is the lower class competing for higher wages and the same issues we have been seeing time and time again.

When you increase the minimum wage it gives better opportunity for those in the lower class to actually live in decent low-cost apartments, if they can find them, but this is temporary. It is temporary because when you increase wages, prices and demand increases almost in every other aspect of the economy too. If people are getting paid more, housing prices and food prices increase too making it essentially impossible for those in the lower class to make a proper lifestyle for themselves still! Not only are prices going to increase but, staff will be cut in many businesses and the hours of those who don’t get cut may decrease. If you cannot afford to lose your job, or in the case of many in this article, both of your jobs, this wage increase is cause for panic.

If the wage increase occurs and these businesses do make their cuts to employees, it will decrease the job opportunities even more. Hopefully the wage increase will not bring this much negative change with it as the people in this article are suspecting, but I guess we will find out.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-me-ln-minimum-wage-hikes-and-businesses-to-re-engineer-labor-force-some-say-20160327-story.html

Crime of Homelessness

About being poor, Causes of Poverty, Government programs, Homelessness, Portraits of Homeless, Working poor

It has been interesting to see that most people think that homeless people are in the situation they are in because they are lazy and/or have no work ethic. This being said, for my teaching project, I have been trying to find real stories of people who are trying their hardest to get out of their situation as well as break the societal cycle.

Yesterday, a social reform type blog posted an article that did just that.  Shanesha Taylor is a homeless mother of 2 that was offered an interview. Because she had no one to watch or care for he children, she had me wait in the car. When she was done with the interview, her life became much more difficult. She was then arrested and her children we taken to child protective services. Since the story did not explain why she was homeless in the first place, it still shines a bright light on the issue of single mothers and their poverty level.  The article says that about 1.6 million kids in America are considered homeless and that sets them up for immediate failure as it makes it much more difficult to rise out of it. After hearing this story, many people reached out to Shanesha and donated money for her to help regain her children’s custody. As this situation was not her choice, it shows that society is constructed by giving the unfair advantage to those who need it the most. Now Shanesha and many women in similar situations have to deal with systems that will cost even more money and time. It is sad to think that people get in trouble for being in a situation they have no control over.

http://socialistworker.org/2014/04/02/the-real-crime-is-homelessness

Internship Progress

Local organizations, Portraits of Homeless, Uncategorized, Working poor

Through my internship, I am volunteering at a religious organization that provides food boxes, emergency food boxes, nightly dinners, and chapel services. I was determined to figure out what the organization had to offer as I wanted to be as unbiased as possible for the entirety of the internship. Upon first going there, I was aware that I was going to be package food and distributing it to those in need. However, I was unaware that it was going to be so much more complicated than that.

The hostility of the current volunteers was somewhat off-putting, yet this was a concept I would come to understand later on. I met a man named Bob who was the only one who greeted me kindly. We put together food boxes and he asked me several questions about my purpose and what I hope to gain out of the internship. The next time I came, mostly everyone greeted me kindly as I had gained the trust of Bob. The dynamic between the volunteers seemed unbalanced. This lead me to ask Bob why he started volunteering at my internship site.

Bob went on and explained his troubled youth in Chicago, to his move out west to work for a bank. Bob had a tiff with drugs and drug usage which landed him in his current unemployed state. He is on welfare and due to the fact he is unemployed, he has to volunteer 150 hours a month to receive his aid. Because he spends so much time volunteering, he is unable to apply for jobs due to irregular “free time” and a lack of internet service. Bob has a nine year old daughter and a wife, who is also unemployed. This lead me to investigate what motivated other to volunteer at the site. The answer was that they were all on parole, probation, or actively going to drug court for their own separate reasons. More than half of the volunteers were using the services of the site itself, depending on their own weekly food box.

There are a few key takeaways I have had thus far. First, all homeless people are not the same. Some people come to pick up their food boxes in work uniforms and some arrive in tattered clothes, but have the same needs. Second, not all people who need help can receive it. There is a rigorous process with my internship site that makes it competitive to receive aid with the limited number of spots. Those who are able to consistently receive aid are viewed as “the lucky ones.”  Lastly, society perceives help and aid in interesting ways as our culture feels like a simple “handout” can lead someone to success. While having a meal would make someone more likely to complete activities since they have calories to get them moving, it actually accomplishes nothing. The construction of our societal model of help blurred by certain help being perceived as good when the reality of intentions does not match the desired result.

What Not To Buy: Dictating the Choices of Low Income Families

About being poor, Food stamps (SNAP), Government programs, Harrassment, Hunger, People, Poverty, Solutions to Hunger, Solutions to Poverty, Working poor

As the debate over Food Stamps receives media attention, once again conservatives, the gullible, and the ignorant do not understand what Food Stamps themselves provide. Whenever this government program is brought up, like welfare, conservative media enjoys reporting on instances of misuse and abuse of the system–except unlike welfare, people cannot purchase anything but FOOD with Food Stamps. Fox News analysts in particular report on instances of people using Food Stamps to buy movie tickets, toys, electronics, cigarettes, even tickets to Disneyland, and the simple truth is that none of these statements are true. Jon Stewart essentially equates this kind of “rumor reporting” to be no better than believing chain emails threatening bad luck if one doesn’t  continue the chain.Food Stamps can only provide those who receive them with food. However, as everyone knows, people need more than food to survive day to day, and from many comments I’ve read on tumblr regarding this debate, it often takes scrambling in order to make up money to pay for the inedible necessities. Thus, the prospect of cutting Food Stamps even further only hurts those who need this program in order to survive because it ruins an already strict budget.

The controversy about Food Stamps continues because some conservatives believe that the government should regulate what people should be purchasing. As Jon Stewart jokes, in his segment What Not To Buy: What Would Jesus Soil, poor people shouldn’t purchase junk food because that’s bad for their health, but they’re also looked down upon if they purchase higher quality luxury foods (they’re abusing the system, they don’t really aren’t poor if they can afford those foods). Thus, low income families are being ripped apart by the media with classism, thus perpetuating stereotypes and classist discourse about poverty.