SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Whirlpool (the appliance manufacturer) donated washers and driers to schools and increased attendance.
According to Whirlpool's research, one in five school children report difficulty finding clean clothes to wear to school. It turns out that offering free in-school laundry services to kids with attendance problems increases their attendance.
When compared to factors like economic opportunity, unemployment, and institutional racism, laundry seems pretty inconsequential in the fight to keep kids in school. But while that might be the case for their parents, for a ten-year-old who already has the odds stacked against them, having nothing clean to wear to school could be the deciding factor in whether or not they want to face their classmates that day.
I can remember my grandmother telling me that she thought lunches in schools were a wonderful innovation, because they didn't have anything like that when she was a girl, and many children couldn't come because they wouldn't have lunch. I'm sure back then nobody thought of lunch as something school should provide. Now apparently laundry is the next big innovation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18 2016, @05:01AM
Hey, thought experiment!
Instead of those people working crap jobs for crap wages, we smash the system! Now they work no jobs for no wages, and yippee, we're not providing a subsidy for Walmart! No, sir, we're virtuously paying the good folks just what they should have because they're flat broke and the alternative is them stealing our shit and killing us. That's the ticket!
Or do you really think a minimum wage of *insert big number here* will suddenly make it all sweet? No, the Waltons of this world will do less business, hire fewer people, and not be displaced by an army of Mom-and-Pops because they will still undercut the small players by a huge percentage. They'll just have higher rates of automation, lower headcount, higher salaries but quite likely lower total payroll.
If you want to break the pattern, you need to break up the big boys, not try to get them to play by a set of rules that is something they will always work around. Unions won't even do it because the unions are themselves monolithic.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 18 2016, @05:08AM
You're making a few unwarranted assumptions as to how I'd go about this... :)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...