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posted by janrinok on Wednesday August 17 2016, @08:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the study-with-suds dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18 2016, @01:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18 2016, @01:02PM (#389567)

    > By using the phrase "starvation wages" you ignore the fact that huge chunks of entry-level workers' paychecks are stolen via the threat of force by governments,

    You have a remarkably exaggerated definition of "huge."

    The Tax Policy Center estimates that, on average in 2015, households in the lowest income quintile (the bottom fifth) will owe federal taxes equal to 3.6 percent of their incomes, much lower than the average 19.8 percent tax rate for all households.
    http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-does-federal-tax-system-affect-low-income-households [taxpolicycenter.org]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @04:35AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @04:35AM (#389923)

    You have a remarkably exaggerated definition of "huge."

    When I last slung boxes off trucks for MegaCorpo, my fifty-cent-above-min-wage paycheck had a hell of a lot more missing from it than 3.6%. You're "forgetting" about all the other hands in others' pockets, such as:

    - FICA (6.2%)
    - medicare (1.45%)
    - states' fingers (from 0%-insane% for just "income")
    - "employer pays" items, which is a lie as those are taken directly off the top of pay offers made to employees: the employee ALWAYS pays these (6.2% + 1.45%)

    Best-case scenario, using your number of 3.6% for "federal taxes", the working schmucks are still robbed of 18.9% of their production.

    So I was correct the first time. One fifth of my production as a min-wage working stiff was stolen from me via threat of force, and supporters of that paradigm are the problem!