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http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/17/news/economy/us-middle-class-basics-study/index.html
"Nearly 51 million households don't earn enough to afford a monthly budget that includes housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a cell phone, according to a study released Thursday by the United Way ALICE Project. That's 43% of households in the United States."
The figure includes the 16.1 million households living in poverty, as well as the 34.7 million families that the United Way has dubbed ALICE -- Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. This group makes less than what's needed "to survive in the modern economy."
"Despite seemingly positive economic signs, the ALICE data shows that financial hardship is still a pervasive problem," said Stephanie Hoopes, the project's director.
California, New Mexico and Hawaii have the largest share of struggling families, at 49% each. North Dakota has the lowest at 32%.
Many of these folks are the nation's child care workers, home health aides, office assistants and store clerks, who work low-paying jobs and have little savings, the study noted. Some 66% of jobs in the US pay less than $20 an hour.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @10:17AM (3 children)
I'll certainly agree with "various causes", but can't agree with this one:
> the boomer generation is the one that brought women full-scale into the work force.
In terms of bringing women into industry (factory work) in the USA, that goes back at least to WWII and "Rosie the Riveter" -- the parents and grandparents of the boomers. I'm a boomer (nearing retirement age now), my single-parent grandmother worked in WWII sewing parachute harnesses. While there may have been more stay-at-home moms in the 1950s, many had either worked themselves, or had mothers who worked in the war effort.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday May 21 2018, @11:08AM
You're talking short-term employment vs. a long-term career though. Filling in temporarily for guys who aren't there doesn't impact the economy nearly as much as doubling the workforce.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 21 2018, @02:12PM (1 child)
Sorry, but I've got to disagree with your comments about WW2.
My mother was typical of the Rosy the Riveter generation. She worked men's jobs, because there were no men to work those jobs. She wrote letters to her sweetheart in the Pacific, pretty regularly I guess. She was horrified to learn that her sweetheart had been wounded, and was in fact, a basket case in California. She waited for months, for him to be released from the Navy, so that he could come home. And, almost immediately, she quit her job to care for him. My mama's generation didn't "want" to do those men's jobs. They were forced by necessity to do them.
Please note that I said my mama was typical of her generation. There were exceptions, of course. Many women refused to weld, rivet, drive trucks, carry trusses, dig ditches, and all the other things that men "should" have been doing. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there were many other women who refused to go back to the kitchen, or the office, or wherever.
My whole point is, the boomer generation did indeed accept women in the workforce, in places where women were never accepted in the past. That was part and parcel with the "sexual revolution" of the 1960's, all wrapped up with feminism.
(Score: 1, Troll) by jmorris on Tuesday May 22 2018, @06:34AM
You are missing the point I think. After women had been actually doing those jobs for several years it was impossible to maintain the position that they couldn't do them. Everybody knew they COULD do them and too many were afraid to do the right thing and tell them "Yes, many of you can do these jobs but you shouldn't because it would be bad for civilization to take large numbers of mothers out of that more important job." Like the original women's rights movement, it was yet another "shit test" that our fathers and grandfathers failed.
The correct solution, the one that had held for centuries, was to accept that for various reasons a few women would seek work in (mostly) white collar positions and allow them to do so, but keep enough stigma to discourage it becoming widespread while celebrating motherhood. Then we should have quietly sent death squads around to the (((Commies))) in the mass media inculcating the message that working outside the home was more fulfilling than motherhood. But we didn't have the balls and now we live in the decaying ruins of a once great civilization.