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from the suppresion-of-the-proletariat dept.
Analysis of a study (PDF) carried by UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education shows that isn't the poor people won't work but the work they do can't sustain them. As a blog on WaPo puts it:
We often make assumptions about people on public assistance, about the woman in the checkout line with an EBT card, or the family who lives in public housing. [...] We assume, at our most skeptical, that poor people need help above all because they haven't tried to help themselves — they haven't bothered to find work.
The reality, though, is that a tremendous share of people who rely on government programs designed for the poor in fact work — they just don't make enough at it to cover their basic living expenses. According to the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, 73 percent of people who benefit from major public assistance programs in the U.S. live in a working family where at least one adult earns the household some money.
This picture casts the culprit in a different light: Taxpayers are spending a lot of money subsidizing not people who won't work, but industries that don't pay their workers a living wage. Through these four programs alone [food stamps, Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, income supports through welfare], federal and state governments spend about $150 billion a year aiding working families, according to the analysis (the authors define people who are working here as those who worked at least 10 hours a week, at least half the year).
The workers relying the most on social programs: Fast Food (52%), Home Care (48%), Child Care (46%) and Part-time college students (25%).
(Score: 2, Insightful) by t-3 on Wednesday April 15 2015, @06:23PM
This is a very naive statement. Nobody wants to pay the costs that come with having human workers, not even the workers themselves, which is why there are a million tricks to extend the probationary period before giving benefits is required, why so many people work 90-180 days then get fired before benefits kick in, why so many people can't get a full time that pays enough to support a family. Doing your best to guarantee the survival of self and family, even at the expense of others, is not sociopathic. If something is sociopathic about that, it's the system that forces people to act like this, not the people themselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @06:29AM
And how, exactly, is one's survival at stake when the company they own earns billions in profit every year? Everything you describe is sociopathic penny-pinching, not poor folks trying to ensure survival; the poor folks trying to survive are the ones being fucked by not getting paid a living wage and being cheated out of benefits.