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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) by mr_mischief on Wednesday April 15 2015, @10:07PM
Thankfully one of the many advantages to automation is lower cost. Regardless of what some people think, businesses do compete on price and lower cost does result in some amount of lower prices. Lower prices mean lower cost of living, so less money goes further.
One example of a good paying job that tends to be quite manual is home construction. With technology threatening to automate away many of these well-paying jobs, housing can theoretically actually be much less expensive. Basically the automation pulls up the bottom some but drops more people toward the bottom at the same time. Meanwhile, the people producing the 3D printing systems (or whatever form of automation is used) and fielding them save money on labor per unit. They take somewhat less per unit but can build many more units. They get richer, their former workers get poorer, but housing becomes more affordable overall.
One way to prevent so many people falling through these cracks is to spread the ownership of the producers of goods. That doesn't necessarily mean socialism or even permanent welfare. It can mean getting substantial numbers of shares sold to the workers. It can mean working for a worker-owned cooperative type of company that replaces your job income with windfall profits from the automation. It can mean temporary government or charitable assistance during retraining. Unfortunately it's difficult to get substantial portions of ownership into the hands of people already struggling to make rent.
It would be nice to live in a post-scarcity economy. Getting there smoothly seems to be unlikely, though. Perhaps we can lessen the blows.