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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: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 16 2015, @10:01AM
if employees can't earn enough at a "full-time job" to support a family, then they aren't being paid enough
Or they aren't doing enough to justify the pay they want. There's that possibility too.
people aren't effective much beyond forty hours per week.
For a particular, very imaginary job. For real jobs, forty hours can be too little or too much. For math researchers, 40 hours a week tends to be too much except for a few, particularly sturdy workhorses. For janitors, they can remain "functional" far beyond forty hours. And various workaholics have shown that 80-100 hours per week can be done by some people for years at a time. Another thing to remember here is that not everyone is equally competent, skilled, and ambitious. A really good worker who does 80 hours a week may not, even with the alleged reduced effectiveness of working that much extra, be replaceable by someone else working that additional 40 hours per week. There is no one-size-fits-all labor policy for this.
Another thing to note here is that this is a hypothetical "country's perspective". It's not reality. So we don't have, for example, a legal requirement that people are gainfully employed at or above a living wage. We just have the far weaker condition that if those people are employed legally, then their rate of pay and some other conditions are satisfied. It's quite easy, for example, for people to be unemployed or underemployed as reality has shown us. It's also quite easy for people to be employed illegally. If legal employment gets too onerous for the employer, then that becomes a viable alternative - in addition to "off shoring" or automating jobs.
There's also some costs per employee to consider here. For example, the US "employer mandate" for health insurance creates (in businesses with 50 or more full time people) a per head cost that provides incentives for increasing the number of hours worked per week per person (alternately, the employer could keep full time employment under 50 people, which is the primary concern for worrying that the US will increase part time underemployment). That ends up being, last I calculated at least a minimum $1 per hour cost per additional employee working exactly the current ideal 2000 hours per year. Work them more than 2000 hours in a year and the cost per hour drops (for the alternative, work them less than roughly 1500 hours in a year with no health care benefits so that you business remains under 50 full time employees, and the per hour cost drops to $0 per hour).
In summary, I see a lot of these policies as being based on delusion. Sure, we'd love everyone to work as little as possible and still get the gains of a technologically advanced society combined with shiny, happy people. But in practice, those policies don't work and create a lot of suffering.