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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.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Thursday August 18 2016, @12:51AM
Many western countries (not all) have higher minimum wages and lower unemployment than the US. Proof that higher wages do not directly translate to higher unemployment.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Thursday August 18 2016, @02:26AM
Sheesh.
Again, differentiate between actual market wages and state enforced minimum wages. Totally different things.
When you impose a minimum wage, this has only two possible outcomes. If it's low enough in relation to market wages, it has little to no effect at all. If it's high enough to have an effect, it produces unemployment, and raises the barrier to entry in the labor market, which helps to institutionalize unemployment.
To put it another way, you think you're helping Joe entry level worker with no job skills or experience trying to gets started. His pay is pitiful and they should really be forced to pay him more!
But the minimum wage law is unlikely to result in him getting a raise, and much more likely to result in him being let go, his position will either be automated or the work will be given to higher paid employees with other skills, and he'll be unemployed.
Plus his little brother who's going to need a job next summer? Yeah, good luck with that.
See you can't just legislate good outcomes and expect it to work like magic. Politics is a tool, a very particular form of tool. The government can only give with one hand by taking with the other. This is why the founders wrote of it as like fire, a dangerous servant and a fearful master, and wrote a constitution of limited powers to chain it down.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday August 18 2016, @04:05AM
Another possibility is that some of the rich don't increase their wealth quite as fast. I understand one of the largest employers and the largest low wage employer in the USA is Walmart, a business owned by one of the richest families in the USA and a business that depends on welfare to make up the shortfall in their wages. Would you really feel bad if they had to pay a living wage, their employees got of welfare and your taxes went down while their wealth increase slowed.
As for the small businesses, they'll have to raise their prices instead of crying to the government, a $1 cup of coffee is not a right.
Where I live, the minimum wage is the lowest in the country while the cost of living is the highest, at least for a densely populated area. The small businesses don't raise wages, they cry to the government for subsidies or the right to bring in foreign workers who don't know what they're getting into and get royally screwed trying to pay of the debt they had to take on to get the job.