It's not OUR fault you can't survive on the salary.
4-Hour Trek Across New York for 4 Hours of Work, and $28
By JOSEPH BERGER
…Sure, there are suburban commuters from, say, Dutchess County or the Poconos who endure four-hour commuting, but usually they are drawn by Wall Street jobs with large bonuses or less glamorous blue collar jobs with good wages and benefits. Still, some workers in all corners of the city are willing to travel breathtaking distances — sometimes for as many hours as they work — for few dollars and virtually no benefits. They do this because whatever small amount they make is essential.
Ms. Museitef commutes four hours each workday to work just four hours at $7 an hour.
More than 18,000 household workers — nannies, cleaners, home health aides — endure daily trips of 90 minutes or more for jobs paying less than $25,000 a year, according to an analysis of 2000 Census data. Most are immigrant women from the West Indies and South America and elsewhere. (Illegal immigrants, leery of government officials, are often not counted.) These are workers who may travel from eastern Queens across the city to New Jersey, or even from New Jersey through Manhattan and the Bronx to Westchester County, almost always by several trains and buses.
Sociologists say that these workers often have no choice, because they live in the city's poorer precincts while the jobs they need are scattered around the region. In the 1950's, unskilled immigrants could rely on manufacturing jobs clustered in a central place like the Garment District, said Daniel Cornfield, a sociologist at Vanderbilt University who specializes in labor. But manufacturing jobs have since evaporated while much of the low-wage job growth has been in areas like household work.
"A service industry like home health care is decentralized because it's in people's homes," Professor Cornfield said.
Posted by P6 at May 6, 2004 08:42 AM
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Comments
Welcome to the It's a Big Idea- this NWO! Bunch a fascist, insane global war contract machine; bohemian asteroid orifices. Arrest them, try them, and carry out sentence-- Now.
Posted by Iceblink at May 10, 2004 04:57 PM