Hard-Earned Money
And whose money is harder earned than the working poor?
Whenever I go past PBS.org I look around for other interesting stuff. Today's find is an interview with David Shipler about his book, "The Working Poor: Invisible in America."
DAVID SHIPLER: I wanted to get inside people's personal lives as well as I could, so that I could see from their perspective the forces that were leaving them in a position where they were working and yet were poor or near poverty. So I spent a lot of time with people and let them talk. And a lot of these folks revealed a tremendous amount about themselves and about their backgrounds. And I watched them go through trials.
I saw a guy who washes cars, but doesn't own one; a woman who's an assistant teacher, but doesn't have the money to send her own children to the daycare center where she works; another woman who was working in the back room of a bank filing canceled checks, but had $2.02 in her own account; migrant workers in North Carolina who harvest the sweet potatoes in time for Thanksgiving and the Christmas trees in time for Christmas; garment workers in L.A... and people that all of us encounter personally also every day, in Wal-mart, in Burger King and so forth.
RAY SUAREZ: They were people who, as you kept reminding us, work hard, work a lot, and never seem to get ahead. Why?
DAVID SHIPLER: Well, they're paid very low wages. They work long hours if they can get the long hours. Not all of them are able to find work that will get them the 40 hours or more a week. They have expenses because a lot of them support families. Half the poor families in America are headed by single women, so there right there you have an economic problem, because if you have one wage earner at seven or eight dollars an hour, you're not making enough to support you very well and lift you above the poverty line. And the other thing is that these folks, a lot of them were struggling hard to get above the poverty line, and the federal poverty line is pretty low, it's artificially low.
RAY SUAREZ: Remind us what it is.
DAVID SHIPLER: Well, for a family with three children and one adult, it's $18,725 a year. And what these folks are finding, and many of them have come off welfare and they're working, is that crossing the poverty line is not like showing a passport and crossing a border. It's like going across a very long mine field, and if you make a misstep, you're dead. And that happens to a lot of folks. They make some mistakes and they've had it.
RAY SUAREZ: Quietly and without a lot of fanfare, I should say, you slip in two notions that are pretty challenging to the conventional economic wisdom of America: One, that this kind of low-wage work makes life comfortable, easy, and affordable for middle class and upper middle class Americans and that a lot of this work comes in the form of a subsidy to employers because people make up the gaps in their paycheck by depending on various forms of government support.
DAVID SHIPLER: That's right. There are, of course... folks who are in this position make the living standards for the more affluent Americans rather high. We can afford a lot of things that we could probably not afford if people were paid a living wage, a much higher wage. In addition, as you point out, there are government programs that in effect subsidize the low wages.
