Work and welfare: Two perspectives

We'll be comparing the readings for this week: from Lawrence Mead and Barbara Ehrenreich.

First, Mead:

• Most minimum wage workers are not poor
• Full-time work is generally sufficient to pull people out of poverty
• Trends in work are benign--younger workers and women want more flexibility
• Mead contends that the gap between whites and blacks doesn't close because of a divergence in work effort (he cites Robert Rector's research from the influential Heritage Foundation)
• With 'strenuous work effort,' blacks can earn on a par with whites

Ehrenreich:

• No job, no matter how lowly, is unskilled work. She was just an 'average' employee.
• And as for minimum wage and poverty reduction ....
• Work effort--Ehrenreich discusses 'rate-busting' and 'pacing' as survival skills . . .
• 'Moral economy' of workers. Budgeting energy is the only way to survive the work week
• dow wage workers have very little leverage in the workplace, or the labor market
• low-wage work is often unhealthy--physical ailments, repetitive motion injuries, etc. And sweatshops exist here in the US
• work vs economic survival: ability to work with ability to survive
• Survival skills: Here's the important stuff, in terms of what people need to know, and how they should understand some of the structural circumstances in which they find themselves:

  • knowing where and how to shop for food (how to cook), how to find housing, etc.
  • budgeting is critical--unforseens can break the budget, lead to debt, etc.
  • How to look for a job.
  • Economic, information literacy
  • Housing: the rich outcompete the poor for housing
    • Supply and demand issues
    • Government housing programs--fail low income households
    • Budgeting--big changes for households since the 1960s (Ehrenreich notes the changes in proportions of food and housing in the household budget)
    • Wages and salaries--Are at their lowest levels, when adjusted for inflation, in 30 years. Executive wages, however, have risen dramatically in last 20 years--several hundred percent
  • Others (e.g., from Shipler)?
    • Understanding the EITC
    • math literacy--loans, interest, probability (e.g., a loan to cover first/last month/security deposit)

  Ehrenreich says poverty is a state of emergency. Mead says that if people work full-time, it would be limited to the most difficult and chronic cases (the 'deserving' vs 'able-bodied').

Questions, critical thinkers??