Working Poverty

Recently I passed by one of our first of probably many Shopper's Row pan handlers of the summer season. A person behind me shouted at him "get a job" to which the man replied "I have a job". I stopped and went back and spoke with him and learned that he has a full time job working for minimum wage. His son required medicine that he could not afford given his limited income, and of course, no medical benefits. He was collecting spare change so his son could be well. In collecting spare change, he was viewed by some as lazy, blameworthy, and invisible when in fact he was a hard working desperate father willing to humiliate himself to take care of his child.
We all disagree endlessly about why the poor are poor and what, if anything, the rest of us should do about it. Many blame poor people themselves, stressing mistakes or bad character, while others point to what they consider an unjust society. And a lot of us can go either way, case by case.
In almost every case, within just a few minutes of conversation, you can identify the mistakes that led to a poor person's troubles: drug or alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, criminal trouble, failure in school. lack of access to higher education, undiagnosed or untreated learning disabilities, untreated mental illness, or bad luck. I've also noticed that the people who pay the biggest price for such mistakes, who wind up as poor adults, are the ones who lacked a cushion to recover from their poor choices - that is, those who grew up poor, those who got lost in the education or health care system, and those who lack a family support system.
It is perhaps easiest to comprehend a day in a life of someone working full-time for a full year and living in minimum wage poverty by converting a typical working poverty income into a daily dollar amount.
And contrary to public opinion, most minimum wage earners are not young people living at home.
For an average working poor Campbell River family consisting of two adults and two children where one parent earns eight dollars an hour (and the other stays home to avoid $18.00 - $30.00 per day child care costs) take home pay is about twelve hundred dollars a month.
It costs about $653 a month to feed a family of four. This does not include non food items.
It costs about $934 for a 3 bedroom rental including rent utilties and phone.
In addition to food and shelter, families need to pay for personal care items, household needs, furniture, telephone, transportation, school supplies, school field trips, health care and so on. There is no money for entertainment, recreation, reading materials, insurance, or charitable or religious donations and in some cases, prescription medications or even over the counter medications.
It easy to understand why poor families must cut into their budget for essentials why they must rent substandard housing; why they move often in attempts to save rent; why they purchase poor-quality food with little freshness or variety; why they must supplement their food budget with trips to food banks; soup kitchens, why they own a minimum selection of mainly used clothing and why they have to panhandle for spare change.
For the poor family of four, living on $10.00 per person per day is not an exercise in the imagination. It is reality, day after day and with no relief in sight.
And here is where the cycle repeats itself. Children who grow up in low-income families stand out in a variety of ways from their better-off peers. They are less healthy, have less access to skill-building activities, have more destructive habits and behaviours, live more stressful lives and are subject to more humiliation. In short, they have less stable and less secure existences and as a result are likely to be less secure as adults.
Poor children stand out even at public schools. It is not surprising, therefore, that the school drop-out rate of poor children is twice the rate of children who are not poor. Surely, as a fundamental principle of fairness, children's opportunities in life should not depend on the economic circumstances of their parents or the stigma that society puts on them for being seen as poor.
We need to insist that minumum wages be raised to a decent level so "getting a job" actually results in keeping parents home with their children rather than out on street corners begging for change.