How America Created a Low-Wage Work Swamp

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http://www.alternet.org/food/how-america-created-low-wage-work-swamp

2013 is the year many Americans discovered the crisis of the working poor. It turns out it’s also the crisis of the welfare poor. That’s tough for us: Americans notoriously hate welfare, unless it’s called something else and/or benefits us personally. We think it’s for slackers and moochers and people who won’t pull their weight.

So we’re not sure how to handle the fact that a quarter of people who have jobs today make so little money that they also receive some form of public assistance, or welfare – a proportion that’s much higher in some of the fastest growing sectors of the workforce. Or that 60 percent of able-bodied adult food-stamp recipients are employed.

Fully 52 percent of fast-food workers’ families receive public assistance – most of it coming from Medicaid, food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit — to the tune of $7 billion annually, according to new research from the University of California-Berkeley’s Labor Center and the University of Illinois.

McDonald’s workers alone receive $1.2 billion in public aid, the study found. This is an industry, by the way, that last year earned $7.44 billion in profits, paid their top execs $52.7 million and distributed $7.7 billion in dividends and stock buyback. Still, “public benefits receipt is the rule, rather than the exception, for this workforce,” the study concluded.

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1. kr. nt

[Triana]

2. Recommend! n/t

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3. Since when is the Earned Income Tax Credit "public assistance"?

Lumping it in with food stamps and Medicaid makes me very nervous. The EITC isn't something you "go on." You don't have to apply for it or prove that you qualify. It's just an automatic part of your tax calculation -- that in most cases simply balances out what would otherwise be a crushing burden of the regressive FICA tax on low-income earners.

I don't know why the universities that did the research decided to lump it in with the actual welfare figures -- maybe to emphasize the percent of fast-food workers getting poverty wages. But if this gives the right an opening to start calling the EITC an "entitlement" that needs to be slashed, that would be a very bad thing.