"One Reason the Poor Have So Little Political Clout"

[applegrove]

One Reason the Poor Have So Little Political Clout

by Emily Badger at the Atlantic Cities

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2014/01/one-reason-poor-have-so-little-political-clout/8068/

"SNIP...................................



But why would this be? And can we do anything to boost voting among this group? (This second question goes beyond eradicating voter suppression tactics.) Two sets of research come to mind. One study concluded that grueling commutes seemed to sap people of the will to care about politics, with the perverse consequence that low-income people who often have the worst commutes are further distanced from the civic arena where they might complain about it.

The other research, from outside the political science field, revealed how the everyday challenges of poverty tax the brain so much that poor people are left with less mental capacity to worry about things the rest of us think about with ease. So a stressed single mother forgets to pay a bill on time. A low-wage worker preoccupied by making his rent can devote little energy to succeeding at night school.

Researchers Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir never get into the implications of this for politics or democracy in their book about this work, Scarcity. But it seems entirely plausible that a poor parent who has to figure out how to produce dinner on $3 a day doesn't have the bandwidth leftover to weigh the pros and cons of Chris Christie.

This doesn't mean that low-income people as a group are uninterested in politics. Maybe the obstacle is not primarily about "interest," or even time, or access to a ride to the polling place. If we want to think about increasing turnout among voters whose voices typically go unheard, maybe we ought to think about what else is consuming their attention instead.





...................................SNIP"

[applegrove]

1. Another reason why the GOP may be trying hard to make more people overly taxed by

worry and stress by not helping the unemployed not become poor. Works for them, obviously.

[Benton D Struckcheon]

2. This isn't news to me.

Over the holidays I took a job at a big box retailer in their customer service dept. It was a revelation.
I was a computer programmer during my working career. I'm semi-retired now, and took this job as a way to make a little for the season and to get out of the house.
First of all, virtually everyone there worked that job and another one. So, the first thing you have to factor in is that the likelihood of working more than one job increases the lower a person's income is, for obvious reasons. That will eat into any time and energy that person has left over for anything else.
Second of all, part time work isn't, not anymore. I had two weeks of training during which I was given 15 hours each week. I thought, hmm, if this is all the hours I have to work, not bad. Unlike someone doing this out of sheer economic necessity, I wasn't looking for the max number of hours.
Then the third week I saw my schedule: 30 hours, spread over 5 days. There were a couple of "8 hour" days in there, but 8 hours at one of these places is 8 hours and your lunch break, which in this place was 45 minutes, because that was the minimum requirement of state law. Needless to say, they weren't going to give you more than the absolute bare minimum requirement. And of course it wasn't paid.
I quit after two months. It was grueling physical work laid on top of heavy mental work - customer service after all means you do everything, from ringing up customers to boxing/bagging up damaged goods to be discarded.
When I was young part time was 20 hours, full time was 40 hours. No one did this in between 30 hour nonsense. The 30 hours was of course the state limit for a person defined as part time. So they were working their part time people as much as they could before having to give out any real benefits.
My wife, who works in an office where a lot of the staff is hourly and part time, told me all of this is normal. I had no idea this is what it's like for hourly workers these days.
This is what we've come to after 40 years of constant chipping away at union power. If poor folks don't have the time or energy for thinking about anything else once they've done what they need to to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, well, that's nothing to be surprised about.

[applegrove]

3. The GOP is implying the poor are lazy, and not just too stressed out to think about

investing in the future. I think it is good that the facts are being flushed out. Less easy for the manipulators to make false generalizations about the poor if we go into detail.