Poverty nation: How America created a low-wage work swamp

[DonViejo]

For decades, both parties supplanted a push for higher wages with well-intended public aid. The result: calamity

JOAN WALSH

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.

full article:
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/15/poverty_nation_how_america_created_a_low_wage_work_swamp/

[LiberalEsto]

1. And let's not forget that "tipped" workers make only $2.13 an hour

and depend on tips from an ever-stingier clientele.

Restaurant servers are among the lowest-earning workers in the nation.

[Igel]

2. Yet dishwashers average about 12% less than food servers.

With servers making an average hourly income (as opposed to "wage&quot of over $10/hr, they're at or slightly above other minimum wage jobs. The 2011 numbers were just under $21k for the national average. Keeping in mind that some tips are cash and might not be reported, that number might be a bit higher.

Dishwashers are just at minimum wage, for the most part. Just under $18.5k for the national average in 2011.

[RBInMaine]

3. It was trickle down economics, shipping jobs overseas, and destroying unions that did it.