Posted on 12/03/2012 8:44:15 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
In the wake of strikes by Walmart workers last week and fast food workers in New York City this past Thursday, the issue of low-wage work is slowly becoming more prominent. This is a timely, important and essential conversation.
Retail's Hidden Potential, a recent Demos' report about the possibility of lifting 1.5 million retail workers and their families out of poverty, provides hard evidence about the impact of low-wage work on the economy. Now a new study by researchers at Boston College and the University of Massachusetts shows the impact of parents' low-wage jobs on their children.
Analyzing over 100 different data sources, the new study, How Youth Are Put At Risk by Parents' Low-Wage Jobs, estimates that nearly 16 million U.S. families are headed by parents working low-wage jobs and that 1 in 6 adolescents alone live in such households.
Figures from the National Center for Children in Poverty corroborate this, showing that 44 percent of U.S. children under 18 live in low-income households. These numbers may be alarming enough, but the impact of low-wage work on family life and on healthy child development is even more astounding.
A Downward Spiral
The Boston College and UMass study shows that parents earning low wages often cannot meet essential expenses, let alone pay for after-school programs, enrichment activities, or services to support the basic health and well-being of their children. It also finds that, since low-wage jobs often have inflexible schedules, parents working in low-wage jobs are often denied time with their children and therefore miss critical opportunities to encourage and support them.
These harsh realities of low-wage life have important short and long-term consequences...
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Obviously the problem is that we need more unions and national oversight on those evil underpaying bosses.
Fortunately the O-messiah is there to help.
Then let’s just get rid of all those jobs!
Ohhh yeah....this administration is already in process (by support or mandate) to do just that.
(Think Twinkies...or the oyster business in CA.)
The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 was in part a result of a series of incidents in which non-union black construction labor enabled various contractors from the South to underbid Northern contractors who used white, unionized construction labor.
The Davis-Bacon Act required that "prevailing wages" be paid on government construction projects – "prevailing wages" almost always meaning in practice union wages. Since blacks were kept out of construction unions then, and for decades thereafter, many black construction workers lost their jobs.
From Race and Economics, by Thomas Sowell
You get to the point finally, where complete morons walk into the work place with zero skill, zero incentive, zero work ethic and call themselves ‘employed’.
EVEN AT THAT... they don't grasp the concept of showing up at the same place-EVERY DAY and AT THE SAME TIME and giving their employer 8 hours.
They grumble and gripe about ‘work’ which hardly qualifies as labor in even the broadest sense of the word, and they don't have the sense to appreciate their own luck at BEING employed or making the most of it! They hate the boss and can only think of ways to get out of their responsibilities and ways to get excused from work.
They don't save, they don't invest in themselves (example: night school, etc,), they don't get an additional part-time job to increase their income, they don't economize in their lifestyle, etc.
IDIOTS!!! (I know what you are going to say so I'll qualify all this: I used to have a part time job with a group of young people who were working the job as their only income. They had NO interest in doing a good job, getting ahead, improving on their skills, working overtime, were NEVER on time, NEVER worked a complete pay cycle without missing for one reason or another, lied and stole from the employer... etc. THESE are the minimum wage losers I am talking about.)
But here we have the highest grossing WalMart in the lower 48, the workers are getting OT, and some are getting housing (up to $16/hr for night stockers). The workers hustle here, they're helpful, and generally are courteous, too, and I haven't heard any complaints from the hired help, some of whom I know personally.
“16 million U.S. families are headed by parents working low-wage jobs and that 1 in 6 adolescents alone live in such households”
single mom’s, encouraged by Liberal media and Liberal entertainment to go for sexual intercourse before marriage, in or right out of high-school, starting parenthood by themselves with low or no skills and now working jobs never intended (at any time in U.S. history) to be the jobs of a pirmary head of household breadwinner
now it is again Liberal interests blaming a scapegoat - the jobs, for a mess they helped create
you can even be an atheist and understand that motherhood before marriage is a recipe for financial disaster
a benevolent dictator would confiscate all the bank accounts of all the Liberal non-profit outfits and escrow the money to go directly to helping the foolish young moms the Liberals helped to their foolishness
The rational way to raise real wages is to raise the productivity of labor. The way to raise the productivity of labor is to increase the supply of capital goods. The way to increase the supply of capital goods is to increase savings and investment, which helps to increase productive expenditure, which helps to increase the demand for capital goods, which increases the production of capital goods. Savings are increased by lower tax rates and higher interest rates.
The way to create better jobs is to promote economic progress. Economic progress is promoted by increasing capital accumulation, technological advances, a rational culture and a free society, private property rights, and capital intensification. Capital accumulation and capital intensification are increased by increased saving and investment.
Government interventionism has a negative effect on all of the above.
All the welfare kids should be Einsteins under this theory. ;-)
Full court press is on to organize these people into unions and implement a “living wage”. As some Democrap POTUS once said that’ll keep ‘em voting D till the end of time.
Lower the poverty level and stop handing out so much to lazy people. Problem solved.
I have the solution! Make the minimum wage a million buck an hour, and we’ll all be rich! WOOHOO!!!
Entry level jobs are low wage jobs. Duh.
They don’t even have to be young to have this mentality. My sister worked the floor in retail at a big regional chain. There was a call for people to move into management training. My sister took the training and has been in retail management ever since.
Every other salesperson around her decided to stay on the floor. I am talking FT people with 5+ years of service, some with 10. They didn’t want the additional responsibility, they liked being able to call in ‘sick’ when they wanted to, etc. It was just too much trouble to be management when they could clock in and clock out for their hourly wage.
If the government mandates a higher wage for EVERYBODY!!!!, then EVERYTHING!!! will be more expensive. Thus the person with the mandated higher wage (assuming they don’t lose their job in the transition) will simply have a higher cost of living - thus - no benefit derived.
The government cannot INVENT value where it does not exist.
did not happen. There were bussed in non-workers picketing and a few workers joined ON THEIR TIME OFF.
That is not "on strike"
Not any more. This has been going on for multiple generations. A lot of kids were raised by parents who thought this same way because the same beliefs were forced into their skulls by media-schools.
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