Broken Bootstraps: Falling Behind on full time work
This article is a reflection and study on the decreasing supply of full time work for the American worker. The article was produced by an organization called Alliance for a Just society. At the time of the publication of the article, the executive director was LeeAnn Hall. This group is comprised of subsidiary groups from states all across the Nation. In the two states that I will be reflecting on, the organizations are the Idaho Community Action Network, and the Montana organizing project. They are both community organizing based groups focusing on economic equality, racial equality and gender equality. This particular article was released in February of 2013 using primarily Job seeker …show more content…
One reason is that some of the largest corporations in the country are actively pursuing business models that create profit from these conditions. Wal-mart, which is the largest low income job provider in the country, employs the practice of only hiring workers part time so that they only pay them low wages and aren’t required to provide any health or retirement benefits. With the affordable care act, the solution to this problem was to fine companies who didn’t give health insurance to their full time workers but provided no protections for part time workers. This has lead the fast food industry to begin cutting employees hours to avoid paying any healthcare benefits. CEO composition is also at an all time high. The ratio between CEO and entry level workers has skyrocketed to at least 200 to 1 in 2011. When you compare these low-income jobs to the living wage there is a huge …show more content…
These are assuming that forty hours are worked a week. This is higher than the minimum wage in both of these states. In Idaho, the $7.25 minimum wage leaves workers only making half of what they need for a living wage. The same is true for workers in Montana. Now the federal government does have a safety net in place to help these workers but only those is the very worst poverty even meet federal poverty guidelines. For a single individual, the poverty line $10,890. This leaves every worker who makes more than $10,890 a year but less than $29,786 without any social safety net. It’s the same Montana workers making less than $28,987. This gap leads to rather staggering numbers of workers competing for living wage jobs. In Idaho and Montana for every living wage job there are eight workers competing for that job. For a single adult with two children living in either state that data skyrockets to thirty-two competitors in Idaho and forty-six competitors in Montana. To add insult to injury in these two states, during the economic crash that began in 2007, the state legislatures looked first to social safety net programs to find cost savings and begin highly draconian budget cuts. There was not a single business tax exemption that was even debated for
This article is a reflection and study on the decreasing supply of full time work for the American worker. The article was produced by an organization called Alliance for a Just society. At the time of the publication of the article, the executive director was LeeAnn Hall. This group is comprised of subsidiary groups from states all across the Nation. In the two states that I will be reflecting on, the organizations are the Idaho Community Action Network, and the Montana organizing project. They are both community organizing based groups focusing on economic equality, racial equality and gender equality. This particular article was released in February of 2013 using primarily Job seeker …show more content…
One reason is that some of the largest corporations in the country are actively pursuing business models that create profit from these conditions. Wal-mart, which is the largest low income job provider in the country, employs the practice of only hiring workers part time so that they only pay them low wages and aren’t required to provide any health or retirement benefits. With the affordable care act, the solution to this problem was to fine companies who didn’t give health insurance to their full time workers but provided no protections for part time workers. This has lead the fast food industry to begin cutting employees hours to avoid paying any healthcare benefits. CEO composition is also at an all time high. The ratio between CEO and entry level workers has skyrocketed to at least 200 to 1 in 2011. When you compare these low-income jobs to the living wage there is a huge …show more content…
These are assuming that forty hours are worked a week. This is higher than the minimum wage in both of these states. In Idaho, the $7.25 minimum wage leaves workers only making half of what they need for a living wage. The same is true for workers in Montana. Now the federal government does have a safety net in place to help these workers but only those is the very worst poverty even meet federal poverty guidelines. For a single individual, the poverty line $10,890. This leaves every worker who makes more than $10,890 a year but less than $29,786 without any social safety net. It’s the same Montana workers making less than $28,987. This gap leads to rather staggering numbers of workers competing for living wage jobs. In Idaho and Montana for every living wage job there are eight workers competing for that job. For a single adult with two children living in either state that data skyrockets to thirty-two competitors in Idaho and forty-six competitors in Montana. To add insult to injury in these two states, during the economic crash that began in 2007, the state legislatures looked first to social safety net programs to find cost savings and begin highly draconian budget cuts. There was not a single business tax exemption that was even debated for