Earning (and Trying to Live on) Minimum Wages in America Today, Part III

Don't like being unemployed? Get a job. Don't like minimum wage? Get a better job.

Things are getting better. Really? For whom?

Maybe my parents did a far better job of educating me of their depression-era young adulthood than I had come to realize until lately: of spare mealtimes--for supper each child getting only a slice of bread smeared with lard; of being told to quit school at sixteen, find work and help support the family (there were ten children in my father's family, eight in my mother's); of hoboes knocking on back doors asking for any small job they could do to offset their begging for a sandwich.

Oddly I took the stories in as a smidgeon but later linked them to romantic notions of colorful poverty (if there can be such a thing)--riding the rails, tales of the desperate Joads extricating themselves from dust of the prairies and hopefully west to California, the tenement occupants of Elmer Rice's Street Scene or poorly paid taxi drivers in Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty. What could be headier than popular-level economic debates with the neighborhood socialists and Marxists of the '30s?

History repeats but in a new way. Economic definitions do not let us call the Great Recession another Great Depression. But for the long term unemployed or those upper age rejects of once well salaried middle management who now struggle to find positions within 60% of their previous earnings is there really a difference? Peter Van Buren (whistle blower at the State Department and now mid-career scrambler) takes on some pertinent questions: 

    1. Who's Thomas Piketty? 

    2. Why don't poor people find better jobs? 

    3. Aren't there places all over the US experiencing economic rebirth?

    4. Get off the couch--look for work? 

    5. Get retrained? 

    6. Cut welfare and force unemployed into the work market?

    7. Shut off Food Stamps? 

    8. Raise the minimum wage and lose jobs? 

    9. Then what? 

And, as I said before, don't blame me. And now, don't blame Peter Van Buren either. Just messengers, remember?

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175851/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren%2C_a_rising_tide_lifts_all_yachts/