America on $195 a Week

[babylonsister]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/01/america-195-week

America on $195 a Week

How the working poor get by. Barely.
—By Sasha Abramsky

January/February 2009 Issue


"I'll take a sandwich to work and that's about it," says Aubretia Edick, who is 58 and works in the pharmacy department of a Wal-Mart in Hudson, New York. "I drink a lot of tea. Once in a blue moon I'll go into Save-A-Lot and I'll get some meat. Eggs is kinda like a luxury kind of thing."

snip//

The fallout can be seen in breadlines across the country. Dozens of food-pantry workers I've interviewed for my upcoming book on hunger report a flood of working-poor clients. Feeding America (formerly America's Second Harvest), a nonprofit that supplies 63,000 pantries and once primarily served "the poorest of the poor," learned in 2006 that more than one-third of its beneficiaries come from working households. "We're seeing faces we've never seen before," says spokesman Ross Fraser. At a pantry in Gallup, New Mexico, visited back when gas prices were soaring, one 29-year-old Navajo woman told me how the grueling drive to her 7-Eleven job in the town of Cuba came to burn up nearly half of her $6.80-per-hour take. In the end, the math didn't make sense, so she quit. "I feed my three boys potatoes," she said. "We eat two meals a day—just breakfast and dinner. Usually oatmeal for breakfast, and in the evening, gravy potatoes with tortillas."

Edick's monthly take-home pay—about $800 at the time I visited—doesn't go far either. She lives in a tiny apartment with a broken stove and mostly empty fridge that barely works. Rent and utilities run about $450 a month; when it's cold outside, she often sets the thermostat to 50 degrees to lower her bill. Gas and car insurance cost another $160 or so, depending on prices at the pump. And then there are the doctor visits, covered only after a $1,000 deductible—plus medicines for a thyroid problem, chronic anxiety, and osteoporosis.

To balance the budget, Edick often skimps on food, some weeks spending little more than $10 on groceries, about one-quarter what the federal food stamp program calculates is needed for three "thrifty meals" a day. She patronizes the grimy discount stores whose prices run even lower than Wal-Mart's, and can tick off their notable sales going back for months. "I had some oranges," she recalls with a self-deprecating smile. "A couple of months ago, they had grapes on sale." And, "If it's less than three dollars for a package of six steaks, that looks like a good deal to me." (She tries not to think too hard about the quality of a 50-cent steak.) Her staples include PB&J, canned ham salad, soup: "I'll get chicken noodle or Campbell's Chunky. There's meat in there. You can pour it over noodles and put butter on it. It's like a delicacy."

In essence, the nation's biggest employers of unskilled labor often leave workers having to feed from the public trough. In 2004, a year in which Wal-Mart reported $9.1 billion in profits, the retailer's California employees collected $86 million in public assistance, according to researchers at the University of California-Berkeley. Other studies have revealed widespread use of publicly funded health care by Wal-Mart employees in numerous states. In 2004, Democratic staffers of the House education and workforce committee calculated that each 200-employee Wal-Mart store costs taxpayers an average of more than $400,000 a year, based on entitlements ranging from energy-assistance grants to Medicaid to food stamps to WIC—the federal program that provides food to low-income women with children.

For her part, Edick, unlike many Americans, hasn't resorted to handouts. (An estimated 28 million people were on food stamps as of last April, up from 17 million in 2000.) "There's times I'm hungry, and I'll look in the refrigerator for something—I'll find a snack pudding. Some leftover rice," Edick says softly. "I'm not starving or anything like that."


Sasha Abramsky's new book, Breadline USA, is due out in May from PoliPoint Press.

[Mist]

1. This shows just how expensive "cheap" labor is for all of us. nt

[bulloney]

7. It also shows the hidden cost of a Wal Mart in your community.

Our county commissioners raved at the sales tax receipts they were getting after a Wal Mart located in the county, overlooking that several locally-owned retailers had gone out of business and the hidden cost of subsidizing the wages of Wal Mart employees through public assistance.

[Fridays Child]

9. Tell Washington to pass the Employee Free Choice Act!

Walmart is selling Americans the shovels to dig our own graves. But, until we wake up and realize it and take the matter into our own hands, taxpayers will just continue to underwrite their "always low prices."

Please tell Washington to pass the Employee Free Choice Act: http://www.freechoiceact.org/page/s/aflcio?source=aflcioweb

[yurbud]

14. instead of giving poor earned income credit, we should simply raise min wage to a living wage

and permanently index it.

[elocs]

2. I'd be one of the working poor except that I am not working.

I am fortunate that there is just me and that I can eat pretty good for $25 a week, but then I don't eat much meat at all, just salmon, tuna, chicken (I can get 10 pounds of legs and thighs for $7 and make meals with it that last me a week). Like much of the world, rice is at the foundation of many of my meals and I like rice. I do get fruit and veggies (I love broccoli and it currently is 69 cents a pound here). Eggs are such an inexpensive source of protein and here they may be 13 cents each for jumbos. I love peanut butter and pb&j. So it's not hard for me, but it has got to be tough to feed a family.

[ikojo]

3. The man who ran the cafeteria in the building next to where I

work was homeless. We didn't know about it until he was found dead in the cafeteria office. Seems he, a veteran, had been living there and died around Christmas time. He was just buried in a local veteran's cemetery a few weeks ago.

[PSPS]

4. Quit your whining! Obama's "stimulus" will give you an extra $2 a day!

You can get your pesky calories from a couple of extra candy bars. It's "hard work" maintaining all of those tax cuts and bailouts for the privileged billionaires among us. I mean, come on! Your cut of the "stimulus" will be the same as getting a whopping 37 cent per hour raise!

[SoCalNative]

5. Hey 37 cents an hour

is a bigger raise than most people will be getting this year from their employers.

[bulloney]

8. I remember Reagan's great tax cut of 1981. I think I took home an extra $4/month. BFD!

Even today, the RW gerbils in the news media and talk radio act like that was the single greatest economic act of the 20th Century, including the New Deal.

[babylonsister]

6. Just so I understand, please do share

what the previous president did to enrich this woman's world, when she started working at Wal-Mart in 2001 for $6,40/hour. Why is the state of our nation the problem of a president who has been in office a total of one month? Yes, he's trying to fix the existing problems, but I'm not going to blame him for creating them.

[PSPS]

11. Here's your answer

The "state of the nation" is, in fact, the "problem" of the president regardless of who it is or how long they've been in office. What is especially disappointing is that, right out of the gate, Obama decided to let the minority party, a mere radical rump of what it used to be, dictate the terms of the stimulus bill. And by doing so, he allowed it to be written in a way to almost insure its failure with its insane continuation of the long-discredited "trickle down" ideology of more tax cuts for the rich and keeping worthwhile spending below the level necessary to have a long-lasting positive effect.

[babylonsister]

13. You're delusional.

He didn't let the minority party dictate the terms of the stimulus bill. He got the majority of what he wanted in it.

And I see you are set up for this to fail right from the get-go without giving anyone else their share of the blame. Like the current minority party. Hey, you sort of sound like the minority party!

[tomreedtoon]

10. Good article, but there is no solution.

Wal-Mart unionizes and the company raises prices. Sales drop and Wal-Mart fires workers. Wal-Mart becomes more and more like K-Mart. And the company immediately blames labor laws in their public statements, and say that labor brings "high prices."

How do you counter corporate buccaneers like Wal-Mart? I haven't heard a good solution yet that didn't involve rioting and killing everybody in Wal-Mart management. (Which, by the way, I think is an enjoyable solution but not very practical.)

[diane in sf]

12. There is plenty of room to take pay hikes out of the Waltons' profits for fair wages

before you even touch prices on goods.

[yurbud]

15. convert corporations to co-ops, so they are less likely to screw workers

Workers will want the company to be profitable, but not at the expense of workers making a living. That structure is more stable than corporations.

[defendandprotect]

16. When is DU-Call-In-Day for the POOR and HOMELESS . . . ?????

Can we all get together on one day and call in to President and Congress on this?

When did we last hear Democrats mention HOMELESS....???

[GeorgeGist]

17. Median global per capita income is ...

$16.35/ wk.