Boston College sociology professor
Lisa Dodson does research on poverty, public policy, and low-income work and family life. Recently her research took a different turn, as she discovered through interviews with U.S. managers in charge of low-income workers that some of them feel "(a) sense of unfairness (...) as a supervisor, making enough to live comfortably while overseeing workers who couldn’t feed their families on the money they earned. That inequality, he told her, tainted his job, making him feel complicit in an unfair system that paid hard workers too little to cover basic needs." Professor Dobson talks about this phenomenon, and how it plays out in that some managers undermine the system, in interviews
in the Boston Globe and
on public radio.
[more inside]
posted by Harald74
on Mar 2, 2010 -
35 comments
Maid for a Month. On February 1, Ontario raised its minimum wage from $7.45 to $7.75 per hour. Well-known Toronto
Globe and Mail writer Jan Wong: "I thought the best way to tell the story of that 30-cent raise was to work — and live — at the bottom of the food chain. I would find a low-paying job, a low-rent apartment and, single-mom-like, take
my boys with me for the month and see how we survived."
posted by russilwvong
on May 1, 2006 -
151 comments
What is a "fair wage" for contractors working in Iraq? Halliburton subsidiary KBR pays subcontracted employees far more than they could earn at home, in exchange for living far from friends and family in a dangerous work environment. KBR insists their contractors adhere to all local labor laws in the country where they operate. But when that country doesn't yet have an effective or legitimate government of its own, and the workers are brought from a country with a
68% poverty rate, is that enough?
posted by justkevin
on Dec 2, 2005 -
41 comments
An
exchange between James Fallows and Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
[L]et me explain that your book is the account of three month-long episodes of attempting to live entirely on earnings from $7- or $8-per-hour jobs. You show up in low-wage cities and try to get on your feet, like someone "graduating" from welfare to work. One of many intriguing aspects is the juggling of three challenges: landing a job (not that hard, in the "tight" economy of the late nineties); doing the job (sometimes quite hard, as you make vivid); and finding a place to live (nearly impossible, for reasons we will get to).
The material questions are 1) Do we care? 2) What should we do about it? The author makes a couple of suggestion a couple of links into the article. What do you think?
link via
adam
posted by Sean Meade
on May 8, 2001 -
51 comments
