Pros And Cons Of Working Poor

WORKING POOR

The economic climate may not look very viable with the historical decline of the union’s position in the labor market. The lack of a survivable wage as well as no guarantee on whether or not an occupation is stable enough to accumulate wealth may have its worst repercussions on the working poor. According to the University of California’s Center for Poverty Research, the working poor can roughly be defined as those who spent 27 weeks or more in a year “in the labor force” either working or looking for work but whose incomes fall below the poverty level; those who are employed are paid very little compensation to the point where they are living from paycheck to paycheck in order to make ends meet (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

The first major topic that should be tackled may be the perception of the working poor. The authors mentioned from the beginning of their article that most research being collected on people who live in poverty mainly discuss joblessness rather than those who work. This occurrence may let people believe that majority of those in poverty do not work when in fact, the opposite is true; between 1974 and 2004, the nonworking poor consisted of on average 3.4 percent of the total population, while the working poor was over triple that amount with 10.4 percent on average (Brady, Baker, and Finnigan 2013:873). The consensus between Brady et al. suggested that unionization is the most viable option for the working poor to improve upon their lives. For the working poor to potentially see their economic abilities expanding, they should “bond together [with the working class], form organizations, and politically mobilize in elections and workplaces” (Brady et al. 2013:875). United together, the working poor can fight not only for their right for more income equality and stability, but for the rights of those who are not in a union; Western and Rosenfeld (2011) claim that the general discussion for the power of the laborer will influence the policy and rules that govern how companies treat its

The financial power of the elite class and the United States as a whole is only as strong as its weakest links, that being the lower and working class and their high productivity distinction. Measures must take place in order to prevent income inequality from growing any more cancerous. In agreement with many of the authors discussed earlier, it is imperative for labor unions to be revived back into a stronger, impregnable institution that can protect the interests of union and nonunion workers alike in its negotiations with the capitalists. To strengthen the cooperativeness between the laborers, laws like the right-to-work laws should be abolished to remove the restraints that hold unions down in favor for free-bargaining opportunities and technology should be used to empower the workers, not to harm their livelihoods. Statutes pertaining to taxes should be heavily revamped to where the wealthy should pay closer to the same rates that were being paid from the post-World War II era to the 1970s. With these actions, the amount of Americans who work extraordinarily hard with no light at the end of the tunnel will likely decrease, the income gap between the haves and have-nots will shrink, and the United States can claim to have their abundant wealth and be proud of