Living in America on $ 2 a day

CHICAGO — Nothing gives insight into the world of the working poor like having your child get his first job.

It’s one thing to be a 16- year- old picking up a few shifts with Mom and Dad available to drop him off and pick him up at whatever odd hours the pizza store scheduler deems necessary.

But it’s almost unimaginable to consider the plight of those attempting to put themselves through college or raise a family with a minimum- wage job.

The erratic work schedules, lack of paid sick time and infinite supply of eager applicants ready to replace you make entry- level work simply untenable for many.

This is the crux of the new book “$ 2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America” by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer.

After giving us a brief history of welfare in America, Edin and Shaefer explore the lives of a small handful of those who end up living on $ 2 of cash a day, not including food stamps and charitable help like homeless shelters and food pantries.

The authors’ thesis is that an overwhelming majority of those who are at the deepest level of poverty want, more than anything, to work. But their efforts are stymied by the very system that kicked them off the cash assistance rolls after President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform in the late 1990s.

Edin and Shaefer explain that when the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program was replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the promise of the new measures — which included an increase in the minimum wage — was that people would transition off of welfare rolls to meaningful work or volunteer opportunities.

The problem: People’s welfare benefits ended but the jobs never materialized — not private- sector employment, not federally subsidized jobs and certainly no volunteer work opportunities that would qualify needy families for cash aid.

As a result, in the 15 years after welfare reform, the number of households subsisting on $ 2 a day doubled to nearly 1.5 million, including approximately 3 million children.

The heart of this book — assessing the mistakes that were made in trying to transform an unpopular welfare program into a temporary hand- up for the nation’s neediest — is itself worth contemplation.

But the book’s biggest strength is in delineating how the world of low- wage work is itself conspiring against one of our country’s biggest assets: able- bodied people who shun welfare and want the opportunity to work.

Their biggest obstacles are inhumane workplaces that shirk labor standards and laws. Some employers practice wage theft by forcing employees to work off the clock or not paying them overtime, for instance. Others require workers to keep their schedules open without the promise of paying shifts — or they schedule shifts that don’t end up starting or ending on time — in order to maximize the businesses’ bottom line.

And businesses that employ low- wage workers rarely provide supports, such as the opportunity for employees to earn paid sick days, which would actually help reduce turnover.

Edin and Shaefer write that American workers lose billions of dollars annually from wage theft alone and think that drawing more attention to such practices could create a race to the top among lowwage employers to offer better benefits.

Recent wins by Starbucks employees who got the corporation to promise saner work scheduling garnered much- needed interest in the issue. The authors suggest that the “nation needs an index of retail firms that offers information on how each one treats its low- level workers” so consumers can make better decisions when they shop.

That may be a small step, but it should be an inevitable one. Most economic forecasts for the last five years have suggested that future U. S. job growth will most substantially occur in low- wage service and hospitality industries. That means that more of our parents, siblings, spouses and children will be engaged in low- wage work at some point in their lives.

If we want to ensure that the non- college- educated will qualify for more than just the kind of jobs that treat employees as disposable, we must insist on employer transparency. Consumers should be able to choose businesses where the people who make our food, stock our shelves and clean our messes are treated with dignity.