Dealer In Fancy Ware, (1877), from Street Life in London by John Thomson and Adolphe Smith:
“The accompanying photograph represents a street group gathered round a dealer whose barrow is one of the most attractive I have seen during my wanderings about town. The story of its owner was narrated to me in the following words :-
“'There are now too many ‘swags’ and most of them ain’t the gentlemen they used to be. I should say there are 1500 'swag’ dealers about London, counting women, boys, and girls. The average clear profits all round would, I think, be about fourteen shillings each a week. My missus and myself between us, we make clear over thirty shillings a week. It takes about thirty shillings to keep us, five shillings a week rent, and the rest for clothes, food, and fuel. Three or four years ago I have drawn as much as two pounds on a Saturday night. Out of that I had about twenty-six shillings profit. Now I have not been drawing more than five shillings a day, except on rare occasions. The profits are much lower at present. Ten shillings out of the sovereign is considered good now. The profit is not so great as it looks, when you think of how long we stand and how many are the folks we supply before we get a pound. It must take about fifty customers to make up a pound of money. Times are bad, and I have left the streets for a regular job. My wife minds the barrow. But bad as times be, it’s wonderful how women will have ornaments. I have had them come with their youngsters without shoes or stockings, and spend money on ear-drops, or a fancy comb for the hair.'”
In Mexico, 71.9% of the indigenous population, which includes 8.3 million people, was in a situation of poverty in 2016, warned the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social: Coneval), three out of 10, that is 3.2 million indigenous people presented three or more social needs and did not have the economic capacity to acquire the basic nutritional food items, which places them in a situation of extreme poverty.
In 2015, six states of the country concentrated 64.8% of the indigenous population: Oaxaca, Chiapas, Veracruz, State of Mexico, Puebla and Yucatán.
Marginalization and precariousness are aggravated when, in addition to being indigenous, they are women or older adults, according to Coneval’s Evaluation Report of the Social Development Policy 2018.
The education levels of this vulnerable population group are very low, 50.3% have primary education (elementary).
The Coneval indicated that in 2016, more than 30% of the indigenous people in Mexico did not have access to a balanced meal, 8 out of 10 did not have social security and 56.3% did not have basic services (concrete floor, running water, elecricity) at their homes.
My usual retort to people who don’t want “universal healthcare/education/basic income/etc.” under the pretense that “the rich shouldn’t have access to it” is that it’s cheaper to just give it to everyone no-question-asked than to try and judge every single case just to exclude a tiny minority of them.
But this tweet thread? This right there? That’s a damn powerful argument. Something that can actually convince people emotionally, more than my cynical, it’s-cheaper-that-way, pragmatic approach.
I’ll keep it, and I’ll re-use it, because it’s with thread like this that you change the world, one opinion at a time.
The number of people I know, myself included, who stayed in the closet because they feared the lose of financial support from their parent is crazy.
My partner grew up poor. Her parents didn’t have shit. But they managed to financially abuse her in this exact manner just by refusing to provide documentation that they were poor. No parental income documentation? No FAFSA. No FAFSA? None of the need-based aid she was 100% qualified for. No aid? No college for her poor ass.
So no, this “but what if a person who didn’t need the help got it” rhetoric will not just harm the children of the rich, even the marginalized and estranged children of the rich. It harms everyone whose parents don’t want them to succeed.
I dropped out of the prestigious college I started at because I lost my financial aid when my parents got an unexpected one-time windfall and refused to give most of it to the school. I don’t blame them, really, but I struggled for another year to afford a state school, then got knocked up and dropped out and never really went back because school just kept getting more expensive.
I know people who did not go until they were in their mid 20s because their parents just wouldn’t do the FAFSA and they couldn’t get aid without it.
I went to the school I picked because of the financial aid I could get that first year. If I’d picked almost any other school, I would have qualified for a full ride, merit-based, because I was a national merit scholar coming out of high school with a 3.87 in mostly ap classes, scads of activities, etc.
I sometimes think if I had to give advice to my younger self I’d tell them to start at the state school even if there were people from the home town there. I’d have met my husband 10 years earlier and finished my degree, maybe, you know?
It’s probably worth noting one of the known side-effects of long-term, persistent poverty situations is a decline in executive function capacity. Or in other words, it may be that in a lot of these cases where people were “poor enough” to get financial assistance, but where their parents “didn’t bother”, “refused” or “wouldn’t do it” with regards to filling out the forms, what we were actually seeing in those parents was a group of people who looked at the forms (which no doubt require things like “putting down your full income for multiple years” or “listing all your assets at current market value”, looking up details of past tax filings and tax returns over a multi-year period, providing payslips as evidence, providing bank statements, and so on) and just went “I do not know where to even start with these, and there’s no way I can fill them out”. That isn’t malice. It’s the cognitive consequence of living for years pay-cheque to pay-cheque, with very little margin for error on anything, and no cognitive resources available for anything other than worrying about whether the money will stretch far enough this week, this fortnight, or this month.
The malice, if there is any involved, is the impersonal malice of a system which first grinds people into poverty, then expects them to function at the same cognitive level as the most wealthy of the wealthy (who in all likelihood hand all the paperwork to their accountants and say “figure out how to get Bratleigh through college at minimum cost to me, would you?”).
(I have a certain amount of sympathy. I’m autistic, which is a disorder which diminishes executive functioning capacity; my joke is my mental executive spends a lot of their time out on the golf course. I could get funding through the NDIS to help deal with the side effects of my disability… if I could just assemble the necessary executive function to be able to fill out all the paperwork, collate all the necessary evidence, submit an application, and argue it through the bureaucracy. For some strange reason - can’t think why - I have a bit of trouble with this. Bureaucracy is designed to be navigable by bureaucrats - as in, bureaucrats are the ones who design them, and thus they think it’s all pretty straightforward, because this is what they do for a living. The rest of us have to figure it out from first principles).
Returning back to the main theme of the thread: one of the benefits of universal free tertiary education (which is something the baby boomers had in my country, although they’d pulled the ladder up behind them by the time I graduated high school) is it provides so many more options to so many more people - and it also costs less to administer than any stringently means-tested scheme for funding tertiary students. In the same way, a decent universal basic income will make a huge difference for the people at the bottom of the heap (enabling a lot of the mental calculus of poverty to be if not actually avoided, at least greatly diminished) even as it barely counts as a drop in the bucket to the wealthy. The 1% are more likely to notice a universal basic income as an increase in their taxes than an increase in their income - but then, they can afford it.
Every time the “the children of rich people shouldn’t have access to subsidized college education!!!!!!!” discourse starts up again I think about the people I knew in my younger days who had to drop out of college due to financial abuse by their wealthy parents.
One of my friends couldn’t get grants and state loans because his dad was rich, thus he didn’t qualify for them. But his dad refused to give him ANY money because he was studying theater and not finance.
I just… think about that a lot. Most people dismiss the idea of financial abuse, if they ever even hear about it. But it’s such a big thing, especially for young people and people who don’t have much of a job history.
One of the big things that keep women and kids from leaving abusive relationships is lack of money. Even if you get out, where will you go? How will you feed yourself? You’ve got nothing but the clothes on your back, whatever you can stuff into a bag or a car trunk.
I know several people who gave up on educational dreams due to lack of funds from their wealthy parents, parents whose wealth prevented them from getting anything but bank loans with excruciatingly high interest rates.
It was the 90s and college was nowhere near as expensive as it is now, but wow was it still not cheap at all. I worked 3 jobs at one point trying to pay for things. I was still constantly broke.
I think about the way wealthy parents can and do abuse their kids kind of a lot. I mean look at the Trumps. You really think there wasn’t some pretty extreme manipulation and abuse going on there? Generationally?
I was reminded that queer kids are affected by this too. I know people who’ve been cut off because they come out as gay or trans or whatever, and I also know people who stayed miserably in the closet out of fear.
Unemployment in Columbus is decreasing while poverty continues to rise. This is because more and more jobs do not pay a living wage.
Columbus service workers are coming together to change this. Janitors – who have now been without a contract for three months – are standing up for justice alongside security officers who protect our downtown buildings, and are organizing to bring good jobs to their communities.
Columbus janitors held a prayer vigil downtown yesterday! They joined with local clergy to pray for justice for working families.
Full-time Columbus janitors are on average paid just $18,200 a year - and we know our city can do better. Right now, janitors are in the process of bargaining a new union contract to secure fair wages, full time work, and affordable healthcare. There’s a lot at stake: The concentrated poverty rate in Columbus has nearly doubled since 2000, and this can be attributed in large part to the proliferation of low wage, no-benefit jobs.
Last week, Columbus janitors took to the streets to demand a fair contract. This Monday, they return to the table to negotiate with the cleaning contractors who have demanded a wage freeze for janitors for the next three years, in addition to increases in health care costs and the right to cut janitors’ hours at any time.
Columbus janitors rallied and marched across downtown today as they prepare to resume contract bargaining on March 18th. Columbus cleaning contractors have demanded a wage freeze for janitors for the next three years, in addition to increases in health care costs and the right to cut janitors’ hours at any time. Janitors are standing up, though, and are fighting for good jobs for families across Columbus.
On Saturday, March 2, more than 100 janitors and community supporters marched to Macy’s — a major commercial office building owner in Cincinnati — to rally for a fair contract.
So far, cleaning contractors that clean Macy’s and other buildings have refused to budge from their offer of a ten cent raise for janitors after a three year wage freeze. Contractors also want to cut hours and increase health insurance costs to janitors who are already paid just $18,000 a year on average for full time work– below the poverty line for a family of three.
Check out more photos from the rally on Facebook here!
“But like… that’s like so much more money than I make. Stop complaining.”
No.
I won’t stop complaining.
Just because your poverty wages are worse than my poverty wages doesn’t mean that I don’t have the right to be mad about my poverty wages. In many parts of the country you can’t even afford an apartment at $20/hr. Including where I live.
Not to mention the cost of medication for my disabled ass. Every wage looks a hell of a lot different if you have to spend hundreds to thousands a month on your life saving medication.
Minimum wage should be $30/hr. Period.
-fae
Minimum wage should scale with the cost of living for an area actually. In places where the cost of living is astronomical, even $30 an hour wouldn’t cut it. In San Francisco, a true living wage would be closer to $70 an hour. It would be a major incentive to regulate prices on damn near everything, but housing especially, because companies definitely don’t want to shell out that much in wages.
[ID: a tweet from @1anjohn that says: $15 an hour is poverty and I think we need to say that loudly because right now companies use it as a badge of honor]
if you want to actually start to end homelessness, you need to give homeless people unconditional homes, including when we use them to do drugs or sit around drinking. either housing is unconditional or it isn’t
someone sitting at home alone, an active alcoholic, squandering your charity, drinking all day is better situation than a street homeless alcoholic. someone using drugs in your charity house is better than them doing the same w no shelter
most of you would not like most street homeless people, I definitely don’t and didn’t when I was street homeless. for every one person who uses unconditional shelter to turn themselves around, someone else will do jack shit and very slowly, if ever, work through the issues that made them homeless, will maybe never be able to live independently. still better than street homelessness, still worth doing. ultimately either you believe that shelter should be universal or you don’t
homeless people actually can’t be rehabilitated if you want to end homelessness. we either affirm the right to shelter for the worst drunken, lying, filthy, cheating, self destructive homeless people that exist, genuinely irredeemable wankers, or we concede that shelter is not a right
So much of the idea that shelter should be earned is tied up in the very concept of charity, when you think about it.
Because this is a flawed concept, that taking care of other people is something good people do out of goodness, and a certain level of indebtedness is expected from the people who receive charity.
It puts the people providing the charity in positions of greater value to the people receiving it, and stipulates that the recipients now need to also work towards goodness, be more like the providers of charity, to deserve it.
But food and homes and healthcare are things every human, no matter how ‘bad’, requires. These shouldn’t be things you hold over someone’s head to convince them to live by the morality of you or your belief system, but that’s what a lot of north American charity is. If you want someone to do something your way, offer them things they can live without. Anything else is just coercion under the guise of help.
Charity, at its core, is something you do only for yourself, or your beliefs. No one should be forced to accept it, and they certainly shouldn’t rely on it for their survival. If we think of the necessities of survival as rights that a society is required to provide (like a social insurance number, identification, and a basic education) instead of things the more privileged leverage against those in need, we remove the moral obligation for people to behave in a prescribed way to be worthy of having basic needs met.
Anyway. Guaranteed basic income, housing, and healthcare shouldn’t be things governments can refuse to provide, especially with the way things are going in western society lately. A global industrialised world can’t live by the same principles of responsibility we had before this world came to be. We reworked how we communicate, travel, and organise ourselves over the last century or so, it’s about time we rework how we take care of the people who need it.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh brings up that 25% of Canadians are going hungry because they can’t afford groceries and that he would tax corporations to fix this inequality, and members of the Conservative Party of Canada start laughing.
