| Email: Joshua
Newton
Hello,
This month we served as overnight hosts at a shelter for 65 men.
We also went on a spirituality and discernment retreat, which
provided a chance to take some time out from the world and focus
on where I feel called to be next year.
I would like to talk about low-wage workers, and specifically
some of the effects on single parent households. This issue is
very important to me because all of the women at our shelter are
struggling to support a family, and most of them who find jobs
enter the workforce as low-wage workers. The average family at
our shelter, Hagar’s House, has about three or four children,
so I am going to use a mother with three children as an example.
The federal poverty level for a single parent family with three
children was $19,884 in 2005. In order to make that much money
in a year, a mother would have to earn almost 10 dollars an hour!
Many of our mothers are lucky if they can find a job that pays
10 dollars an hour when they leave the shelter, and some of them
have as many as seven children.
The poverty level is also somewhat misleading. The formula that
determines the federal poverty level assumes that a family spends
one third of their income on food, so it basically takes food
costs and multiplies them by 3. Our families that get financial
assistance for their rent take a financial management class in
which they discuss what an ideal budget is today. Financial planners
suggest that you now spend no more than 12 percent of your budget
on food, not 33 percent, as the federal poverty level assumes.
Since 1979, the cost of housing has tripled and the real wage
for the lowest 20 percent of workers has remained static (the
real wage is the wage from year to year after accounting
for inflation). So housing costs have significantly increased
while the amount families should spend on food has dropped. If
the poverty level were calculated using a more modern formula,
the number of families living in poverty would increase. The poverty
level for a single person in 2007 is $10,210 (which is actually
close to what you would make working a minimum wage job). Can
you imagine living on $10,210 a year?
My church has started a documentary film series and we recently
watched “Waging a Living,” a documentary that followed
a few low-wage workers. The film introduced a number of very disturbing
statistics about low-wage workers in our country. One that struck
me the most was that increases in wages for a low-income worker
can lead to devastating cuts in government benefits. One mother
in the film received a raise from $8.25 to $11 per hour, which
equaled a monthly increase of about $450 in her wages. Because
her income changed, she had to have her government assistance
modified to reflect her new salary. After the cuts in food stamps,
Section 8, Medicaid, and other services, she lost about $600 in
benefits. So even though she got a raise, she really lost $150
a month because of the cut to her benefits, which can be devastating
for a family that is just hanging on. I do not understand how
we can expect a person to pull themselves out of poverty and fully
support themselves when we cut their benefits more than their
salary increases, putting them into a worse situation than they
were in before. This mother could barely support her family as
it was, and getting a better job just made it worse.
I believe that a key to a secure and beneficial society is both
strong communities and strong families. Strong families are especially
important because they can lead to strengthening our communities.
But just saying this won’t make it true, we have to do something
about it. In order to have strong families, we need to make sure
that parents are able to be home with their children in the evenings
and at night, instead of working a second or third job just to
get by. We need to promise a mother that if she works full time,
that she can go home to her three children and provide them with
all that they need to be successful. This isn’t something
that can be done easily. Raising the minimum wage, although it
is a start, will not fix this problem. We must ensure that when
a family is getting government assistance, if they have an increase
in income, then their assistance will never decrease by more than
the amount of their raise. Nationally, the child poverty rate
is 25 percent. Working in a shelter, I see with children living
in poverty every day, and I cannot even begin to describe the
effect that it has on them. It is not acceptable to have children’s
lives adversely affected by poverty because of their parents’
income. Not only does Christ tell us this, but it is something
that everyone in our society should be able to agree upon. No
child should ever go hungry. No child should ever have to sleep
in a car. No child should ever have to sleep in a shelter.
This is not a problem that can be fixed easily. We must be dedicated
to ending poverty as individuals, as faith communities, and as
a society. As churches, we must make this a priority by developing
programs that build up families, allowing them to support themselves.
As churches, we can provide direct assistance to families in need.
We must never be satisfied that our current ministries are enough.
We must always be going back to our community and asking how we
can better serve it and developing new ministries that address
those needs that are not being met. As individuals, we must also
go into our communities and serve those in need around us in any
way that we can. If we pour ourselves and our resources into making
individuals, families, and communities stronger, then everyone
will benefit.
Sincerely,
Joshua Newton |
