Low Wage Life - Donnie Green

Thankfully I was not born into a family that works and lives the low wage life. I have never actually even had to work for low wages myself, something I have taken for granted. When I was young I couldn’t make the connections and understand why it is that some people are poor and live off of low wages. I always had the idea in my mind that anyone that worked hard could make a lot of money and that then gave me the impression that all of the people that were working low-paying jobs weren’t hard workers. I’ve come to realize that I was very wrong in my assumptions and that it is actually more often than not that people that live below poverty do work hard, if not harder to live than people who have money and live comfortably. While I’ve understood that concept for a while now, I haven’t been able to figure out why those low-wage workers seem stuck in a cycle that prevents them from ever getting out. However, after reading the works of Barbara Ehrenreich, Eric Schlosser, and David Shipler, I’ve come to realize that it seems like the bane of their existence is a poor education. While I certainly don’t believe that our nation should become communist and everyone should earn the same wages, I do think that it would be extremely beneficial for our country on a whole to pour more money into our educational systems thus giving more people the necessary foundations to escape poverty and make something of themselves. The fact that 20 million homes in the US do not have internet access, not including homes that don’t even have computers, shows that a large amount of people in this country don’t even have the modern day tools and even the skills that are now widely regarded as required in the job marketplace for competitive jobs. The reason that the majority of these people are computerless is that they simply can’t afford one. And why can’t they afford one? Because they didn’t receive an education that could launch them up to higher paying jobs and therefore many are stuck doing the low-paying menial labor that supports the comfortable lifestyles of the rest of the country. If we were to invest more money into the school systems and make them more accessible to everyone we could be preparing a new generation of bright individuals to create a stronger, more intelligent, and capable workforce. Another aspect which affects many of the low-income workers’ lives through their lack of education is the amount of resources and options the government has available to them that they either don’t know exist, don’t know how to access, or don’t have the means to access, such as a computer. The authors of these books that we’ve read so far in class have not only highlighted the many hardships faced by the low-wage workforce but have also opened my eyes to the reasons why they are stuck in these perpetuating cycles of debt and poverty and how closely connected they are to our daily lives.