low wage life proposal

For my hypertext on my low wage life I wanted to get into the lives of janitorial work as well as children of the working poor and how their situations leave them little choices and causes them to make more bad decisions. In The Working Poor David Shipler talks about immigrants coming to America and being exploited by contractors. “The contractor explains, is put up two and a half months’ of wages as a contracting fee.. Next thing you know you’re owed several thousand dollars and you wonder what happened.” (Shipler 20) This topic of janitorial work also leads into issues with illegal immigrants as Shipler discusses because people are afraid to report any of this because their “frightened that their illegal status may be discovered” (Shipler 20). Often discussed by Shipler, poverty is a cycle and people always say the feel helpless, I couldn’t agree more with this statement. Children are left to make decisions and usually get into illegal activity to get things that their parents are enable to provide and revert to things such as, “selling food stamps, stealing off clothesline, ‘shopping’ by eating quickly off the shelves of supermarkets” (Shipler 28). Even younger children get it just as bad because bad parenting because of numerous reasons or parents not able to afford day care when the go to work lead to children not being taken care of properly. “Kayla, at eighteen months, chewing on a cigarette and putting a Bic lighter in her mouth. She played in the dirty toilet while Cody pulled his chair up to the stove with the burners lit” (Shipler 35).