Ending Hunger in America, 2014 Hunger Report Full Report | Page 75

CHAPTER 2 Workers with the least predictable schedules are those with jobs in restaurants and retail. A typical worker in retail sales makes $21,000 a year, with cashiers earning just $18,500.26 In addition to being sent home early on slow sales days, as Muñoz described, workers also may not know from one day to the next what their schedule is. They may be scheduled for a couple of days but put on call for the rest of the week, which makes it almost impossible to take other jobs to make up the income or to schedule college classes. Retail giant Wal-mart uses “justin-time” schedules, meaning that workers cannot plan ahead because their work schedules change depending on how busy the store is. Most people know of Wal-mart’s reputation for low prices—and its reputation for paying low wages. As the largest private employer in the United States, Wal-mart’s influence on wage rates and working conditions stretches across the entire economy. This is because other retailers must reduce their labor costs in order to be competitive with Wal-mart’s. One way to do this is to schedule workers for part-time rather than full-time work.27 Young workers with children are twice as likely to be living in poverty as the rest of the adult working-age population.28 In fact, having a baby is one of the leading causes of a “poverty spell.”29 The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) grants some parents the right to 12 weeks of unpaid leave after the birth or adoption of a child. Low-wage workers are less likely than others to meet the requirements for the FMLA, which include working for a company with at least 50 employees and having worked for at least 1,250 hours during the preceding 12 months.30 Less than 60 percent of private sector workers are eligible for FMLA.31 Many who don’t qualify are single parents, primarily mothers, whose responsibilities at home make it difficult to put in long hours at work. More than 75 percent of single mothers are in the labor force,32 but many receive little or no financial support or help looking after their children from the children’s father. One reason single-parent families have higher rates of poverty is that the primary responsibility for supporting children falls on only one adult. The share of families headed by single mothers surged during the 1970s and rose less rapidly in the 1980s. Since 1990, the rate has leveled off. The public discourse about poverty often focuses on single mothers, but the eroding value of wages affects all low- and middle-income families. Families that have not fallen behind have managed this mainly by working longer hours. From 1979–2007, married women in middle-income families increased the number of hours they worked annually by 58.5 percent, or 522 hours—the equivalent of three months of full-time work. 33 These families maintained their foothold on the middle class mainly because they had two incomes. www.bread.org/institute? Seven of the 10 lowest paying jobs in the United States are in the restaurant industry. ? 2014 Hunger Report? 65 n iStock