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.
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