Work Increasingly Doesn't Protect Against Poverty

Time for Work to Pay

A quick addendum to Why We Build the Wall. The sole justification for building the wall is to provide jobs, which are offered as protection from poverty. “What do we have that they have not? We have a wall to work upon!”

Here’s the thing: jobs are no guarantee against poverty.

In the United States, we have no living wage law. The federal minimum wage is $7.25, and has not changed since 2009, though some states require a higher minimum wage. Full-time work at $7.25 per hour earns you $290 per week, or $15,080 per year, below the poverty line for a single person in fiscal year 2026 is ($15,650). If you work in a tipped job, the federal minimum wage is $2.13 per hour, though federal law requires employers to make up the difference between the state minimum wage + tips and the federal minimum wage.

Another problem with the minimum wage is that many employers fail to pay the minimum, which is considered a form of wage theft. Nationwide, such wage theft exceeds $15 billion annually.

The problem is masked in part by the fact that the official measure of poverty in the United States is flawed and out of date (and so, consequently, are the SNAP eligibility and benefits formulas.). The Ludwig Institute for Social and Economic Policy developed its own measure of a “minimum standard of living” to use in place of the misleading poverty: measure. “Between 2001 and 2023, the cost to meet basic needs—”what LISEP considers a minimum standard of living—doubled. Housing and health care expenses have surged, and the cost of saving for in-state public college jumped 122% during that time. But surely wages have risen to keep pace, with annual adjustments based on changes in the cost of living? Not even remotely.

“Meanwhile, real earnings for the bottom 60% of workers have dropped by 4% when adjusted for the cost of living tracked by the index. Income growth in these households has also lagged significantly, increasing by just 0.37% annually—less than half the pace seen among the top 40% of earners, LISEP’s research shows.”

https://unusualwhales.com/news/the-gap-between-what-americans-earn-and-how-much-they-need-to-bring-in-to-achieve-a-basic-standard-of-living-is-growing

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There is also the problem of barely-paid prison labor–the exception to the 13th amendment abolishing slavery–except for prisoners, who can be made to work for pennies per hour.

Similarly, people with disabilities can be employed in “piece work” for far less than the minimum wage. A 2020 report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights showed that people with disabilities who work for the “subminimum wage earn $3.34 per hour on average and work about 16 hours a week, or about $214 a month — 20 percent of the federal poverty threshold for one person.”

“Monica Soares, who is deaf and spent her early career in California working in a workshop for people with disabilities, told The 19th through an

her pay for packing candies into boxes was $2 to $3 an hour. On such a low wage, Soares said that she struggled to pay for food: “‘I was hungry and worried I might die.’”

Since the creation of the American social safety net, there has been much debate over the “dignity of work,” giving rise to cliches like “a hand up not a hand out,” and demands to know why we should help you if you’re not willing to work to help yourself. This is why public benefits programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, aka food stamps), housing assistance, and cash aid (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANF) have ever-expanding work requirements. Decades of research have shown that work requirements do not increase work, and only serve to cut people off of needed assistance through cumbersome paperwork requirements.

For mothers in particular, work often costs more than it pays. They need child care, which often costs more than they can earn from a job for which they need child care. Hades is lying to Orpheus and the other workers in HadesTown. Walls and jobs don’t “keep us free” or “keep out the enemy: poverty”. We stave off poverty through jobs that pay a living wage: what people need to meet their basic needs: food, housing, utilities, clothing, education, feminine hygiene products, diapers, and more. For 60% of Americans, work does not pay them enough to do that. Now, in HadesTown, perhaps workers are provided with the basic needs, so their pay is less crucial. But if they can’t leave the job, or the town, is that freedom? If we need to work to meet our basic needs and survive, and full-time work increasingly is not even enough to ensure even that much, is that freedom?