3 of the labor force makes minimum wage or less and about 20 of the workforce

Only about 4.3% of the labor force makes minimum wage or less, and about 20% of the workforce plugs away for $9 or less R V CHAPTER 12: FAMILY

 Barbara Ehrenreich , sociologist and writer, did her own study where she had to live off of $9 a day and traveled the country working for $6 or $7 as a waitress and still could not afford to live off of her wages  Faced with either welfare or low-wage work, single mothers find that the government’s definition of responsibility is narrowly defined as wage work  By forcing welfare moms to enter the workforce while not providing adequate child care, the government encourages women to abandon their children in an unsupervised home  To manage this tension between being a good worker or a good mother, single mothers may shoot for the nearly impossible strategy of self-reliance, but in reality they often ending up depending on cash assistance from family or boyfriends The Pecking Order: Inequality Starts at Home  The home (no matter who makes up a family) is a haven of equality, altruism, and infinite love in an otherwise harsh world  In Haven in a Heartless World , Christopher Lasch paints a rosy portrait of domestic life o To him, the home really is a haven where workers seek refuge from the cold winds of a capitalist public space o The family is sacred because it provides intimate privacy, managed by a caring woman who shields male workers from “the cruel world of politics and work” o This idea of the family as insulated from the outside world is deeply entrenched in America  Such ideas give a misleading sense of the family as a harmonious unit, its member altruistically sacrificing for one another to forge a healthy, hearty, and loving private world  In the book The Pecking Order (2004), the premise is that in each American family, there exists a pecking order among siblings, a status hierarchy, if you will—that can ignite the family with competition, struggle, and resentment  In explaining economic inequality in America, sibling differences represent more than half of all differences between individuals  Birth position matters only in the context of larger families and limited resources  The children born first or last into a large family seems to fare better socioeconomically than those born in the middle o Middle kids feel the effects of a shrinking pie, as they tend to be shortchanged on the resources like money for college and potential attention  The family is, in short, no shelter from the cold winds of capitalism; rather, it is part and parcel of that system  When families have limited resources, the success of one sibling often generates a negative backlash among the others o As the parents unwittingly pull all their eggs—all their hopes and dreams—in just one basket, the other siblings inevitably are left out in the cold R V CHAPTER 12: FAMILY