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Working Poor Struggling to Eat
Posted on February 24, 2005
There have been great success is the campaign to raise the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to over $7.00 and the film Struggling to Survive illumintes why this increase is essential. As the nation waits for that legislation to pass there is a new economic phenomenon emerging: the working poor cannot afford to eat. It is no longer the homeless and unemployed going to food banks but full-time workers cannot make ends meat. Although the reasons for this phenomenon are multifarious and complex, Author Richard Manning partly attributes it to the corporate supermarkets springing up in cities across the US. He looked to his own town to explain the why workers need to go to food banks and here is what he discovered:
There is something fundamental buried in all of this: where these people work. Many of them,
report the food bank people, work full time for minimum wage and no health insurance at the
ring of chain stores that has suburbanized this once unique mountain town. The big-box retail
business has exploded in Missoula, making us a regional market center, part of the cause of
our prosperity. That is, hunger is increasing in our town not in spite of our healthy economy,
but because of it .
Read Richard Manning’s article "Where the Working Poor Eat"