Low-income family

“ Florence Kelly, 289 Fourth Avenue, New York. Look for this label when you buy any garment.
Low wages make possible the continuation of the sweat-shop system. In a family where the wage-earner receives less than enough for its subsistence, or for some reason or other the earnings are decreased to a rate at which the family cannot live, it becomes necessary to supplement the family income. Wife and children go to work, boarders and lodgers are taken into the home, and the standardization of living is so lowered that normal conditions of home life are impossible. ”

“ In the kind of shabby-genteel family that I am talking about there is far more consciousness of poverty than in any working-class family above the level of the dole. Rent and clothes and school-bills are an unending nightmare, and every luxury, even a glass of beer, is an unwarrantable extravagance. Practically the whole family income goes in keeping up appearances. ”

“ They have society in relatives and neighbors. They have no board to pay, and fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, helping support them. They put all their earnings into a common fund, and it supports the family. Such girls can afford, and will work for two, three, four, and five dollars a week. All that they earn makes the burden so much less on the father, who otherwise would have supported them in idleness. Now, a homeless stranger in the city must pay board, and therefore they can't compete with those who live here. Wages are kept too low. ”

“ Insufficient family income often means that children have to join in the daily quest for family subsistence or work outside the home, and this reduces their availability for learning and sometimes prompts them to leave school or live in the streets. ”

“ There is now, however, no recognized social responsibility for giving support to poorer members of the family within one household. There is no pressure to bring those needing material relief tinder the roof of the well-to-do of the family circle. Even parents cannot claim residence with adult children, although they can claim by law some support commensurate with their children's income. It is seen now that the duty of aid does not carry with it the obligation for personal association. ”

“ I see that many humane people are asking what can be done to alleviate the sufferings of the poor. I don't know whether there is any society which looks after the wives and children of malefactors, and lends them a helping hand, if they deserve it, to tide over the absence of their sole source of income; but if there is not, I fancy here is work for idle hands to do, and a source for charity that, worked with discrimination and care, might alleviate one of the crushing evils to which poor families are liable. ”

“ Hence a fictitious value is assigned to youth in all departments of work to-day. Hence, again, a special movement for actual trial of the relative values of workers of different ages in special kinds of work is necessary if we would know whether or not it is possible to prevent that premature old age and tragical financial helplessness at fifty-five or sixty, which makes the workless man or woman a burden where many believe he or she might be still a help to the family income. ”

“ We will consider the chief causes of poverty and their cure.
(1) The cause that bulks largest is the inadequate wages of a considerable portion of the lowest class. It is obviously impossible to support the average family of five in decency, not to say in health, efficiency, or comfort, with an income of, say, less than a thousand dollars a year, as prices go at time of writing (1914) . Yet great numbers of families at present have to exist somehow upon less, even much less. Five million adult male workers in this country receive less than six hundred dollars a year for their work. ”

“ Needed most in the poorest home, the help of the grandmother is often appreciated in inverse ratio to the income.
In the circles above the poverty line there is much variety in the estimation and in the treatment of grandfathers and grandmothers. The ideal picture of a family always has in its background, if not in the very front, an old man and an old woman, benevolent and sweet-natured, who can be depended upon to be more indulgent to the children than even the father or mother and who appear always in family emergencies to renew their youth of service in behalf of the younger generation. ”

“ What a rich family spends upon the actual necessaries of life, the indispensable food, clothing and shelter, is very little compared with its income. Most of its expenditures are for things that are not necessaries, and may be classed as luxuries, the purchasing of which may be suspended or postponed without hardship. But the poor family, the wage-earner's family, is obliged to spend a very large part of its income from day to day upon food, clothing, shelter, heat and light, that cannot be temporarily dispensed with without hardship. ”

“ We must seek innovative ways to address this problem and to promote stronger families, including greater flexibility in paid work hours, more affordable child care, and increased support for low-income families. ”

“ Today the Federal Government has 59 major welfare programs and spends more than $100 billion a year on them. What has all this money done? Well, too often it has only made poverty harder to escape. Federal welfare programs have created a massive social problem. With the best of intentions, government created a poverty trap that wreaks havoc on the very support system the poor need most to lift themselves out of poverty: the family. Dependency has become the one enduring heirloom, passed from one generation to the next, of too many fragmented families. ”

“ It is hard to escape from the insistence of a situation in which the money a workman makes in a year fails to cover the upkeep of his family; and this impairment of the father's income through unemployment has largely to be met by child-and woman-labor. The Federal Immigration Commission's report shows that in not a single great American industry can the average yearly income of the father keep his family. Seven hundred and fifty dollars is the bare minimum for the maintenance of the average-sized American industrial family. ”

“ How can poor families consume more than they earn? Many supplement their income through welfare, Food Stamps, unemployment benefits, Medicare, Medic­aid, school lunches, rent subsidies and other programs, all of which the statistics leave uncounted. And the poverty statis­tics ignore wealth, which can be more important than current income. Workers temporarily laid off don’t get paychecks but they often have savings to fall back on. Although many retirees earn low in­comes, their houses, cars and furnishings are paid for, and they’ve got nest eggs. ”

“ Most relevant here, between 1988 and 1990, Congress required participating States to include among their beneficiaries pregnant women with family incomes up to 133% of the federal poverty level, children up to age 6 at the same income levels, and children ages 6 to 18 with family incomes up to 100% of the poverty level. ”

“ We go patiently on, and still give our ungrateful children the benefit of our love and our experience. I have seen in my own family that horrible mixture, Gentility and Poverty. In our class of life, poverty is not only poverty, it is misery, and meanness as well. My income dies with me. ”

“ As we work to make the American Dream real for all, we must also look to the condition of America's families. Struggling parents today worry how they will provide their children the advantages that their parents gave them. In the welfare culture, the breakdown of the family, the most basic support system, has reached crisis proportions — in female and child poverty, child abandonment, horrible crimes and deteriorating schools. After hundreds of billions of dollars in poverty programs, the plight of the poor grows more painful. ”

“ When the average income of a working family is named, it must not be supposed that this represents the wage of the father of the family alone. Each family contains about 21/4 workers on an average. This is a fact, the significance of which is obvious. In some families, the father and mother, and one or two of the children, will be contributors to the weekly income; in other cases, the burden of maintaining a large family may be thrown entirely on the shoulders of a single worker, perhaps the widowed mother. ”

“ What is desired often, and what seems to the young only reasonable for all to have, is the scale of living the parents' households have attained after a life of hard work. It is a matter for profound ethical thinking to decide what measure of increase in expense of home upkeep should follow upon increase of income where there are children to be affected by changes. It may sometime be seen to be a social duty to keep much farther within bounds the natural desire to expand expense as income increases ”

“ Where, however, the state aid comes without any contributory savings from the individual or his employer and where to qualify for its benefit all must have an income of very small proportion, it is in effect a class measure and obviously for the relief of the very poor.
The higher family interest demands that every system of insurance or of subsidy, or of occasional aid to any member of the family, should tend directly and powerfully toward and not away from thrift, work capacity, and sound business principles. ”

“ The 1965 Economic Report of the President revised the data on the number of persons living in poverty in the United States to take account of the varying needs of families of different sizes, rather than using a flat cut off at the $3,000 income level. The resulting revision illustrates the significance of family size. Using these criteria, the number of poor families is smaller, but the number of large families who are poor increases, and the number of children in poverty rises by more than one-third—from 11 million to 15 million. ”

“ In the fight against poverty, we now know it's essential to have strong families-families that teach children the skills and values they will need in the wider world. How many self-made men and women in America owe their success to the strength of character given to them by hard-working, loving parents? Yet when we ask whether our welfare system has encouraged family life, we must answer: far from it. Among the welfare poor today, families as we've always thought of them are often not being formed. ”

“ BLACKBURN BARD.
It is a curious thing to note the various combinations of circumstance which exist among the families of the poor. On the surface they seem much the same; and they are reckoned up according to number, income, and the like. But there are great differences of feeling and cultivation amongst them; and then, every household has a story of its own, which no statistics can tell. There is hardly a family which has not had some sickness, some stroke of disaster, some peculiar sorrow, or crippling hindrance, arising within itself, which makes its condition unlike the rest. ”

“ What can the man with limited income do but avoid the responsibility of a family? Has he a moral right to bring unhappiness to his wife and two children? Having been caught in the trap, why give him all the blame if he tries to increase his income by speculation?
The more one studies this question of shelter for the salaried group, the more is one convinced that it lies at the root of our social discontent and is a large factor in our moral as well as physical deterioration. ”

“ Nevertheless, I cannot help but note that many suburban communities have accepted at face value the traditional canard whispered by the ‘blockbuster’: ‘When low income families move into your neighborhood, it will cease being a decent place to live.’ But as there is no difference between the love of low income mothers and fathers and those of high income for their children, so there is no difference between the desire for a decent community felt by one group and that felt by the other. ”

“ If the mother, also, is a wage-or salary-earner we have the dictum of economists that her inherited and usual place in the family machinery must be filled, if at all successfully, by trained and congenial helpers at a cost in present conditions prohibitive for the average family income. ”

“ It is not chance that the family is just now poor. It is no emergency which we are summoned to meet. It could have been foreseen long before and it will certainly recur unless we can trace out its causes and prevent their acting as they have hitherto. Hence the detailed, prolonged, individual study of the family's economic state is necessary. One must find out, first of all, all the details of income and outgo. ”

“ What is forty pounds for a family often very large? They can hardly afford to take some underwear and warm clothes.... Behind each family there remained a home, probably a store, a stand, a workshop or simply a sewing-machine, the sole source of income.... All are equal now in this dreadful train, which carries them away from home, naked wrecks of humanity, torn from their customary course of life and deprived of the daily toil, which fed the family. ”

“ That is a very different thing from the institution that, with its handsome buildings, its lawns, and its gravelled walks, looks to the poor parent like a grand boarding-school where his child can be kept, free of charge to him, and taught on terms that seem alluringly like the privileges enjoyed by the rich, until it shall be old enough to earn wages and help toward the family support; very different from the plan of sending the boy to the asylum to be managed, the moment parental authority fails at home. ”