Another woman profiled, however, who also works at a fast food restaurant and has to manage her family’s household needs at the same time, is married to a husband who is unemployed, and appears to have been unemployed for quite some time, and remains unemployed for the duration of the multi-year interviewing period. One of those was a woman who was married to her high school sweetheart, both of whom worked at a fast food restaurant - the classic “working poor.” Even though the book is nominally about cooking, the authors spend a section on an incident in which the mother tries to navigate through waiting for a brother who’s supposed to give her a ride to her mother’s (to do laundry) and then to work he’s running late and it causes problems. I agree that the numbers are small - 700,000 Americans stand to be cut off from food stamps if they don’t find/document working (with or without pay) for 20 hours per week, because they are between the ages of 18 – 59, not at school, not responsible for anyone’s care, and don’t have a doctor’s note that they’re incapable of working.īut I mentioned the other day reading a book titled Pressure Cooker, profiling 9 women/mothers and their experiences with food and cooking for their family, especially poor women and the world of food stamp shopping. It’s also the case that there are those who insist that every poor person is always trying to better themselves, so that they clearly don’t need any push in the form of work requirements, because these are humiliating, difficult to comply with, and a waste of time for the person involved as well as for the government, in terms of administrative costs. I was told I’m an evil Catholic for saying otherwise.įourth, those who just name-called (apparently I’m ugly) and spouted profanity without any useful comments. Third, those who say that, no matter what, people should be able to have food, and, indeed, have their basic needs met by the government without any preconditions at all. But to the extent they exist, yes, they need to be fixed the general tenor of this category of replies, though, most generously stated and shorn of profanity, was that it isn’t possible to establish a system in which people are required to document their productively-spent time without some people falling through the cracks, so we should simply accept giving benefits to those who don’t even try to work, as an unavoidable consequence that’s a reasonable trade-off for insuring those in need receive help. Quite honestly, these issues looked like implementation bugs more than a longstanding issue, let alone a design intended to rip benefits out of people’s hands. Second, those who said that people would lose their benefits not because of an unwillingness to work (for pay or otherwise) but because it was too difficult to comply with the documentation requirements. First, those who really did not understand what’s going on here, and seemed to think that people had to work for the government to earn their food stamp benefit, as opposed to being required to be a part of the workforce generally speaking, or do something productive with their time if not.
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