Articles of the Month

Are Our Assumptions Helping Us Create Poverty?

What are the underlying assumptions you have about people on welfare or in low paying jobs? Do you believe they are lazy? Are they all drunks and drug-addicts? Are welfare recipients all "frauds"? Do you somehow assume that if they don't have a good job, it's because they lack job training or they just don't put in the effort required?

Poor-Bashing: The Politics of Exclusion is a remarkable book by Jean Swanson that shows how all of these assumptions have been not just proclaimed through our media, but nurtured and promoted by those in power for the last several hundred years. These attitudes show up in the old British Poor Laws, which forced people into near-slavery conditions and work houses from which few survived. Read about how those same attitudes and ideas are still being used today to force people into workfare programs, and below poverty line wages.

In the last decade or so, workfare programs and welfare reform have relied upon the assumptions that the unemployed must be forced to work at any cost, and that the jobs are readily available for them. Reforms have assumed that fraud is rampant, and that under no circumstances should a non-working person be better off than a working person. Welfare families have had to put up with their homes being searched, their neighbours reporting on them and judging them, and their children being harassed in schools. Parents have been forced to leave their children and take below-poverty line jobs. Unemployed have been subject to kindergarten-type workshops meant to boost their self-esteem by having them sing songs, write personality quizzes and act out job-interviews, as if it was somehow their fault that too few jobs exist. People are being told they must accept any job offered, even under horrid conditions, or their support will be cut off.

But all of these policy changes have implications for those who are employed as well. People are having to compete for jobs with workfare recipients who come with a portion of their wage subsidized. With the government "subsidizing" the poor, what they're really doing is creating a system in which the business can pay even lower wages. . By blaming the unemployed for their own unemployment, the governments and think-tanks can ignore the shortage of jobs. By creating desperation through degrading welfare and UI rules, people are taught to be grateful for having any job, and told not to question the fact that their jobs don't pay their bills. And without real help available for people in need, those in abusive jobs or relationships are less able to escape.

Poverty won't go away until we expose and reject the myths that we have built up around it. It won't go away until we recognize that the poor aren't to blame for their poverty. It won't go away as long as we focus on "job training" as though somehow being taught to write resumes will help everyone get the jobs that don't exist. We need to create more jobs. We need to raise minimum wage so that no-one working full time falls below the poverty-line. We need to create justice in our world, not expect that charity will make things alright. We need to recognize those laws which are unfair and unjust. Jean Swanson's book helps to shine a bright light on the way in which Canadian society oppresses the poor, and by doing that she creates a ray of hope that things can be changed.