Blog Post #7

Minimum wage jobs do not allow these mothers to have the time to care about anything other than the bare necessities for their children. It often become the case that poor, working mothers have to make a choice between supporting their children and providing for them, or spending time with them. And unfortunately, the choice has to be going to work in order to support them because they need things like food, clothing, and shelter. Often they have to make choices between the necessities as one girl from the videos, Jessica, discussed. She mentions that she has to choose between things like paying rent and fixing the car that she used to get to work. Sometimes these women are even forced to work more than one job. These low wage jobs are hard because they pay minimum wage or close to it, so these mothers have to work several hours just to make ends meet. Erin from “7 Days of Minimum Wage” describes that life she lives at minimum wage as emotionally and physically draining. She says she does not understand how a family could ever live on such a little amount of money. On top of that, women already make less money than men, especially low income mothers because of job loss due to children. Also, many low wage jobs have hours outside of the norm which makes it incredibility hard to find available, affordable, and quality care for their children. In the low-wage workforce, workers are rarely given sick days, paid time off, and vacation time so I child becoming ill may bring an end to their job. This forces these women to continually start over (at minimum wage) because the jobs are much harder to keep, as the workers are generally seen as replaceable, just as Jessica from “7 Days at Minimum Wage” talks about. Jobs tend to base what they are going to pay you on what you made previously, but what if that was not enough? And if you can keep them there is very little opportunity to advance. Mallory who is also from the video “7 Days at Minimum wage” discusses the fact that the best way to move up is education but since those living at minimum wage do not have any money to save, as they live from pay check to pay check, and cannot find the money to go to college or even a car to maybe be able to get a better job.

In the book Putting Children First, they looked at the life of Julia who is a working mother with three children, and her youngest, Julia. Before Julia was born the family was living in different homeless shelters but the day after her birth they moved into their first real place in section 8. She wanted to find a way out of poverty and welfare so she decided to go to community college and have Julia’s father watch her youngest two daughters. After the semester, she broke up with the father and that is when life got really hard. She did not do all of things needed to get food stamps so they were literally on the brink of starvation. The next care arrangement while Julia was back in school and doing an internship was to have her younger sister watch her kids, but this ended because of her sister’s job. The internship she was doing turned out to be no good. She took a short job working in a burger joint but didn’t stay long because she did not want her public assistance to get cut. She took a new internship after not working for a month because she could not find child care. At her new internship, she put her daughters in a care center but that situation ended because her public assistance kept messing up the payments to the provider. Next her cousin started watching them but quit when she was getting paid because Julia was cut from welfare when they lost all of her paper work. Julia continued to have to change the care arrangements to work around her job(s) or she would risk losing her source of income. Julia was forced to pay her new provider more money because her kids needed to be there longer, and past normal hours after she was offered her first real full time job. Once welfare realized that Julia had been working they cut off all of her assistance and she could no longer afford any care for her children because she was having a hard time paying rent and food.