Until I took a class, read The Glass Castle, and watched “Waging a Living,” my definition of poverty was completely wrong and I was severely undereducated on what it really meant to live in poverty and how many people actually do. Poverty doesn’t just mean the lazy high school dropout addicted to drugs begging on the streets because he can’t hold a job. It’s not just the squatters that live in abandoned, boarded up old buildings and dig through the trash for dinner. It can be whole families in a number of different circumstances and situations. A housewife going through a divorce suddenly has to support herself and her two kids. A single mother of five works sixty hours a week at a low end job just to feed her kids and pay the babysitter.
There are numerous causes of poverty. With the value of the American dollar constantly decreasing, the old American dream of a man working to support his family while his wife stays home and takes care of the children is becoming more and more impossible. A family cannot be sustained financially by just one income anymore. Mix this with the fact that divorce rate and single parenthood are ever rising, and that is one major cause of poverty. The majority of people living in poverty are single mothers and children. This can be because of divorce or just because the father doesn’t want to take responsibility. Women are expected to support and raise their children at the same time. Education is another factor in poverty. People don’t further their education and they get stuck in low paying jobs in retail or factories. These jobs don’t pay enough to support a family.
The interactionist perspective examines the individuals and their unique situations in poverty. This is also termed “blaming the victim.” They analyze the negative attitudes and behaviors assumed of poor people. This is where the stereotypes come from, like the guy who’s too lazy to get a job so he just wanders the streets begging and looking for drugs. Interactionists believe the individual creates his or her own situation by choosing to do or not do certain things, like go to school or seek employment. They think they lack the motivation to gain human capital to better themselves. They’re confident in the fact that America is the land of opportunity and it’s an American’s own fault not to take advantage of all the chances they have.
Functionalists prefer to study the bigger picture and look at possible reasons outside the individual’s control that could be keeping them from excelling. Reasons that can be as large as changes in economy that decrease job opportunities and make it hard for the individual to find a job, even if he is actively trying. This most frequently happens to entry level positions when large corporations want to increase profit. They often eliminate lower job positions that they feel are unnecessary. People with little experience, education, or human capital, most often feel the blow of this.
The conflict perspective also looks at the big picture, but in a different light. They consider the struggle between the social classes in the capital system. This is probably what is mostly responsible for the constantly widening gap between the capitalists and the lower classes. The lower class people have to deal with larger and larger chunks being taken out of their paychecks while the corporate executives get high salaries and good benefits. Corporations are constantly finding ways to replace jobs with machines that will cost them less than employing someone to do the tasks, which puts these lower end workers out of a job. This increases both poverty and the profit these corporations are generating, thus widening the gap between capitalists and lower class working people.
To fully analyze and understand the causes of poverty, and ultimately to prevent them, it is necessary to look at both the micro and macro viewpoints of the problem. While it is true that certain negative attitudes and patterns of behavior can keep an individual from pulling him or herself out of a desperate, repetitive situation, it is also evident that major corporations are just as much at fault. It’s very common during a recession in our economy for corporations to downsize and cut down on cost as much as possible, regardless of what it does to the lower workers, as long as the executives are raking in large salaries. They’re too greedy and selfish to care that they’re making so many other lives harder. To be fair, however, those that are effected by this need to take it as an opportunity to grow. Instead of complaining and simply moving onto another job just like the one they lost only to lose it again later, they need to get an education and move on. Something needs to improve or change in order for history not to repeat itself.
Both of these aspects need to be reevaluated if we ever want to solve the problem of poverty. There should be laws passed on how much a corporation can cut back on employees and the manner in which they do so. They shouldn’t be allowed to just dismiss people because they’ll save money by not paying them. Depending on the corporation’s overall profit, they shouldn’t be allowed to have less than a certain amount of employees that they can comfortably afford to pay. For the lower wage workers, we should make education easier and cheaper to attain, so they’re more apt to earn degrees and get better paying jobs.
To study and observe the amount of poverty in the United States, I would first look into major retail corporations. Stores and malls are usually the first place that inexperienced, uneducated entry level seeking people go to for a job, because it’s all they can get, and corporations tend to take advantage of that. They pay them little and demand a lot from them. They’ll refuse to make them full time so they don’t have to pay for benefits. To prove all this, I’d assign under cover people to become employees at several of these corporations. I would have some of them work extremely hard and show that they care about their job, while others would slack off and merely do what was expected of them, if that, and analyze how differently they get treated. I would count how many get let go because of downsizing.
In addition to that, I would conduct surveys of the small communities to see the different degrees of poverty and the similarities between the people living that way. Is it mostly single mothers with three to five children? Is it young people who can’t afford an education? Where are these people working? Is there a community college nearby? What about affordable, adequate childcare? Everything must be taken into account to completely understand one community’s circumstances and situation and eventually correct it.
Overall, I do not agree that poverty is simply another social class level and that it will always be there. I believe it can be at the very least decreased drastically, if not nearly eliminated. Poverty is just another problem that we will one day solve.