!"This country" · 10:40pm Nov 20th, 2020
So, I was reading my usual dose of libcom links (while my dog is asleep), and this specific one (on education) definitely remined me about quite amount of shock I got when I first read that ""The UK is the world’s fifth largest economy, it contains many areas of immense wealth…The results? 14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty." . I mean, how?! This is not my failing Rodina, this is "First World Country!" Yet, apparently report this article cites is real ...
So, fiction first ( "ID - That Indestructible something", by Chatoyance):
Late one night, she had heard her mother and father arguing about their daughters being forced to live at home. She had heard her mother say that they hadn't tried hard enough, that Greta was lazy and that Gregoria didn't take life seriously enough. Those words had burned inside Gregoria. Not a speck of it was the least bit true. There just weren't any jobs, not any that paid well enough to afford both food and a place to live. The jobs were just gone. Gregoria had tried so hard, so very hard. Greta had nearly killed herself doing three part-time jobs, one after the other, every day, and it still hadn't been enough. She did take life seriously. And Greta was anything but lazy.
- 2013 ....
Now, non-fiction (from report above):
Employment as the Cure-All for Poverty
The government says work is the solution to poverty and points to record employment rates as evidence that the country is going in the right direction. But being in employment does not magically overcome poverty. In-work poverty is increasingly common and almost 60% of those in poverty in the UK are in families where someone works. There are 2.8 million people living in poverty in families where all adults work full time. Families with two parents working full time at the national minimum wage are still 11% short of the income needed to raise a child. One person told me “I know people who are working five jobs to make the national minimum wage, which isn’t a living wage.”
- 2018!!!!
This making me much ...more unhappy. How exactly those problems remain very real over years and decades. But this is reality. And if it will continue this way ......
