NYC Educator: How to Solve Poverty

NYC Educator: How to Solve Poverty:

How to Solve Poverty

It's tough to keep a job you like. I've managed to do it for almost three decades, but my daughter has not been so lucky. A few months ago, she went with my wife to try to join a new gym in our town, helped the staff translate for some Spanish-speaking customers, and then ended up with her very first job. She loved it, and was fairly gung-ho on it until quite recently.

The manager who hired her got fired, as did a much-loved and hard-working cleaning person, and my daughter and a whole bunch of her co-workers were no longer happy. So they organized, made a list of demands, and quit en masse. I don't suppose they will see their demands realized. This is a disadvantage of 8-dollar-an-hour, zero benefits non-unionized jobs.

She's fortunate in that she doesn't actually need this job. If she did, it would be a lot harder to take a stand. Around the country, minimum-wage workers have taken stabs at organized protest. But it's a lot tougher if you work several of these jobs just to make ends meet.

Should we really be placing working Americans in that position? I don't see how it helps anyone, even if Gates, Broad, Waltons, and the Koch Brothers are OK with it.

But the solution is simple. I've long felt, for example, that if we made those who administer schools systems patronize them you wouldn't have NYC Educator: How to Solve Poverty: