WHO ARE THE POOR?

Who Are The Poor?

[Kelly Martin]

[Introduction To Social Welfare And Social Work]

[Mr. Phillips]

Who Are The Poor?

Introduction

We believe that the crucial questions to do with building a social movement to end poverty, led by the poor as a united and organized force are: 'who are the poor?', 'why are they poor?', and 'how do we unite the poor?' Any discussion of poverty and the poor that tends towards a very narrow definition falls into the stereotypes and images that are projected by the forces that are arrayed against us. To not have an accurate estimate of who are the poor and why would have us all descend into subjective and divisive personal judgments of who's poor and who's not.

To leave out people who are in fact poor is to fall into the trap of the Powers That Be and their representatives that says that we should only be concerned with 'extreme poverty' and not all poverty. If you can't get the basic necessities of life, you're poor. A narrow definition further isolates and the divides the poor. When you have a narrow definition of poverty, it leads to separating the homeless poor from the day laborer poor from poor artists, obscuring what people have in common, when the task before us is to unite all the poor. The division of the growing ranks of the poor upholds the powerful stereotypes, which blind the main mass of the people from understanding the cause and cure of all poverty.

Analysis

A number of research groups and think tanks have taken up the question of who is poor, and we should consult this analysis, as well as our experience of economic human rights documentation over the years. For instance, the Economic Policy Institute points out that a family with a single wage earner with 3 children has to make at least $14 per hour to secure the basic necessities of life, not just food but housing, clothing, food, electricity, transportation, etc.

The social position of the poor gives them the least stake in the economic status quo. And given the current economic and political direction of society this position of the poor anticipates the position of the mass of the population. Both these and other circumstances make the poor, whether they are aware of it or not, the leading social force for ending poverty and accordingly changing society. Our mission to unite and organize the poor is essentially to raise their consciousness of their social position and thereby giving them greater mass influence and impact.

The poor and dispossessed today differ from the poor and dispossessed of the past. They are compelled to fight under qualitatively new conditions and to creatively wield new weapons of struggle. In other words, the socio-economic position of the low waged, laid off, and locked out is not that of the industrial poor, the slave poor, or of the colonial poor of yesterday. The new poor embody all the major issues and problems that ...