Over 44 percent of American full-time workers earn below living-wage thresholds

Evidence

According to a recent report analyzing salary data against MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, more than 44 percent of American full-time workers do not make enough to meet basic needs. The number of people who fall into the category of the “working poor” is on the rise globally. In the United States, McDonald’s and Walmart (the two largest private employers in the world) pay so little that their workers have to rely on state aid for the poor to survive, from Medicaid to food stamps. The numbers are discouraging. An official report for Congress states that in 2020, 70 percent of Americans receiving state aid were full-time employees. New data also shows that more than half of the homeless population is employed. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 116

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Relates to the sacrifice article: state welfare subsidizing capital’s wage suppression is a form of hidden transfer from public to private — an undertheorized ‘sacrifice’ of taxpayers to maintain corporate profit.
• SEED: Angle: ‘the subsidized wage’ — how public welfare (Medicaid, food stamps) functions as an invisible state subsidy to the two largest employers on Earth.