I’ve been looking through some US and EU labor data and I have started to wonder why don’t more of the working poor join local mutual aid groups instead of staying at their likely shitty jobs or relying on charities?
This is a study on the labour distribution in the US among the working poor
On table 4 it shows that there are about 5,812,000 people that are classified as working poor ( Its says number in thousands so I multiplied the number given by 1000) and that alot of those jobs are in essential services like making food or providing support to others.
Similar diversity is show in the EU as well
So if most of these people decided to stop working at their current job and instead bring that those skills to a mutual aid network wouldn’t they still get most of the resources they need because other specialists would be there to help them and also live a generally more happy life?
Also the reason why I am saying instead of charities is because charities become less effective the more people request from them because they have limited resources to share and also mainly supported by wealthy people that can unilaterally give and take away support.
Whilst mutual aid networks can take the diversity that more people joining the network gives them and use it to offer more services to other people in that community.
This seems like a no brainer so what am I missing?
So you are saying that the main barriers are housing and electricity. Ok that makes sense but I suspect that there might be plenty of places where you could first get people in that network to collectively save up to buy plots of land to then eventually build up housing. I just think that their is alot of wasted potential to actually directly support these people more.
The issue with being poor is that you don’t get to save a lot - if any - whilst you are paying for rent and the basics. That is a large part of the reason that the housing co-op that I mentioned has housed so few after so long.
Yes, in the right conditions it will work, but there are a lot of situations that don’t leave people with access to those conditions.
If they were able to save up enough to buy land, and build housing… they wouldn’t be poor.
I also don’t think you understand poverty. Almost half of Americas have less than 500 dollars in the bank, and 18 percent have nothing.