When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. (via howtobeterrell)
There’s one major flaw with this. It frames the act of living as a poor person as one that is voluntary. It’s not. It’s imposed on people by those with more money from the moment you’re born until the moment you die in the same shitty little town you were born in, or in some other shitty little town where somebody knows you as the janitor or the lunch lady or the waitress at the diner, or that old lady that’s been eating cat food for the past three years because she can’t afford actual food. It’s not something that anyone willingly chooses, precisely because it does take you away from family and deprive you of sleep and health and acceptable living conditions and anything resembling leisure time. It’s not a donation, and to term it such makes it seem like anybody volunteers to get ground under the feet of the powerful.
Meg's Mumbles 