Inequality. It’s
a loaded word, isn’t it? Some people will argue that it is always
the fault of the people who are at the bottom of the heap, that they
simply are not working hard enough, that if they just weren’t lazy,
they could achieve the same success that the people at the top are
achieving. In making these arguments, the idea that certain groups
are inherently lazier and others are inherently harder workers is
perpetuated- how else could the theory of hard work overcoming all
explain the stories of who makes it and who doesn’t? How else could
they explain the fact that success is largely the domain of the white
straight men without disabilities? So they state that inequality is
an acceptable cost of the trickle-down economy (which doesn’t
actually work, since simply handing rich people more money doesn’t
change the margins where they make their hiring decisions) and that
if the poor just worked hard enough, they wouldn’t be poor.
Others will note
that there is insufficient education for many who are at a
disadvantage, that social mobility is not nearly as extant as the
hard work advocates claim, and that there are huge amounts of
disinformation on the subject wherever one looks. As Americans, we
generally hold that the proper distribution is more equal than what
we think it is, but what we think it is turns out to be yet closer to
equal than reality.
For people who are
at a disadvantage, we see that discrimination often is part of what’s
going on, and we see stories that show hard work to be insufficient.
We hear about the single mother working multiple full time jobs who
still needs food stamps (or the alternately named equivalent, as many
states changed the name to avoid the stigma associated with food
stamps.) Occasionally, we hear about lower pay for people of color or
firings upon hearing that a person is not straight.
What we hear less
about is people with disabilities. Send the same twelve men to repair
shops to get the same thirty-six repair shops. Half use wheelchairs;
half don’t. The result? Wheelchair users were charged approximately
thirty percent more, and a follow up suggested that it was because
shop owners expect wheelchair users to do less shopping around
because of their mobility impairments. Every car repair costing 30%
more than it should adds up over the course of a lifetime. Add in the
fact that proving discrimination in the workforce is nearly
impossible, and we find that people with disabilities have a tougher
time than most staying out of poverty, even working just as hard.
The numbers show
that women, people of color, the elderly, and people with
disabilities are over-represented in the “people living in poverty”
demographic and under-represented in the “highly successful”
demographic, and part of the inequality seems to come from access:
getting charged more, getting offered fewer jobs, getting offered
lower-paying jobs, not being able to afford the suits that would
force employers and the world to stop taking advantage of populations
they (correctly) assume to have trouble fighting back. Poor people
stay poor because they are vulnerable to being hit again once they
are down, not because they are less willing to work hard.
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