U. N. That spoke to the General Social survey said that 60 to 70 of americans think we have to provide more support to the poor and yet when you say we need to provide more welfare assistance to them, people do more and think that its not true. Another normative assumption that im so happy you wrote the book is most people by people who need public support is being folks Ronald Reagan described, the women who had 80 names and 30 addresses. She was quite a character. Most of that is when she was not true. Years later and was quite an impressive recipient. The most amazing thing is people who are poor want to work. I am just on a daily basis beaten over the head by my colleagues with the notion the certain neerdowell, lazy people who dont want to work, who are constantly lacking in personal responsibility and they dont want to work. They won a game the system and the yearbook, you describe the eight folks here as people connected to the workforce in some style throughout your studies. Lets start with my first question. You start the book out by describing we talk about the welfare reformers touting the success and you said i need some clarification that 58 of lowincome single mothers were employed by 2000 after the touted welfare reform of 1996. And then you say 75 of them were working in Child Poverty rates so four consecutive years after 1996. Democrats and republicans taking big to relapse and have been since then talking how well off the welfare leaders were. And then we have your book. Tell us what happens. I want to give you a little bit of background so you know how i came to the topic. Prior to welfare reform i traveled the country asking welfare recipients how they made ends meet. So i collected edges from hundreds of single mothers and told the story of my first book about how welfare wasnt paying enough to survive so you had to work as well but you couldnt tell the Welfare Office said they would take away the money. Ever since then ive had this mental calculator in my head. After six years of asking people about their balance sheets, its just automatic. A study poverty for quite a while and then i went and studied urban families. In 2000 i came back to the topic in baltimore interviewing young adult and i began running across household for whom there is no visible means of support. If you dont baltimore come in the chipset that in the shadow, the prison downtown, this old dickensian looking structure. Alicia just had a baby three weeks ago and came to the house and she was visibly depressed. There is no food in the house. Only a table with one broke and share and more worrying. Three weekold baby. She is having trouble supporting the babys head. We sat alicia, i think we need to interview you again because i was concerned about the baby i thought maybe we could bring over some formula. So they gave her the 50 for used and low and behold it came the next day. Her hair had been permed. And she was on her way out to look for jobs. What we realize in that little moment before i met my coauthor, luke schafer, the numbers guy who analyzes the government survey. But i realized not only was it possible that group of americans were living on income so low we didnt even as the nation think it was possible. If you have no cash in the developing world, there is a rich barter economy that you can subsist on. It is not a pretty story, but a lot of transactions occur without cash. Here we are in the world leading capitalist nation and to not have cash is to almost not exist, to not be a citizen. But that little infusion of cash, alicia felt a sense of efficacy that allowed her a modest way. This is where the negative 2 a day came, run into alicia. But then followed her over the next two years, watching her struggle was the inspiration for this jury that is now bled us to four other cities and a lot of number crunching to tell the story from a statistical establishing a National Portrait of 2 at a poverty but also a deep inhuman when we felt it was necessary to tell the story so americans could think through what does this mean. Well, thats 2 a day didnt interview the 1. 5 million families do you say that the subsistence levels, but she did make an effort to go beyond your experience in. You have beyond appalachia into the delta, the mississippi delta in cities like chicago and cleveland a new event reference one of my cities, milwaukee, wisconsin together these data to tell us what its like to live off 2 per person per day. What we found that the recent recession is that snap benefits, formally called food stamps are the only form of income some people had any document that in this book so that people who have snap, but they didnt have money. So you sort of talked about the difficulty that provided, even though we do know that it only income that presented. Can you tell us a little bit about nothing but snap. Half of the 2 a day poor get snap although they are eligible. So the half that do, you can see the data the exact same rise in Household Living without cash. So thats one interesting thing you can see this monotonic rise in the number of people who are telling the food stamp office, i have no income. But in a way, it works. I say to my colleagues at the time, this is a capitalist society and while its not pleasant to the Great Recession we had in 2008, it is something we can depend on happening in the kind of economy we have so when there is no work but have a social safety net and snap served as a social safety net to provide people with something. We see that in a recession with our statistical analysis, we see a set is snap in the Great Recession. So if we counted snap as cash, which you may or may not want to do because of the reasons you know because youve read the book they would cut them out of 2 a day poverty in half. You see that one is no increase in 2 a day poverty and in many ways is really the only social safety net we have left and it is incredibly important program. The reason i say when you dont have cash in your kid named snacks for school, a uniform, but pack from a change of underwear, you need something fungible. The bad part is that it is not fungible. So families do trade in snap for cash to provide essential goods for their kids to keep the lights on in jackson, mississippi, one of the only ways you can keep the air conditioning on his resolve the vast majority of snap. Whats the problem . Snape doesnt cover the fruit of family name so what you see in cases where families are selling snap or three weeks out of the month if they have anything is even a 7cent packs of ramen for every meal. You can imagine the impact on hypertension and obesity and so one. Diabetes. All that sodium. Host well, you know, so you did not find that it was just a matter of purse and all responsibility and on page 45 of your book but a lack of personal responsibility blame it on the lack of personal responsibility and Structural Forces at play here and then you Start Talking about how Service Sector employers often engage in practices that the middleclass professional would never accept and set people up for failure. So here we are. Weve got willing workers, people who want to work according to you, people who dont want to go on welfare according to your book. We talk about one of your recipients who refuses to go down to apply and they want to work but said the jobs themselves set people up for failure. Can you talk about that. One nice thing about having government statistics as you can play the stories the numbers off against each other. You are talking about Randall Cormack in cleveland, ohio is still will not go on tanf. She sees herself as a worker. During the time and cleveland would begin to ask who are the 2 a day courier and what can predict a spell of 2 a day poverty . Are these longterm dependent who fallen off welfare rolls are raised another story. Only the prior two years, 10 had claimed even a nickel from the Tennis Program that 70 during the last year had an adult working in the form of labor market. Our story is one of people wanting to work, taking pride in the work status, thinking of welfare as something unacceptable, something that violates their sense of who they are pretty at the bottom of the labor market has become so degraded and eating out efficiencies from labor says blake on call contracts recommit caught in any time could not be guaranteed hours. At the foot traffic slows you are sent home. Justintime scheduling. So can you give us some examples of this . Justintime scheduling is when you cant predict what your schedule is going to look like for more than 48 hours. If you are a mom with kids, it is very hard to pair the jobs of parenting. The other problem in the fulltime see how our contract is you never know what your income is going to be. Its impossible to plan. In predict the ability means its difficult to take a second job. So working double shifts becomes almost impossible when you cant predict what shift your beyond the first job. They say to you you are a day care worker, you are to be oncall for saturday at noon so therefore you cant babysit, do hair on saturday afternoon because you have to be available to go to work. If they dont call you to go to work, you cant get paid. You can predict your income. These are regular work crack says that even some of the large employers. You also talk about safe working conditions, you know, working. Jennifer fernandez may be the worst job in the book. She gets a custodial job for on enough three years, just got these two little kids. She goes to work for chicago city and affairs choose cleaning corporate apartment buildings but then the workflows. Winterset man suddenly the only contracts are in only contracts arent foreclosed houses on chicagos south side. There is no heat in the psalms, no power. The crew from chicago city arrived. They unlock the door. There might be vermin. They never know whether that is used as a shelter for wildlife or a drug den. Theres broken glass and expect to clean up these places. They are scrapping and the skin is falling off and of course jennifer began suffering from asthma because of all the mold and other toxins she is exposed to. So then she gets sick. The kids get sick and they end up in a cycle of illness. As she comes to work anyway, but employers is so that the rest of the crew said. You go home. They give her less than fulltime hours so by the end of her work she is only half time hours. She knows it will take months to find another job. So she lay chicago city so she will have time to search for another job. Meanwhile the whole family has been in and out of the hospital exacerbated by jennifer sort of ringing sickness. The middleclass workers wouldnt tolerate this because they have worked or traction than someone. Wage theft. It is something that we just say hey, if they had that her character, if they would accept personal responsibility, they would you well in certain corporate note they dont have a pension. We know often they dont have health insurance, but these are things people dont think about. They just take a safe working environment for granted. What is wage theft . , in practices with hotel maids. So you are told you have to clean her room before you clock in. So you put in 45 minutes before youre even allowed to clock in and then you are paid minimum wage. This practice is where you are paid subminimum wager youre forced to clock in or clock out in ways that dont capture the full day. You are working overtime and this also happened to jennifer at the spot downtown. She was working 10, 12 hours a day and not being paid overtime. Wage theft is a huge problem in our country and something not often talked about, the very real. What talk about being talk about things that middleclass families may take for granted or maybe not. Personal days, sick leave. I want to talk specifically about the employee of the month award he that you talk about in the book cited for being employee of the month. Guest shes an amazing woman pattern name is Ray Mccormack paid she has a beautiful little daughter and she works at kmart, lets kmart even though kmart never gives her more than parttime hours. But kmart closes down when a Super Walmart comes to the neighborhood. So she searches and finds a job at walmart. Again, i cant emphasize enough how important work is in the lives of these folks. She decided shes going to memorize all the bar code to produce items because that takes the longest to key in. So she devises this method. By the way, this woman is so poor and has been so neglected by the time shes made a result she no longer have teeth. We are talking a deep report young woman from a deeply poor family. She reads the bar code numbers to the recording device on her cell phone and when she goes home at night she turns it on endless repeat as she sleeps and shes able to memorize an amazing amount of information. She prefers the day shift because she likes to work hard in the night shift pays a dollar more but she doesnt like to be bored. She has so many medications that she has a special place in the employee locker room to keep her mad and the bosses know sometimes she has to go get her medicine, especially her asthma medicine, but she is working and shes living with extended family in kind of an exploit a situation where she has to turn over a lot of her pay in return for use of the car. So her pay is supposed to cover the use of car and gas and shes just need the payment. So she just gas up the car and make the payment to the extended family member, george, who is sort of her landlord. She gets in the car monday morning and there is no gas. She has no money left. George says i spent all of your money paying the rent and doing other things. So she is frantic. She is furious. She is up she is up in detroit and in detroit in the stores father went down in parma. So she calls her manager after winning to play the mud fights for six months. She said if he cant find a ride or a way to get to work, just dont bother. She lost her job. Host she lost a minimum wage job and she didnt have a personal day that all of us take for granted if we were to have this view. Guest there is no good. Thats a critical feature. People who have lives that require good in a lowwage labor market increasingly has no reason because theres 10 people lined up for your job. Host we talked a little bit we talked a lot about the housing situation of people who are part of a 2 a day per person or subject to two. A lot of them dont look with other family members. Youve got some poor people who live with other poor people. They are able to share a house and make it. So what did you find in your research . Guess the back of nature appeared family is the first line of defense. We spent quite a bit of time talking about paul who comes in the shelter in the storm for this extended family who are all in the pizza business together when all of the stores the bus at the same time. Here is a whole Family Business that goes belly up in 2009 and everyone ends up at pauls house. We tell the story about how the twobedroom home along the rain avenue on the west side of cleveland is crawling with people, pa view is fair with 12 of his grandkids. So that was a real protect good thing. We can contrast that to the story of what happened to jennifer her name does when she doubled up with a relative in texas where she had grown up as a child and her mother had grown up engine affair has to end in disaster because often times with sordid seals your fate as a 2 a day per person if youve got some dysfunction in your family not work and that is part of this noxious to that creates a disadvantage. Anyways, in jennifers case her beautiful little girl ends up being molested by george n. They fully to a goodwill that makes the bedroom for them out of an office. They go to the police and of course the entire family turns their back on jennifer for reporting this uncle, you know, who manages a country club. She broke the family have. We see a similar story with Madonna Harris and her little girl, briand at doubled up with her mother and she has a foster sister and grin and sat in a psychiatric ward after this other little girl it is so humiliating to be this poor. Little briand on breanna was so ashamed. There were so many times. They have been in shelters for three years before they landed the situation that when this cousin taunts her and ridicules her again and again, she loses that nsf spending a month in a psychiatric hospital. Host one of the things i found heart wrenching ends when the mother had a much younger boyfriend, husband and a much younger wife and has been was an abusive partner and made her choose between him and one of her other kids they made the mom put her daughter out. Guest this is the story of tabitha who is the star of the book in many ways. She is an exceptional 18yearold was incapacitated to think and reflect on her situation in ways you almost never see. Youll notice that half of the windows are boarded out. Whenever they lock him out he stomps and comes in. The kids are really trying to defend their mother against cliff, and one day a big fight breaks out and they run to this sort of convenience store, liquor store. He chases her and the kids follow. Theres a confrontation between tabatha. Cliff says to all of them, you have to choose. And alba says, why dont you go with a friend of yours for a while. Host i could tell you that when you talk about the need for money, rent is one of the things you cant pay for guest thats right. Host you cant pay without money. You Start Talking about a lot of your passions with your research in the projects. And, of course, a lot of us about caring of the socalled projects. Guest right. Host but we are now experiencing affordable housing, and not only that, your book talks about 19902013 rent grew faster than inflation and every region of the country by 6 income drop by 13 , the housing and urban developing that we should spend no more than 30 on housing, i guess that would include electricity and so forth. Even those not spending 2 per day spend 50 of income on housing. Just by definition, people who have no money are at risk for being homeless, for having to double up with unscrew unscups relatives and coach to couch to couch. That is real trouble having just solid housing so that when you are part of the 2dollar per person group, housing becomes a major struggle and the ability to protect your family, because toggle. Just having to get to work. Whats your address . Guest we have a chapter as you know a room of one film, it is what ray dreams of for her little daughter. She fantasizes. Dora do explorer room with the princess bed and special blankets, this is her fantasy. It is true that rents have risen, the affordability crisis is about falling wages as it is about rises rents, the combination of the two is rea