Photographic Chronicle of America's Working Poor @Smithsonian

Smithsonian Magazine

A Photographic Chronicle of America's Working Poor | History | Smithsonian: "The official U.S. poverty level is an annual income below $11,880 for a single person or $24,300 for a household of four. That yields a rate of 13.5 percent of the population, or 43.1 million people, according to the U.S. Census. But because these figures don’t fully account for the skyrocketing cost of housing, among other things, they underestimate the number of Americans enduring hard times. “Low income”—which I take as synonymous with “working poor”—is $23,760 for a single person, $48,600 for a four-person household. At that cutoff, 31.7 percent of the population is seriously struggling. That’s 101 million Americans."

"Undoubtedly the economic story of our time is the growing income gap: Between 2009 and 2015, the top 1 percent nabbed 52 percent of the income gains in the so-called recovery, according to Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez. I found ample evidence for the troubling decline in what experts call the “labor share” of revenue, the amount devoted to workers’ pay rather than executive salaries and corporate profits."

"But I encountered something else that Agee didn’t find 75 years ago and that I didn’t find even 30 years ago. It came from a former drug dealer in Cleveland who is now taking part in a kind of economic experiment. It was a word I haven’t heard in decades of reporting on poverty: “hope.”"

A Photographic Chronicle of America's Working Poor | History | Smithsonian: "Martha, 51, emerges from one of the tiny duplexes to greet me and Juanita Ontiveros, a farmworker organizer, who’d telephoned ahead. Martha’s hair is slicked back and she wears freshly applied eye shadow. Yet she looks weary. I ask her about work. Martha replies in a mixture of Spanish and English that she will soon begin a stint in a watermelon-packing plant. The job will last two months, for $10.50 an hour.

After that?

“Nothing.”