poverty and unemployment essay

Essay On Unemployment And Poverty

Unemployment and poverty are some of the threats that hinder South Africa’s economic growth and development. Failure to render basic services by local Government / Municipalities as mandate the national government catalysis poverty. The stats-SA 2008 mid-year population estimate is 48.7 Million people in South Africa out of which about 21.9% are unemployed. Approximately 18 million South Africans (45% of the population) live in poor households that earn less than R352 per adult per month. Power relations in poor households tend to be characterised by violence, fear, food insecurity, exploitative work and other pathologies. Three of every five South African children grow up in poor households (Human Development Report for South Africa, UNDP, 2000). …show more content…

A number of initiatives and programmes such as the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP), Internship programmes, working for water programme, SETA training programmes and National Sanitation Job Creation Programme, have been put in place to address the shortage of skills while also decreasing poverty and unemployment . Unemployment due to ever improving technology is another challenge that the country is facing. Strategic interventions are critical to ensuring that poor start participating in the main stream of the economy and also bridging the gap between the first and second economy. Limited or lack of access to economic opportunities, particularly by youth prevents household from moving out of the poverty web. In some cases, those amongst the unemployed youth have skills and have undergone some form of training. The country’s economy could grow by far if these skills are utilized even on the temporary

Child Poverty Remains High In The Uk Essay

Explain why child poverty remains high in the UK and is increasing Introduction Child poverty is a persistent issue in the United Kingdom (UK), affecting an significant proportion of the nations children each year. Although the UK is a developed country, the it has a higher than average rate of child poverty in Europe (see figure 1), approximately 4.2 million children were living in poverty as of 2021 (Department for Work and Pensions, 2023). The amount of children affected is predicted to increase further because more families will become vulnerable to financial hardship because of the COVID-19 pandemic, conflict in Ukraine and austerity to name a few. This essay will explore the causation of child poverty in the UK and why it continues to

Cause Of Poverty In America Essay

There are many causes for poverty in America. According to Pusuegod.org, the common causes of poverty are “poor economy, drug use and lack of education”. In addition, debts and medical expenses. Having a poor economy can ruin people’s life because people depend on the economy. When the economy goes down people have limited resources and may have to ration out their food and money.

Essay On Poverty In Canada

Canada is one of the countries with the most significant economic and human development in the world. Their rules of living are among the highest in the world, and it is not uncommon to find some of their cities among the reviews that mark them as the best on the planet to live in. But that 's only part of the reality. One of the social reasons that contribute to poverty in Canada is that people who are considered poor, do not have jobs with minimum wages or whose jobs are not fixed or stable (4 out of 10 poor), who are unable to work because of health, disability or being cared for by young children (5 out of 10 poor) and who are unable to find employment (1 out of 10 poor, either because of lack of training, experience or because in their

Rethinking American Poverty Summary

III. A theory in the work is that political and economic structures failed to provide enough decent opportunities and support to the whole economy. IV. The Author does not present any original research, does use sources to come to conclusions on poverty. The author doesn’t mention the methodology used.

Child Poverty In The United States Essay

Child Poverty in the U.S About nine months after conception, newborns come out of the wombs and come to the world. The newborns must be the most beautiful gift the mothers have ever received. It is always moved that the mothers finally see their babies after have waited for long time. The newborns start their new journey in the world. Meanwhile, the babies will embody tomorrow’s world.

Satire About Poverty

Poverty is universal but does vary within countries, even neighborhoods. According to society poverty is hunger, lack of shelter, not having the ability to see a doctor when necessary and limited education. In third world countries, it is very common for parents to conceive a high number of children as a source of labor. Not only do these kids frequently receive slight or no education, but large families in these countries are the main contributor to global overpopulation. These children are not privileged with the same basic opportunities given to an American child.

Health Inequalities Essay

Health inequalities are preventable and unjust differences in health status experienced by certain population groups. People in lower socio-economic groups are more likely to experience chronic ill-health and die earlier than those who are more advantaged. Health inequalities are not only apparent between people of different socio-economic groups – they exist between different genders and different ethnic groups (“Health inequalities,” n.d.). The situation in which people are born, grow, develop, work and age are affected by social, economic, environmental and most importantly political factors.

Child Poverty Informative Speech

From a 2013 report done by UNICEF, it has shown that poverty rates rose from 30.1% in 2008 to 32.2% in 2010 and these figures are still rising. As of 2012, there are around 16.1 million children living in poverty and around 32% of us Americans living in food insecure homes are children. And in the report, we are ranked second in having one of the

Growing Up Poverty

The Effects of Growing up in Poverty Poverty is not a new phenomenon we are dealing with. It has been an issue from the foretime till now. Poverty gradually has continued and changed its form in a different manner that has created many problems for the new generations, for example, in the old days poverty implicated to lack land and food, but nowadays, poverty means lack of education, lack of food and water, lack of money and much more. The main cause of poverty is a lack of money or income which has created a very critical situation in local and international society. These critical situations are child labor, hunger, health problems and much more that we are dealing with nowadays.

Thesis Statement On Poverty

I. Introduction A. Thesis statement: A child’s early development is greatly impacted by living in poverty which leads to poor cognitive outcomes, school achievement, and severe emotional, and behavioral problems. II. Body Paragraph 1. Claim: According to (Short, 2016) poverty consists of two parts: a measure of need and resources available to meet those needs.

Essay On The Effects Of Poverty On Education

In 2009 the estimated number of impoverished families was more than 45 million, which is about 14.5 percent of the total U.S. population (Gongloff 2014). Majority of the poor Americans are white, but the poverty rate is much higher among minorities. Poverty can affect a child in many different ways. It can affect the whole child, the development of the child’s brain; it can also affect the child’s performance at school. Poverty can not only hinder a child, but it can also cause stress within the family.

Poverty And Poverty Essay

Poverty can adversely affect the population in so many ways. Families living in poverty can face emotional and social challenges, cognitive lacks and health and safety issues and acute and chronic stresses. Levels of stress increase with the economic circumstances. Subsequent poverty and job loss are associated with violence in families, including child and elder abuse. These families are also more likely to be exposed to illnesses, job loss, eviction, criminal victimization and family death.

The Problems Of Unemployment As A Social Problem In Society

Typically, one does not think about unemployment being a social problem, unless you are someone that is unemployed or has experienced unemployment. Unfortunately, unemployment is becoming a serious social problem today in society. Many people who happen to be unemployed are more than capable of working they just do not have the proper experience or flexibility that a job requires. Many are also unemployed because there are not enough jobs for everyone. The unemployment rate is rising every day and the something needs to be done to stop this.

Poverty And Inequality Essay

Inefficient policies all around the world and especially in our country are contributing to problems in the society. And the biggest problem which the world faces today is the problem of “Poverty” and “Inequality”. It is hard for one to determine whether poverty causes inequality or is it the other way around because both these problems are interrelated. Poverty is something which is caused due to transferring wealth in to the hands of a specific group and the unjust policies of the government. And inequality is discriminating a person in all spheres of life which gives a rise to sense of deprivation.

The Negative Impact Of Unemployment In Youth

The evidence suggests that, while there are major structural challenges, there are also some promising options to pursue. Explain why you selected this problem as a team Youth unemployment is a problem within Gauteng region and it affect both personal and social status of an individual. Unemployment has been found to affect household hence increasing poverty rate as a result of no income or loss of income. It creates dependency on social grants which affect the economy.

More about Essay On Unemployment And Poverty

Related topics.

• Unemployment
• Poverty in the United States
• United States
• Cycle of poverty

Module 16: Work and the Economy

Poverty and unemployment in the united states, learning outcomes.

• Describe the relationship between poverty, work, and unemployment

Poverty in the United States

When people lose their jobs during a recession or in a changing job market, it takes longer to find a new one, if they can find one at all.  Also, according to (Hicks 2013), those with higher human capital, or years of education, have a much more difficult time finding work. When people do find a job, it is often at a much lower wage or not full time. This can force people into poverty. In the United States, we tend to have what is called relative poverty, defined as being unable to live the lifestyle of the average person in your country. This must be contrasted with the extreme poverty that is frequently found in underdeveloped countries and defined as the inability, or near-inability, to afford basic necessities such as food (Byrns 2011). (You can review more about poverty and differences in terminology in the module on inequality.)  [1]

The Historical U.S. Unemployment Rate

Examining unemployment can help us better understand poverty in the United States. Let’s look at what the unemployment rate is really telling us. The unemployment rate is not the percentage of the total adult population without jobs, but rather the percentage of adults who are in the labor force but who do not have jobs. Even with the “out of the labor force” category, there are still some people that are mislabeled in the categorization of employed, unemployed, or out of the labor force. There are some people who have only part time or temporary jobs and who are looking for full time and permanent employment that are counted as employed, though they are not employed in the way they would like or need to be. Additionally, there are individuals who are underemployed . This includes those that are trained or skilled for one type or level of work who are working in a lower paying job or one that does not utilize their skills. For example, an individual with a college degree in finance who is working as a sales clerk would be conside red underemployed. They are, however, also counted in the employed group. All of these individuals fall under the umbrella of the term “hidden unemployment.” Discouraged workers , those who have stopped looking for employment and, hence, are no longer counted in the unemployed also fall into this group.

Let’s look at how unemployment rates have changed over time and how various groups of people are affected by unemployment differently. Figure 1 shows the historical pattern of U.S. unemployment since 1948. While it clearly fluctuates over time, the unemployment rate seems to return to a range of 4% to 6%. There does not seem to be a long-term trend toward the rate moving generally higher or generally lower.

Figure 1. The U.S. Unemployment Rate, 1948–2016. The U.S. unemployment rate moves up and down as the economy moves in and out of recessions. (Source: www.census.gov/cps).

As we look at this data, several patterns stand out:

• Unemployment rates do fluctuate over time. During the deep recessions of the early 1980s and of 2007–2009, unemployment reached roughly 10%. For comparison, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the unemployment rate reached almost 25% of the labor force.
• Unemployment rates in the late 1990s and into the mid-2000s were rather low by historical standards. The unemployment rate was below 5% from 1997 to 2000 and near 5% during almost all of 2006–2007. The previous time unemployment had been less than 5% for three consecutive years was three decades earlier, from 1968 to 1970. It has returned to this level in 2016.
• The unemployment rate never falls all the way to zero. Indeed, it never seems to get below 3%—and it stays that low only for very short periods. (Reasons why this is the case will be discussed later.)
• The timing of rises and falls in unemployment matches fairly well with the timing of upswings and downswings in the overall economy. During periods of recession and depression, unemployment is high. During periods of economic growth, unemployment tends to be lower.
• No significant upward or downward trend in unemployment rates is apparent. This point is especially worth noting because the U.S. population nearly quadrupled from 76 million in 1900 to over 314 million by 2012. Moreover, a higher proportion of U.S. adults are now in the paid workforce, because women have entered the paid labor force in significant numbers in recent decades. Women composed 18% of the paid workforce in 1900 and nearly half of the paid workforce in 2012. But despite the increased number of workers, as well as ot her economic events like globalization and the continuous invention of new technologies, the economy has provided jobs without causing any long-term upward or downward trend in unemployment rates.

Unemployment Rates by Group

Unemployment is not distributed evenly across the U.S. population. Figure 2 shows unemployment rates broken down in various ways: by gender, age, and race/ethnicity.

Figure 2. Unemployment Rate by Demographic Group. (a) By gender, 1972–2012. Unemployment rates for men used to be lower than unemployment rates for women, but in recent decades, the two rates have been very close, often with the unemployment rate for men somewhat higher. (b) By age, 1972–2012. Unemployment rates are highest for the very young and become lower with age. (c) By race and ethnicity, 1972–2012 . Although unemployment rates for all groups tend to rise and fall together, the unemployment rate for whites has been lower than the unemployment rate for Blacks and Hispanics in recent decades. (Source: www.census.gov/bls).

The unemployment rate for women had historically tended to be higher than the unemployment rate for men, perhaps reflecting the historical pattern that women were seen as “secondary” earners. By about 1980, however, the unemployment rate for women was essentially the same as that for men, as shown in 2(a). During the recession of 2008–2009, however, the unemployment rate climbed higher for men than for women.

Figure 3 . While women had historically more affected by unemployment, there is very little gender unemployment gap today.

Younger workers tend to have higher unemployment, while mid dle-aged workers tend to have lower unemployment, probably because the middle-aged workers feel the responsibility of needing to have a job more heavily, in addition to having more experience. Younger workers move in and out of jobs (and in and out of the labor force) more easily. Elderly workers have extremely low rates of unemployment, because those who do n ot have jobs often exit the labor force by retiring, and thus are not counted in the unemployment statistics. Figure 2(b) shows unemployment rates for women divided by age; the pattern for men is similar.

The unemployment rate for African-Americans is substantially higher than the rate for other racial or ethnic groups, a fact that surely reflects, to some extent, a pattern of discrimination that has constrained Blacks’ labor market opportunities. However, the gaps between unemployment rates for whites and for Blacks and Hispanics diminished in the 1990s, as shown in Figure 3(c). In fact, unemployment rates for Blacks and Hispanics were at the lowest levels for several decades in the mid-2000s before rising during the Great Recession of 2008.

Finally, those with less education typically suffer higher unemployment. In early 2013, for example, the unemployment rate for those with a college degree was 3.7%; for those with some college but not a four-year degree, the unemployment rate was 6.0%; for high school graduates with no additional degree, the unemployment rate was 7.6%; and for those without a high school diploma, the unemployment rate was 10.3%. This pattern may arise because additional education offers better connections to the labor market and higher demand, or it may occur because the labor market opportunities for low-skilled workers are less attractive than the opportunities for the more highly-skilled. Because of lower pay, low-skilled workers may be less motivated to find jobs.

Thinking about Unemployment

We cannot rely on unemployment statistics to provide a clear picture of total unemployment in the United States. First, unemployment statistics do not take into account underemployment , a state in which a person accepts a lower paying, lower status job than their education and experience qualifies them to perform. Second, unemployment statistics only count those:

• who are actively looking for work
• who have not earned income from a job in the past four weeks
• who are ready, willing, and able to work

The unemployment statistics provided by the U.S. government are rarely accurate, because many of the unemployed become discouraged and stop looking for work. Not only that, but these statistics undercount the youngest and oldest workers, the chronically unemployed (e.g., homeless), and seasonal and migrant workers.

A certain amount of unemployment is a direct result of the relative inflexibility of the labor market, considered structural unemployment , which describes when there is a societal level of disjuncture between people seeking jobs and the available jobs. This mismatch can be geographic (they are hiring in California, but most unemployed live in Alabama), technological (skilled workers are replaced by machines, as in the auto industry), or can result from any sudden change in the types of jobs people are seeking versus the types of companies that are hiring.

Because of the high standard of living in the United States, many people are working at full-time jobs but are still poor by the standards of relative poverty. They are the working poor. The United States has a higher percentage of working poor than many other developed countries (Brady, Fullerton and Cross 2010). In terms of employment, the Bureau of Labor Statistics defines the working poor as those who have spent at least 27 weeks working or looking for work, and yet remain below the poverty line. Many of the facts about the working poor are as expected: Those who work only part time are more likely to be classified as working poor than those with full-time employment; higher levels of education lead to less likelihood of being among the working po or; gender and race impact ones odds of being in this group and those with children under 18 are four times more likely than those without children to fall into this category. In 2016, the working poor rate, which is the the ratio of the working poor to all individuals in the labor force for at lest 27 weeks or more, was 4.9  percent, or 7.6 million Americans, down from 2015. In that same year women were more likely than men to be among the working poor. The rate for Blacks and Hispanics were 8.7 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively, compared with 4.3 percent for whites and 3.5 percent for Asians (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016).

Figure 4.  Women are disproportionately represented in the working-poor, especially Black and Hispanic women.

Age also plays a factor in being classified as the working poor.  The working-poor rate of employed youths 20 to 24 years old was 8.7 percent in 2016, considerably higher than the rates for workers ages 35 to 44 (5.6 percent) and 55 to 64 (2.8 percent). Workers age 65 and older had a working-poor rate of 1.5 percent.  (Chart 1) [2]

Figure 5.  Poverty rates vary by states and region. As you can see, areas with the highest level of poverty are relaively tightly clustered, but the second-highest rates of poverty occur in states across the nation, from Nevada and Arizona in the Southwest to New York in the Northeast. (Credit: U.S. Census Bureau)

MillenNials and Poverty

Millennials, or Americans born between 1982 and 2000, now number 83.1 million and represent more than one quarter of the nation’s population. Young adults today are marrying at lower rates than previous generations, and self-reports suggest that a lack of economic security including wages, poverty, and housing (e.g., housing costs and living arrangements) are all associated with lower marriage rates among young adults.  [3] . According to Pew Research (2017) more millennial households are in poverty than households headed by any other generation. In 2016, of the approximate 17 million U.S. household living in poverty, 5.3 million were headed by a millennial. [4] \

Figure 5 . Millennials face greater rates of poverty when compared with other generations.

Most developed countries such as the United States protect their citizens from extreme poverty by providing different levels of social services such as unemployment insurance, welfare, food assistance, and so on. They may also provide job training and retraining so that people can reenter the job market. In the past, the elderly were particularly vulnerable to falling into poverty after they stopped working; however, pensions, retirement plans, and Social Security were designed to help prevent this. A major concern in the United States is the rising number of young people growing up in poverty. Growing up poor can cut off access to the education and services people need to move out of poverty and into stable employment. As we saw, more education was often a key to stability, and those raised in poverty are the ones least able to find well-paying work, perpetuating a cycle.

Another notion important to sociologists and citizens is the expense of being poor. In a practical sense, people with more money on hand, better credit, a more stable income, and reliable insurance can purchase items or services in different ways than people who lack those things. For example, someone with a higher income can pay bills more reliably, as well as have more credit extended to them through credit cards or loans. When it comes time for those people to purchase a car, for example, they can likely negotiate a lower monthly payment or less money down. In an even more simplistic situation, people with more spending money can buy groceries in bulk, spending far less per unit than those who must purchase smaller portions. The single greatest expense for most adults is housing; beyond its significant portion of a family’s expenses, housing drives many other costs, such as transportation (how close does someone live to the places they need to go), childcare, and other areas. And people in poverty pay significantly more for their housing than others – sometimes 70-80 percent of their total income. Those with fewer resources are also more likely to rent rather than own, so they do not build credit in the same way, nor do they have the opportunity to sell the property later and utilize their equity (Nobles 2019).

The ways that governments, organizations, individuals, and society as a whole help the poor are matters of significant debate, informed by extensive study. Sociologists and other professionals contribute to these conversations and provide evidence of the impacts of these circumstances and interventions to change them. The decisions made on these issues have a profound effect on working in the United States.

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• Why do you think millennials have such a high number of households living in poverty? 

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• Hicks, M. J. (2013). Notes On: Labor Markets After the Great Recession: Unemployment and Policy for Indiana. Labor Law Journal, 64(2), 103–113. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=88045408&site=ehost-live ↵
• BLS Reports. A profile of the working poor, 2016. Retrieved from  https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2016/home.htm . ↵
• Gurrentz, Benjamin (April 2018) Millennial Marriage: How Much Does Economic Security Matter to Marriage Rates for Young Adults?   Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/library/working-papers/2018/demo/SEHSD-WP2018-09.html ↵
• Fry, Richard (2017).  5 facts about Millennial households . Pew Research Center. Retrieved from:  https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/06/5-facts-about-millennial-households/ ↵
• Modification, adaptation, and original content. Authored by : Rebecca Vonderhaar for Lumen Learning. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Work in the United States. Authored by : OpenStax CNX. Located at : https://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]:cdCaIHP1@3/Work-in-the-United-States . License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]
• Patterns of Unemployment. Authored by : OpenStax College. Located at : https://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]:82qMsJce/Patterns-of-Unemployment . Project : Economics. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Patterns of Unemployment. Provided by : Lumen Learning. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-macroeconomics/chapter/patterns-of-unemployment/ . Project : Macroeconomics. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Work in the United States. Provided by : OpenStax. Located at : https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/18-3-work-in-the-united-states . Project : Sociology 3e. License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/18-3-work-in-the-united-states
• 5 facts about Millennial households (graph). Authored by : Richard Fry. Provided by : Pew Research Center. Located at : https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/06/5-facts-about-millennial-households/ . License : All Rights Reserved
• The Gender Unemployment Gap Image. Authored by : Guillaume Vandenbroucke and Heting Zhu . Provided by : Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Located at : https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/second-quarter-2018/gender-risk-unemployment . License : All Rights Reserved

UN Decades on Poverty

First United Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty 1997-2006 

Second United Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty 2008-2017

Third United Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty 2018-2027 

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Poverty Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on poverty essay.

“Poverty is the worst form of violence”. – Mahatma Gandhi.

How Poverty is Measured?

For measuring poverty United nations have devised two measures of poverty – Absolute & relative poverty.  Absolute poverty is used to measure poverty in developing countries like India. Relative poverty is used to measure poverty in developed countries like the USA. In absolute poverty, a line based on the minimum level of income has been created & is called a poverty line.  If per day income of a family is below this level, then it is poor or below the poverty line. If per day income of a family is above this level, then it is non-poor or above the poverty line. In India, the new poverty line is  Rs 32 in rural areas and Rs 47 in urban areas.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Causes of Poverty

According to the Noble prize winner South African leader, Nelson Mandela – “Poverty is not natural, it is manmade”. The above statement is true as the causes of poverty are generally man-made. There are various causes of poverty but the most important is population. Rising population is putting the burden on the resources & budget of countries. Governments are finding difficult to provide food, shelter & employment to the rising population.

The other causes are- lack of education, war, natural disaster, lack of employment, lack of infrastructure, political instability, etc. For instance- lack of employment opportunities makes a person jobless & he is not able to earn enough to fulfill the basic necessities of his family & becomes poor. Lack of education compels a person for less paying jobs & it makes him poorer. Lack of infrastructure means there are no industries, banks, etc. in a country resulting in lack of employment opportunities. Natural disasters like flood, earthquake also contribute to poverty.

In some countries, especially African countries like Somalia, a long period of civil war has made poverty widespread. This is because all the resources & money is being spent in war instead of public welfare. Countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc. are prone to natural disasters like cyclone, etc. These disasters occur every year causing poverty to rise.

Ill Effects of Poverty

Poverty affects the life of a poor family. A poor person is not able to take proper food & nutrition &his capacity to work reduces. Reduced capacity to work further reduces his income, making him poorer. Children from poor family never get proper schooling & proper nutrition. They have to work to support their family & this destroys their childhood. Some of them may also involve in crimes like theft, murder, robbery, etc. A poor person remains uneducated & is forced to live under unhygienic conditions in slums. There are no proper sanitation & drinking water facility in slums & he falls ill often &  his health deteriorates. A poor person generally dies an early death. So, all social evils are related to poverty.

Government Schemes to Remove Poverty

The government of India also took several measures to eradicate poverty from India. Some of them are – creating employment opportunities , controlling population, etc. In India, about 60% of the population is still dependent on agriculture for its livelihood. Government has taken certain measures to promote agriculture in India. The government constructed certain dams & canals in our country to provide easy availability of water for irrigation. Government has also taken steps for the cheap availability of seeds & farming equipment to promote agriculture. Government is also promoting farming of cash crops like cotton, instead of food crops. In cities, the government is promoting industrialization to create more jobs. Government has also opened  ‘Ration shops’. Other measures include providing free & compulsory education for children up to 14 years of age, scholarship to deserving students from a poor background, providing subsidized houses to poor people, etc.

Poverty is a social evil, we can also contribute to control it. For example- we can simply donate old clothes to poor people, we can also sponsor the education of a poor child or we can utilize our free time by teaching poor students. Remember before wasting food, somebody is still sleeping hungry.

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Poverty eradication: The role of youth participation as a catalyst for social change

2012, Society and Economy

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Joseph Francis , Bevelyn Dube

Amb. Salisu I U M A R F A R U K DANMASANI GCNY

ABSTRACT Young people play a crucial role in the prospect for development and should be included in all National Development Plans and Programmes. But reality shows that attention to youth has not been sufficient and more needs to be done considering the practical implications of shifting perceptions of youth and the role they can play in the society. This paper discusses the conceptual issues and literatures related to the barriers to effective youth participation in national development, such as lack of education, unemployment, extreme poverty, HIV/AIDS, discrimination and cynicism from both adults and young people themselves about participation competence, and institutional resistance. The paper also aims at enriching current discourse on youth participation and to supplement existing information available about the values and aspirations of young people towards participation in national development. The paper concludes and recommends solutions to overcome the challenges that are sensitive to national development in social, economic, cultural and political contexts by identifying best practices and approaches that can work. These include: Efforts needed to create mutual understanding between young people and the adults in organizations, schools and in homes; changes in youth development frameworks away from a deficit model of young people’s needs to recognize what they already have to offer, especially recognition of their leadership potential; young people should be involved at all stages of projects and programmes, including the envisioning and planning phases; adult mentors, educators and allies are needed to support young people’s efforts; flexibility of systems; youth participation must be institutionalized in issues, settings and practices that are part of young people’s lives; and finally, the need for enhanced measures to address youth poverty and unemployment for meaningful contributions to national development.

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19.10: Poverty and Unemployment in the United States

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Learning Outcomes

• Describe the relationship between poverty, work, and unemployment

Poverty in the United States

When people lose their jobs during a recession or in a changing job market, it takes longer to find a new one, if they can find one at all. Also, according to (Hicks 2013), those with higher human capital, or years of education, have a much more difficult time finding work. When people do find a job, it is often at a much lower wage or not full time. This can force people into poverty. In the United States, we tend to have what is called relative poverty, defined as being unable to live the lifestyle of the average person in your country. This must be contrasted with the absolute poverty that is frequently found in underdeveloped countries and defined as the inability, or near-inability, to afford basic necessities such as food (Byrns 2011). (You can review more about poverty and differences in terminology in the module on inequality.) [1]

https://assessments.lumenlearning.co...essments/14817

The Historical U.S. Unemployment Rate

Examining unemployment can help us better understand poverty in the United States. Let’s look at what the unemployment rate is really telling us. The unemployment rate is not the percentage of the total adult population without jobs, but rather the percentage of adults who are in the labor force but who do not have jobs. Even with the “out of the labor force” category, there are still some people that are mislabeled in the categorization of employed, unemployed, or out of the labor force. There are some people who have only part time or temporary jobs and who are looking for full time and permanent employment that are counted as employed, though they are not employed in the way they would like or need to be. Additionally, there are individuals who are underemployed . This includes those that are trained or skilled for one type or level of work who are working in a lower paying job or one that does not utilize their skills. For example, an individual with a college degree in finance who is working as a sales clerk would be conside red underemployed. They are, however, also counted in the employed group. All of these individuals fall under the umbrella of the term “hidden unemployment.” Discouraged workers , those who have stopped looking for employment and, hence, are no longer counted in the unemployed also fall into this group.

Let’s look at how unemployment rates have changed over time and how various groups of people are affected by unemployment differently. Figure 1 shows the historical pattern of U.S. unemployment since 1948. While it clearly fluctuates over time, the unemployment rate seems to return to a range of 4% to 6%. There does not seem to be a long-term trend toward the rate moving generally higher or generally lower.

As we look at this data, several patterns stand out:

• Unemployment rates do fluctuate over time. During the deep recessions of the early 1980s and of 2007–2009, unemployment reached roughly 10%. For comparison, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the unemployment rate reached almost 25% of the labor force.
• Unemployment rates in the late 1990s and into the mid-2000s were rather low by historical standards. The unemployment rate was below 5% from 1997 to 2000 and near 5% during almost all of 2006–2007. The previous time unemployment had been less than 5% for three consecutive years was three decades earlier, from 1968 to 1970. It has returned to this level in 2016.
• The unemployment rate never falls all the way to zero. Indeed, it never seems to get below 3%—and it stays that low only for very short periods. (Reasons why this is the case will be discussed later.)
• The timing of rises and falls in unemployment matches fairly well with the timing of upswings and downswings in the overall economy. During periods of recession and depression, unemployment is high. During periods of economic growth, unemployment tends to be lower.
• No significant upward or downward trend in unemployment rates is apparent. This point is especially worth noting because the U.S. population nearly quadrupled from 76 million in 1900 to over 314 million by 2012. Moreover, a higher proportion of U.S. adults are now in the paid workforce, because women have entered the paid labor force in significant numbers in recent decades. Women composed 18% of the paid workforce in 1900 and nearly half of the paid workforce in 2012. But despite the increased number of workers, as well as ot her economic events like globalization and the continuous invention of new technologies, the economy has provided jobs without causing any long-term upward or downward trend in unemployment rates.

Unemployment Rates by Group

Unemployment is not distributed evenly across the U.S. population. Figure 2 shows unemployment rates broken down in various ways: by gender, age, and race/ethnicity.

The unemployment rate for women had historically tended to be higher than the unemployment rate for men, perhaps reflecting the historical pattern that women were seen as “secondary” earners. By about 1980, however, the unemployment rate for women was essentially the same as that for men, as shown in 2(a). During the recession of 2008–2009, however, the unemployment rate climbed higher for men than for women.

Younger workers tend to have higher unemployment, while mid dle-aged workers tend to have lower unemployment, probably because the middle-aged workers feel the responsibility of needing to have a job more heavily, in addition to having more experience. Younger workers move in and out of jobs (and in and out of the labor force) more easily. Elderly workers have extremely low rates of unemployment, because those who do n ot have jobs often exit the labor force by retiring, and thus are not counted in the unemployment statistics. Figure 2(b) shows unemployment rates for women divided by age; the pattern for men is similar.

The unemployment rate for African-Americans is substantially higher than the rate for other racial or ethnic groups, a fact that surely reflects, to some extent, a pattern of discrimination that has constrained blacks’ labor market opportunities. However, the gaps between unemployment rates for whites and for blacks and Hispanics diminished in the 1990s, as shown in Figure 3(c). In fact, unemployment rates for blacks and Hispanics were at the lowest levels for several decades in the mid-2000s before rising during the Great Recession of 2008.

Finally, those with less education typically suffer higher unemployment. In early 2013, for example, the unemployment rate for those with a college degree was 3.7%; for those with some college but not a four-year degree, the unemployment rate was 6.0%; for high school graduates with no additional degree, the unemployment rate was 7.6%; and for those without a high school diploma, the unemployment rate was 10.3%. This pattern may arise because additional education offers better connections to the labor market and higher demand, or it may occur because the labor market opportunities for low-skilled workers are less attractive than the opportunities for the more highly-skilled. Because of lower pay, low-skilled workers may be less motivated to find jobs.

Thinking about Unemployment

We cannot rely on unemployment statistics to provide a clear picture of total unemployment in the United States. First, unemployment statistics do not take into account underemployment , a state in which a person accepts a lower paying, lower status job than their education and experience qualifies them to perform. Second, unemployment statistics only count those:

• who are actively looking for work
• who have not earned income from a job in the past four weeks
• who are ready, willing, and able to work

The unemployment statistics provided by the U.S. government are rarely accurate, because many of the unemployed become discouraged and stop looking for work. Not only that, but these statistics undercount the youngest and oldest workers, the chronically unemployed (e.g., homeless), and seasonal and migrant workers.

A certain amount of unemployment is a direct result of the relative inflexibility of the labor market, considered structural unemployment , which describes when there is a societal level of disjuncture between people seeking jobs and the available jobs. This mismatch can be geographic (they are hiring in California, but most unemployed live in Alabama), technological (skilled workers are replaced by machines, as in the auto industry), or can result from any sudden change in the types of jobs people are seeking versus the types of companies that are hiring.

Because of the high standard of living in the United States, many people are working at full-time jobs but are still poor by the standards of relative poverty. They are the working poor. The United States has a higher percentage of working poor than many other developed countries (Brady, Fullerton and Cross 2010). In terms of employment, the Bureau of Labor Statistics defines the working poor as those who have spent at least 27 weeks working or looking for work, and yet remain below the poverty line. Many of the facts about the working poor are as expected: Those who work only part time are more likely to be classified as working poor than those with full-time employment; higher levels of education lead to less likelihood of being among the working po or; gender and race impact ones odds of being in this group and those with children under 18 are four times more likely than those without children to fall into this category. In 2016, the working poor rate, which is the the ratio of the working poor to all individuals in the labor force for at lest 27 weeks or more, was 4.9 percent, or 7.6 million Americans, down from 2015. In that same year women were more likely than men to be among the working poor. The rate for blacks and Hispanics were 8.7 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively, compared with 4.3 percent for whites and 3.5 percent for Asians (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016).

Age also plays a factor in being classified as the working poor. The working-poor rate of employed youths 20 to 24 years old was 8.7 percent in 2016, considerably higher than the rates for workers ages 35 to 44 (5.6 percent) and 55 to 64 (2.8 percent). Workers age 65 and older had a working-poor rate of 1.5 percent. (Chart 1) [2]

MillenNials and Poverty

Millennials, or Americans born between 1982 and 2000, now number 83.1 million and represent more than one quarter of the nation’s population. Young adults today are marrying at lower rates than previous generations, and self-reports suggest that a lack of economic security including wages, poverty, and housing (e.g., housing costs and living arrangements) are all associated with lower marriage rates among young adults. [3] . According to Pew Research (2017) more millennial households are in poverty than households headed by any other generation. In 2016, of the approximate 17 million U.S. household living in poverty, 5.3 million were headed by a millennial. [4] \

Most developed countries such as the United States protect their citizens from absolute poverty by providing different levels of social services such as unemployment insurance, welfare, food assistance, and so on. They may also provide job training and retraining so that people can reenter the job market. In the past, the elderly were particularly vulnerable to falling into poverty after they stopped working; however, pensions, retirement plans, and Social Security were designed to help prevent this. A major concern in the United States is the rising number of young people growing up in poverty. Growing up poor can cut off access to the education and services people need to move out of poverty and into stable employment. As we saw, more education was often a key to stability, and those raised in poverty are the ones least able to find well-paying work, perpetuating a cycle.

There is a lively debate about how much support local, state, and federal governments should give to help the unemployed and underemployed. The decisions made on these issues will have a profound effect on working in the United States.

Think It Over

• Why do you think millennials have such a high number of households living in poverty?

[glossary-page] [glossary-term]discouraged workers:[/glossary-term] [glossary-definition]those who have stopped looking for employment due to the lack of suitable positions available[/glossary-definition] [glossary-term]structural unemployment:[/glossary-term] [glossary-definition]a societal level of disjuncture between people seeking jobs and the jobs that are available[/glossary-definition] [glossary-term]out of the labor force:[/glossary-term] [glossary-definition]those who are not working and not looking for work—whether they want employment or not; also termed “not in the labor force”[/glossary-definition] [glossary-term]underemployed:[/glossary-term] [glossary-definition]individuals who are employed in a job that is below their skills[/glossary-definition] [glossary-term]underemployment:[/glossary-term] [glossary-definition]a state in which a person accepts a lower paying, lower status job than his or her education and experience qualifies him or her to perform[/glossary-definition][/glossary-page]

• Hicks, M. J. (2013). Notes On: Labor Markets After the Great Recession: Unemployment and Policy for Indiana. Labor Law Journal, 64(2), 103–113. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=88045408&site=ehost-live ↵
• BLS Reports. A profile of the working poor, 2016. Retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2016/home.htm . ↵
• Gurrentz, Benjamin (April 2018) Millennial Marriage: How Much Does Economic Security Matter to Marriage Rates for Young Adults? Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/library/working-papers/2018/demo/SEHSD-WP2018-09.html ↵
• Fry, Richard (2017). 5 facts about Millennial households . Pew Research Center. Retrieved from: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/06/5-facts-about-millennial-households/ ↵
• Modification, adaptation, and original content. Authored by : Rebecca Vonderhaar for Lumen Learning. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Work in the United States. Authored by : OpenStax CNX. Located at : https://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]:cdCaIHP1@3/Work-in-the-United-States . License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]
• Patterns of Unemployment. Authored by : OpenStax College. Located at : https://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]:82qMsJce/Patterns-of-Unemployment . Project : Economics. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Patterns of Unemployment. Provided by : Lumen Learning. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-macroeconomics/chapter/patterns-of-unemployment/ . Project : Macroeconomics. License : CC BY: Attribution
• 5 facts about Millennial households (graph). Authored by : Richard Fry. Provided by : Pew Research Center. Located at : https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/06/5-facts-about-millennial-households/ . License : All Rights Reserved
• The Gender Unemployment Gap Image. Authored by : Guillaume Vandenbroucke and Heting Zhu . Provided by : Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Located at : https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/second-quarter-2018/gender-risk-unemployment . License : All Rights Reserved

Essay on Poverty Eradication

Students are often asked to write an essay on Poverty Eradication in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Poverty Eradication

Understanding poverty.

Poverty refers to the state of not having enough resources to live a decent life. It’s a significant issue affecting millions worldwide.

Causes of Poverty

Poverty is caused by factors like unemployment, lack of education, and economic instability. These factors prevent people from earning a sufficient income.

Steps Towards Eradication

Poverty eradication involves steps like providing quality education, creating job opportunities, and promoting economic stability. These steps help people to earn a decent living.

Role of Individuals

Everyone can contribute to poverty eradication. We can donate, volunteer, or help in creating awareness about poverty and its solutions.

Eradicating poverty is a big challenge, but with collective efforts, it’s achievable. Let’s all contribute to a poverty-free world.

250 Words Essay on Poverty Eradication

Introduction.

Poverty eradication stands as one of the most pressing issues that humanity faces today. It is a complex problem that requires a multifaceted approach, involving economic, social, and political strategies.

The Scope of Poverty

The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than $1.90 per day. However, poverty extends beyond mere monetary measures, encompassing elements like access to quality education, healthcare, and basic human rights.

Economic Strategies

Economically, poverty eradication involves creating opportunities for the poor. This could be achieved through policies that promote job creation, fair wages, and entrepreneurship. Microfinance initiatives can empower the impoverished to start their own businesses, fostering economic independence.

Social Strategies

Socially, poverty eradication requires improving access to education and healthcare. Education equips individuals with the skills needed for better employment prospects, while good health is essential for productivity and income generation.

Political Strategies

Politically, governments need to ensure that policies are inclusive and equitable. This includes implementing progressive taxation, strengthening social safety nets, and promoting gender equality.

In conclusion, poverty eradication is not a task for the faint-hearted. It requires a holistic approach, with concerted efforts from governments, civil society, and individuals. By working together, we can make significant strides towards a world free from poverty.

500 Words Essay on Poverty Eradication

Poverty eradication is a global challenge that requires concerted efforts from all sectors of society. Despite the remarkable progress made in reducing extreme poverty, millions still live below the poverty line, struggling to meet their basic needs. This essay explores the concept of poverty eradication, its importance, strategies to achieve it, and the challenges faced.

Understanding Poverty Eradication

Poverty eradication implies the complete elimination of poverty in all its forms. It’s a multidimensional issue, encompassing not just financial poverty but also other aspects like lack of access to health services, education, and opportunities. The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1 aims to “end poverty in all its forms everywhere” by 2030, signifying the global commitment towards this cause.

Importance of Poverty Eradication

Poverty eradication is crucial for sustainable development and human dignity. It’s not only a moral imperative but also a key to unlocking human potential and societal progress. Eliminating poverty can lead to improved health, increased productivity, and reduced crime rates. Moreover, it can foster social cohesion and political stability, contributing to peace and security.

Strategies for Poverty Eradication

Addressing poverty requires a comprehensive and multifaceted approach. First, economic growth must be inclusive, ensuring that the benefits reach the poorest sections of society. This can be achieved through job creation, fair wages, and social protection measures.

Second, investment in human capital is crucial. Access to quality education and healthcare can enable individuals to break the cycle of poverty and lead productive lives.

Third, promoting social inclusion and reducing inequality are fundamental. Policies should aim to eliminate discrimination and empower marginalized groups, enabling them to participate fully in society.

Lastly, it’s essential to build resilience against shocks such as economic crises, conflicts, and natural disasters, which can push people into poverty.

Challenges in Poverty Eradication

While the path towards poverty eradication is clear, several challenges persist. Economic disparities, both within and between countries, hinder progress. Structural issues, such as corruption, political instability, and inadequate infrastructure, can exacerbate poverty.

Climate change poses another significant challenge. Its impacts, such as extreme weather events and food insecurity, disproportionately affect the poor, undermining efforts to eradicate poverty.

Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has reversed some of the gains made in poverty reduction, highlighting the vulnerability of progress and the need for robust social protection systems.

Poverty eradication is a daunting task, but not an impossible one. We have the knowledge, resources, and strategies needed to overcome this challenge. What’s required is the political will, global cooperation, and a commitment to justice and equity. By addressing poverty, we can build a more prosperous, sustainable, and equitable world.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Rural Poverty
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Growing up in Russia’s biggest rubbish dump

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Hanna Polak on her Witness documentary about life in a notorious Russian landfill.

Editor’s note: The svalka was closed in 2007. A smaller dump was opened on the same landfill site where people continued to live.

At age 10, Yula had just one dream: to lead a normal life.

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I first met Yula in 2000. She was one of the inhabitants of the “svalka” outside Moscow. This svalka, known simply by its Russian term for rubbish dump, was the largest landfill in Europe. It lay only 20km from the Kremlin, in Putin’s Russia, on the outskirts of the Russian capital – the city with the world’s third largest number of billionaires.

Yula is the subject of my film Something Better to Come , a Witness documentary currently airing on Al Jazeera, which follows her life over a 14-year period.

In 2000, I had been working with a volunteer group helping Moscow’s homeless children. Some of the young people that I met took me to the svalka for the first time. 

I didn’t have a permit to visit the rubbish dump (it would have been impossible to obtain one anyway), so they taught me how to enter undetected. 

Inside, I discovered a dystopian place where hazardous waste was dumped, heavy machinery constantly operated, and hundreds of wild dogs roamed around. Although no one “officially” lived there, it was home to an estimated 1,000 people: the most destitute of Russia’s underclass. This community was exploited by a local mafia, which ran illegal recycling centres. The landfill was like a country within a country: hidden from the external world, lawless, but with its own rules and codes.

Few organisations or people helped Moscow’s homeless children. Virtually no one came to the landfill to help its inhabitants. For the outside world, these people didn’t exist.

I wanted to help the landfill’s inhabitants – through medical assistance, for instance, which I have brought to them over the years – but also by chronicling their lives.

READ MORE: Is the Kremlin fuelling Russia’s HIV/Aids epidemic?

The ‘waste mafia’

Yula’s parents had brought her to the landfill when she was 10, after their home was demolished. Her father was an alcoholic and her mother, Tania, had lost her job. Their neighbours told them about the dump, where food could be found and pennies earned.

Shortly after the family arrived, Yula’s father was detained in a prison for the homeless where he contracted tuberculosis. He died soon after his release. Tania became an alcoholic and Yula looked after her mother. Yula grew up quickly, in a world rife with poverty, despair and decay.

Although Yula was shy and didn’t speak often – not an easy protagonist to film – I was drawn to her. She was feisty, stubborn and fun; she was different from the other children.

Her home, this huge mountain of trash, almost 100 metres high and nearly two kilometres long on one side, was surrounded by a tall fence. Guards monitored it closely to keep intruders out.

The people who lived there worked as scavengers, sorting the rubbish which came from Moscow, collecting recyclable materials, such as bottles, metal, paper and plastic, for the “waste mafia”.

The workers earned just two rubles ($.03) per kilogramme of metal sorted, not the 78 rubles ($1.27) per kilo they could’ve earned outside. A bottle of fake vodka – a grain alcohol manufactured for industrial use – was the most common form of currency. The mafia paid the dump’s denizens with vodka.

This mafia posed a constant threat to the waste-pickers’ lives: if the dump’s inhabitants tried to work for a different trash overlord, they risked being beaten or killed. If they tried to remove goods from the landfill they risked execution. If they were killed, they disappeared into the rubbish for ever.

Bulldozers sometimes buried people alive. Women were frequently raped. Yet the police were never called; it was common knowledge that criminal investigations or ambulances weren’t welcome there. Corrupt police officers kept charity workers and ambulances out. On the rare occasions that the federal police did come, they burnt down huts and arrested people for living there illegally.

For most of the people who came to the svalka, this was their last stop before death. Most deaths occurred during the cold Russian winter, when storms swept across this mountain of waste. One winter, Yula counted almost 30 deaths in a week.

There, everyone was a doctor. People got sick, gave birth, and sometimes cut off their own limbs or toes when they froze in order to avoid gangrene.

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Lack of hope

Although life was grim, it also often brought out the best in people. 

The landfill’s denizens generously shared their vodka with each other and opened their ramshackle sheds to shelter those who needed it.

Despite the misery that life had to offer, people strived for normality in the dump.

It was dangerous to film at the landfill. I stepped on nails and was lucky not to get sick. Once, I was able to fend off attacking dogs with pepper spray. I was caught and arrested numerous times by the dump’s security guards and the local police and was warned many times never to return. Twice my materials were destroyed. I managed to escape the dump’s security forces a number of times. Another woman journalist who came to film there wasn’t so lucky – both her camera and nose were broken.

But the people living there welcomed me warmly.

“We are like flies, like dogs, we are like roaches of society,” Olga, another protagonist in the film, told me.

I think my presence as someone from the world which had rejected them signalled the possibility to them that society could one day accept them again.

As a child, Yula played innocent games with the other children and with the toys found in the rubbish. She cracked jokes, listened to music and read magazines plucked from the trash. She listened to the radio to keep up with what was going on in the outside world.

She dyed her hair pink and wore makeup to look beautiful and glamorous and to briefly escape the dreariness of her life. All this – toys, clothes, makeup and hair dye – she’d find at the dump.

Yula once told me that the landfill used to be a source of hope for her.

“[It was] like the Pinocchio story: a field of wonder. There’s a pile of cookies here, a toy there.”

She explained that people came there after having nowhere else to go, and hoped for a better life but only ended up in misery.

“I lost everything here. I lost my mother [to alcoholism], my father, I lost all normal life here. Before it was a field of wonder, but now I see it is a field of fools,” she said as a teenager.

At 13, Yula had started drinking.

“It helps you forget that you had something in the past, maybe a normal life, and now you simply don’t have anything,” she told me.

The worst horror in the svalka was the rampant lack of hope. The place was like quicksand, dragging people deeper and deeper into despair – those who are sucked into this vortex of homelessness almost never managed to escape it. But Yula refused to live and die like so many others there.

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Escaping the garbage dump

At 16, Yula realised that she would never be able to have a normal life outside the svalka unless she found the strength to leave this vicious cycle of poverty, addiction, and hopelessness.

The first step was to find work outside the svalka. She learnt how to cut metal parts and make fences for the cemetery. The work was hard and dirty and badly paid, but with this job, she took her first step outside the rubbish dump.

She and her boyfriend Andrey – who was brought to the dump by his mother, who ended up dying there – managed to find cheap accommodation. He and Yula supported each other as best as they could.

Yula stopped drinking. She found seasonal work despite her lack of formal education.

And, just as Yula turned 21, she got one lucky break: she discovered that she was eligible for a government subsidy for housing because her father’s apartment was demolished.

She got her own apartment and on April 25, 2014, she gave birth to a baby girl, Eva.

What once seemed like an impossibility to Yula had become a reality, albeit not an easy one.

The apartment Yula owns is 300km away from Moscow and both she and Andrey can only find small jobs in the city. They travel between work and home, leaving Eva in the care of Yula’s mother, who now lives with them. The economic sanctions on Russia don’t make it easier – there is less work than there used to be and their wages have dropped. 

In July this year, Eva was diagnosed with a very serious disease – osteomyelitis – an extremely rare bone marrow infection, which has required several surgeries and constant medical attention. Eva now awaits more surgery and Yula has stopped working to care for her daughter full-time. Andrey struggles to find work.

The couple are barely able to pay the bills, let alone cover the mounting medical expenses for their daughter. Yula worries about losing her daughter, who remains seriously ill. She worries too about having to give up her apartment and being forced to return to the dump.

She told me she never thought “normal life would be so hard”.

As she faces another struggle, I think about what Yula told me when she just got her own apartment, when I asked her what she thought was unique about her.

“I don’t feel unique in any way …,” she had replied. “Well, perhaps in one way – if I am offered even the slightest opportunity, I will seize it and utilise it to the fullest.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

For more insights into Yula’s life please visit the film’s website .

Hanna Polak is a Polish documentary filmmaker. Her film The Children of Leningradsky (2004) was nominated for an Oscar and two Emmy Awards. She is an advocate for improving the lives of homeless and underprivileged children and is a found of the Russian NGO   Active Child Aid .

Her film Something Better to Come is currently airing on Witness, Al Jazeera English.