I’ve been looking through some US and EU labor data and I have started to wonder why don’t more of the working poor join local mutual aid groups instead of staying at their likely shitty jobs or relying on charities?

This is a study on the labour distribution in the US among the working poor

On table 4 it shows that there are about 5,812,000 people that are classified as working poor ( Its says number in thousands so I multiplied the number given by 1000) and that alot of those jobs are in essential services like making food or providing support to others.

Similar diversity is show in the EU as well

So if most of these people decided to stop working at their current job and instead bring that those skills to a mutual aid network wouldn’t they still get most of the resources they need because other specialists would be there to help them and also live a generally more happy life?

Also the reason why I am saying instead of charities is because charities become less effective the more people request from them because they have limited resources to share and also mainly supported by wealthy people that can unilaterally give and take away support.

Whilst mutual aid networks can take the diversity that more people joining the network gives them and use it to offer more services to other people in that community.

This seems like a no brainer so what am I missing?

  • Rouxibeau@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    As a person who was poor and is now doing OK, wtf is a mutual aid group? And I don’t mean that as my being unable to Google; I mean it as: I’ve known a lot of people in poverty and I’ve been to many a government welfare office and there’s no discoverability for things like this in many areas.

    • Danterious@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      1 year ago

      This is my answer in another comment.

      I only heard about them recently too so I might give an incomplete answer but the general gist is that mutual aid is when a group of people band together and share whatever resources and services that they have to offer to other people in that group.

      So if someone made an excess of vegetables in their garden they would give that to others in the group with expecting anything immediately in return in the hopes that when their fence breaks down and they request help someone with knowledge on how to fix it would be willing to come help.

      As for finding mutual aid groups I’ve seen mutualaid.wiki and mutual aid hub but I’m not sure of what else there is.

    • merde alors@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      1 year ago

      government won’t help you to meet “mutual aid groups”, government needs you to stay poor (i guess there may be some benevolent governments somewhere i don’t know about). For there to be rich, there must be many times more poor.

      mutual aid groups mostly gather through “affinity”