1 Way to Help Your Employees Struggling with Food Insecurity and Hunger
Tupperware is not the answer.
An article from the often pretty thoughtful website Everyday Feminism (EF’s tagline should really be: The Articles You Share When Someone Asks You To Do All Of The Emotional Labor Of Explaining Intersectionalism Instead Of Just Googling It Their Own Damn Selves)* is circulating right now and, while there are some very valid points in it, it’s missing a pretty crucial element.
The piece is directed at employers whose workers are struggling with food insecurity, which the USDA divides into two categories; low food security is defined as “reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet. Little or no indication of reduced food intake,” while very low food security is defined as “multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.”
Essentially, it means people are eating less or worse because they can’t afford to eat more or better. The EF piece, then, lists 20 tips for how employers can be more empathetic and helpful in such a situation.
However, there’s one tip that’s not there. It is simply this:
1.) Pay them more.
That’s it! That’s the whole tip. It seems so simple, and yet, it’s so, so, so glaringly absent from the piece.
A lot of people, understandably, have taken notice.
The author, Wiley Reading, began responding to the backlash on Twitter last night, noting that the piece was “directed at people with no institutional power to change wages,” and admitted that “I think a disclaimer would have been smart.”
Hindsight. It’s tough.
And to be fair, the entire article is not a complete wash. People have complicated lives. Even a living wage, on paper, is not enough to make up for the fact that student debt, the cost of housing, and other expenses (alimony, credit card debt, and, and, and…) may mean that a to-go container full of leftover office pizza can be lifeline during a particularly tough week or month. Additionally, very small businesses often operate on a razor-thin margin, which means that giving raises could be difficult. There’s also the problem, which Reading addressed on Twitter, as well, of historically low nonprofit pay, but that’s a whole other issue with which the nonprofit world has been grappling.
Making employers aware of the struggles that employees face when they leave the office — particularly employers who themselves have never struggled to put a meal on the table — is a noble cause.
However.
It is fundamentally problematic to create a listicle for employers—regardless of where on the chain of command they are since writers don’t really have the power to specifically decide who reads their writing or heeds their advice—about poverty without once mentioning that the most basic reason that people struggle with food insecurity is because they just do not get paid enough by those same employers. It is irresponsible and it is a missed opportunity to talk about hunger without talking about the low wages (hunger in the US peaked in 2011; it’s slightly down since then; wage stagnation is real as hell) that workers are somehow expected to survive on today.
It’s not because you didn’t have Tupperwares in the office to pack out the old breadsticks. It’s not because you almost threw out the leftover lasagne that Mary at the reception desk baked. It’s not because you made them feel bad about it. It’s because their paycheck is just too damn small.
This is the real failing of the piece from Everyday Feminism, and to be clear, from much of our conversation around hunger, poverty, and jobs in general: We collectively don’t have a good idea of what it means to be underpaid because as workers, we’re so used to just making do with shitty wages, and because as employers, we are used to balancing our books in spite of or perhaps because of the financial hardships our workers face.
When we talk about hunger and poverty and wages, we talk about them separately, somehow divorced from each other, and as a result, as an intractable problem.
If employers don’t have the power to help their workers establish food security, who in the actual hell does?
Often, this shirking of responsibility happens in kind of insidious ways—the kinds of ways that are given as tips in the EF piece. A company will, say, provide food or other workplace perks (I’ve written about this before) in lieu of a pay raise. Christmas bonus? No, give them a $50 Macy’s gift card.
(This is a true story: One December I literally only purchased novelty candies and other boxed gift-type foods from Macy’s to eat because my wages were so low and a gift card was the only spending money I had. Those same bosses also determined there would be no annual raises that year. The top boss took home a bonus in the multiple millions.)
Employers, it seems, would rather spend more money on stuff than putting the cash directly into the pockets of their workers.
Here is another example.
I used to work for a startup where our CEO was extremely candid with the company’s earnings. Working in the marketing department, I knew exactly how much money my input and labor, directly, impacted the bottom line. In one month, my marketing efforts netted the company multiple millions of dollars.
During that same time, I was in negotiations for a raise. I had done a lot of research about what market rate was for my position, and it was about $5,000 per year more than what I was earning. It was a drop in the bucket for my bosses, and one that seemed worth it; I had a good portfolio of work at the company, was doing demonstrably good work, and still struggling to make rent and pay my student debt because, while my apartment had gotten more expensive, my pay had not kept up.
However, when anyone at the company asked to negotiate a raise, the CEO would often point to our many perks—free meals some days, a kitchen loaded with snacks, and a ~fun work environment~ that anyone would be lucky to take part in.
Of course, when you’re running the math in your head about whether you’ll get paid before your $700 student debt payment goes out that month, all of the NERF guns and movie nights in the world kiiiiiiind of don’t matter.
Those same perks, however, were on the chopping block when a new numbers guy started at the company. In an all-hands meeting, he told us they’d be trimming back the breakfast offerings because the food was frequently getting wasted.
“We’re spending about $60,000 per year on bacon alone,” he told us.
Bacon was literally getting paid more than I was.
Which is kind of the thing about workplace perks, and about providing food for your staff as an incentive—it probably costs more than just paying them more fucking money.
That brings me back to the Everyday Feminism piece.
It’s true that it takes a lot of courage to tell your boss “hi, you’re not paying me enough so I’m literally unable to purchase a basic need every month, please correct it.” It’s also true that stopgaps, like work snacks and creating a culture of empathy where it’s not weird to take leftovers home could be useful, in that empathy in the workplace, generally, is a good thing.
But if you’re already having the conversation—if you’re already telling your direct supervisor, who may not have control over your wages, that you can’t afford to eat—why not have a larger conversation about why that is? (Aside: Also, what the hell kind of manager would hear that and not immediately run it up the flagpole to the person who is in charge of wages?)
And I think that’s where the backlash from the article stems: It’s extremely important to remind people with means that some people do not have means. It’s important to talk about the systemic roots of poverty. It’s important to talk about where poverty comes from.
And while there are a lot of factors—increased housing costs, the price of food, college debt, legal fees, etc—at its most basic core, poverty is the result of not getting paid enough. And it’s the result of having conversations which don’t directly link problems like hunger to problems like stagnated wages.
So, bosses of the world, if your workers are struggling with hunger (which, by the way, is bad for business! So even if you’re literally Ebenezer Scrooge, you have incentive to make them not-hungry! Think of the ROI!) you could help them out by being less of a jerk about their poverty and providing them with ways to pack leftover food home.
Or you could dig deep and just pay them more.
*In the interest of disclosure, I should say that I have been published on Everyday Feminism. They paid me $25 to republish a Medium piece.
