Like this article? rabble is reader-supported journalism. Chip in to keep stories like these coming.

Please support our coverage of democratic movements and become a supporter of rabble.ca.

Karen Maleka is a part-time personal support worker. She works in and around Cambridge, taking care of sick people, old people and people who can no longer care for themselves. Each week she works 35 to 40 hours, and yet her employer classifies her as a part-time employee.

Chip in to keep stories like these coming.

Chip in to keep stories like these coming.

I am going to talk about giving money to "poor people"; and about the massive architecture of helping that we continue to build, in part because we do not want to give money to people living on a low income.

So you want to support your local food bank?

Great! We need your help. But first, a story.

My grandfather was a preacher, usually at small rural churches in southwestern Ontario. His "salary" was unpredictable, paid out of every fourth week's offering -- more like a stand-up comic's than the wise and venerable shepherd of his flock. My grandparents were poor, and in obvious ways dependent on their congregation.

"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Read more

Who works for minimum wage? Grumpy high-school students spitting on your cheeseburger? Retired Wal-Mart greeters? Not quite.

In Ontario, you can work 40 hours a week for minimum wage, and still finish the year 17 per cent below the poverty line. This is bad; we know poverty is expensive; and even the Economist concluded that "No-one who has studied the effects of Britain's minimum wage now thinks it has raised unemployment."

What would you do with $908? Take a cruise to Alaska? Buy a nice new bicycle? A TV? 900 boxes of Kraft Dinner? Bury it under a large rock?

Maybe you'd go grocery shopping?

There is no real grocery store in Gull Bay First Nation, an Anishinaabe community about 200 kms north of Thunder Bay. There is no good public transit connection between Gull Bay and Thunder Bay, meaning you drive. If you can't afford a car or gas, you have to take a taxi. And you had better fill that cab to the gills, because it's $908 round trip.

That's $908 plus the cost of groceries.

In parts one and two of this series I outlined the relationship between economic and food insecurity (it is strong!) and the started unsettling the idea that we can explain food insecurity in terms of food "illiteracy" (no!). Part three, below.