Ending Hunger in America, 2014 Hunger Report Full Report | Page 88

Fidelina Santana, a 40-year-old mother of three, is the sole breadwinner for her children.
She works in the food court at a federal office building in Washington, DC. “Even after [nine]
years of hard work, I only earn $9.50 an hour and I don’t have any benefits,” says Santana.
“To make ends meet, I need to work 73 hours a week. I don’t even get overtime. I work so
much because I am a single mother of three children. I need to feed them and put a roof
over their heads, even if it’s only a
bedroom that I rent in my sister’s
Table 2.1 Low-Wage Private Sector Workers Funded by
house.”110

Public Dollars
The Department of Defense
(DoD) is by far the largest con560,000
Jobs funded through direct federal contracts
tractor for government goods and
204,000
Jobs funded through SBA loans
services.111 An estimated 20,000
workers make military uniforms.112
759,000
Jobs funded through Medicare spending
Since the law requires that all U.S.
425,000
Jobs funded through federal Medicaid spending
military uniforms be made domes2,000
Jobs funded through federal Child Health Insurance
tically, DoD is the world’s largest
Program spending
purchaser of U.S.-made textiles.
Sewing machine operators in the
Jobs supported by Public Buildings Service property leases
9,000
uniform manufacturing plants
Jobs funded through federal infrastructure funds
33,000
earn an average of $10.22 per
total 1,992,000
hour. Lucy Johnson (a pseudonym)
works on a federal contract to proSource: Amy Traub and Robert Hiltonsmith (2013), “Underwriting Bad Jobs: How Our Tax Dollars
are Funding Low-Wage Work and Fueling Inequality,” Demos.
vide uniforms to DoD. She’s been
a sewing machine operator for 25
years at a plant in Knoxville, Tennessee, and earns $7.25 an hour. The company she works
for earned $13 million from federal contracts in 2012 alone and a total of more than $200
million since 2002.111 Johnson is now 65, but retirement is out of the question. She receives
Social Security benefits and Medicare (which covers 80 percent of her medical expenses).
But with a heart condition that costs her $100 per month in out-of-pocket medical expenses,
she can barely afford to eat even with the help of food stamp/
SNAP benefits.114
“Low-wage
A 2013 study by Demos, a nonpartisan public policy orgagovernment contract
nization, found that nearly 2 million private sector employees
workers outnumber
working on behalf of American taxpayers earn $12 per hour
all the low-wage
or less.115 See Table 2.1. As mentioned earlier, a family of four
workers at Wal-mart
with one worker earning $12 an hour is right at the poverty
and McDonald’s
line. These 2 million low-wage government contract workers
combined.”
outnumber all the low-wage workers at Wal-mart and McDonald’s combined.116
Amy Traub, who co-authored the Demos report, “Underwriting Bad Jobs: How Our Tax
Dollars Are Funding Low-Wage Work and Fueling Inequality,” testified before Congress in
May 2013 about the effects of low wages paid by federal contractors. She put the burden on
taxpayers in context: “When federally funded workers are paid low wages, taxpayers are, in
effect, subsidizing their jobs twice. First we pay for the work itself. But we pay again when
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