this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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Why don't more poor people join mutual aid groups instead of using charities? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by Danterious@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2258784

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?

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[โ€“] DreamerOfImprobableDreams@kbin.social 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Because if everyone involved is quitting their jobs, they'll have no money with which to buy food. Which means they'll have to farm it themselves. And farming, even with top-of-the-line modern tech, is backbreaking fucking work. Also unpredictable as hell: bad harvests aren't uncommon, especially for novice farmers with no formal training like these guys would be.

In other words, one bad harvest, and everyone in the system you're proposing fucking dies. Yeah, there's a reason in the 1800s people were abandoning their family farms for the horrorshow of Victorian era-factories en masse: because even that hell was still preferable to farming.

[โ€“] nobodyspecial@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

Not to mention needing capital for the land, equipment, seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, fuel, power, storage, transportation and uncountable other misc with a price tag. Starting with trained doctors and on to even more narrow specialists.