Introduction
The cultural construction of poverty and people’s struggles to deal with poverty has always been linked to the everyday politics of civil society organizations as well as the interaction between people and various organizations. Governance and the dynamics of policy processes will always affect communities and individuals either citizens or migrants to a certain area.
While governments have aimed to provide an equitable supply of basic needs for their citizens, the quest for this itself created a competition among governments so that there end the winners and losers: the rich and the poor, consequently reflected on the class of their country or state.
Such can be said on the migrant workers of Winnipeg, particularly the Mexicans of Skid Row representing either legal or illegal migrants that have to contend with what job is available for them, and that pay would be better than nothing at all.
Cheap work makes the rich richer
As proposed in the lecture, sharing and generalized reciprocity, as well as modern marketing economy, are drivers, or factors that affect low-wage labor. As such, the Skidrow residents are willing to work sporadically for low wages, for handwork that agriculture technology fails to provide. While first-world economies like the US and Canada demand cheap food, wealth among them is measured after paying for basic needs: the more you spend on food, the poorer you are. It has also been suggested that cheap work makes the rich richer
While migrant workers have to contend on low wages, unpaid time caused by the unpredictability of crop cycles, housing variables of trailers, rented, or shacks, the need to work when sick, no provision for old age, difficulty in educating children and receiving social services when parents are mobile, the possibility for many children to work in fields, legally and illegally, as well as being looked down upon by residents, either as invisible or stigmatized.
Other implication for the situation of the poor migrant workers includes survivors adopting a socio-centric attitude within an “egocentric” culture where group and family loyalty is more highly valued than in the surrounding society.
Summary
In analyzing the situation, it would not at all impact whether I am willing to pay more for cheap food with a personal aim to help increase the wage of the workers. It just will not reach them as the process is more economically intricate than a labyrinth where a dollar is sifted through a process before reaching the desired destination, such as the poor migrant workers.