Welcome to Part 4 of The Poverty Story.

We’ve been talking about the system that creates poverty.

Can you give an example of one of the ways this system works?

Yes - Good question, Susanna.

Take the history of our federal minimum wage. This falls firmly under Tactic # 1 - Under Compensation.

The minimum wage was raised to $1.60 per hour in 1968 – and that represented the peak of its purchasing power. $1.60 in 1968 represented $13 of 2022 buying power.

In 2009 it was raised to $7.25/hour and in spite of annual attempts to raise it, no bill authorizing a raise for the poorest workers in our society has passed a senate vote since then. It’s been voted down either by the House or the Senate for 16 successive years during which the cost of living has escalated hugely.

This makes no sense to us or to almost everyone involved.

Why doesn’t this change?

Well, it’s an embedded exploitative system that uses its power and its profits to protect itself. Basically, it’s protected from change by surrounding systems that it has helped create - like the system of industry lobbyists and the system of campaign finance rules.

So, your goal is to change these rules and remove the barriers?

No – not either – These are protected systems.

Our role is to create alternate pathways for low-income and struggling workers to bypass the barriers that keep them poor.

These alternate paths are designed to help people escape the system?

Correct.

You see, the Poverty system chews people up and spits them out. Without a constant supply of poor people to extract profit from, it dries up and loses power.

Eventually, the rules will change, and they should – and the barriers will be lower or cease to exist, but neither of these steps is necessary to turn poverty around.

OK. Where, specifically, do your solutions intersect with poverty?

At the barriers that poor people encounter.

Each of 5 tactics that profit from poverty employs many barriers, sometimes dozens, that are insurmountable for people who lack adequate financial resources.

As discussed, the Level UP Apps enable people to bypass many of these barriers - one by one.

Can you give me some specific examples of barriers?

OK.

They show up in all embedded poverty-driving systems, including employment, housing, finance, education, healthcare, and more.

I’ll dive into how our society – and its systems - manages employment and some of the barriers it creates out of a list of dozens we have identified.

Ok – Also can you cover how this relates to poverty?

Fair question.
Let’s start there.
Barriers to employment fall under tactics 1 & 2, Under-Compensation & Economic Impairment.

Here we specifically evaluate our existing system’s typical job application platforms, which are how most people access jobs today, to identify unnecessary barriers.

The barriers are often legacy or old-school, mostly unchallenged, requirements and decision points that in essence block lower income and more diverse groups of people from qualifying for this, or most any, position on these platforms.

Is this another example of reverse engineering?

Yes. That’s exactly what we do – reverse engineer the job application process for both the applicants and the employer.

Is your updated approach good for employers?

Yes. It turns out that many existing practices in recruitment add no benefits for the employer. In fact, they do damage, create liability, and undermine the company’s image, success, and mission.

Changing up these job application management practices identifies better-fit candidates, creates a more connected culture for workers, and a better experience for applicants. These benefits and others increase profitability and company sustainability. This is backed up by research, studies, and experience.

In fact, I have a fun real-world story to illustrate this whole revision of the employment model we are discussing here and the slew of benefits it created. Let’s cover that in a later section.

Absolutely – I’ll remind you.
I think we are getting to the examples of barriers that people experience.

Yes – here are some of the barriers that most employment processes include today:

1. Disqualify applications by prioritizing one type of education over another – which in many cases is just an engrained practice that’s got little if any relevance to identifying a “great-fit” long-term candidate.

2. Focus on criteria designed to identify “superstars”, rather than the people most likely to drive overall company success, and which, in practice, are discriminatory. They also use these arbitrary factors to rank applicants, and to advance some while weeding others out.

3. Employers often fail to identify the real requirements for a position, which turns routine searches into fabled quests to find “the” most qualified”.

4. By not incorporating on-the-job training, role-sharing, flexible schedules, and other employee-friendly solutions into their job profiles (all of which, studies show, drive better business outcomes), employers overlook both outstanding candidates and the workforce of the future.

5. Lastly, for now, far too many existing job application platforms harvest and sell applicants’ private data. That’s their business model.

OK - These barriers are examples of what you revise, replace or bypass in your Level UP Employment App?

Yes – and it is designed to plug into existing HR software.

In summary, it helps create better job descriptions, attract and not disqualify well-suited and/or outside the “usual box” candidates, and create “better-fit outcomes” for both employers and candidates.

So, this app makes it easier for people to qualify for a decent job, or get promoted when positions open in their current company?

No – the goal is not to make the job easier to qualify for, that’s a common misunderstanding.

It is in fact to better understand and present the job so that better-fit candidates can qualify. Which is a win-win solution, or what we call an infinite solution which makes the future better than the present.

Can we cover the App itself in more detail to understand specifically how this is achieved?

Yes - Let’s do so later in our conversation.

There’s also a White Paper available under the Resources Section that goes in-depth into the design, reasoning, and features of this product – which is based on 20 years of experience in implementing HR systems and understanding the inherent bias in today’s employment software.

Thank you, Paul, have you more to add on this subject?

I’ll add a story from my own life. This is not the story I mentioned above – you can remind me of that one later.

OK – a labor story on Labor Day!

Yes – perfect.

I came to the US as an engineer in 1985. That was at the height of a bad recession, and my entire engineering class emigrated - but that’s another story.

I started work at a concrete products company. We made large concrete boxes, concrete pipes, concrete roof tiles... and other large concrete structures. My specialty was how to make concrete stronger without added cost which was a good fit there and across all their sister companies.

As a result, I was on the road for about 2 years working for weeks at a time in factories in 25 states. For a young outsider, it was a great job. I was treated as an honored guest and had the run of the plants – but I also got to experience American lives across a broad spectrum of locations and situations.

My job had me working directly with the workers on the ground. They were fantastic people - many of whom could fix anything, build anything, work with anyone. They clearly understood how things worked, and how things could be better. By better, I mean, how the products could be better – which often included making their work easier and safer.

I remember lots of great experiences – and a few that are especially relevant to this topic – How the system manages employment.

Depending on the state, the labor force was at least 50% Black and/or Hispanic, and often much more. In general, these workers were extremely loyal – they did their best in often really bad working conditions, to put out the best product they could.

The foremen always started as laborers, and from there were promoted over the years. But in my travels, I only ever came across one black foreman, and two or maybe three Hispanic foremen – this is out of 40-plus situations because there were sometimes multiple foremen per site.

This is an example of a failing system; one that overlooked outstanding foremen who had brilliant ideas, who were great at motivating their teams, and who could have made the company more successful. And to be clear, this was driven by the system, not the people. I knew foremen who told me directly that they wanted to promote certain workers but were blocked by the “company brass”.

Secondly, I submitted numerous plans and drawings to reroute processes and create more space and comfort for people doing the work, and that would increase safety and efficiency. Both the crew and the foremen worked with me on these plans – and always sent their endorsement. Yet, there were only 2 instances where these plans were approved – and each time, the outcome was spectacular – modest changes to the work environment, improved morale, increased safety, cut waste, and increased productivity. This was mostly because these changes were especially beneficial for the workers on the lowest rung.

Both of these barriers – conditional promotions and conditional improvement for workers are examples of how systems can be configured to resist change – even when that change is to a company’s benefit. I saw these same barriers pop up over and over, across 25 states, at the plant locations where I worked.

Wow - You got around.

Yes – from sea to shining sea – or more aptly – from border to border.

Yes – good story and great points I think we are making good progress.