>Ironically this is what you get from "labor protections" from politicians. The employer would be happy to give you more hours instead of paying the same amount

>Ironically this is what you get from "labor protections" from politicians. The employer would be happy to give you more hours instead of paying the same amount to two people who each work half as many hours. That's lower training and hiring costs for them. But paying one person the same amount they're paying two is illegal, so they do the second one and you get screwed into two commutes. >Then if you're working part time twice, both employers want you to be there during the busiest part of the day but you can't be in two places at once. You can avoid this by working two different kinds of jobs so the busiest periods don't overlap, but now you're forced into another inconvenience (you may like one type of work better) solely because you can't even offer to work for one employer for the same hours and compensation you get from two. And in the perfect workers' paradise, we'd all be free to sell our labor for the market rate, and work 120 hours a week at our base rate if we wanted, because there's no meddlesome government interfering with the moral perfection of the free market? </s> My frustration was that it wasn't until I had full-time hours that they bothered to give me even approximately consistent hours, and even then, I had to prove myself to be valuable enough that they let me keep doing my 8-hour-a-week, practically volunteer second job (a job which I really preferred, but it was at a community rec center with very limited, fixed hours). >Right, so the percentage of people in the under-$20,000 group who don't have full time employment is even higher than 75%. The point I was trying to make is that the "poor" stretch upwards into the higher incomes, incomes that are noticeably absent from those plots. $20k - $39k is not depicted, and that's where e.g. full-time minimum wage earners in California, Washington, and 29 other states land. Your argument seems to be that we can just dismiss college students, and trust-fund babies, but also e.g. the disabled, etc because they're spoiled or in a passing phase. In prior generations, it might've been true that leftist, liberal, or Democratic-party leanings tended to fade with age, but starting at least with millennials, that's less and less true. In any case, the actual trend is obscured, because a survivably poor income is not reflected in the link I shared.