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http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2003/s994830.htm
MARK COLVIN: A new report has blown a hole in the myth that homeowners with big mortgages are the Australians who are suffering most from debt. It's found instead that it's the unemployed and low wage earners who are at the heart of the debt crisis. Many of them are running up huge credit card bills to pay for essentials like food, rent and medical expenses.
The report by the University of Newcastle and the Financial Counsellors' Association says that as levels of consumer debt continue to rise, those finding themselves in trouble are also getting younger, some are just 18.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,18766207-2702,00.html
Cut to the bone: working poor on the rise
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Elisabeth Wynhausen and Tracy Ong | April 10, 2006
EVEN before they and their workmates were sacked by Cowra Abattoir last week, Vicki and Terry Rawiri supplemented their earnings from the meatworks with casual jobs at the Bi-Lo supermarket.
They were trying to get ahead by paying off the mortgage of their $365,000 home in Cowra in eight years.
By day they worked at the supermarket, while at night Vicki, 42, weighed carcasses and Terry, 43, classified as a labourer, worked as a slaughterman.
The couple are still agonising about going back to the meatworks, which has withdrawn the dismissal notices. But compared with an increasing number of Australian workers, the Rawiris are in clover.
New research suggests a period of unrivalled prosperity in Australia has coincided with an alarming rise in worker poverty, with growing numbers of employees facing what Barbara Pocock, director of the Centre for Work and Life at the University of South Australia, described as a "a pervasive sense of struggle and deprivation".
The number of working Australians who make less than two-thirds of median earnings - $533 a week or $27,716 a year - has risen from 1.2 million to 1.8 million, a rise of 50 per cent in about a decade, Ms Pocock said.
In a project funded by the Brotherhood of St Laurence, the Australian Research Council, universities and trade unions, researchers investigating the experiences of low-paid workers interviewed 18 childcare workers and 23 cleaners.
By the time they have paid the rent or met mortgage payments, many low-paid workers find they have no money left for basics such as dental care and school excursions for their children.
Some can afford phones that take only incoming calls. Some say even visiting friends is beyond their means - they cannot afford the petrol.
But poverty imposes its own irrational exigencies.
"I have to drive an unregistered car," one woman, a 29-year old childcare worker with three children, told researchers. "Then you get caught. Then you get a fine from the cops ... and then you can't afford to pay court fines. So it's basically a web that slowly ... eats you up."
Conscious of their isolation, some workers spoke to researchers about living in a different world from other Australians.
"I can't afford ... everyday things that people might take for granted. I sort of think, 'Oh no, if I go to the pictures, it means that's $20 less for the food ... or bills to be paid'," said another woman, a 55-year old cleaner raising two children on her own.
John Buchanan, from the Workplace Research Institute at Sydney University, said statistics of consumption patterns in the wider population showed the fast-growing legions of low-paid workers spent $30 a week less on food and half as much on clothing and footwear.
negative earnings occur where low income earners are Forced to subsidse their income with debt against credit cards and pawning their possesions.
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