The Yellow Sweatshirt: Human Dignity and Economic Human Rights in Advanced Industrial Democracies

THE YELLOW SWEATSHIRT Some years ago on a Saturday morning, I stopped downtown in my economically depressed city of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, to give a couple of dollars to a youngish man with dirty-blond hair who was asking for money. I noticed that he was wearing a bright yellow sweatshirt and I complimented him on it. He replied that he had received it from his sister for his birthday; she had taken him to the local charity store to buy it. I was surprised – it had not occurred to me that a person who asked strangers for money might have a sister or celebrate his birthdays. In advanced industrial democracies, the poor are largely invisible to the comfortable middle classes; they live in segregated economic zones, send their children to different schools, and patronize different social institutions. Middle-class people such as I can choose to acknowledge them or avoid them when we go to areas they frequent, in the meantime salving our consciences about this most intractable of social problems by giving money to charity or perhaps engaging in volunteer work. The poor's invisibility is one aspect of the indignity they suffer. Even though they enjoy formal legal equality with all other citizens, they are more acted upon than actors, intruders in the world of the autonomous and efficacious. A few among the poor are those who do not wish to work; many more are those who cannot find work.