Word: chumps
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...throughout the land. Frustrated by Congress's repeated failures to improve the national standard for the lowest- paid employees, eleven states set higher minimums of their own. Even fast- food chains often find themselves bidding $6 an hour and up for workers who scoff at the minimum wage as "chump change...
...watching their mothers labor at low-paying jobs or struggle to stretch a welfare check. With the unemployment rate for black teenagers at 37%, little work is available to unskilled, poorly educated youths. The handful of jobs that are open -- flipping burgers, packing groceries -- pay only minimum wages or "chump change," in the street vernacular. So these youngsters turn to the most lucrative option they can find. In rapidly growing numbers, they are becoming the new criminal recruits of the inner city, the children who deal crack...
...advocates of an increase believe it would address one of the more confounding problems of the poverty cycle, what has been called the "chump change" dilemma: many able-bodied poor people see no profit in working for low wages when they can often earn more in welfare or hustling on the street. The problem is most severe among inner-city black youths, who make up the largest segment of the nation's unemployed. Many liberals and labor leaders argue that upping the minimum wage will encourage more people to seek employment and get off the welfare rolls...
...greater impact than a minimum- wage increase. That seems to be one idea on which left and right can agree: the Reagan Administration has proposed an $800 million training program for youths receiving welfare benefits. Without the skills to build a career, workers will find the minimum wage is chump change no matter how high it goes...
...pursuing Nola. First, the most sensitive, loving, and boring, is Jamie Overstreet (Tommy Redmond Hicks): "I believe that there is one person in this world that was meant to be your soulmate... For me, Nola Darling was that person." Hicks succeeds in making his character less of a chump than he might seem. Jamie plays the largest part in Nola's love life, and is especially useful as a foil for the other two men. After hearing a poem Jamie has composed for Nola, one competitor remarks "Aw, aw, that's the worst piece of shit I've ever heard...