5% of two-income households in Israel live below the poverty line. This sentence should be self-contradictory; “should” being the key word. A family in which both spouses are employed should have sufficient income to ensure it lives with dignity. However, in reality, even two full-time jobs are often not enough, and from year to year the situation deteriorates. While twenty years ago, only 2% of families with two breadwinners lived below the poverty line, by 2016 the rate had almost tripled, to 5.3%. That same year there were 463,300 families in Israel under the poverty line, accounting for 1.8 million people, of whom 850,000 are children.
The situation of two people, both employed, struggling for their basic existence is not only economically and socially unviable, but also morally destructive. It produces unhealthy norms, including a transition to reliance on welfare. If it is impossible for them to earn a living from hard work, employees are left with a sense of despair and hopelessness, pondering why they should work at all.
This is where employers, certainly big ones, should - and can - take a much more active role in the fight against poverty. It is important to pay salaries, but it is much more important to break the cycle of poverty.
In recent years, many programs and initiatives have been developed in Israel, with the primary aim of assisting lower salaried workers. By creating incentives and developing enrichment activities, they are intended to break the chains of poverty and enable all employees, certainly those in large corporations, to earn a respectable living.
Among these initiatives, Maala and the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC Israel) have enlisted numerous large companies to participate in such efforts. Among the benefits employees most commonly granted by socially conscious employers in an attempt to alleviate the predicament of the working poor (with the percentage of large Israeli companies that implement them) are: private health insurance (75%); preferred terms on loans to employees for a defined purpose (68%); long-term savings plans (67%); benefits in kind (49%); a crisis relief fund (47%); and even an increased minimum wage, which has been applied to date in 35% of the large companies reporting to the annual Maala Index.
These are just a few examples from of a long list of measures that are available to companies, both large and medium-sized, to assist low-income employees. Among additional possibilities are: continuing education funds for employees; participation in financing daycare and day camps for employees' children; various social services; and personal empowerment, either by way of offering scholarships for employees and their family members (common in 58% of large companies), or by developing career paths for entry-level employees, in conjunction with counseling, financial guidance and professional mentoring.
Although clearly not all employers are capable of implementing the entire range of possibilities that are available for larger corporations, I have no doubt that all employers can find and implement initiatives that match their financial and human resources capacities. By taking these steps, companies can create working conditions appropriate for the 21st century: more balanced, more equitable, and ultimately far more economically worthwhile for both employers and employees.
The writer is the CEO of Maala - Business for Social Responsibility
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on October 15, 2018
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