Today's Inequities (Blog post #4)

In last week’s blog post I spoke of how income is an important determinant of health. I didn’t, however, give examples of how this is true. To elaborate on this, I will speak of last week’s lecture material from FNN 400 and from FND 401 (Social & Cultural Dimensions of Food).

In FND 401, I learned about “health disparity” and “health inequity”, where health disparity is defined as a “disproportionate disease burden among population groups”, while health inequities are the “causes of health disparities”. This relates to last week’s lecture on social inequities. The primary inequity boils down, once again, to income. There is a large gap between the very poor and the very rich, which is becoming bigger as time progresses. There have been attempts made to decrease this gap by increasing minimum wages. This, however, is insufficient.

Many businesses that pay employees minimum wage are retail and grocery stores. Speaking from experience, minimum wage increases didn’t always benefit the employee. I used to work at Metro grocery store for nearly three years of my life. As a student and a part-time worker I would get thrilled when minimum wage was going to increase. I would think to myself, more money in my pockets. However, as minimum wage increased, so did my union dues and a decrease in available hours in the departments. It didn’t affect me much because I had the second highest seniority, and thus the number of hours per week I was scheduled remained nearly unchanged. My circumstances aren’t exactly generalizable to the rest of minimum wage workers, because I was a student who couldn’t work many hours in the first place. Some people were scheduled less hours, and no longer benefited from the minimum wage increases; some were worse off.

What other things can we do to make all equal, to eliminate the gap between the Rich and Poor, and thus increase the health in the lower socio-demographics? In class we spoke of also increasing social assistance, make food, housing and day care more affordable, and increase health and recreational activities. However, who will pay for all of this? Will the Rich be good Samaritans and put more money into these concepts? One way this can potential happen would be to speak to the emotions of the Rich.

An issue I can see arise from this is the potential of an increased tension between the Rich and Poor. It is possible, that that the Rich may feel like they have a right to make all the important decisions, an example would be could be where the affordable houses will be built. Will the Rich feel like they are superior to the Poor, and act as if they were their saviour? If the Rich think they aren’t benefiting as well, would they retract their donations? Either way, I don’t believe I will see this in my life time or for at least many years from now.

If we can’t reduce the social inequalities, we must find a way to reduce these relationships.  The relationships explored in class included those between income inequalities and Physical Health, Mental Health, Obesity, Violence, and Teenage Births.

Sources:

FNN 400 lecture notes, week 5

FND 401 lecture notes