Poverty as a second job

Poverty has its own working regime. It includes hours spent in waiting rooms, traveling for cheaper groceries, negotiating with authorities, and daily logistics of scarcity. This work has no salary, vacation, or social recognition, although its performance determines the reproduction of life for millions of people. In an economy that transforms time into money, a lack of money is punished by the obligation to sacrifice even more time.

In this text, I will use the words poverty and poor. I could write about low-income households, socially disadvantaged individuals, or economically vulnerable groups. After all, these are expressions that sound sufficiently cultivated to be spoken without much embarrassment at a ministerial press conference. However, they have one unpleasant property: they turn material deprivation into an abstract administrative circumstance. As if poverty were primarily a problem of terminological inaccuracy, and not of social arrangement.

I do not consider the use of the word poor as an attribution of identity or a moral judgment. Poverty is not a character trait, cultural predisposition, or personal failure. It is a material position within a system of unequal resource distribution. If we want to discuss its political economy, I see no reason to start with linguistic concessions that make it more acceptable to people who do not experience it.

According to data from the Statistical Office, in 2025, 16.7 percent of Slovakian residents were at risk of poverty or social exclusion, that is, more than 895,000 people. Although after the previous four years of growth, the proportion of poor or socially excluded individuals decreased year-on-year, significant class, regional, and family inequalities hide behind the national average. For example, in the Prešov Region, almost one in three people faced poverty or social exclusion, and in households with a single adult and children, even one in two.

The Political Economy of Cheap Butter

One of the less discussed aspects of poverty is the amount of work it requires for its daily management. While conventional economics focuses on income, consumption, and productivity, a significant part of the lives of the poor unfolds in spaces that these categories cannot capture.

Take grocery shopping. For a person with sufficient income, it is a relatively trivial consumer activity. For someone with an existentially strained budget, it can resemble a complex microeconomics exercise. Comparing unit prices, tracking discounts, planning routes between supermarkets, optimizing consumption, and continuously recalculating remaining budget—all for a few euros that determine whether it will be possible to shop at the end of the week.

In neoliberal discourse, such activity would probably be interpreted as a sign of financial responsibility. The poor person behaves like a model homo economicus: evaluating alternatives, minimizing costs, and maximizing utility. However, this celebrated rationality has its material cost. Saving three euros may require an hour of travel and another hour of planning. From an economic perspective, this is an extremely disadvantageous transaction if one can afford to value their own time. And this is where the problem lies: not everyone can afford to consider their own time as valuable.

Feminist Marxist tradition has been highlighting the invisibility of reproductive work for decades. Silvia Federici and other authors have shown that capitalist production rests on a vast sphere of activities performed outside the wage relation. Caring for children, the elderly, or sick family members, cooking, cleaning, and other activities related to maintaining the household and life ensure the daily renewal of labor power, although their economic value remains systematically undervalued.

Poverty further complicates this work. Lack of money forces households to replace paid services with their own time. A broken washing machine means hours of improvised repairs based on YouTube videos; unaffordable housing results in longer commutes; and expensive groceries mean constant price comparisons. A special form of unpaid work emerges, whose product is not wealth accumulation but the very maintenance of existence.

Waiting as a Class Experience

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu noted that the ability to command others' time is a form of power. The powerful can make others wait. Subordinates must be prepared. Sociologist Javier Auyero developed this asymmetry in his research on Argentine state institutions, examining the waiting of poor people as an everyday experience of political subordination.

The waiting room in front of a clinic is, in this regard, an interesting sociological laboratory. A person with sufficient economic capital can, in some cases, use paid examinations, secure individual transportation, or organize their workday more flexibly. A person dependent on public transport and with a fixed work schedule must go through an entire logistical choreography: bus ride, waiting for connections, transfers, the examination itself, and the subsequent journey home.

If a doctor’s visit takes five hours, the healthcare system usually does not record this time as its cost. The clinic’s accounting does not include the loss of income of a patient who had to take unpaid leave, nor the time of a person waiting an extra hour at the stop due to a missed connection.

Institutional inefficiency externalizes onto the individual. We could call this process the expropriation of time. However, such expropriation does not require a legal act or explicit coercion. It is enough to create conditions where access to basic services depends on the willingness to subordinate one’s daily routine.

Waiting is not distributed democratically. A person with money has more options to avoid it. The poor must develop patience as a practical survival skill.

Bureaucratic Pedagogy of Obedience

A special chapter is the administrative apparatus of the social state. Its declared goal is to alleviate material deprivation. However, its daily functioning can require an astonishing amount of administrative work from people in need.

Researchers Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan use the concept of administrative burden to describe the costs borne by citizens when exercising their rights and claims. Gathering information, filling out forms, documenting income, visiting offices, or the psychological stress associated with uncertain outcomes form a separate dimension of accessing social assistance.

For a person with sufficient cultural capital, this may be an unpleasant but manageable procedure. For someone with limited digital literacy, irregular working hours, or complicated family situations, the same process can be a significant obstacle. A paradox arises where the state conditions access to aid on the ability to mobilize resources, the very scarcity of which is the reason for the application.

Administrative burden is not only a technical problem. In social assistance systems, it historically intertwines with moral distinctions between deserved and undeserved poverty. Applicants repeatedly have to prove the legitimacy of their claims, willingness to cooperate, and conformity with responsible behavior.

This can turn social policy into a disciplinary mechanism, where material aid is provided along with an implicit lesson in obedience. Of course, not every confirmation is an act of repression. But if administrative control consumes disproportionate time and energy from those who have the least, its effects cannot be separated from class relations.

Meritocracy Needs Free Time

The ideology of meritocracy assumes that social mobility results from individual effort. Education, retraining, building contacts, or entrepreneurial initiatives are presented as universally accessible strategies for improving one’s life situation. However, this idea contains a significant, often unspoken assumption: that a person must have the time and capacity to focus on their future.

For working poor, this assumption may be unattainable. An eight-hour shift, long commutes, household care, and logistics of material scarcity create a regime of perpetual time shortage. The demand for constant investment in human capital then functions as an absurd command to optimize a life whose every available hour is already occupied. Poverty, in this sense, creates a reproductive trap. Its daily management consumes resources needed to overcome the conditions that cause it.

However, the meritocratic discourse interprets this mechanism through categories of personal responsibility. Lack of time is translated into a lack of discipline, exhaustion into absence of ambition, and material insecurity into an inability to plan. Systemic limitations thus become individual moral failings. It is particularly noteworthy that people who must perform complex logistical and organizational work every day are also told about the need for better time management.

Class-based distribution of time begins to manifest long before entering the labor market. While children from economically secure households can spend afternoons preparing for entrance exams, tutoring, language courses, or extracurricular activities, their peers from poorer backgrounds may spend the same time working part-time jobs, caring for younger siblings, or helping at home. While some accumulate cultural capital, others secure the conditions for their daily reproduction.

Bourdieu would recognize in this mechanism one form of reproducing class privileges through the educational system. Schools formally evaluate individual performance, but this performance arises under fundamentally unequal material conditions. The results of entrance exams may then serve as an objective measure of abilities, although they also partially reflect the amount of time, support, and financial resources invested by households in preparation.

At university, this asymmetry deepens further. A student with financial backing can afford unpaid internships, study abroad, conference participation, or simply more time for studying. For someone who must work alongside studies, the same opportunities entail additional costs they may not be able to afford. Paradoxically, activities aimed at increasing future employability remain more accessible to those whose economic future is already relatively secure.

The meritocratic story then begins only at the outcome. One résumé contains international experience, volunteer projects, and prestigious internships; another lists several years of work in hospitality or retail. The first is interpreted as a sign of ambition, the second as a lack of initiative. It is often overlooked that both individuals could have worked with the same intensity, but one invested time in their future career while the other had to finance their current existence. The educational system thus does not need to directly create class inequalities to reproduce them. It suffices to evaluate different starting conditions through seemingly neutral success criteria.

The Luxury of Doing Nothing

Political economy of poverty should therefore pay more attention to what can be called the class distribution of temporal autonomy. Wealth not only enables higher consumption but also allows delegating unpleasant, time-consuming, or repetitive activities to others. Importing food, cleaning services, private transportation, paid care, or living close to work are various forms of converting economic capital into available time.

Ownership of money provides the possibility of not being constantly occupied by one’s own existence.

This inequality also has a significant gender dimension. Since unpaid care and domestic work are unevenly distributed, the time costs of poverty often disproportionately fall on women. Especially in single-parent households, any failure of public infrastructure can trigger a chain of additional obligations. A delayed bus is not just a transportation inconvenience if it affects picking up a child from kindergarten and being able to go to work the next day. The freedom to manage one’s own time is thus not an abstract individual capacity but materially and institutionally conditioned.

If leftist politics considers decommodification of basic needs, it should also include time in this consideration. Accessible public transport, healthcare, housing, and less burdensome administration are not only social services. They can reduce the amount of unpaid work a person must perform to secure daily existence.

The current political debate repeatedly returns to the question of whether social assistance sufficiently motivates the poor to work. Much less attention is paid to how much work these people already perform without pay. In this regard, poverty has all the characteristics of an extremely disadvantageous form of employment. It has no fixed hours, no vacation, no overtime pay, and its duties increase proportionally with resource scarcity.

And when, after a whole day spent working, on the bus, at the office, and shopping for the cheapest groceries, fatigue finally sets in, there is always someone who recommends better time management.

The author is engaged in research and scholarly publishing in the field of economics

The text was created with the support of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, with a representation in the Czech Republic. The publisher is fully responsible for the content; the views expressed in the text do not necessarily represent the foundation's position.