It’s the holiday season and most American households are struggling, many desperately, as the economy continues it’s dismal performance. Yes, unemployment is down to 8.6% from 9% and higher (where it had been stuck since 2008) but that modest “improvement” was mainly due to discouraged workers dropping out of the labor market. The employment and hiring rates remain at historically low levels.

But while there’s been lots of attention paid to unemployment and to the income gains of the top 1%, there has been far too little focus on the need to combat poverty level wages. We are enmeshed in a toxic brew of joblessness, low hours (involuntary part-time employment), and low pay (1/3 of all workers earn below 2/3 of the median wage – see below).

It is said that Charles Dickens intended A Christmas Carol as a “sledgehammer blow on behalf of the poor and unfortunate” (“Father Christmas,” New York Times, December 7, 2011). One of the great lessons of Dickens’ accounts of 19th century London is that poverty for families with working-age adults is rooted less in joblessness than in low pay. But they’re connected: the threat of job loss undermines the ability of workers to demand decent pay and working conditions.

In the first pages of the A Christmas Carol, Dickens writes:

“The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn’t replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room…”

And when Scrooge overhears his pathetic clerk mutter Merry Christmas to Scrooge’s nephew, his response is “… my clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I’ll retire to Bedlam.”

Yes, keeping a veneer of Christmas cheer while maintaining a family on 15 shillings a week in the employ of . . .

Read more: The Metrics of Protest – A Christmas Carol for 2012: Good News in the Fight Against Low Pay?