the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Oct 14, 2024
Plenty of people have felt the frustration of long waits to have their electricity restored due to an outage. A recent study showed that the poor wait longer than others, on average, according to Chuanyi Ji and Scott Ganz of Counterpunch.org.
They analyzed data from over 15 million consumers all across the U.S. receiving power from 108 different power companies between 2017 and 2020. They found that for every 10 percentile drop in socioeconomic status, people waited 6.1% longer for power to be restored. This amounts to waiting almost three hours longer, and the gap between the poorest and the richest consumers could be ten times that amount! And that was true across all racial, ethnic and housing categories.
As they point out, this can be due to poorer consumers living in more flood-prone areas or more vulnerable buildings. It could be because they live farther away from large commercial and industrial customers, to whom the power companies give higher priority.
Whatever the exact reason, this results in poorer customers, least likely to have insurance or other resources, are more likely to lose refrigerated food, have no running water, and be unable to use fans to dry things out and prevent mold damage to their homes.
Somehow the corporate media have managed to completely ignore these statistics for all these years. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the power companies or the politicians to do anything about it, either!