Okoliczności popadania w biedę w wielkim mieście. Na przykładzie Łodzi i Katowic

Abstract

The paper considers covert incentives and qualifying factors of falling into poverty in two Polish big industrial cities, Łódź and Katowice. The researches on poverty (understood in comparative terms) reached the households eligible for the welfare temporary subsidies. Analysis of figures covers the ‘officially poor’ ones, viz. households with annual earnings per capita not exceeding the minimum retirement wage, where emerge such disabling factors as single-parenthood, homelessness, the need to protect maternity, unemployment, etc. Among the causes of growing impoverishment of Polish society in recent years, authors suggest the worldwide processes: restructuring the economies, deindustrialization, privatization, along with particular Polish conditions. Further analysis applies, as its theoretical framework, the model of individual’s provisions that include three systems: the state coverage, the market forces and the family. That model suggests variety of settings that could cause falling into poverty. The figures show, that qualifying factors of becoming poor merges into a whole with three systems mentioned and that poverty in the investigated cities correlates with: - family life crumbling and overburdening by the number of children, - the situation in the labor market that restrains the households incomes, - inappropriate provision of social benefits for the families outwards the labor market. The impoverished families in Łódź and Katowice seemed comprehended similarly, yet not alike. In Łódź the poverty almost thoroughly concerned the fraction of so called ‘new poor’ (single mothers, jobless persons, low-paid families with children), while in Katowice, besides the ‘new poor’ emerges the category of ‘traditionally poor’ ones, as disabled persons, chronically diseased, etc.