"Herr Strauss is useless" is probably one of the things that I hate hearing folk say the most because even if you don't like him, he is definately not useless, lemme explain.
Herr Strauss says himself that he feeds the women and children of the camp, but it is in a mission not everyone gets and the comment is passing and easy to miss, but he is completely and utterly correct.
We are going to get very technical, but it is needed to understand. The gang has two saving boxes, Tahiti and day to day things. The Tahiti box is the one that half of all earnings go into, it is the one that Dutch says he keeps hidden outside of camp, the one you steal if you go back for money at the end and the one that Arthur has a little record of at the beginning of his journal, this box is never touched. No one uses any money from it at all, ever. Half of everything, not voluntary goes into this box.
Then we have the other box, the day to day box, this is the one that pays for ammo, medicine and food, those three things and that is about it as well as other common use things like chicken coops, house updates and so on. It is the box standing outside Dutch's tent with the ledger. Everything that goes into this box is voluntary, how much you choose to donate is up to you, you can even choose not to donate at all, Sean says in his robbing mission that he has never donated to it. The money coming going into this is out of people's own pockets, but why does that matter and what does that have to do with specifically the women and Jack?
Arthur, Bill, Javier and most of the male members of the gang have their own savings, they have the money to eat out of their own pockets because they are making their own money, they don't need Pearson to make them food, they can just go buy their own in town. The women on the other hand don't have this luxury, a lot of them are living off the food coming from the surply day to day box, characters like Abigail don't even have five dollars to their name, which we learn in a camp interaction where she mentions needing five dollars to clothe her son, because the daily box doesn't provide clothing, just food, ammo and medicine. She needs this camp box to survive.
Now let's circle back to Strauss, because what does all of that have to do with him? The fact that his operations does not go to Tahiti. When you return with debts, you go directly to the day to day box and 90 percent of the entire debt is put into this box, you gain 10 percent, Strauss gains none.
Let me rephrase, while every other job has a 50 percent Tahiti rate, and then a 'whatever you feel like it' rate to daily stuff (most of which is donate by the exact people who don't actually need it the most), Strauss's job is 0 percent Tahiti and 90% money directly secured to feed the members of the gang who aren't able to make money.
