Written by Helen Cunningham
Everyone knows that America is a land of glistening opportunity. From our gold paved streets to our towering skyscrapers nothing screams self made success like our fifty years of global economic dominance. Men march by in suits sharp enough to cut steel. Car horns blare as businesspeople wait to do their daily part for the crushing wheel of capitalism. Posters of famous models plaster every building, making bedroom eyes at pedestrians forty feet below.
But look closer.
Further down the street there’s an upscale coffee place, and inside is a barista who only slept two hours last night. No one cares that she’s a single mom with two kids and three jobs. Across the counter is a kid who’s slowly paying his way through community college to avoid crippling student debt. No one cares that half of his $7.50 hourly wage is spent on a cup of coffee. The bell on the door dings and an elderly lady hobbles in to buy herself a scone. No one cares that she had to interrupt her retirement to go back to filing papers when her husband got sick.
Politicians like to believe that the only people making minimum wage are teenagers flipping burgers or scooping ice cream. However, that’s simply not true. Teenagers account for only 12% of workers making minimum wage. The other 88% are part time or full time employees with a median age of 35. 27% percent have kids, and 19% are the only people in their family who have a job.
This January my city is raising the minimum wage to $10.10, and as an ice cream scooping teenager I am ecstatic. Since I don’t financially support anyone, not even myself, I can save all of my pay checks for college. $10.10 an hour is a dream for me.
Still, ten dollars an hour is not a living wage. People with children can not buy groceries for ten dollars an hour. People can’t barely afford rent, or student loans, or car payments or any of the other expenditures our modern society necessitates. Worse yet, the big businesses that employ low wage workers don’t care. McDonald’s suggestion to employees struggling to live on the minimum wage was to go on food stamps.
Organizations such as Fight for 15 say that the minimum wage one person should make to live in relative financial security is $15 an hour. A study by Purdue University predicts that if a federal minimum wage of $15 was enacted fast food prices would go up 4.3 percent. Basically instead of paying $5.80 for your quarter pounder with cheese, you’d pay $6.05.
If you ask me, that seems like a pretty reasonable price to pay so that low wage workers can live in something that resembles financial security.
Comments are closed.