Once Upon a Time, Minimum Wage Was a Living Wage
In 1970 I was fresh out of high school, working in a gas station in Los Angeles for one cent over minimum wage: $1.66 per hour. I worked 6 days a week, nine hours a day, for a net weekly paycheck of $96. With that little paycheck I had a decent studio apartment, a car, and enough cash in my pocket to eat out regularly — and even take a girl to a movie now and then. Today minimum wage won’t let you do all that. In 2004, in most cities, you’re lucky if you can stretch minimum wage to cover rent, let alone food, clothing, entertainment, and a car.
Part of the problem is a shift in housing availability. We have a housing crisis in this country. But it’s one that affects people who work at Macy’s, not people who shop there, so it gets hardly any notice. Put bluntly, there are no decent places to live for people in low-wage jobs unless they can beg some sort of government subsidy. The real estate market has moved as far away from the needs of low-income Americans as the health care industry. Either rent or health insurance will eat all of a $800/month minimum wage paycheck. A family with two minimum-wage workers, one of whom holds two jobs, may be able to barely make it, but it is going to be tight. And this assumes they pay nothing or next to nothing for child care, which is unlikely. (Unsubsidized) day care for two children can also eat up 40 hours’ worth of minimum wage pay every week. Even if we get some sort of minimal health program that covers everyone, it’s not going to help with the rent problem. Minimum wage today is simply too low for anyone to live on.
‘But only teenagers have minimum wage jobs’
Anyone who says this is a liar. I go to the fast-fooders in Bradenton, Florida, and I usually see nothing but adults working. I saw adults working in most of them in Columbia, Maryland. I see adults working in restaurants, retail stores, and as security guards, all for minimum wage or little above it. I talk to a lot of these people, and more often that not they are trying to support themselves on those little jobs. This finding doesn’t conform to Republican Right Reality, but it is so.
In Republican Right Reality people who hold menial but necessary jobs simply don’t exist or are considered “the help” and will be replaced by immigrants or overseas labor if they whine about their miserable existences. Our current administration worships Ayn Rand, not Jesus. If you don’t believe this, ask Republican stalwarts why they are against increases in minimum wage and support tax breaks for their richest constituents. They will give you plenty of nice economic rhetoric about how paying workers a living wage means fewer jobs and why regulating business is wrong. But when you try to frame that question in moral or ethical terms you will get nothing but sputtering, because there is no moral or ethical justification for this behavior.
They may sing their hymms on Sunday mornings, but when it comes time to practice their purported religion in everyday life it looks like Satan, not Jesus, is the Republican Right’s inspiration.
But I could be wrong on this. I am no expert on theology. Maybe Bush and his followers aren’t Satanists in disguise. It’s possible that supernatural beings have nothing to do with their behavior; that they are simply greedheads who have no respect for anyone who isn’t part of their social class and cynically use religion as a tool to manipulate people they consider their inferiors.