Tag: people

Who Can Live on Today’s Minimum Wage?

If you're stuck working minimum wage jobs like I am, you know what everyone else who earns the lowest pay allowed by law knows: You can't live on minimum wage, certainly not on the part-time hours employers give.

That's why it's heartening to see fast food workers across the nation going on strike to demand better pay.  I pull in $8.30 an hour at around twenty hours a week.  I can't afford even the cheapest of apartments on that.  As a single white male with no dependents, I am ineligible for most public assistance, including welfare, housing assistance, and medical assistance (Medicaid).  I get a pittance in food stamps every month, but it's not enough to keep me fed on a regular basis.  I'm lucky if I can eat once a day.

My entire paycheck is spent paying bills before I even get it deposited to my bank account, which is typically at or near empty.  That is the reality for me and for everyone else who works a minimum wage job.

Some stupid motherfucker was posting on a friend's Facebook page yesterday about how unfair it would be if fast food workers got an increase in wages to earn the same amount as he does in his construction job, because he doesn't expect that an increase in the minimum wage would necessarily bring an increase in his own pay.  According to him, we minimum wage monkeys don't do any real labor, and therefore don't deserve to make anywhere near the same amount of money as someone whose job involves backbreaking physical labor.  This same stupid asshole thinks that we can get higher paying jobs if we wanted to, and that we don't want to.  Bullshit.  If I could get a job working construction, I'd be working it right now.  I've applied for those jobs and they haven't even granted so much as one interview.  Most require that I have my own transportation, which I can't afford because I don't make enough to afford my own vehicle.  Those that don't haven't deigned to give me an interview either.

I can tell you right now that this ignoramus wouldn't last even one full shift working at McDonald's.  He couldn't keep up with the fast pace, and he certainly couldn't deal with impatient, often angry customers, standing on his feet for eight hours or more.  I've done that and it's exhausting.  My back is still screwed up from nearly three years of bending over a work table marinating, trussing, and spitting chicken carcasses for roasting, and I left that job in 2005 — eight years ago.  These days I grind lenses for an eyewear company for barely above my state's minimum wage.  I have to clock out for lunch if I work over six hours, costing me a half hour's pay, because the corporation for which I work doesn't want to pay me for a shift that's long enough to necessitate taking a few minutes to restore my energy levels.

News articles about the fast food strike state that the demand for fifteen dollars per hour would raise pay for full-time workers to thirty-one thousand annually, more than double the current annual average of fifteen thousand.  Some, however, quote workers pointing out that most minimum wage jobs don't provide full time hours.  They allow twenty or under, meaning someone like me might make $7,500 a year or less, and very often it's a lot less.

In an article on NBC Washington, it's revealed that financial woes actually have a negative impact on a person's IQ.  That is, the sheer stress of not being able to afford even the basics, like adequate food and drink, is literally making people dumber.  Starvation wages lead to actual starvation, so the body can't get the nutrients it needs to maintain a healthy brain.  Financial worries force people to devote more of their mental power to worrying over how they'll afford to live, leaving much less time and energy for other matters.

Who the hell can live on the current minimum wage?  No one, not without public assistance, which is already slashed to the bone with Republicans and Democrats cutting the social safety net even further.  Many of us are either homeless or soon shall be (myself included).  No one is out there advocating for us.  No one is doing a damned thing to lighten our financial burden.  The vast majority of our tax dollars (yes, we poor folk do pay taxes) go to fund wars and Wall Street, with things like education, housing, food, and Social Security getting less and less.  Yet we're told by ignorant assholes to “suck it up”, stop asking for “handouts”, to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and make do or die.  If we could do that on what we get paid, we would.  But we can't, and even though we work and pay taxes (unlike the obscenely rich), we aren't allowed to have a say in how our tax dollars are spent.

So what's to be done?  Well, I don't know about you, but I for one have no intention of crossing any picket lines, and neither should you.  Don't let striking fast food workers do this all by themselves.  Support them in whatever way you can.  Join them, in fact.  If you know in your heart that everyone has the right to work “a useful and remunerative job” that pays enough to live on, then join them in solidarity and demand an increase in the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour.  Call and write members of Congress in both houses, call and write the White House, march on Washington in the millions and shut the place down, join striking workers on the picket line, donate whatever money and food you can afford to help people who are starving.

This country and this planet are going to hell in a hand basket, but only if We the people let them.  Don't let them.

The True Wealth Deficit

“This is an impressive crowd: the Have’s and Have-more’s. Some people call you the elites. I call you my base.”

George W. Bush

“It is not the creation of wealth that is wrong, but the love of money for its own sake.”

Margaret Thatcher

“Being rich is having money; being wealthy is having time.”

Margaret Bonnano

lest we forget …

President Obama was wrong

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    “Insurance executives don’t do this because they’re bad people; they do it because it’s profitable.”

President Obama – 9/9/09

     With all due respect, Mister President, I beg to disagree.

     Therefore, I submit this as evidence to the fact that Insurance Executives are in fact bad people, very, very bad people.


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ThinkProgress.org

    As you can see, our 9/11 heroes who ran into the burning flames of the WTC and survived can be denied insurance because of their occupation. An expecting father can be denied health care insurance. He might as well be having the baby himself, in their opinions, and, if that were the case, they would still deny him coverage anyway.

    Therefore, I respectfully disagree with what you have said, President Obama. I understand why you said it, after all Insurance Execs are people too. At least, one must assume so.

    With all due respect, Mr. President, I appreciate your attempt to avoid demonizing anybody, even Insurance Executives, as I assume you do so for the sake of decency, President Obama, really, I do. I understand that it is beneath the office of the President to do so. I simply disagree with your statement, but with respect, of course.

    So I will say it for you.

    Not only are insurance execs bad people who do what they do for profit, they are clueless, heartless, greedy bastards who would let you die for a dollar. That is not just bad, I’d say it’s evil, but since you can’t say that, Mr. President, I will for you.

    Insurance Executives are EVIL, greedy, clueless, heartless leeches who would sooner watch your family die than lose a dollar of profit, profits that go to pay their big, fat salaries.

     More of the cold, hard Truth below the fold, and a call to action as well.

May One – if One May, Please

If you can make it to Faneuil Hall in Boston around 11:30 this Thursday that’d be great. If you can do something locally wherever you are that’d be great. If you can take some time and write to your congress critters that’d be great. If you can take some time and write some LTEs that’d be great. If you can take some time and call your congress critters or local rag that’d be great.

If you can join one of the many protests that seem to be naturally occurring simultaneously that’d be really great. The longshoremen’s union, the truckers and the immigrants will all be making a statement on the born-in-the-USA (Haymarket, Chicago, 1886, 8 hr workday movement) International Workers Day.

Don’t know about all of you out there but I just can’t sit around flinging IP packets into the bit-stream and waiting for something to happen. We can type away until our fingers fall off. It’ll change nothing. We gather here in web space and piss and moan to the chorus. We’re intelligent, we’re creative, we’re outraged by what is happening around us. We pour our hearts out. Nothing happens. We’d still be in Viet Nam if people hadn’t gone out of their way to show up by the dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, to collectively vent their unwillingness to allow the desecration of all they held to be right to continue.

It has to start somewhere at some point in time with someone showing up in public to make the case for stopping the collective insanity. It looks like a lot of people have picked May One as the day. If you can’t bring yourself to participate, find something going on and go watch. Body counts matter. There’s enough of us who were around for the 60s and 70s protests to remember what it felt like to be part of a movement for peace. Movement is the key. Turn off the computer, go outside, find one other person to join you and go to the most heavily trafficked public place near you. See if anyone else shows up who may have the same feelings you do.

This May One thing is in our primitive neo-pagan history. It’s that cross-quarter day halfway between the Vernal Equinox and the Summer Solstice. There’s a primal nature behind the day. Get outside with other like-minded people and see what happens. Take pictures. YELL LOUDER!

May One. Take America Back.

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