I Wasn’t Worth A Living Wage.

Let’s do a thought experiment.

You want to raise national test scores. You decide it will become national law that every child in 1st Grade will start Math with Pre-Algebra and English with a critical analysis of “Where The Red Fern Grows” by Wilson Rawls. No one even thinks to ask if these kids should start with plus and minus and their ABCs, except you. And you do ask. But, you’re labelled a bigot because every child deserves a higher education.

A year later national test scores haven’t risen. In fact their seems to be a widening gap between those who have higher test scores and those who do not. Younger students seem to be unable to even complete the test.

This is a conundrum. Fear sets in. So what do you do?

You raise the minimum. Now all first graders will start Math with Geometry and English with Shakespeare.

By the next year the system is failing so badly for these younger students that they start rising up and demanding that they should be given even higher education because the bar wasn’t raised enough. After all they’re only 8 years old. They have no fucking clue how the world works. But, they are certain they should be earning the same test scores as the classes that came before them, dammit!

By raising the minimum wage to $15/hr, and having our child labor laws as strict as they are, we are effectively cutting off our “early childhood education” in job skills.

Every morning I would walk down to the neighborhood store to get a newspaper. (The Internet at this time was dial-up, mainly consisted of chat rooms, and it took 3hrs to download a photograph!) Anxiously I would walk back home brimming with excitement for when I got inside.

I would sit on the side of the bed and open the paper, The Miami Herald, to the classified section. I would start scanning for jobs. Oh, looky here: servers, line chefs, dishwashers wanted. I’d circle the add with a red pen.

Still searching I would circle all the jobs I thought I could possibly do. Anything from acting to door-to-door sales. One by one I would call them to set up an interview.

After a few interviews I got a job. The pay sucked! It always sucked because I was a pimple-faced teenager who thought he was a man.

I’d work there for a few months and inevitably quit. Ok, ok, I only got fired twice. The first time I was too young to know it was legitimate discrimination, and the second time I absolutely deserved it.

The morning after, I’d walk down to the neighborhood store to get the Miami Herald so that I could circle red all the new jobs I thought I could do.

From one job to the next I was paid shit. In the beginning. By the time I was 23 years old I was able to hold down jobs that paid me enough to move into my own apartment.

Now, in my late 30s (shhh don’t say 40!) with the combined household income of me and my immediate family, we just broke into the 5%.

When I was 18 years old I got a job as a door-to-door salesman selling coupon books. The company I worked for would get a marketing agreement with a restaurant. They would then design and manufacture a coupon book that they armed us with. We were sent out into the neighborhoods around the restaurant to sell them for $20 each.

The restaurant didn’t get any of the money. For each one I sold I kept $7 and gave $13 back to the company at the end of the day. In the morning, at the opening team meeting at 7am, we were given the script we were supposed to deliver when we knocked on your door. Then each team was sent off to our respective neighborhoods.

Upon arriving we would be assigned streets by our team leader and off we went to knock on 100 doors before we met back for lunch. Yes, you heard that right. 100 doors before lunch. Maybe 30% would be home. For the rest we’d write down the house number on the little notepad we carried with us and move on to the next door.

Meeting back for lunch we’d compare who sold more. It was a cold day in hell when I had sold one before lunch. Then, we were off to knock on every door that hadn’t opened. We’d pitch our product, mark off that house number if they slammed the door in our face, and move on.

Once we’d made it through the second round of houses we’d start over for one last pass on the last 30% of doors that hadn’t opened. We’d meet up again to drive back to HQ for the closing team meeting at 9pm where we would report results and cash out.

The next morning, at 7am, we were at the opening team meeting again. Maybe we had the same account, maybe we had another account in another part of town with another restaurant. We would learn that new script and set off to knock on 100 doors three times.

Monday through Saturday we were there. I was lucky to sell 3 or 4 a day. I needed to consistently sell 10 a day for a week to become a team leader, but I just couldn’t get there. I was fucking horrible at sales!

Once, a guy answered his back door by opening a window in it (His kitchen’s back door was literally right next to his front door.) and he stuck only his hairy chest out it, hairy nipples and all. He said some ominous thing about how he was going to beat my ass if I didn’t leave. I took a step back, said “I’m sorry to bother you, sir!”, and knocked on the next door. No answer. Next.

Now, I feel a dark presence approaching me. I turn around and there’s his hairy chest again. Along with the rest of him. In his hand is a Billy Club and his face is red and bothered.

“Oh shit!” I thought. But what came out of my mouth was, “If you get within five feet of me I will consider that an attack and I will defend myself!” I know, I’m just as impressed as you are that I said something so well crafted and not something like, “Fuck!”

Well, he stopped. I slowly backed away towards the stairs. Once away I found another apartment complex, scratched the previous one off my list, and started knocking on more doors.

I made $7 that day.

Another time a lady opened her door with a 6'0" 250lb growling attack dog looking me straight in the eyes frothing at the mouth six inches in front of my face. I know how much the beast weighed and how tall he was because that’s what its owner told me right before she said, “You have 10 seconds to get off my property.”

Without saying a word I immediately walked backwards off of her property as fast as my beating heart would take me. Breathe. Ok. Phew! Scratch that one off. Next house.

A month later my Team Leader was being promoted to an Owner, and he was given a territory in Tampa, FL. That’s 205 miles away from where I currently lived in Miami, FL. I was given an offer to move over there with the team and to be put up in a townhouse our team leader was renting for us. I took the offer.

It was a two bedroom townhouse with a loft that eight of us lived in. The two couples got the bedrooms and the rest of us shared the loft. I slept on an air mattress in the corner and the back 2 feet of the right side of the closet was mine.

By this point I had gotten pretty good at never getting a goose-egg. That means I didn’t knock on 100 doors three times for nothing anymore. I even sold 5 coupons once making $35 that day.

A month later I reached my coveted number 10 one day. Three weeks later, on the fourth week, I sold 10 each day Monday to Friday! Boom-Shaka-Laka! Now, if I could keep that up I'd be promoted to a Team Leader and make $8 a sale with my own team.

I decided I was going to go out to Ybor City that Friday night and celebrate with a couple local new hires. And boy did we celebrate. We got wasted and wound up picking up three girls who we spent the night with in a hotel. No, we didn’t pay for the girls, get your mind out of the gutter! We picked them up in a club the old-fashioned way. Getting them drunk. Fuck you! I’m no angel. But, I’m no devil, either. I was just as drunk.

The next morning, well the next afternoon, we woke up, agreed this was a one night stand, and went separate ways.

This was the first time in six months that I had missed a day of work, but dammit it was for a good reason!

Enough about that! So, it turns out that the owner had decided to promote me to a team leader right away and I fucked my promotion up. (Pun intended!) I was never promoted because of that. Two months later I quit and moved back to Miami. Lesson learned.

In the morning I would walk down to the neighborhood store to get The Miami Herald.

I look back on my first jobs, like that one, or like when I worked for a temporary labor agency that got me a gig in a machine shop drilling 10,000 holes in 10,000 metal nuts every weekday for a month. I was paid a dollar extra per hour because, by this time, I had a used 1991 Toyota Corolla and could drive other temp laborers there with me.

I remember how much those jobs sucked. At how little I was paid. About how tough it was back then. How I pinched pennies. About how hard I worked for so little. About how frustrated I was that I couldn’t get a job that paid me enough to live off of.

And then I thank God that I went through that hell. Looking back now with more than 20 years of hindsight I see so much now that I couldn’t see at the time.

You see, I also have had the opportunity to see how my friends lives have developed over that time as well. Some of them have grown up to be successful in many different paths. But, some of them have been, well, unable to find a clear path for themselves.

And now to the point of my story. Here’s what is so interesting to me:

My friends who all got down and dirty and did whatever shit work for whatever shit pay are now mostly successful accomplished adults making more than a living wage. It was my friends who were too good for the shitty work and needed to be paid “a living wage” before they’d lower themselves to getting a job who are now either wandering aimlessly through life, or have changed their tunes.

For them, it is now in their late 30s and early 40s that they are going through the shit jobs I got out of the way when I was a teenager. One is a telemarketer, one went back to school to get a science education so that he can earn a living, since his arts education didn’t work out as well as he pompously planned, and another last worked behind the counter in a flower shop.

What I have learned over the years is that no matter how much I wanted to earn a living wage back when I was 15, or 17, or 20 years old, I wasn’t worth a living wage. You can wish as hard as you want to solve Algebra problems in first grade. But, if you don’t have the skills like multiplication and division it ain’t going to happen.

And the answer isn’t just to skip Arithmetic and start teaching first graders Algebra.

I worked illegally when I was 15 years old because of how strict the child labor laws are. I couldn’t legally work a straight 8hr shift on a Saturday or Sunday. Or any other day. Ever. At all. It is fucking illegal! Are you stupid?

Ask ANY Economist. No, seriously, ask them. Economists don’t unanimously agree on many things. But on minimum wage they unanimously agree that we should abolish it!

I agree with the intentions of the $15/hr minimum wage. I agree that we should fight for everyone to earn a living wage. But, you’re making it worse, and I will fight you tooth and nail because my children, my whole family, my cousins and nieces and nephews deserves better than this. My children can work for me, or any friend or family member I have for whatever price they can command. They can start working when they begin school. There is no minimum wage. They can work whenever it’s a responsible time.

Do you know what happens by the time they’re out of college? In a time when college graduates aren’t supposed to be able to get a job anywhere? Go ahead and fucking guess. You’re innocence, ignorance, and arrogance is not allowing you to see the brutal facts.

I would never have had the skills I needed to get better and better jobs if I had not started in the shitty ass jobs that paid me from shit, to not a fucking thing, from when I was 15 years old until I could finally start to command a basic living wage at 23 years of age. I wish I had started earlier.

I thank God that idiots weren’t in charge when I was 18 years old, no matter how much my 18 year old self would have voted for it at the time. Stop pandering to the ignorant and inexperienced and make the harder right choice for once!

#MinimumWage #WageGap #ImWithHer #FeelTheBern #Minimum15 #MakeAmericaGreatAgain

Article Update.

Two days after writing this article I came across the employment numbers for Seattle’s $15 minimum wage hike. It doesn’t look good. Doing the right thing isn’t always the easy thing. Sometimes you have to be a villain to save the world. #watchmen #ozymandias