Who Can Live on Minimum Wage?
Hint: No One
McDonald’s can’t seem to get its math right in calculating who can survive on minimum wage. That’s no surprise; the nation’s second-largest industry, namely, the restaurant industry, goes to extreme lengths to make sure that its low-wage employees can’t earn a decent living. This is because of the profit motive: the less a company pays its workers, the more profit it can squeeze out of them. If businesses could get away with bringing back slavery so they didn’t have to pay their workers at all, they would.
Which is why it’s no coincidence that today’s minimum wage is, when adjusted for inflation, “actually 25 percent lower today than it was in 1968.” Who can live on today’s minimum wage? I’ll give you a hint: No one. No one can live on today’s minimum wage, not without public assistance.
I should know since I’m earning just barely above my state’s minimum wage and must rely on food stamps in order to eat. I can’t even afford housing. I sleep on friends’ couches to avoid the homeless shelters, which I am told are absolutely horrendous in the county in which I “live”. A counselor at college told me that if I become truly homeless, to do it in any other county than the one in which I currently reside. Naturally, having no transportation of my own, I can’t get to neighboring counties without walking from the bus stop nearest to the county line. You see, the university bus pass I use to get around is only good for the public transit system in my home county.
I fully support striking fast food workers. I used to be one and I’ll tell you right now that they’re not only kids working their way through high school or college. They’re adults with families to raise, and they can’t do it on what they’re paid, so most minimum wage workers who are able get two or more jobs and end up not being able to get adequate sleep, not being able to see their families. That is essentially the existence of a slave. You can’t call that a life.
Yet the masters of this planet, who pay little or nothing in the way of taxes, are the ones who dictate how much we’re paid and how much public assistance we get, if any. In a sane world this would never be accepted, but we Americans do just that every single day. Sure, there are rumbles, and some go on strike, but not in enough numbers to shut places down across the country until their demands are met. People are, as Cornel West has no problem pointing out, too frightened to make waves. We are terrorized by our own government and by our own employers into shutting up and going back to our work for fear that we may end up homeless or in prison or dead, or all three.
Why do we put up with this? At what point does endless fear give way to boundless anger? At what point do We the People stop taking this crap and start fighting back? How many of us have to become homeless or get sick of always teetering on the edge of it (as I do) before we say, “enough is enough” and do something about it?
