Three years ago my wife quit her job and we forked over half our savings---and a promise to pay way more than we should---to buy a run-down roadside diner with 18 seats and a greasy counter. Neither one of us slept that night.
It was seventeen days after Barack Obama was elected President. The first American flag either of us ever owned was still planted on the front lawn of our first house, next to the first campaign yard sign we ever considered posting.
That sign read, “Hope.” We were thoroughly inspired. I wrote a couple embarrassingly exuberant diaries about it then, but not much since.
I’ve been very busy. Hope is hard work. And today we employ eight workers, each of whom earns $10 per hour or better. Half of them are part-time. Next month, we hope to start paying my wife her first wages in three years---she works 14 hour days, five days a week, and she’s acquired some mad skills.
Here’s what I’ve learned so far about job creating: it’s not what millionaires do. The wealthy study ways to slash their payrolls, liquidate pension plans and demand that their workers pee in cups.
Those of us who work to earn a living---so we can one day contribute the sort of taxes million-dollar income families should pay, and that would be almost all the rest of us---we’re the ones who create jobs.
Starting out my wife and I both worked 10- and 12-hour days every day except Christmas, New Years and Easter. We gave up most of our friends, nights out, our backyard garden, her beehives, a trip to Chiapas, Christmas gifts, you get the idea.
We dribbled every penny we’ve earned back into the business. Gradually, we’ve turned a wreck of a roadhouse with four parking spaces and a single full-time employee into a thriving 30-seat breakfast, lunch and specialty café that served 230 customers today---some of them twice---with stone-ground, whole-kernel yellow grits, locally-made andouille sausage, wild blueberry oatmeal and 139 other “real food” items besides bacon and eggs, plus a good 50-cent cup of coffee you get to pour yourself.
I can say with a straight face that this is a roadside café that hope built, and hope is still going hard at it.
We’re not alone. We’ve developed friendships with half a dozen families whose living comes from food service, and we’re about average when it comes to the hope part. So are our workers.
The term “workers” is inappropriate. We operate more like a tribe, on consensus. Most decisions are pretty logical, and as much as possible all of us participate.
Our two newest hires are part-time high school kids---twins who will work a five-hour shift one evening each week, home by 9:30 (with time for homework before their shift starts). One of them hopes her straight A’s will get her into med school. The other one hunts wild boar with her dad.
A third high school kid works all day Sundays at much more demanding tasks, and in six months, he’s doubled his hourly earnings by improving his skills. He’s saving up to enroll at the local community college in two years.
Three of our workers are their families’ principal wage-earners. A couple are only able to work part-time. One is applying for disability benefits. I’m the only one who shows much sign of elderly-ness and ethnic Italian is the closest we get to having people of color among us. We’re not as diverse as we could be.
Our full-timers earn between $10.00 and $15 per hour. The most physically strenuous and repetitive work earns the lowest wage. The highest-paid work is highly skilled, demanding and somewhat hazardous. I washed dishes and cleaned the bathrooms myself for the first six months. I know how arduous the work is, and the wage disparity bothers me. We hope to improve it.
But the imperative guiding that effort is moral and ethical, not mathematical. In this economy, we can get our dishes cleaned for minimum wage (I don’t know what that is at the moment, next year it goes to $7.67 in Florida). It’s also hopeful.
Our single mom with two elementary-aged kids and no financial support earns well above minimum wage and still barely scrapes by. But she’s got hope too: over the past year she’s put herself through real estate school, earned her license, quit her night job as a server at a local steakhouse and moved into a much nicer apartment with her kids.
Today, we brought in just enough cash to make payroll tomorrow. Tomorrow’s revenues will pay for the groceries and goods I bought this afternoon if tomorrow’s an average day.
If it sounds like our business is bankrolled as much by hope as by cash, it is. I’m okay with that. These days that makes us an average small business.
I’m okay with this, too. By next fall---when it comes time to plant our Stars and Stripes and our Obama 2012 yard sign---we’ll be living elsewhere. Our lender, alas, is foreclosing.
It’s not an easy house to give up---we bought it from my brothers when my mother passed away five years ago. It’s the house I grew up in. There’s still a mark on one wall that shows my brother’s height when he was four-foot six. He’s now six-eight, with two kids whose own marks better his four-six.
But we have a Sophie’s choice---the house or the business. Last year my day job pay was cut in half. The workload stayed the same, of course.
In moneyspeak, the equity in our house, even in the current market, is worth way more than our business.
But our business is eight workers, six of their children, hopefully a couple of college educations, whole futures in other words, promising, wholesome, hopeful futures. Our house is a thing of the past. Pun intended.
Hope is what creates jobs and builds futures that wealth and greed---the fabled Invisible Hand?---scheme and calculate to make redundant and pointless.
Hope is what guides working people toward common interests and consensus, into OWS encampments and, I am sure, to Tea Party meetings. Hope is an essential asset that enriches liberals and conservatives, activists and ironists, idealists and the rigidly practical.
Hope is an asset that capitalism traditionally undervalues---at its ultimate peril and, these days, to its everlasting shame.
Hope is people.
Postscript/Update: I didn't mean to whine about losing the house. Except for the labor involved in moving out (three of my brothers have lived here with their families, there are Boy Scout and Little League uniforms from the 70's in the storage room), the house thing is all good. Our cafe is 50 miles from our home. Counting gas, maintenance and turnpike tolls, we can buy a (cheap!) home closer to the cafe and just about break even. We're looking at a lakeside mobile home where we can fish off the back porch, not the sort of place I want to settle but adequate for now, since we don't really have a life anymore. We worked through the angst six months ago. Foreclosure will undoubtedly hurt our credit, but we don't use credit anyway, hate it, think it's evil, and the meager credit line we have for the business is pretty safe (our local credit union folks are regular customers).
As to our web site, it'll be back up later this week. I didn't have the $150 to pay for the hosting when it was due, now we have the cash (winter is our busy season).
We're both grateful for all the offers to help in the comments, but there are way more needy (and worthwhile) efforts out there that deserve assistance. Last Monday night we hosted a "Soup for the Hungry" dinner at the cafe and our customers kicked in $506 for the local food banks. Wife made apple squash soup, and it kicks ass.