I'm nyhcmaven84, an entrepreneur and writer very active on Alternet. Former tax advisor who was disturbed by the massive wealth disparity I saw and became morally opposed to the system I had to help keep in place, and the clients I was charged to advocate for.
I work for myself now, and advocate for others who eschew traditional work out of choice or out of necessity; as I happen to fall into both categories.
What I'm about to say has likely been said countless times before: but I want to drive it home in a manner that addresses all the bullshittery I've seen regarding wage stagnation. Primarily this: all low-wage workers, regardless of work consistency or job title, should go on strike to convince these morons why raising the minimum wage to a livable level is dire. The affordable rental crisis is only compounding things.
Oh, and when I get impassioned like this I swear a lot. If you dislike four-lettered friends you might want to skip out on this one.
I passed by a real estate office near the bingo hall advertising a studio apartment the next neighborhood over from me in the Bronx: for a shitty little 400-square foot studio in a quiet but inconvenient location with no parking if you drive, and several blocks from the nearest subway if you're like me and can't drive due to macular degeneration.
$1,200/month and it's not even in a "prime" neighborhood.
$1,200/month is what a TWO BEDROOM apartment used to cost here!
$1,200/month could easily be someone's mortgage. No wonder we can't save up for ownership.
And you could only command that much if the apartment was insanely close to public transit and/or a large employer like one of the universities or hospitals up here. I remember when I was looking for housing closer to my school, and 1-bedroom apartments went for $700/month. This was 2005.
That was also a time when I had something that is very rare, if not utterly extinct, in this day and age: a full-time minimum wage job that had a consistent schedule. I lived with roommates and paid $450/month for a room in a ramshackle private house until I got my own studio that was $200/month more. My consistent and predictable work schedule enabled me to go to school.
Judging by the Trulia and StreetEasy searches I just ran that left me aghast, I discovered that if I wanted to go back to my old neighborhood, which is still pretty crime-ridden and rife with poorly-maintained housing: I'd have to pay $600-900 for a ROOM. Not even a whole studio: a single room in an apartment or private house. And all the ads insist on nicely-groomed professionals to share even-- get this-- A BEDROOM with a total stranger.
Wow. Judging by books like "The Breadgivers", "Jews Without Money", "How the Other Half Lives", and other chronicles of the early 20th century coupled with the stories handed down to me from my great-grandparents who lived on the Lower East Side tenements: sharing bedrooms and hell, BEDS with total strangers was a commonality. There'd be up to four or five unrelated people sleeping in the same bed. Getting a private room was considered hoity toity stuff in the tenements. Geez, is this what it's coming to? Roommates in high housing cost areas are a fact of life, but sharing bedrooms off a Craigslist or Trulia listing is really just a hop and skip away from sharing beds with random-ass strangers. All while paying the equivalent of what a whole apartment used to cost barely a decade ago? Hmm, when you factor in all these old diseases like measles making comebacks, multigenerational households becoming a necessity, stagnant and unlivable wages combined with inconsistent work, fewer protections for workers while robber barons get all the gains...holy shit. History really IS repeating itself! 2015 is the modern tenement era.
Let's face it, it's really hard to afford being able to just live if you don't have housing-- even if it's as dire as having to share a bedroom with a complete stranger. You need an address and a stable means of contact to look for work, a place to shower and keep interview-appropriate clothing. Even sharing a bedroom with someone you don't know has to beat living on the streets.
So I got home and randomly Googled "I can't afford to live" and some interesting results come up.
The first result was for a suicide watch blog where the author talked about how despite living in a fairly low-cost area, she is unable to afford much beyond a beater car and rent, is struggling to the point of contemplating suicide. How many lives has this widespread greed claimed? People who are literally working themselves to death, or dying in situations caused by such harsh conditions? People who WANT to kill themselves out of being unable to afford basic living expenses?
Another result: article from HuffPo, citing that new grads can't afford to rent in most American cities. A commenter rightfully points out that it's not just recent grads feeling the pinch either: their parents are too, as are people who've long since graduated and are patchworking jobs or just not getting paid what they would've been paid years ago.
Right before that, there's an AM New York article dictating how much a worker has to earn to live in all five boros: my home boro of the Bx comes to the cheapest at $21.26 per hour. New York's minimum wage is currently $8.75/hour, slated to go up to $9 in 2016. Cuomo has agreed to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour for fast food workers by 2018.
Um, I'm going to come out and say it: we need $15/hour TODAY. Not in 2018. And for ALL workers. Because please tell me, what the HELL is the point in working when you can't even afford to live as a result of it?
Moreover, regardless of how much you make: one of the biggest points these people are missing is that people still need to be housed. So if you simply cannot afford rent, and are in no position whatsoever to buy, how do you get housed then? Camping out under the George Washington Bridge?
How many people are working two, three, four, or more jobs not just in New York, but everywhere? Where even if it's in an area that has lower living costs, paying rent is still incredibly hard even with more than one job? Maintaining a car is also not cheap and shitty cars break down all the time, and that's assuming you don't have a medical condition or disability that prevents you from driving in the first place. And given the sorry-ass state of American infrastructure, a car is a necessity in most parts of the country. Why, we have a D+ in infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers, with transit getting a solid D! Man, and not's the kind of cartwheel-worthy D+ we saw in Tommy Boy 20 years ago.
Next result: San Francisco teachers can't afford to live in the districts they teach in. There's a very short supply because the jobs don't pay enough for them to live there. Wouldn't that be a cue to raise pay for the teachers so they can actually afford to live where they WORK? After all, rent is so astronomical because supply is short!
Many more articles came up in my search all proclaiming that we're totally fucked. But a staggering amount of people in the comments are really brainwashed. Here's a paraphrasing of the responses I saw:
"Minimum wage jobs are for teenagers and college students starting out!"
"Of course you're going to have a shitty job and roommates after you graduate college. If that's still happening at 30, something's wrong."
"Well, I still couldn't afford to live in NYC and made more than $15/hour. I just commuted to the city, so can you."
"Don't make the government pay for your inability to just increase your skills so you can just keep doing the bare minimum."
"You want $15/hour? Then do something that's worth $15/hour."
"Well, I worked three jobs to put myself through school! I worked harder than you! Working for the bare minimum means you're lazy and unmotivated."
"All these kids need STEM degrees because you can make $60K out of the gate! Have fun discussing women's studies while you serve coffee."
And they're all missing the point.
Aside from the fact that you can have a college degree, an advanced degree even, and be earning total shit, if you literally do nothing but work and commute and still can't afford to live, just where the hell are you going to get not just the money but also the TIME to increase your skills? If you have an inconsistent work schedule with just one job, let alone two or three, forget going to school. Your employers won't give a shit if you miss classes and will fire you if you can't come to work because of an exam: people are fighting for crumbs. You can be easily replaced.
Even in STEM and business fields, jobs don't pay what they used to. And what if you just are not cut out for scientific fields?
But the biggest disconnect of all?
THESE JOBS STILL NEED TO BE DONE! No matter how much they pay or what skill level they are.
Even if they're scarcely above minimum wage, all labor has value. To put it very simply, if these things didn't need to be done, then would these jobs even be around?
If minimum wage jobs are considered to have no value, followed by other low-wage work and then the non-STEM skilled work that is mocked so much...let's imagine a day they all stopped working, disappeared, whatever. Behold the following scenario:
It's a typical Monday morning and you wake up at the ass crack of dawn to get ready for your corporate job that is so, so important and useful! You want coffee before you go to work in the morning. Oops, can't do that-- there's no one to make the coffee or punch the register at the coffee shop of your choice.
So you'll make some coffee at home then. Oh shit, you're out of coffee. Better go to the store to get some. Can't do that either: the supermarket's closed because no one's there to stock shelves, use the registers, cut meat and cheese at the deli counter, or clean up the huge mess the only two managers in the store just made because they couldn't keep up the pace.
Lunchtime rolls around. You told all those food service employees to go get real jobs, so there's no fast food or casual restaurants to go to since they went on strike in response due to being unable to find "real jobs". Whoever will make your lunch now?! You don't want to pack or home cook EVERY meal. And even if you did, once again, all the supermarkets are indefinitely closed because they couldn't stay open very long operating with a skeleton crew of management employees, same goes for the restaurants. They can't tend to discarding spoiled inventory fast enough or ringing up purchases. Only a few very tiny establishments where the owner-operator or manager does all the dirty work are open. And they don't keep the long hours that the more established chains do: even shorter hours because they don't have a delivery fleet right now so they lose income on delivery orders, and can't cook all the dine-in and takeout orders themselves so even those little restaurants are a stretch at getting some food in your stomach right this second.
Oh, but cooking food, making coffee, sweeping floors, punching a cash register, and stocking shelves all while trying to keep irate customers happy is THE BARE MINIMUM! The people who work these jobs clearly just don't work hard. It can't be that important, right?
You go back to the office and find that the phones are ringing off the hook, the floors are dirty, there's papers laying everywhere, and your co-workers are really agitated that they have to do their own scheduling, make their own copies, and take phone calls where half are clients and half are cold call sales pitches that take forever to hang up. Clients are getting fed up and dropping their accounts because they can't get through!
All because you and your co-workers are now busy doing other things that are sucking away valuable time they need to get new clients and keep your current clients happy. While your support staff isn't making minimum wage on the nose, they make slightly above it and joined the minimum wage workers in their walkout: well, they clearly failed at life for your choice to pay them $11/hour and require a college degree! Guess that answering the phones, keeping the office clean, and taking care of those piled up little tasks wasn't that valuable, hmm?
You leave the office still hungry and agitated. You're dying for an aspirin but the drugstore has a line snaking outside like it's hotter than Shake Shack because there's only one overworked manager there to do everything. The big box store down the road is miraculously open. You head over there and it's the liveliest establishment you've seen all day. The self check-out is its saving grace. But when you scan your bottle and it prompts you to wait for an attendant, the attendant never arrives. No one's there to run the registers. Items are haphazardly thrown everywhere because no one's there to put shelf pulls back. Unless you steal this aspirin, you're not going to go home with it before midnight at this rate.
Fortunately, there's no more underpaid security guards either because they too joined the walkout so no one comes when you saunter out with a bottle of aspirin that sets off the alarms. Other people get wind of what you did and they too just storm out with blatantly shoplifted items. This is not without consequences: it all comes out of the manager's pay, and prices increase to cover the cost of constantly stolen merchandise.
You head home, grateful you had some food in the fridge from before the strike. But you just want to relax and watch some Internet cat videos, maybe fill some comment sections with screeds on how lazy these people are to not work!
Oh snap. Not happening. Your computer turns on and your connection is fine, but most of the sites you frequent are down. Turns out that you need all those people with worthless degrees relying on minimum wage jobs to pay their rent while content mills pay them pennies on the dollar for funny writing you like. No one's hosting cat videos: underpaid systems admins joined the strike. You can find plenty of old content in RSS feeds, but there won't be new content unless higher wages and fees are paid to writers and editors.
So you go out, wanting to have just a nice experience of SOME kind whether it's getting your hair or nails done, going shopping in an atmospheric store, going to the movies, whatever. To your horror, none of those things are options: even the hairdressers that did well for themselves with their own salons are having a hard time fitting people in for appointments because their minimum wage helpers and front desk attendants aren't there to schedule people and sweep floors, so the marble floors now resemble a shag carpet. Congrats, your refusal to acknowledge that floors need to be swept now makes this upscale salon with $6,000/month rent look like where the BeeGees were sent to die.
Just like the grocery and drugstores, even the fancy clothing stores only pay their employees minimum wage or just barely above it. Most of them also send their employees home if the store is not making its sales target for the day. Store definitely didn't do that today because no one was there to help customers, ring things up, and order from the warehouse if they were out of stock on an item. How would you like it if you were counting on your nice stable paycheck and your boss suddenly told you to go home because not enough accounts were landed and overdue accounts were not being paid? Oh, but you think it's just fine for this "unimportant" low-paying job even though you really wanted that cool item behind the glass that no one can open for you.
And movies...what movies? Not only is there no one there to sell you tickets or popcorn, but no one is writing scripts either. Instead, these prospective set designers, script writers, and even actors who were honing their craft at school decided to try civil engineering instead at your pressure. You have no new articles to read, no cat videos to watch, and definitely no movies to view but you DO have this wobbly bridge about to collapse because someone who hates their job and/or is not cut for out will really just half-ass it.
See where I'm going with this?
Minimum wage is supposed to cover the basics: rent, food, utilities, transportation. It's a hell whole lot easier to "stop doing the bare minimum" and "just get an education" when you don't have to work two or more jobs just to still be unable to pay for the basics, the largest of which is simply putting a roof over your head. How the hell can you save for anything like education when you can't even afford to live? And even if you crow at them, "Just move!" well, moving costs money and doesn't guarantee you'll find work in a cheaper place to live, let alone a living wage.
The scenario I gave above could apply anywhere, though it definitely applies to big cities like where I live: if all the low wage workers just went on strike, a lot of shit wouldn't get done. It would most certainly be noticed if these workers stopped showing up. Who wants to commute an hour plus each way for a job that still doesn't let them afford to live? If a city needs that many low-wage workers, surely there needs to be housing for them that is actually affordable! Or their pay needs to drastically increase.
As that article I pointed out earlier said, even highly-educated professionals like teachers can't afford to work in the districts that need them! People in various fields who make more than minimum wage, a lot more even, simply can't afford the rent even if they are educated. So clearly just getting an education isn't the answer. But it doesn't change the fact that these low-wage jobs they deride so much are still needed.
So here's my proposal, that I make as both a businesswoman and a die-hard Socialist: let these businesses do without the low-wage work they use if it's that unimportant and low-value to them. And let's see how the people who can afford $5,000/month apartments like it when they suddenly can't get their coffees and meals someone else prepared and have to do their own administrative work, clean their own workplaces, and all those other little things they take for granted.
Even if you will never afford unfathomable housing like that: you likely rely on low-wage labor to some extent whether you realize it or not. Whether you go to a store and buy something or when you order online and pickers in fulfillment houses get paid minimum wage or even less in Dickensian conditions to pack up that dish soap and double-sided dildo you wanted. Picking up coffee on the way to work? Chances are the person making it is working at least one more job. Even if you go to college to try and better your chances at climbing out of the clinched asshole of poverty: the person who is teaching your classes more than likely is on food stamps and worrying about how many classes they will have in the coming semester.
So imagine this: if minimum wage becomes a living wage, people who make and serve meals to others can afford the same for themselves and don't need to work 2-4 jobs so they can gasp have the time to gain skills and education if they desire, and even if they only have mental capacity for "doing just the minimum", this is a hell whole lot better than having crowded shelters and perpetual couch-surfing because they cannot pay rent.
Then when companies don't want the stigma of offering barely above the new minimum wage, that means YOU have to be paid more: and getting paid more means things like paying off debts early and home ownership are more in sight. More ownership = more available rentals which can ease the supply constriction that is leading to such insanely high rents.
But even if you try to make every minimum wage worker into someone skilled: where are all the skilled jobs going to come from? How consistent are they? Moreover...who's going to make your coffee, do your errands, pack your orders, and all those other "unimportant" things? Why SHOULDN'T they have a living wage? Scraping the bottom isn't exactly motivation to do better because if they do nothing but work and commute, there's no time for betterment.
How these people don't see this disconnect is really stunning.