While this is fascinating, I don’t actually have a problem with paying teenagers higher wages, either. The idea that we have to punish young people on their way into the job market is justification for passing along bullying and crap behavior to which we were subjected. I HAD IT HARDER THAN YOU, PUNK isn’t actually, you know, a contribution to the conversation, and from an economic standpoint, kids spend their money in their communities. On the T-shirts, and the rapper albums, and such. Thus supporting a growing economy.
I just get so tired of the bullshit argument that nobody should ever ask for more than he or she is given, that we should all just humbly accept, preferably on bended knee, whatever scraps are thrown from the table. Maybe it’s being a woman, and having fallen for the “good girl in the office” trap too many times early in my career, or maybe it’s just that I don’t like seeing people kicked, but at some point we’ve got to stop thinking of it as a sin, reaching for more. Especially if we didn’t.
At some point we’ve got to quit repeating what we were told for no reason other than that we were once dumb enough to believe it, and get inspired by people fighting for better, instead of being ashamed.
A.
Friend of mine from high school had been working the same job for four years by the time she finally complained to me that she was still making minimum wage and it wasn’t enough to pay the rent her parents were starting to charge her for living in their house (she was still in high school at the time, though she was now 18). She had no idea how to actually ask for a raise, and I couldn’t coach her through it. I finally convinced her to at least get a different job (at Target, where regular raises for grunts come from corporate, not spiteful managers).
Every time people say “we shouldn’t raise minimum wage because it’s just teenagers” I say “what happened to that whole worked-part-time-and-put-self-through-college story you were telling five minutes ago? At $7.25 an hour with state school resident tuition at $10K/year, it’ll only take 1435 hours to earn enough to pay for one year! That’s 35 weeks of full time work.”
I worked 40 hours a week as a disc jockey, for considerably more than the then-prevailing minimum wage, while also a full-time student. Even so, I graduated with, in today’s dollars, about $29,000 in student-loan debt. More importantly, the experience damn near killed me physically, probably cost me at least half a point on my GPA academically (the difference between Phi Beta Kappa and not), and isolated me socially from what was supposed to be the insular and friendly atmosphere of a small college.
I’d prefer my kids not have to do the same.
And that’s just the kids. Don’t even get me started on adults who have to try to get by on minimum wage.
What is this country’s economy for? Is it to make a few rich individuals and corporations wealthier at the expense of everyone else? Or is it to provide jobs that offer people at least a comfortable, if modest, living? Let’s have that question thrown out in every political debate for a while.
Get thee to a screen where last night’s The American Experience: 1964 can be viewed in its entirety.
This country has been hijacked, since the days of the GOLDWATER defeat, by the rich and their flunkies (starting with Reagan in
64).