this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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I haven't seen it in ages, and I can't critique the approach, but the maker of SuperSize Me tried to spend 30 days doing a minimum wage job. Iirc, it wasn't great and they had so much debt by the end of it.
I wish these people could get a similar perspective.
McDonald's made an article about how to live on a McDonald's wage with average costs. They couldn't make it work so the first line in their budget was to get a second job.
I'm not sure it's still online
Love how the breakdown of monthly expenses that McDonald's provided includes "Heating: $0"
Warmth really is a luxury when you think about it though...right? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They were basically saying it's perfectly normal to work 70-hour weeks and still hardly be able to cover their made-up costs of living (actual costs are much higher in my area, and presumably in most others as well). Oh, and I'm using heat--so I'm pretty much gonna be in debt for life. Guess we should have gone to college/less avocado toast/whatever. But that's just business! Don't hate the player, hate the game! Blah blah blah (งツ)ว
$600 for rent? I haven't paid less than $700 in over a decade. For an apartment.
When I first moved out on my own in the mid 90s I was paying $525/month + utilities for a 3 bedroom semi detached house.
It could be done with roommates.
While it's a stretch, that's not the most glaring thing here...health insurance at $20/mo is an absolute joke that should've never gotten past any of the eyes that had to look at this thing before it went out.
The last time I had to pay for health insurance out of pocket, my premium was closer to $250/mo.
Granted that was for good coverage, but even a "just the basics" plan was at least half that.
One of the other things that "breakdowns" like this miss too is that these places typically don't have sick days or paid vacation at all. You don't come in, you don't get paid.
So getting seriously ill is a major issue. If you catch the flu or covid and you're down for two weeks, that's half your month's budget, from both jobs, gone. Plus your expenses are likely spiking for one or more doctors appointments, covid tests, medicine, etc. that you wouldn't normally be spending on.
Add to that that a shitty manager might also just decide that missing two weeks makes you unreliable, so they just fire you, or just decide not to schedule you anymore, and now your future income is gone too.
...all because you caught an illness.
$20 health insurance my sides
That is because McDonald's offers employee health insurance for only $10/pay period… They do offer that insurance, right?
If it is not clear, I very much doubt that they offer such cheap health insurance (and that is assuming that they don't have a policy in place that forbids workers from being scheduled for more than 29 hours per week per franchise so they can be classified as "part time" at each location and not offered health benefits).
Are they eating 3 meals at McDonald's? I don't see the food line item.
The heating thing is easily explainable by it being included in the electric bill in this scenario. I don't know why people go after something like that when the actual egregious thing is them telling people to get a 2nd job instead of paying them more.
My gas furnace would like to argue otherwise
And why itemize it if it's included in another bill?
Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a great book about this called Nickel and Dimed. She was a full time journalist and set out to get a job at a diner and find a place to live on the salary. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed
Matthew Desmond's books Evicted and Poverty, By America are amazing, well researched, easily readable books about poverty in the US. I can't recommend them enough. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/17/1158230630/poverty-by-america-book-review-matthew-desmond-evicted
This is why it infuriates me so much when people argue that some jobs, "Aren't meant to pay well and live on."
From the social standpoint: then if that's your argument, anyone looking to support themselves had better be able to find a job that pays better for the skills they have. This not being the case, it suggests that these people are in fact trying to support themselves, they've just found themselves on the wrong side of the capitalist meat grinder, and the argument of the job being one that "isn't supposed to support you" is nothing more than a distraction so you don't have to say the real reason: because you'd rather have the person that serves your diner breakfast be trapped in an endless cycle of poverty than pay an extra dollar for your meal. You're complicit in the process and you like it.
From the individual standpoint: ignoring for a moment the questions of who gets to decide these sorts of things and where the cutoff lies...isn't it really just creating a convenient circular excuse for greed? These jobs have low pay because they're not meant to support oneself on...but the reason they're not meant to support oneself on is because they have low pay? And that's good enough of an explanation?! People, especially older boomers, like to paint with broad strokes and imply that service industry jobs are "for teenagers in the summer and college kids putting themselves through school", as a way to somehow justify low pay. Now regardless of the demographics of the employee (and we won't even touch the idea of working at any job, much less service industry, to pay for college as you attend in this day and age)... regardless of all that...doesn't it make sense that whoever is doing the work, if the same work is being done the pay should be the same? Granted there's room for seniority, experience, skill, dependability, etc. but the point I'm getting at here is: isn't it ridiculous to say that a kid should be paid less for doing a given job just because they're a kid?
And regardless of where you stand on the exploitation of child labor, either answer leads you back to the same point: either it's not okay to exploit kids, so kids should make the same as an adult for the same work, so we can pay these workers fairly...or you think it is okay to exploit child labor, in which case, that only makes it okay to short the kids' pay...not the adults. Either way, the only explanation left for subsistence pay for adults is: the system is victimizing the working poor like an elephant sized parasite latched onto an ant, and justifying it by suggesting that if the ant doesn't like it they should just try, you know, making more money.
I remember a young journalist in my country that tried to do that a long time ago. He was a rich spoiled kid who got into the newspaper by nepotism and wanted to make a name for himself. He had no clue what it was like to live on minimum wage (which is earned by the majority here). On the first few days he was already way beyond the budget. He actually went to the restaurant "just once". Readers were laughing how clueless he was and he'd be starving before the 3rd week. It didn't happen because the column mysteriously vanished after week 2.