Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Minimum Wage, Minimum Chance
By Peter Van Buren
Posted on February 16, 2016, Printed on February 16, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176104/ ;
To say that we live on a 1% planet isn't just a turn of phrase. In fact, it
would undoubtedly be more accurate to speak of a .1% or a .01% planet. In
recent years, wealth and income inequalities have grown in a notorious
fashion in the United States -- and, as it turns out, globally as well. In
January, Oxfam released a report on the widening gap between global wealth
and poverty. It found that, between 2010 and today, the wealth of the
poorest half of the planet's population fell by a trillion dollars, a drop
of 41%, while that of the richest 62 people (53 men and nine women)
increased by half a trillion dollars. Put another way, those 62
billionaires were wealthier than the bottom 50% of the world's people, while
the richest 1% owned more than the other 99% combined. The direction in
which we're heading is obvious. Just consider that, in 2010, it took 388 of
the super-rich to equal the holdings of the bottom 50%; now, that number is
326 people smaller.
Keep that trend line in mind as you read about TomDispatch regular Peter Van
Buren's latest adventures in the minimum-wage economy. Back in 2014, he
described for this site how, having lost his State Department job for being
a whistleblower on the Iraq War, he fell for a time into the low-wage world.
As he wrote, "And soon enough, I did indeed find myself working in exactly
that economy and, worse yet, trying to live on the money I made. But it
wasn't just the money. There's this American thing in which jobs define us,
and those definitions tell us what our individual futures and the future of
our society is likely to be. And believe me, rock bottom is a miserable base
for any future." His experiences in a big-box retail store inspired him to
write his novel, Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent. As last year
ended, he returned to the minimum-wage world, now -- thanks in particular to
Bernie Sanders -- part of the national conversation. And here's what he
found. Tom
Nickel and Dimed in 2016
You Can't Earn a Living on the Minimum Wage
By Peter Van Buren
When presidential candidate Bernie Sanders talks about income inequality,
and when other candidates speak about the minimum wage and food stamps, what
are they really talking about?
Whether they know it or not, it's something like this.
My Working Life Then
A few years ago, I wrote about my experience enmeshed in the minimum-wage
economy, chronicling the collapse of good people who could not earn enough
money, often working 60-plus hours a week at multiple jobs, to feed their
families. I saw that, in this country, people trying to make ends meet in
such a fashion still had to resort to food benefit programs and charity. I
saw an employee fired for stealing lunches from the break room refrigerator
to feed himself. I watched as a co-worker secretly brought her two kids into
the store and left them to wander alone for hours because she couldn't
afford childcare. (As it happens, 29% of low-wage employees are single
parents.)
At that point, having worked at the State Department for 24 years, I had
been booted out for being a whistleblower. I wasn't sure what would happen
to me next and so took a series of minimum wage jobs. Finding myself plunged
into the low-wage economy was a sobering, even frightening, experience that
made me realize just how ignorant I had been about the lives of the people
who rang me up at stores or served me food in restaurants. Though millions
of adults work for minimum wage, until I did it myself I knew nothing about
what that involved, which meant I knew next to nothing about
twenty-first-century America.
I was lucky. I didn't become one of those millions of people trapped as the
"working poor." I made it out. But with all the election talk about the
economy, I decided it was time to go back and take another look at where I
had been, and where too many others still are.
My Working Life Now
I found things were pretty much the same in 2016 as they were in 2012, which
meant -- because there was no real improvement -- that things were actually
worse.
This time around, I worked for a month and a half at a national retail chain
in New York City. While mine was hardly a scientific experiment, I'd be
willing to bet an hour of my minimum-wage salary ($9 before taxes) that what
follows is pretty typical of the New Economy.
Just getting hired wasn't easy for this 56-year-old guy. To become a sales
clerk, peddling items that were generally well under $50 a pop, I needed two
previous employment references and I had to pass a credit check. Unlike some
low-wage jobs, a mandatory drug test wasn't part of the process, but there
was a criminal background check and I was told drug offenses would
disqualify me. I was given an exam twice, by two different managers,
designed to see how I'd respond to various customer situations. In other
words, anyone without some education, good English, a decent work history,
and a clean record wouldn't even qualify for minimum-wage money at this
chain.
And believe me, I earned that money. Any shift under six hours involved only
a 15-minute break (which cost the company just $2.25). Trust me, at my age,
after hours standing, I needed that break and I wasn't even the oldest or
least fit employee. After six hours, you did get a 45-minute break, but were
only paid for 15 minutes of it.
The hardest part of the job remained dealing with... well, some of you.
Customers felt entitled to raise their voices, use profanity, and commit
Trumpian acts of rudeness toward my fellow employees and me. Most of our
"valued guests" would never act that way in other public situations or with
their own coworkers, no less friends. But inside that store, shoppers seemed
to interpret "the customer is always right" to mean that they could do any
damn thing they wished. It often felt as if we were penned animals who could
be poked with a stick for sport, and without penalty. No matter what was
said or done, store management tolerated no response from us other than a
smile and a "Yes, sir" (or ma'am).
The store showed no more mercy in its treatment of workers than did the
customers. My schedule, for instance, changed constantly. There was simply
no way to plan things more than a week in advance. (Forget accepting a party
invitation. I'm talking about childcare and medical appointments.) If you
were on the closing shift, you stayed until the manager agreed that the
store was clean enough for you to go home. You never quite knew when work
was going to be over and no cell phone calls were allowed to alert
babysitters of any delay.
And keep in mind that I was lucky. I was holding down only one job in one
store. Most of my fellow workers were trying to juggle two or three jobs,
each with constantly changing schedules, in order to stitch together
something like a half-decent paycheck.
In New York City, that store was required to give us sick leave only after
we'd worked there for a full year -- and that was generous compared to
practices in many other locales. Until then, you either went to work sick or
stayed home unpaid. Unlike New York, most states do not require such a store
to offer any sick leave, ever, to employees who work less than 40 hours a
week. Think about that the next time your waitress coughs.
Minimum Wages and Minimum Hours
Much is said these days about raising the minimum wage (and it should be
raised), and indeed, on January 1, 2016, 13 states did raise theirs. But
what sounds like good news is unlikely to have much effect on the working
poor.
In New York, for instance, the minimum went from $8.75 an hour to the $9.00
I was making. New York is relatively generous. The current federal minimum
wage is $7.25 and 21 states require only that federal standard. Presumably
to prove some grim point or other, Georgia and Wyoming officially mandate an
even lower minimum wage and then unofficially require the payment of $7.25
to avoid Department of Labor penalties. Some Southern states set no basement
figure, presumably for similar reasons.
Don't forget: any minimum wage figure mentioned is before taxes. Brackets
vary, but let's knock an even 10% off that hourly wage just as a reasonable
guess about what is taken out of a minimum-wage worker's salary. And there
are expenses to consider, too. My round-trip bus fare every day, for
instance, was $5.50. That meant I worked most of my first hour for bus fare
and taxes. Keep in mind that some workers have to pay for childcare as well,
which means that it's not impossible to imagine a scenario in which someone
could actually come close to losing money by going to work for short shifts
at minimum wage.
In addition to the fundamental problem of simply not paying people enough,
there's the additional problem of not giving them enough hours to work. The
two unfortunately go together, which means that raising the minimum rate is
only part of any solution to improving life in the low-wage world.
At the store where I worked for minimum wage a few years ago, for instance,
hours were capped at 39 a week. The company did that as a way to avoid
providing the benefits that would kick in once one became a "full time"
employee. Things have changed since 2012 -- and not for the better.
Four years later, the hours of most minimum-wage workers are capped at 29.
That's the threshold after which most companies with 50 or more employees
are required to pay into the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) fund on behalf
of their workers. Of course, some minimum wage workers get fewer than 29
hours for reasons specific to the businesses they work for.
It's Math Time
While a lot of numbers follow, remember that they all add up to a picture of
how people around us are living every day.
In New York, under the old minimum wage system, $8.75 multiplied by 39 hours
equaled $341.25 a week before taxes. Under the new minimum wage, $9.00 times
29 hours equals $261 a week. At a cap of 29 hours, the minimum wage would
have to be raised to $11.77 just to get many workers back to the same level
of take-home pay that I got in 2012, given the drop in hours due to the
Affordable Care Act. Health insurance is important, but so is food.
In other words, a rise in the minimum wage is only half the battle;
employees need enough hours of work to make a living.
About food: if a minimum wage worker in New York manages to work two jobs
(to reach 40 hours a week) without missing any days due to illness, his or
her yearly salary would be $18,720. In other words, it would fall well below
the Federal Poverty Line of $21,775. That's food stamp territory. To get
above the poverty line with a 40-hour week, the minimum wage would need to
go above $10. At 29 hours a week, it would need to make it to $15 an hour.
Right now, the highest minimum wage at a state level is in the District of
Columbia at $11.50. As of now, no state is slated to go higher than that
before 2018. (Some cities do set their own higher minimum wages.)
So add it up: The idea of raising the minimum wage ("the fight for $15") is
great, but even with that $15 in such hours-restrictive circumstances, you
can't make a loaf of bread out of a small handful of crumbs. In short, no
matter how you do the math, it's nearly impossible to feed yourself, never
mind a family, on the minimum wage. It's like being trapped on an M.C.
Escher staircase.
The federal minimum wage hit its high point in 1968 at $8.54 in today's
dollars and while this country has been a paradise in the ensuing decades
for what we now call the "One Percent," it's been downhill for low-wage
workers ever since. In fact, since it was last raised in 2009 at the federal
level to $7.25 per hour, the minimum has lost about 8.1% of its purchasing
power to inflation. In other words, minimum-wage workers actually make less
now than they did in 1968, when most of them were probably kids earning
pocket money and not adults feeding their own children.
In adjusted dollars, the minimum wage peaked when the Beatles were still
together and the Vietnam War raged.
Who Pays?
Many of the arguments against raising the minimum wage focus on the
possibility that doing so would put small businesses in the red. This is
disingenuous indeed, since 20 mega-companies dominate the minimum-wage
world. Walmart alone employs 1.4 million minimum-wage workers; Yum Brands
(Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC) is in second place; and McDonald's takes third.
Overall, 60% of minimum-wage workers are employed by businesses not
officially considered "small" by government standards, and of course
carve-outs for really small businesses are possible, as was done with
Obamacare.
Keep in mind that not raising wages costs you money.
Those minimum wage workers who can't make enough and need to go on food
assistance? Well, Walmart isn't paying for those food stamps (now called
SNAP), you are. The annual bill that states and the federal government foot
for working families making poverty-level wages is $153 billion. A single
Walmart Supercenter costs taxpayers between $904,542 and $1.75 million per
year in public assistance money, and Walmart employees account for 18% of
all food stamps issued. In other words, those everyday low prices at the
chain are, in part, subsidized by your tax money.
If the minimum wage goes up, will spending on food benefits programs go
down? Almost certainly. But won't stores raise prices to compensate for the
extra money they will be shelling out for wages? Possibly. But don't worry
-- raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would mean a Big Mac would cost
all of 17 cents more.
Time Theft
My retail job ended a little earlier than I had planned, because I committed
time theft.
You probably don't even know what time theft is. It may sound like something
from a sci-fi novel, but minimum-wage employers take time theft seriously.
The basic idea is simple enough: if they're paying you, you'd better be
working. While the concept is not invalid per se, the way it's used by the
mega-companies reveals much about how the lowest wage workers are seen by
their employers in 2016.
The problem at my chain store was that its in-store cafe was a lot closer to
my work area than the time clock where I had to punch out whenever I was
going on a scheduled break. One day, when break time on my shift came
around, I only had 15 minutes. So I decided to walk over to that cafe, order
a cup of coffee, and then head for the place where I could punch out and sit
down (on a different floor at the other end of the store).
We're talking an extra minute or two, no more, but in such operations every
minute is tabulated and accounted for. As it happened, a manager saw me and
stepped in to tell the cafe clerk to cancel my order. Then, in front of
whoever happened to be around, she accused me of committing time theft --
that is, of ordering on the clock. We're talking about the time it takes to
say, "Grande, milk, no sugar, please." But no matter, and getting chastised
on company time was considered part of the job, so the five minutes we stood
there counted as paid work.
At $9 an hour, my per-minute pay rate was 15 cents, which meant that I had
time-stolen perhaps 30 cents. I was, that is, being nickel and dimed to
death.
Economics Is About People
It seems wrong in a society as wealthy as ours that a person working
full-time can't get above the poverty line. It seems no less wrong that
someone who is willing to work for the lowest wage legally payable must also
give up so much of his or her self-respect and dignity as a kind of tariff.
Holding a job should not be a test of how to manage life as one of the
working poor.
I didn't actually get fired for my time theft. Instead, I quit on the spot.
Whatever the price is for my sense of self-worth, it isn't 30 cents. Unlike
most of this country's working poor, I could afford to make such a decision.
My life didn't depend on it. When the manager told a handful of my coworkers
watching the scene to get back to work, they did. They couldn't afford not
to.
Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement
during the "reconstruction" of Iraq in his book We Meant Well: How I Helped
Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. A TomDispatch
regular, he writes about current events at We Meant Well. His latest book is
Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent. His next work will be a
novel, Hooper's War.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Peter Van Buren
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176104
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Minimum Wage, Minimum Chance
By Peter Van Buren
Posted on February 16, 2016, Printed on February 16, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176104/ ;
To say that we live on a 1% planet isn't just a turn of phrase. In fact, it
would undoubtedly be more accurate to speak of a .1% or a .01% planet. In
recent years, wealth and income inequalities have grown in a notorious
fashion in the United States -- and, as it turns out, globally as well. In
January, Oxfam released a report on the widening gap between global wealth
and poverty. It found that, between 2010 and today, the wealth of the
poorest half of the planet's population fell by a trillion dollars, a drop
of 41%, while that of the richest 62 people (53 men and nine women)
increased by half a trillion dollars. Put another way, those 62 billionaires
were wealthier than the bottom 50% of the world's people, while the richest
1% owned more than the other 99% combined. The direction in which we're
heading is obvious. Just consider that, in 2010, it took 388 of the
super-rich to equal the holdings of the bottom 50%; now, that number is 326
people smaller.
Keep that trend line in mind as you read about TomDispatch
regularhttp://www.amazon.com/dp/0805096817/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
Peter Van Buren's latest adventures in the minimum-wage economy. Back in
2014, he described for this site how, having lost his State Department job
for being a whistleblower on the Iraq War, he fell for a time into the
low-wage world. As he wrote, "And soon enough, I did indeed find myself
working in exactly that economy and, worse yet, trying to live on the money
I made. But it wasn't just the money. There's this American thing in which
jobs define us, and those definitions tell us what our individual futures
and the future of our society is likely to be. And believe me, rock bottom
is a miserable base for any future." His experiences in a big-box retail
store inspired him to write his novel, Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the
#99Percent. As last year ended, he returned to the minimum-wage world, now
-- thanks in particular to Bernie Sanders -- part of the national
conversation. And here's what he found. Tom
Nickel and Dimed in 2016
You Can't Earn a Living on the Minimum Wage
By Peter Van Buren
When presidential candidate Bernie Sanders talks about income inequality,
and when other candidates speak about the minimum wage and food stamps, what
are they really talking about?
Whether they know it or not, it's something like this.
My Working Life Then
A few years ago, I wrote about my experience enmeshed in the minimum-wage
economy, chronicling the collapse of good people who could not earn enough
money, often working 60-plus hours a week at multiple jobs, to feed their
families. I saw that, in this country, people trying to make ends meet in
such a fashion still had to resort to food benefit programs and charity. I
saw an employee fired for stealing lunches from the break room refrigerator
to feed himself. I watched as a co-worker secretly brought her two kids into
the store and left them to wander alone for hours because she couldn't
afford childcare. (As it happens, 29% of low-wage employees are single
parents.)
At that point, having worked at the State Department for 24 years, I had
been booted out for being a whistleblower. I wasn't sure what would happen
to me next and so took a series of minimum wage jobs. Finding myself plunged
into the low-wage economy was a sobering, even frightening, experience that
made me realize just how ignorant I had been about the lives of the people
who rang me up at stores or served me food in restaurants. Though millions
of adults work for minimum wage, until I did it myself I knew nothing about
what that involved, which meant I knew next to nothing about
twenty-first-century America.
I was lucky. I didn't become one of those millions of people trapped as the
"working poor." I made it out. But with all the election talk about the
economy, I decided it was time to go back and take another look at where I
had been, and where too many others still are.
My Working Life Now
I found things were pretty much the same in 2016 as they were in 2012, which
meant -- because there was no real improvement -- that things were actually
worse.
This time around, I worked for a month and a half at a national retail chain
in New York City. While mine was hardly a scientific experiment, I'd be
willing to bet an hour of my minimum-wage salary ($9 before taxes) that what
follows is pretty typical of the New Economy.
Just getting hired wasn't easy for this 56-year-old guy. To become a sales
clerk, peddling items that were generally well under $50 a pop, I needed two
previous employment references and I had to pass a credit check. Unlike some
low-wage jobs, a mandatory drug test wasn't part of the process, but there
was a criminal background check and I was told drug offenses would
disqualify me. I was given an exam twice, by two different managers,
designed to see how I'd respond to various customer situations. In other
words, anyone without some education, good English, a decent work history,
and a clean record wouldn't even qualify for minimum-wage money at this
chain.
And believe me, I earned that money. Any shift under six hours involved only
a 15-minute break (which cost the company just $2.25). Trust me, at my age,
after hours standing, I needed that break and I wasn't even the oldest or
least fit employee. After six hours, you did get a 45-minute break, but were
only paid for 15 minutes of it.
The hardest part of the job remained dealing with... well, some of you.
Customers felt entitled to raise their voices, use profanity, and commit
Trumpian acts of rudeness toward my fellow employees and me. Most of our
"valued guests" would never act that way in other public situations or with
their own coworkers, no less friends. But inside that store, shoppers seemed
to interpret "the customer is always right" to mean that they could do any
damn thing they wished. It often felt as if we were penned animals who could
be poked with a stick for sport, and without penalty. No matter what was
said or done, store management tolerated no response from us other than a
smile and a "Yes, sir" (or ma'am).
The store showed no more mercy in its treatment of workers than did the
customers. My schedule, for instance, changed constantly. There was simply
no way to plan things more than a week in advance. (Forget accepting a party
invitation. I'm talking about childcare and medical appointments.) If you
were on the closing shift, you stayed until the manager agreed that the
store was clean enough for you to go home. You never quite knew when work
was going to be over and no cell phone calls were allowed to alert
babysitters of any delay.
And keep in mind that I was lucky. I was holding down only one job in one
store. Most of my fellow workers were trying to juggle two or three jobs,
each with constantly changing schedules, in order to stitch together
something like a half-decent paycheck.
In New York City, that store was required to give us sick leave only after
we'd worked there for a full year -- and that was generous compared to
practices in many other locales. Until then, you either went to work sick or
stayed home unpaid. Unlike New York, most states do not require such a store
to offer any sick leave, ever, to employees who work less than 40 hours a
week. Think about that the next time your waitress coughs.
Minimum Wages and Minimum Hours
Much is said these days about raising the minimum wage (and it should be
raised), and indeed, on January 1, 2016, 13 states did raise theirs. But
what sounds like good news is unlikely to have much effect on the working
poor.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1935462911/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1935462911/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20In New
York, for instance, the minimum went from $8.75 an hour to the $9.00 I was
making. New York is relatively generous. The current federal minimum wage is
$7.25 and 21 states require only that federal standard. Presumably to prove
some grim point or other, Georgia and Wyoming officially mandate an even
lower minimum wage and then unofficially require the payment of $7.25 to
avoid Department of Labor penalties. Some Southern states set no basement
figure, presumably for similar reasons.
Don't forget: any minimum wage figure mentioned is before taxes. Brackets
vary, but let's knock an even 10% off that hourly wage just as a reasonable
guess about what is taken out of a minimum-wage worker's salary. And there
are expenses to consider, too. My round-trip bus fare every day, for
instance, was $5.50. That meant I worked most of my first hour for bus fare
and taxes. Keep in mind that some workers have to pay for childcare as well,
which means that it's not impossible to imagine a scenario in which someone
could actually come close to losing money by going to work for short shifts
at minimum wage.
In addition to the fundamental problem of simply not paying people enough,
there's the additional problem of not giving them enough hours to work. The
two unfortunately go together, which means that raising the minimum rate is
only part of any solution to improving life in the low-wage world.
At the store where I worked for minimum wage a few years ago, for instance,
hours were capped at 39 a week. The company did that as a way to avoid
providing the benefits that would kick in once one became a "full time"
employee. Things have changed since 2012 -- and not for the better.
Four years later, the hours of most minimum-wage workers are capped at 29.
That's the threshold after which most companies with 50 or more employees
are required to pay into the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) fund on behalf
of their workers. Of course, some minimum wage workers get fewer than 29
hours for reasons specific to the businesses they work for.
It's Math Time
While a lot of numbers follow, remember that they all add up to a picture of
how people around us are living every day.
In New York, under the old minimum wage system, $8.75 multiplied by 39 hours
equaled $341.25 a week before taxes. Under the new minimum wage, $9.00 times
29 hours equals $261 a week. At a cap of 29 hours, the minimum wage would
have to be raised to $11.77 just to get many workers back to the same level
of take-home pay that I got in 2012, given the drop in hours due to the
Affordable Care Act. Health insurance is important, but so is food.
In other words, a rise in the minimum wage is only half the battle;
employees need enough hours of work to make a living.
About food: if a minimum wage worker in New York manages to work two jobs
(to reach 40 hours a week) without missing any days due to illness, his or
her yearly salary would be $18,720. In other words, it would fall well below
the Federal Poverty Line of $21,775. That's food stamp territory. To get
above the poverty line with a 40-hour week, the minimum wage would need to
go above $10. At 29 hours a week, it would need to make it to $15 an hour.
Right now, the highest minimum wage at a state level is in the District of
Columbia at $11.50. As of now, no state is slated to go higher than that
before 2018. (Some cities do set their own higher minimum wages.)
So add it up: The idea of raising the minimum wage ("the fight for $15") is
great, but even with that $15 in such hours-restrictive circumstances, you
can't make a loaf of bread out of a small handful of crumbs. In short, no
matter how you do the math, it's nearly impossible to feed yourself, never
mind a family, on the minimum wage. It's like being trapped on an M.C.
Escher staircase.
The federal minimum wage hit its high point in 1968 at $8.54 in today's
dollars and while this country has been a paradise in the ensuing decades
for what we now call the "One Percent," it's been downhill for low-wage
workers ever since. In fact, since it was last raised in 2009 at the federal
level to $7.25 per hour, the minimum has lost about 8.1% of its purchasing
power to inflation. In other words, minimum-wage workers actually make less
now than they did in 1968, when most of them were probably kids earning
pocket money and not adults feeding their own children.
In adjusted dollars, the minimum wage peaked when the Beatles were still
together and the Vietnam War raged.
Who Pays?
Many of the arguments against raising the minimum wage focus on the
possibility that doing so would put small businesses in the red. This is
disingenuous indeed, since 20 mega-companies dominate the minimum-wage
world. Walmart alone employs 1.4 million minimum-wage workers; Yum Brands
(Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC) is in second place; and McDonald's takes third.
Overall, 60% of minimum-wage workers are employed by businesses not
officially considered "small" by government standards, and of course
carve-outs for really small businesses are possible, as was done with
Obamacare.
Keep in mind that not raising wages costs you money.
Those minimum wage workers who can't make enough and need to go on food
assistance? Well, Walmart isn't paying for those food stamps (now called
SNAP), you are. The annual bill that states and the federal government foot
for working families making poverty-level wages is $153 billion. A single
Walmart Supercenter costs taxpayers between $904,542 and $1.75 million per
year in public assistance money, and Walmart employees account for 18% of
all food stamps issued. In other words, those everyday low prices at the
chain are, in part, subsidized by your tax money.
If the minimum wage goes up, will spending on food benefits programs go
down? Almost certainly. But won't stores raise prices to compensate for the
extra money they will be shelling out for wages? Possibly. But don't worry
-- raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would mean a Big Mac would cost
all of 17 cents more.
Time Theft
My retail job ended a little earlier than I had planned, because I committed
time theft.
You probably don't even know what time theft is. It may sound like something
from a sci-fi novel, but minimum-wage employers take time theft seriously.
The basic idea is simple enough: if they're paying you, you'd better be
working. While the concept is not invalid per se, the way it's used by the
mega-companies reveals much about how the lowest wage workers are seen by
their employers in 2016.
The problem at my chain store was that its in-store cafe was a lot closer to
my work area than the time clock where I had to punch out whenever I was
going on a scheduled break. One day, when break time on my shift came
around, I only had 15 minutes. So I decided to walk over to that cafe, order
a cup of coffee, and then head for the place where I could punch out and sit
down (on a different floor at the other end of the store).
We're talking an extra minute or two, no more, but in such operations every
minute is tabulated and accounted for. As it happened, a manager saw me and
stepped in to tell the cafe clerk to cancel my order. Then, in front of
whoever happened to be around, she accused me of committing time theft --
that is, of ordering on the clock. We're talking about the time it takes to
say, "Grande, milk, no sugar, please." But no matter, and getting chastised
on company time was considered part of the job, so the five minutes we stood
there counted as paid work.
At $9 an hour, my per-minute pay rate was 15 cents, which meant that I had
time-stolen perhaps 30 cents. I was, that is, being nickel and dimed to
death.
Economics Is About People
It seems wrong in a society as wealthy as ours that a person working
full-time can't get above the poverty line. It seems no less wrong that
someone who is willing to work for the lowest wage legally payable must also
give up so much of his or her self-respect and dignity as a kind of tariff.
Holding a job should not be a test of how to manage life as one of the
working poor.
I didn't actually get fired for my time theft. Instead, I quit on the spot.
Whatever the price is for my sense of self-worth, it isn't 30 cents. Unlike
most of this country's working poor, I could afford to make such a decision.
My life didn't depend on it. When the manager told a handful of my coworkers
watching the scene to get back to work, they did. They couldn't afford not
to.
Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement
during the "reconstruction" of Iraq in his book We Meant Well: How I Helped
Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. A TomDispatch
regular, he writes about current events at We Meant Well. His latest book is
Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent. His next work will be a
novel, Hooper's War.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Peter Van Buren
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176104
