Living Rage

What is a living wage in America? I'd define it this way: if a person is wasting her precious time and probably jeopardizing her health forty long, horrible hours a week, that person should be compensated with enough dough to meet all of her expenses comfortably and have a decent amount left over for discretionary spending/saving. It's that simple. I don't care if she’s packing French fries or cleaning up vomit, what she does is important to society and probably amounts to a soulless hell: physically taxing, emotionally draining or both. She deserves just compensation.

Job creators and their duped apologists of the lesser classes forget: while those who are lucky enough to be in a position to create jobs (and, yes, it's usually luck, or they are rich already) are necessary, the people that do the jobs, let's call them the "Job Doers" are also necessary. You see, it's a mutualistic relationship, not a parasitic one as the free market fundamentalists would have you believe. For some reason, those who divide the world into makers and takers leave out the doers, the category where most of us belong.

There is no doubt: labor is deeply undervalued, but coming up with a wage that reflects its value is a challenging task. All of the existing methods of determining this are too abstract or absurd to have any representation in what I like to call the "real world". It is for this reason that I have decided to step up to the plate in order to develop a more rational method: Lara Samuels's Super-duper Living Wage Calculation. And how did I come up it? Am I a qualified economist? No! But unlike the millionaires who make decisions for working people even though they have no clue what things actually cost: I have spent most of my life when I’m not asleep actually living in the real world.

For those of you who hear the word "calculation" and run for the hills because you failed Algebra and hated all of your math teachers except for that one guy you had in college who spoke with a Queen's accent and totally changed your opinion of math when he said “math was discovered, not created”, rest assured: This formula is incredibly easy to understand and uses numbers with nice, round zeros. There are no Greek letters in this formula. There are no constants except maybe one: it’s called sense.

Here it is:

Shelter + Bills + Food + Everything Else = A living wage. Got it? Let’s break it down.

1. Shelter = ($1,000).

Yes, rents vary wildly from place to place, but this is a nice average. Besides, part of Lara Samuels's Super-duper Living Wage Calculation is to leave wiggle room. If the crime rate where you live isn't all that important to you because you are a very angry man with rippling muscles and veins the size of sausages sticking out of your neck, or you're lucky enough to find a nice pad that is only $500, or you have a roommate, then, by all means, use the difference to save for a rainy day, or that vibrating weight set you've been wanting, or spend it now on a really nice bottle of expensive whiskey or dance lessons for your kid. More than likely, though, unless you are living with your parents and paying no rent at all, you’d be shelling out what you might save in this department to variable #2 (coming up). Don’t worry, though, Lara Samuels believes that if one is getting a “living wage”, one should be “living”; and by living I don’t mean not dead, I mean enjoying oneself occasionally. Variable #4 will take this into account.

2. Bills = ($1,000):

For simplicity, this includes anything that is not really optional that one has to pay for every month: Gas, electricity, water, sewage, student loans, laundry, health care, media, communication, transportation, insurance, etc. Also, I’d include all that pesky nickel and diming stuff that goes on in the world of the working class: fee-fees, stamps, oil changes, taxes, unexpected events like a broken window or a parking ticket, etc.

3. Food = ($500):

...And when I say food I’m not talking Twinkie. I'm talking about what Michael Pollan calls "food": You know, healthy stuff that humans have been eating for thousands of years and that doesn’t lead to expensive, long term health problems like heart disease and Type II diabetes. By all means, if you’re like my good friend "The Blasphemer from the Hinterland" and you are such an ectomorph that you can live off one meal a day consisting of Ramen noodles, peanut butter and wonder bread, and you’d rather spend your money on electric guitars, then you have A LOT of wiggle room here. However, I think healthy eating should at least be an option for the working class person. He shouldn't be forgoing fresh vegetables because he can't afford it.

4. Miscellaneous = ($500).

Ah, this is the variable that puts the “living” in “living wage”. I’ll just spout a few things off the top of my head: clothes, furniture, entertainment, pets, booze and other recreational drugs, vacations, haircuts, gifts, bees, books, electronic devices, power tools, appliances, lessons, musical instruments, tablecloths, sex toys, art supplies, jewelry, charity, memberships, nice smelling candles, camping equipment, ugly porcelain knick-knacks etc. Whatever floats your canoe. You might be able to even buy a canoe. I know, I know, clothing is not optional in America, but I’m putting it in this category anyway since theoretically you could get by with just a few things. For example, I’ve had the same pair of sandals since 1992. Yes, I hold everyone else to the same standards of frugality. What? Oh, yeah. Children. Yes, I've heard that they grow. Hmmm. Well, I'm leaving it here anyway. Clothes are cheap if you shop at Thrift stores.

Living Wage = $3,000/month or $36,000/year or about $700 a week or about 17.50/hour AFTER TAXES. So, $20/hour to account for those. That, my friends, is a perfectly reasonable, perfectly fair living wage, given the cost of living today.

I can’t make the assumption that everyone has two incomes or that everyone is dealing drugs on the side or that everyone loves working so much that they put in eighty hours or that (as the free market fundies seem to think) everyone is a teenager working a summer job at Smiling Sue's Ice cream Stand. This is enough for one person working one job, possibly with children, but maybe not, to live a perfectly comfortable existence in America today.

There’s only one problem, the free market fundamentalists will say: “It will wreck the economy!” You see, this is what they will say because the average free market fundamentalist wants the average working poor person to die from exhaustion and/or spend hardly any time at all with our families and friends. I’m not sure why this is, because we’re actually pretty nice, but they don’t want to pay us a decent wage, nor do they want to redistribute any of the money we earned for them with our sweat and blood for social services to subsidize their crappy wages. They do, however, want us to perform the absolute worst jobs in the land and be happy that they are so charitably paying us at all.

Well, to them I say “Take a hike” or something more vulgar if they piss me off enough.

Look, the entire capitalist economy is about their interests; there is nothing wrong with standing up for ours. Besides, using their two favorite concepts (incentive and innovation), if they can’t figure it out, I say raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour and they now have an incentive to innovate!

Oh, wait. I see where this is going. If we raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour there is only ONE WAY to pay for it. The job creators will have NO CHOICE but to raise prices. If that happens every working person will have the same old miserable purchasing power we started with: a bunch of starving puppies, lapping at the heels of a comfortable life. They’ll feed us just enough tall tales about social mobility to keep us working until we are wise enough to figure out their little game. By then, we’ll be too exhausted to do anything about it. Tired, brains soaked in sugar syrup, only capable of making the simplest decisions: Let’s see, the baseball game or Survivor? Let’s see, the albuterol or the porridge? Forget any talk about the makers getting by on less! They may have to choose between the Jaguar and the Porche! They should have both, by god! I mean, if you pay someone three-million dollars instead of five-million dollars, or twenty million instead of fifty-million or whatever the hell those crazy people make, WHERE’S THE INCENTIVE?

Yup, I'm raging now...hmmm? What did you say? Not every job creator is Boeing or Monsanto or McDonalds or Con-Agra or Bank of America or Wal-Mart or Starbucks? You mean, there is such a thing as the little ice cream stand owned by my neighbor Smiling Sue? Okay, okay, so the small business does actually exist. I’ll get to that in a moment.

First, I want to expel a few myths.

1. “Trickle down is the only way!” : Trickle up works better than trickle down. Put money in the pockets of people who will spend it. It has already been proven that a poor person’s dollar puts more back into the economy than a rich person’s dollar.

2. “It will eliminate jobs!” : Your average job creator, who is thinking of the bottom line, will only pay as many employees as it takes to keep his customers satisfied. It’s not like Grumpy Gus is saying: “labor is SO FUCKING CHEAP that I think I’ll just hire extra people to stand around and do nothing! I’ll have them polish my shoes with a Q-tip!” If they want their business to operate they CANNOT eliminate jobs. As efficient as working people are, he can only increase our productivity so much. We are not super-robots.

3. “It will eliminate jobs! Again!” : If people are paid more perhaps they won’t need a second income or a third income and this would actually open up MORE jobs.

4. “I hate paying taxes to subsidize the bad habits of lazy, drug-addled people’s children!” : The higher the living wage, the less is spent on the horrible, lazy person creating safety net...and now we can actually afford our drugs… and food, too! What a deal.

5. “Everyone making minimum wage is a teenager working a summer job!” Fine. Let them make $20 an hour, too. Maybe they can spend more time doing what they should be doing: enjoying their childhood. Or, maybe, if they are so inclined, they can save for college and not accrue so much student debt. Oh, yeah. That’s right. The capitalists WANT us to be in debt. I forgot.

6. “If you aren’t suffering you won’t be driven to better yourself”. This is total free-market fundamentalist propaganda. First “bettering” oneself does not necessarily mean advancing in one’s career. Maybe it means getting stronger or smarter or nicer. Maybe it means creating art or music or poetry… and maybe, just maybe people aren’t only motivated by money. Maybe cleaning up vomit even if you’re making 35,000 dollars a year is not what you’d like to be doing. Maybe you would like to be spending that forty hours a week doing something more fulfilling. Look, capitalists think people are only motivated by money because THEY are only motivated by money and they think everyone else is like them.

7. “Technology will eliminate the need for working people anyway! So nah-nah-nah-nah-nah!” : Hmmm…this one is probably true, but beyond the scope of this post…however, I feel another one coming on. Something about how if we want to make a better world we have to stop capitalism all together…

Okay, I think I hit on most of the most common myths surrounding this debate with elegance and unassailable logic. But, there is one nagging issue that I promised I’d address: the poor, hapless, small business person. Poor Grumpy Gus. Poor Smiling Sue. Do the fucking math, okay Lara? Do the fucking math. Your Algebra teacher from Queens who told you that C = Pie x d was not a formula for a circle but WAS a circle would be proud.

20 employees x 35,000 dollars a year = $700,000 dollars/year.

Holy leaping chipmunks! While clearly this would be nothing to take out of your average large business CEO’s salary without her even noticing, a small business just couldn’t swing it. Shit. What to do, what to do…

Okay, I know. I’m going to create an entirely new category to address this problem. Actually, it’s not my idea, but I’m not sure if it’s ever been proposed to address the “small-business” problem of raising the minimum wage to a perfectly reasonable $20 an hour: it’s called the “cooperative”.

That’s right. No more working for grumpy Gus. All he did was yell at you anyway and make you polish his shoes with a Q-tip. No more working for Smiling Sue. She was really sweet, bringing us donuts everyday even though we were all trying to diet, but she’s going to have to go, too. Unless she’s willing to shell out twice her income for labor costs. It’s okay, though. She can still be involved.

If Sue wants to get away with paying her employees less, she has to be part of a cooperative. If she and her employees (now her business partners) register with the government as a "cooperative", they can dodge the $20/hour minimum wage. In this model, everyone employed at the ice-cream stand gets some base pay and splits the profits equally….compensation is tied to success. Talk about incentive. Yes, it’s been done. Yes, it works. How and why it works is a subject for another day, since it’s time for me to put down what I love doing and go to work where I will clean up some fabulous job creator’s grandmother's poop.

Nah, I don’t deserve a living wage.