Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America Read Online Free

that bet by finding another shitty job.
    The most I’ve seen anyone manage at once was four jobs: bartending, dancing, waitressing, and teaching yoga. I’ve held down up to three: tending bar, waiting tables, and working as a voter registration canvasser. It nearly killed me, and I still didn’t break twenty grand that year.
    I think that most liberal Americans don’t have too hard a time believing that it’s difficult to make ends meet when you’re making minimum wage. But I also think that people in both parties get hung up on the minimum wage as some kind of miracle line of demarcation—as if making more than the minimum puts you on easy street. Meanwhile, millions of people are making above minimum wage—so they don’t get counted as making the minimum. And do you know what they’re making? Instead of $7.25 an hour, they’re getting $7.35 an hour. Maybe even $7.50! In many places in America—think fast-food restaurants, dollar stores, gas stations—most of the employees make under $8 or $9. And these employeesare not all kids. So when you hear or participate in these discussions about minimum wage statistics, assume that the vast majority of service workers are making within a stone’s throw of minimum wage. Our ladder’s rungs are set close together, and there are so many of them that it takes us forever to climb it. My husband worked for the same restaurant for nearly two years before he broke $7.75. Was he making minimum? No. But the difference between minimum wage and $7.75 is just around $1,040 a year if you’re working full-time, which is pretty rare.
    So there you are, working all the time, bringing home so little, and very often getting behind. But your landlord doesn’t care that you’re working as hard as you can, that there aren’t more hours for you to work. The only thing that matters to your landlord is whether or not you have the money for the rent. I’ve had a landlord tell me that I could be turning tricks if I really cared about paying my bills, that clearly the only reason I was broke is that I wasn’t trying hard enough, that he had no patience for people who couldn’t simply get along in life. He actually dispensed all of this as though it were helpful advice rather than a series of insults. And that was
after
the begging, after I’d already debased myself, already explained that my hours got cut for the slow season and they hadn’t warned me in time for me to find another job.
    This is my bottom line point about work and poverty: It’s far more demoralizing to work and be poor than to be unemployed and poor. I have never minded going without when I wasn’t working. It sucks not to be able to find a job, but youexpect to be tired and pissed off and to never be able to leave your house when you’re flat broke. Working your balls off, begging for more hours, hustling every penny you can, and still not being able to cover your electric bill with any regularity is soul-killing.
    The popular conception of minimum wage workers is that they’re mostly teenagers working part-time. That would be because the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on its website, is pretty clear that about half of workers making the minimum or below are under the age of twenty-five. But that same BLS website will tell you that about half of workers making the minimum or below are
not
under the age of twenty-five. That’s 800,000 adults over the age of twenty-five working at minimum wage or below. Or, if you prefer, about 25,000 more people than live in all of San Francisco.
    As I’ve pointed out already, a lot of adults are getting just pennies over the minimum wage—and I’d argue that your average adult does his job, however lowly, a damn sight better than most teenagers. And when you think about how insignificant a raise of even fifty cents above the minimum turns out to be, it’s hard not to feel devalued—as if the sum of your accomplishments as an adult amounts to some nickels and dimes.
    But let’s