Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America Read Online Free Page A

put that frustration aside and talk about what it actually means to make minimum wage.
    Working for minimum wage (or, as we’ve already established, close to it) means that making a long-term budget is an exercise in wishful thinking. You just have however muchmoney you have until you run out, and you pay whatever bill is most overdue first. When I was working in Ohio at a fast-food joint, I’d generally get about twenty-five hours in a week. That was paid at $7.50, making my weekly check $187.50. My husband, working forty hours at the same place, brought home $300. We made about $25,000 or so between us, working every week of the year. That’s a little over $9,000 above the poverty line for a family of two, or an extra $200 or so a week. We made ends meet, but barely. Not well enough to ever really feel comfortable or rest or take a day off without feeling guilty. And we were at the top of the bottom third of households that year, meaning that approximately one-third of the America population is living on the same sort of budget.
    Or, for some, a much smaller one. The yearly income of a forty-hour-a-week minimum-wage worker is $15,080. So if you’re paying half of that for housing, you’re left with $7,540 to live on.
    Yearly.
    That’s $628 per month, or $314 per paycheck, for everything else—food, clothes, car payments, gas. If you’re lucky, you get all that money to live on. But who’s lucky all of the time, or even most of the time? Maybe you get sick and lose your job. Even if you land a new job, that measly $314 is all you’ve got to last you until your paychecks at the new place start up. Or what if, God forbid, the car breaks down or you break a bone?
    But all right, let’s increase that salary. Let’s be kind and bump it up well above the median fast-food worker’s pay. Ifyou’re doing okay, making, say, $10 an hour, that’s $20,800. That leaves you $10,400 to live on annually, $867 monthly, $433 per paycheck. Before taxes. (Which, by the way, we pay plenty of.) Not that $100 doesn’t make a giant difference, but it’s not like you’re rolling around in money like Scrooge McDuck simply because you’re earning better than the absolute least that can be legally paid.
    Of course, those scenarios are if you are absolutely jacked, with half of your income going to rent. If we go with the old one-third recommendation, then your disposable income by paycheck rises a bit, to $418 for those making minimum and $577 if you’re at double digits.
    So, let’s go with the more generous number. Say you make $10 an hour and you pay a third of that in rent. That’s going to give you $1,066 a month to spend. You pay your utilities and for gas to get to work. Food and household stuff. Maybe you now have $500 left. And that’s assuming, of course, that you have no medical bills or prescriptions or debts. And that’s before taxes.
    The truth is that what you’ve got left from all that work you’ve been doing is about $10 per day to spend on anything other than the barest necessities—and that’s based on the premise that you live in a shitty apartment, eat cheaply, and work full-time with no missed days. Then, if you do all of those things and you are unburdened by debt and medical issues, you can do any number of things with your free time! You can rent a movie and buy microwave popcorn. You can drive to the nicer section of town and have fancy coffee. With$10 a day to spend at whim, the world is your oyster. Hell, you could even buy a can of oysters.
    I’m hoping that I’m not being too subtle here, because this is what it comes down to: The math doesn’t fucking work. You can’t thrive on this sort of money. Period. You can survive. That’s it.
    —
    There is something even worse than minimum wage. It’s called temp work. I bet that the majority of Americans—unless they’ve experienced it for themselves—would be shocked to find out that companies regularly hire temps to work full-time hours, but