Terrence Wise is a 36-year-old, 2nd-generation fast-food worker. He’s been in the industry for nearly two decades and works two jobs. He makes only $8 per hour.
His fiancé is a home health care worker. She’s been in the industry for 12 years. She makes just $10 per hour.
Why are you working in fast food. There is no excuse why you don’t have a better job, it really isn’t that hard to find a job that pays more than $10hour even at that age
You tell them to get a better job but you won’t create those jobs for them. You tell them to go into fast food to begin with because they’re always hiring, and then degrade them for working in the only available options. You tell them finding a job that pays better is easy, and yet you refuse to pay minimum wage workers a living wage.
You do this all while simultaneously degrading them for the services they provide that YOU couldn’t live without– fast food, janitorial services, house cleaning, the person at the checkout stand at the grocery store, your bagger at the grocery store, your barista, the server and busser at your favorite restaurant (who is primarily paid in tips), the person that watches your kids (if you can afford it), teachers, nursing assistants, EMTs, your local pharmacy tech, line cooks, your favorite auto mechanic… Those wonderful and overworked people who do your nails and wax your eyebrows for you at whatever nail salon you choose to go to regularly that get made fun of and degraded for their thick accents and speaking to each other in a foreign language while spending decades away from their family in their home countries. And even worse, are the people who aren’t paid minimum wage at all: the migrant labor that picks the majority of your fruits and veggies, who are seasonal workers, who don’t legally have to be paid minimum wage because the agriculture business is purposefully left out of federal minimum wage limits to continue to force people to work in deadly, degrading conditions for pennies an hour.
Do none of these people deserve a voice to you? I think they deserve to be heard far more than you, who degrades them for doing work you wouldn’t sink to do, who finds yourself above the people who provide services that without, our entire society wouldn’t even function. And that is cruel. They are still human beings, they deserve a comfortable life without having to live paycheck to paycheck. Their job does not define their humanity. And let’s not even begin with the amount of disabled persons who physically are unable to work, or who are forced to despite massive amounts of risk to their health. Do those people also not matter to you? Because that’s what it sounds like.
Do not degrade the people who provide the services you could never deign to do yourself, that you literally couldn’t live comfortably without, while demanding those same services. You and your hypocritical nature can fuck right off. Minimum wage workers deserve a fucking living wage just like every other person in the workforce– WITHOUT having to find other, “better” jobs in order to make a living wage.
