Thursday Proletarian Uprising
OG is now officially a member of the working people, a clerk/cashier at the local Lovely Lovely Super Convenient Drugs, Beauty and Unbelievably Overpriced Foods of Convenience Shop. She gets a free shirt and nameplate. She also gets $7 an hour. Let's do the math:
If OG works 40 hours a week at $7 that's $280 before taxes for the week or $14,560 a year. Taxed at 35%, annual take home is $9,464. She only works 20 hours a week right now.
How does someone live on this kind of salary? She's just a kid living at home so it's fine for her, but some of her co-workers, this is what they do. This is it, this is their main source of income.
By the way, this is about $2 more an hour than minimum wage.
5 comments:
You should go read 'nickel and dimed" by barbara ehrenreich. I make less than your daughter does - I cannot afford to live on my own. I'd have to earn about twice what I do now to be self sufficient, and that's not even considering childcare costs.
Isn't this crazy? I make alot more than $14K but still live so frugally. Vacations are taken every 5 years, the only meal I eat out is lunch on the weekends. I never order take out during the week, I cut coupons, drive an old car, buy cheap ass clothes, etc.
I don't know how people who work at Walmart's, for example, get by. I guess the answer for many is credit cards.
I was just going to suggest that book.
That's the same situation in Alberta, before he recent hike to $7/hr, the minimum wage was $5.90/hr, which is ridiculous because literally anytime an Albertan gets a word in edgewise they mention that they are the richest province in all of the land, forgetting of course that it's citizens aren't because they have to pay through the nose for everything.
I've worked for my university for almost 3 years, what would you guess my hourly wage is? Yeah, a whopping $7.85/hour (the only reason I make that much is because we're unionized, which means that I lose a portion of every paycheque for union dues)
I think the thing people fail to grasp is that while it's easy to find a job in Alberta, in all likelihood it will be a job that pays minimun wage - not even close to a living wage.
The only thing that keeps me going is my summer job pays between $12-15/hr
I am also a single mom with my 15 year old son and 2 year old granddaughter at home (who I am raising). Because of the outrageous cost of childcare, I can only pay for 3 days a week for her and have to try to cram in enough work in those 3 days. Something has to change. Unfortunately, the only way to effect real change is to have a nation wide strike, and not enough of us will do that.
When OG was first born, I worked a total of 3 jobs putting in almost 70 hours a week of work. It was exhausting but you do what you have to do. I wonder what the percentage of people work more than one job just to get by.
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