After bagging on Salon so much in recent weeks, here’s a plug: An article today on author Barbara Ehrenreich’s descent into the underworld of the just-above-minimum-wage worker, the folks who are making $6—$8 bagging your groceries or trimming your lawn or dusting your mantle or whatever. Ehrenreich did these gigs to see how people get by near the bottom of the economic ladder, and her conclusion, which comes to no surprise to anyone who has ever actually had to work in a Joe Job: A lot of these people aren’t actually making it at all—they just live in a sort of limbo in which they make just enough to get to choose between eating and paying the gas bill every few months. And God forbid any of them ever get sick. Then they’re really screwed.
The article struck a chord because, not to put too fine a point on it, I come from fairly white trashy background. We’re talking a real live welfare cheese eater here, folks (it comes in a metal can the size of a tom-tom. So does welfare peanut butter). I’m not ashamed of my welfare days—among other things, it’s not as if I had a choice in the matter—but I’m also fairly pleased that I’m no longer dragging along the bottom of the social net.
However, I’m also aware how little it takes to get trapped into the permanent poverty cycle. If you ever want to know what the real difference between being poor and not being poor is, the answer is truly and astoundingly simple: It’s education. It really is. I’m the walking, talking, Web-writing proof of this. I’m the first person in my immediate family to finish high school, much less college. Consequently, I make more than all the other adult members of my family combined.
To be sure, there are other factors involved, relating to personality and particular circumstances. However, ultimately, the only difference that counts is that I had a college diploma to wave around when I first went looking for jobs. Simply put, if I hadn’t gone to college, I wouldn’t have gotten a job working at the Fresno Bee—you can’t get a job at a newspaper of any size without a college degree anymore. If I hadn’t had a high school diploma, well. I can’t even imagine. The world would be full of jobs I couldn’t have. There are millions of Americans, with no handicap other than the lack of one or two of these diplomas, who open the want ads and see nothing but jobs that someone else will get. So, damn it, kids, stay in school.
Every time I hear a well-fed conservative fart about how there’s no need to raise the minimum wage, I have to fight the urge to give him a punch right in his fat face. I dare any of them to make a go of it at $17,229 a year, which is the official US poverty level for a family of four. That comes out to $8.61 an hour, presuming a 40-hour work week and 50 weeks of work a year—well above minimum wage. Find an apartment (‘cause you certainly couldn’t afford a house), find a car that you can afford that won’t crap out on you and whose tank you can afford to fill, pay your gas and electric bills, pay for food and for clothing, and hope you don’t fall ill, because there isn’t a chance in hell you can afford health insurance.
If you can manage that, then try it on the actual Federal minimum wage, which is $5.15 an hour ($10,300). Anyone who thinks the minimum wage is adequate for anything but beer money has simply never had to exist on it.
Ironically, while I have immense sympathy for the poor schmucks who earn $6 an hour washing cars or whatever, I find that I am utterly and entirely intolerant of college-educated people who gripe about their finances. A friend and I were e-mailing each other about it the other day; she wrote “If you’re able-bodied and have a college education, there should be no whining allowed,” and I have to say that I agree with this philosophy completely.
Despite the downturns in the new economy sector of things, unemployment nationwide is still at really low rates, 4.5% or something like, and unemployment for the college-educated is of course, even lower. Generally speaking, there is no reason a college graduate cannot work and make enough to get by pretty well. Even those people with useless degrees. After all, I have a degree in philosophy. What the hell am I ever going to do with that?
I cheerfully note that “get by pretty well” is an economic standard, not a mental happiness standard—i.e., lots of college-educated people make enough money but are desperately unhappy with their jobs because the jobs “aren’t them,” or however you want to phrase it. I’m actually very pleased whenever someone tells me they’re unhappy with their job for a reason like this—it means the economy is so good that people can allow themselves self-pity because all their job gives them is money. You know that in the Depression, people weren’t bitching about the fact their lousy jobs didn’t allow for self-realization. Eating takes precedence over self-realization. If shallow 20- and 30somethings can gripe about needing to find themselves in their work, you’re in good times. Live it up.
(I’ll also cheerfully note that I was one of those shallow 20somethings—I left my job at the Fresno Bee specifically because they cut my humor column and wanted me to do more straight-ahead reporting, and—stomp stomp pout pout—I didn’t wanna. It was ‘96, the beginning of the ‘Net boom. Would I have done the same thing five years earlier, when there was a recession and college grads were begging for jobs? Hell, no. Timing counts.)
Be that as it may, the initial theory still applies—college degree, no whining. And, to be entirely honest, I think this goes double with “creative” types, who nobly starve for their art. Two words: Day Job. A Day Job is a (not-yet-digustingly-successful) creative person’s best friend. Very few people are insanely creative 24 hours a day (and those that are often have more emphasis on the insane than the creative), so why not fill those hours in which you’d otherwise be agonizing over your personal sense of self-worth with cash-generating busywork?
I think college is the best thing that can happen to someone economically, but I also believe that with that diploma you agree to throw certain things out the window, among them the right to garner sympathy for your financial position. If you’re educated enough to get a degree, you’re educated enough to make money (I say “educated” rather than “smart,” since lots of smart people are unfortunately not educated). If you’re educated enough to make money, then go out and make it. Really, it’s not that hard. At least, not right now. And thank God for that.