Their beef
(sorry, couldn’t resist that one)? They
want $15 an hour.
Well, good
luck with that.
They
interviewed a KFC worker from Brooklyn, one Naquasia LeGrand.
She has worked as a cashier at Kentucky Fried Chicken for
three years in Park Slope, an affluent neighborhood in Brooklyn. She makes $8
an hour and pays $1,300 a month for her apartment. She says fast food workers
all over are struggling to survive. "We live in New York City--a
multi-billion dollar city," she said. "These corporations are taking
everything from us."
Really? They’re taking everything from you? Those bastards! How are they
doing it? Do they have a gunman outside
who demands your check from you on your way out each payday? Has KFC hired hackers to strip the funds from
your bank account?
Oh,
wait…they’re giving you a check? They
are paying you for your labor? I’m
pretty sure that’s not the definition of “taking.”
Really, if
you want to look at who is “taking everything” from you, look at the state you’re
living in. You have the highest taxburden of any state. You have rent
controls, which are supposed to keep rent affordable but have actually
decreased availability and affordability of housing. $1300 a month for an apartment? I’m going to be paying less than $900 a month
for a house I’m buying.
It’s not a
heck of a lot better on the West Coast.
The Shieldmaiden (who, by the way, has experience on the bad side of the register) has a former fellow student from her first college
complaining about the cost of living versus his income. Well, Cali is #45 for tax burden, and it, too
has rent control, plus the further complication of free space laws.
Which brings
us to my patented Improve Your Life Plan:
Stop whining and change.
Phase 1: move.
“Go West,
young man,” is still good advice.
In Bozeman,
MT, McDonalds pays $12-14 an hour. That’s
almost what I made with a frikkin’ 4-year degree. Montana has the #6th lowest tax
burden.
According to city-data.com, Bozeman
has a cost of living index of 94.3% of the US average. Brooklyn has a 619.8%. You can snag an apartment in Bozeman for over a grand less than that Brooklyn apartment. LA is 135.3%, by the way.
If you go to
the Bakken, you’d probably make $18. Granted,
housing’s almost as hard to find in the oil fields as in Brooklyn, but hey, it
ain’t no $1300 a month. In Williston, the cost of living index is 79.9%.
And before
anybody says the Bakken is going to bust, it looks like it should be good for the
next three decades. Given that people
with a GED are making over $100,000 a year (some prefer making $70,000 in nine
months and going south for the winter, which after my first winter here, I
thoroughly understand), that’s plenty of time to bank a poop-ton of money for
when it does stop.
Which brings
me to Phase 2 of the Improve Your Life Plan:
Change jobs.
Mike Rowe
has been a huge boon for manual jobs. I
love his show and his work philosophy.
The only thing I wish he would mention on his show is how much money you
can make if you’re willing to put up with jobs no one else wants to do. Though, he does mention it here.
A coworker
of mine's father recently sold his ranch.
Before he quit, he had a husband and wife team of farmhands. He paid them half again as much as Ms.
LeGrand is making…each. Then he tacked
on no-rent housing in an actual house on the farm. Which, incidentally, also removed commuting
costs. Then, he sprung for their
groceries. Then, he sprung for their
medical bills, including braces for their daughter. For Pete’s sake, I had to pay for The
Shieldmaiden’s braces, and we had a dental plan!
They were awfully cute, though.
Or if you
want more, you can take that job in Bozeman and hit the local community college
for your CNA. Move up here and work at
Valley View. Within a year, you’ll be
making $15 an hour, and you won’t even have to threaten to walk off to get it.
So, maybe
you have to slave over a pile of poop, instead of a deep-fryer. But I have it on good authority that the
smell of bodily fluids airs out of clothes much faster than fast food deep-fry
grease.
Let’s make
it personal. A little over a year ago,
my family was in sad shape. We had mounting
debt. My employer, Mountain State Health
Alliance was broke and getting broker so pay raises weren’t exactly a big
priority. We had a nice house, but it
was costing more than we could afford.
Worst of
all, my job was second and then third shift.
I didn’t see the Dot and Lump for days at a time. There may have been a day shift opening in
the works, but that would have lost me my shift differential, which was 12% of
my pay.
It was so
bad, that for once, I didn’t delete the travel employment agency email in my
box. It advertised a job in Atlanta
making a lot of money. I short-noticed
my boss (I really am sorry, Mary Ruth), and I went for it.
It didn’t
work out that well.
As the end
of the contract neared, I needed another job.
There were two jobs in Ohio paying a couple bucks more an hour than I
had been making. There was another
position in Montana making quite a bit more.
Doubtful the Shieldmaiden would ever go for it, I still applied on a
lark. More of as a joke, really.
I told her
and she rolled her eyes and said no way we were moving to the middle of
nowhere. She may have…ah…”emphasized”
that statement.
The Ohio
jobs were dragging their feet, and the place here had already given me a firm
offer. But given the distance from
family, we were running numbers to see if we could survive two weeks without a
paycheck. We could have if I hadn’t
buried two cars in 6 weeks thanks to crappy Georgia drivers, but I’m not bitter
or anything…
Then I
mentioned that the bright side of the Montana job was that it was day
shift. Somehow, I had failed to mention
both Ohio jobs were seconds. The
Shieldmaiden’s reply? “Oh, no. We are not
doing that again.” Again, she may have
emphasized that a bit more.
Now, I see
my kids every day. I net more than I
grossed in TN. We’re buying a
house. I have insurance that will make
getting the Dot’s head surgery half-way affordable. All it took was the courage to move. Not on my part, because I was just operating
on logic, but the Shieldmaiden officially has a pair of brass ovaries that
drags the ground.
Or maybe it
was just love for our growing family. I
was the sole breadwinner in TN (still am), but I was not providing much
emotional support (and honestly wasn’t adequately supplying the bread, either). We did what we had to do for the good of our
children. Sure, it took a little
sacrifice—I don’t get to watch nearly as many B movies anymore—but it was worth
it.
While the
unnamed Californian in question probably just didn’t read the right books,
perhaps he was a Breaking Bad fan and remembers this line:
What does a man do, Walter? A man provides for his family…When you have
children, you always have family. They
will always be your priority, your responsibility. And a man?
A man provides. And he does it
even when he’s not appreciated, respected, or even loved. He simply bears up and he does it. Because he’s a man. - Gus
Or if you
prefer a true story from someone who isn’t an amoral, ruthless drug kingpin:
My dad grew up back and forth between Kentucky and
Virginia because his father was a coal miner. And when my dad was fourteen my
grandpa came home and told my grandma to load up the truck 'cause they were
gonna move. And when they took off they were going the wrong way—she just
assumed they were going back to Virginia—and they were headed somewhere else.
So my grandma said, "John, where in the world are we going?" And my
grandpa said, "Well, Rose, we're going to Detroit." And she said,
"Why in the world are we going to Detroit?" And he said,
"Because I don't want my boys to grow up to be coal miners." And so
they got as far as Indiana and ran out of gas—and that's how I got here. – Rich Mullins
What did Mullins’s grandfather know
about farming? Probably Jack Crap, but
by the time he passed, he owned his own.
What did I know about 25-bed hospitals and sub-zero cold?
Roughly as much.
Eventually every adult comes to a place
where he (she) must nut up (ovary up) or shut up. If you don’t, quit whining so I can go back
to my regularly scheduled human interest stories. I hear a cat saved a boy from a dog attack.
And a side
note for those without anyone they care about enough to find a different job or
move to BFE, the Beach Boys weren’t kidding about Mid-west farmers’ daughters
and Northern girls. I can officially say
that, because after surviving a -40 winter, the Shieldmaiden officially qualifies
as a Northern girl.
