Keep in mind that most entry level, and an increasing amount of lower managment, jobs are not full time. Companies have figured out that if they hire full time employees, they have to pay benefits, are more likely to be sued rather than the worker just quitting when things suck, don’t get away with scheduling the bare minimum of workers for any given time, and generally have to act more responsibly towards their employees. Therefore it is a lot more cost effective to hire a bunch of part time employees, and employ them as needed. This means minimum wage workers may not know until the schedule is made out on Moday if they are going to work eight or forty hours that week.
Got a cite for the “most” aspect (ie, > 50%) of that statement? I’ll believe it when I see it. You are aware that without some back-up statistics, your statement is meaningless, right?
Um, I think it’s called life in the real world. When you’re calling in response to ads in the classifieds, or out pounding the pavement in search of a job and find that it’s next to impossible to find reliable full-time work, it becomes pretty easy to figure out that most employers are now using mostly part-time help at the entry level, and even in lower management.
Also, my mom is getting close to 60, and she was looking for part-time work, because she doesn’t have the stamina she had when she was younger, and found that nearly every job she applied for was right around 35 hours a week. Forty hours is full-time, and they have to pay benefits, 35 hours is part time, no benefits.
Get the picture?
I dearly love people who demand cites for real-life experience.
> 2,100 posts over 4 years and you think that statements such as that don’t need to be backed up with actual data? Astounding…
He wasn’t asking for a cite for your “real-life” experience, but for your claim that “most employers are now using mostly part-time help at the entry level, and even in lower management.”
Your experiences, or those of your mother, or even those of every worker in Las Vegas, do not rise to the level of “most”.
As a grad student my fellowship gave me exactly $1000 per month before taxes. I hated it but I can understand how it is possible to live assuming that one big IF, low rent. And I don’t believe its possible to have a car, or moped since your first repair bill would be too much to handle.
But in theory no one should ever live off MW. That represents the bottom of the social rung. Even if you say McDonald’s or Wal-mart, how long would someone stay at MW? I realize its easy for me to say that from my ivory tower. But you start as the fry guy making $5.15, you work hard and in a few months they move you to cash and give you $5.25. Keep up the good work and eventually you make your way up to some sort of management pulling down $5.35.
My point is that MW isn’t meant to be lived on, its meant as some where to start. Am I wrong or just naive?
Hey, I did it, on a bag of potato chips and a six-pack of Schmidt’s Red a day, at the princely sum of $5.35 an hour, although I have to admit I was pissed when the minimum wage was raised to that sum and I was merely promoted to the lordly sum of $5.50 an hour.
I got by. I lived with some guys who somehow acquired a Playstation, and some early hacker burned us some discs, and we had the Asian film connection which scored us the best Jackie Chan and John Woo pictures before they were released in America, entirely in trade because we taped everything that got played on that VCR. We even had a dog which I adored. Once a season I could afford to see a film in the theatre. I worked at a bookstore and anything which was not utter bullshit became my nighttime read.
I also stole. I stole prolifically, actually, but only from my employer, the book store. If there was something I had to read, well, I got it. You can’t keep a starving drunk from the book he wants. I sometimes used my position to order 'em read 'em, and then returned 'em to the publisher. Sometimes they showed up, but were lost through clerical error. With a few valuable exceptions I returned them all, though there are a few books I retain today for which I probably should have paid.
Beer was my only real form of entertainment, because I also rightly realized (I’m still here, ain’t I?) that beer is actually a valuable source of calories and, supplemented with vitamins and that crucial bag of potato chips, could sustain both life and alcoholism, apparently indefinitely. Anything I didn’t have, I made; anything I couldn’t make, I’d pick up broken and fix; anything I couldn’t fix, I’d use to prop up the couch.
I was dating a girl who was waiting to turn 25 so she could inherit what I estimated to be somewhere between $7 and $40 million dollars. Her father was totally insane and left a 6000 square foot home in Oakton, furnished, vacant. We had a go at putting that together, but she was crazier than I and should have been born with kneepads on.
That inspired me to a level of self-sufficiency which was downright palatial, considering I could blow a day’s wage on dinner and a movie done right, even in the early '90s. I didn’t drive, though I holed up a set of wheels in case I needed it. I kept the woman interested primarily through sex and primitivity, which was a luxury she could (temporarily) enjoy on her costumed traipse amongst the masses. But I was awash in media, and the museums were only a river away, and I used those resources with a relish that tourists can only dream. Eventually I even squeaked a shitty job out of the Smithsonian out of it, though that was largely to my regret.
I only stole from the people who employed and severely undervalued my services. I still regret it even now, because I could have done it just as easily without being so rude. I kept everything that was given to me or left in the trash. I had well-placed friends who saw my fall from grace (I made my fortune early and squandered it with the vigor that only youth can provide) and who carefully saw me through my poverty, neurosis, and depression with occasional meals and entertainment.
Eventually, I scratched my way out of it and had a lot more fun, the fun a Horatio Alger character might enjoy, though when you start from zero, you know you never really have anything (and recently, I lost it all again). What was harder by far was scratching my way above the pack-rat mentality which dictated that a tool I forewent was the tool which would eventually kill me. I get by with a couple of screwdrivers and a sawbuck in my pocket now.
Just don’t get hurt or sick, or care about anyone too much, or risk an appendage you can’t afford to lose, and I suppose it’s not a bad life. It’s certainly better than most everyone else’s, and for that, I’ve always been thankful.
Sure, very doable.
There’s a number of people I know (and a few FOAFs) who are working the minimum wage and not making it because they’re trying to do it in The Big City. Dammit, if you’re gonna be poor, do it in a rural location. I’ve got a sister-in-law living in a small (~500) town in SoDak that has rent of $125 a month for a house and can walk to work and the grocery store. If I wanted to, I could live like a freaking KING there.
Other helpful tips:
* Grow a garden! Simple, cheap, and healthy. What’s not to like?
* Don’t eat out. The opposite of the first point, I think.
* Limit the booze. The other root of all evil. Expensive and makes you prone to hurting yourself or others.
The biggest problem I would have is lack of a good library.
Theres a reason why people go to cities when they are poor though- thats where the jobs are. Rural areas are often economically depressed, and don’t have enough employment to support the people living there- which is why so many people go to cities in the first place. Additionally, rural areas offer little in the way of career advancement- most people don’t want to be a clerk at the corner store for the rest of their lives even if it does provide a decent standard of living. FInally, whole job sectors don’t exist in rural areas. My trade, for example, is filmmaking. I pretty much have to to live in a big city if I ever want to work anything but a minimum wage job.
May I just add one more draw-back to rural-living? Transpostation. Rural areas don’t have a developed transportation system like cities do (if any at all). Not to mention the fact that it will be harder to find a place to live that’s close to wherever you end up working, provided you do have a job, since everything is more spread out.
Sure it’s doable. I spent my whole twenties making less than $10K a year.
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Give up eating in restaurants and eating prepared food. Buy raw supermarket food and cook it yourself. Yes, it takes longer. But it will be much healthier, much tastier, and much cheaper. A backyard garden helps tremendously, as long as you stick to basics and don’t go insane. And visit the food bank.
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Give up on having a car. You’ve got an old bicycle, right? Well get it back in shape. Ride your bike, ride the bus, hitch, ask friends for rides. Live near where you work. Everyone else is going to have a car, it is easy to get rides or help moving things. Yes, there will be 3 or 4 times a year where you will be stranded somewhere cursing the fact that you are too poor to have a car. Get over it.
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Share housing. No, you can’t afford an apartment to yourself. For years I spent under $250 a month on rent. How? Renting houses with groups of friends and/or strangers and splitting the rent.
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Don’t have medical problems. I was young and healthy. I saw the doctor twice in 10 years, and paid out of pocket a few hundred bucks for medical care. If you have a medical catastrophe, go to the emergency room and tell them you don’t have any money. They’ll treat you, sort of, and negotiate payment or write it off, or you can get some sort of assistance. The point is, they won’t let you die.
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You have a library card, right? Well the library is now your main source of entertainment. You don’t buy books, you don’t go to see movies, you don’t go to live music unless it’s free, you don’t buy CDs. You borrow books, movies, and CDs from the library, and go to free lectures and book readings, use the internet, use the bathroom. All for free.
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Other free entertainment. You have buddies working on a play? Get them to comp you tickets. Your friends got a band together? Get them to comp you the cover charge. You can go to book signings. You can go to coffee shops or bars and buy one drink for a night. Volunteer at the museum and get in free. Volunteer for the garden tour and ask for a ride and get it free. You get the idea.
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Don’t have kids. Wait until you’re making more than minumum wage to have kids. You can’t support your kids on minumum wage unless you live with your parents. You know it, I know it, the American people know it. So stop making kids. Adoption is a beautiful thing.
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You know those stores that sell brand new clothes? And people with lots of money buy those clothes? And then they get tired of them, and throw them out? And Goodwill picks them up and sells them for a few quarters? That’s where you get your clothes. And when Mom gives you underwear and new socks for your birthday you are happy!
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You don’t buy furniture, household goods, TVs, stereos, computers, chairs, fine china, trips to Cancun, drugs, jewelry, jetskis, iPods, or any other expensive objects. Fuck that. This is America. People are literally throwing away perfectly good household goods every day. Your mom’s neighbor is getting rid of her old sofa? Score. Your brother doesn’t want his old coat? Score. Your buddy got a job across the country and doesn’t want to move his bed? Score. Cinder blocks and milk crates on the side of the road? Score.
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You have a social network so you can borrow $20 bucks till the end of the week in an emergency. If you are a hateful antisocial loser with poor grooming, you are going to have a lot more trouble living cheaply than if you are friendly, interesting, helpful, generous, and clean. Oh, and not having severe mental problems and/or addictions helps tremendously.
That’s how I lived for years on next to nothing. In Seattle in the 90s, a very expensive housing market, paying off some student loans at the same time. Working part time crappy jobs, tutoring, gardening, yardwork, etc. I had tons of free time, I read hundreds of books, and had fun. Yes, I’m making more money now. And a mortgage, and a wife, and a kid, and two cars, and this and that. But the point is, you can easily do it, assuming you speak English and don’t have significant mental disorders.
Well, here are my expenses:
Rent: $520/mo
Phone: $30/mo
Internet: $12/mo
Electric: $50/mo
Food: $80+/mo
Smokes: $105/mo
Gas: $60/mo
Car insurance: $140/mo
About $1,000/mo.
Even if I quit smoking, I wouldn’t make it. Maybe if I stopped paying my car insurance, too.
We’re just lucky that both The Cody and my cars are both paid off, and Cody’s mom pays for his car insurance.
Well, and the fact that The Cody makes $14/hr with 8+ hours of overtime a week.
I live in a small city. So rent is cheaper here than it was when I lived in Austin. But there are jobs here, so we wouldn’t move to an even more rural area for lower rent. Ha!
Since no one has mentioned it yet, I’ll mention the book Nickel and Dimed. In it, a middle-class writer decides to see how survivable the minimum wage is by moving to a series of cities and taking the sorts of jobs you can get with no qualifications (among other places, she worked in a nursing home and Wal*Mart) and little if any cash reserves.
Her conclusion is more or less that you can barely scrape by (e.g., no surplus money for savings or health insurance, etc.) if you work two jobs. Interesting read.
Sure it can be done, so long as you live somewhere cheap. I don’t know, for instance, how all the restaraunt employees in Boston manage to live. Shit, I was paying $800 a month for a studio apartment two years ago.
Lemur
A garden? Huh? With what property? 
I don’t think this is idealistic, but I don’t think it is the kind of suggestion that is highly reliable. In the smaller suburb I grew up in, it really was true that the business near me weren’t hiring.
As far as is it possible, the economic answer is “it depends.”
I believe that many economists think min. wage is a horrilbe thing (which is understandable…it diminishes the “insvisible hand” of the free market to a large degree)…but that’s another story altogether.
But minimum wage may or may not be a viable means of survival. In a place like Manhattan, it certainly would not be a viable solution, unless you lived in the projects (and even then…). On the other hand, if you were to live in Deep South Texas (say, along the Rio Grande), you could live quite well on minimum wage. Cost of living in Texas is much less than a place like NYC or Boston. Down there, you can get a decent apartment for as little as $300 or 400/month.
Which qualifies for Food Stamps. The amount of food stamps depends upon household size, income and expenses.
thanks for that, before i posted this i wanted to read that book but couldn’t remember the title, i just remember a book about trying to survive on min. wage.
Rent is cheaper than $300 month Abbynormalguy (if you have a roommate) in some places. In some places its as low as 250/month per person for a 2 bedroom (125/person). At least here in the midwest, in an isolated town. I agree that it would be impossible to live on min. wage in a large city though, unless you had 5-7 roommates.
For the record, by ‘survive’ i mean having adequate transportation, nutrition, shelter, and entertainment to not feel deeply deprived (ie, not living in the car on a diet of bread and butter) or struggle endlessly to make ends meet.
It most certainly is cheaper with roommates; in Houston, 3 friends of mine got an apartment and each paid $200/month. My above numbers were for your average 1 bedroom apartment for a person living by themselves…with roommates, the costs go down considerably (I may be moving to Waltham, MA or NY in August, and despite my desire to live alone, I’ve found that the only viable way for me to live up there…at first, at least, is to have roommates.)
lol, ya, its do-able. I didn’t make over 20k a year until I was nearly 30, and after highschool/during college I worked at Highs Dairy for $4.45 to start out, working up to the princely summ of $5.15. I had a car I bought 3rd hand and worked on it myself (older cars were a breeze to fix and keep repaired, especially with some judicious scavaging in the local junk yard). I didn’t drink or smoke (unless it was for free at a party or such). I lived in a 3 bedroom appartment with 2 other guys at first, and moved into an appartment with my future wife later. Never ate out, and my only ‘vice’ was books. Later on I actually managed to get my hands on a computer by offering to write some code in exchange. My first ‘real’ job out of college was junior programmer/analyst for the unheard of summ of $15k/year…wooohoo, I could actually go out to dinner occationally!!
Again, I was healthy and my tastes were very modest…I didn’t waste a lot of money. I was pretty happy to be honest. I certainly didn’t start out with a silver spoon in my mouth by any means, nor did my folks give me any money or what have you to start…they simply didn’t have it to give then. I worked like a dog the summer of my senior year while still living at home in construction to build up some money. Oh, and I shamelessly used the government and white boy guilt to pay for my college (lots of grants out there for hispanics). Hell, even at $15k/year I was a success story in my family. 
-XT
I definitely second the rec to read Nickled and Dimed.
As I recall, the author claimed a major problem was the relative lack of low-income housing. I believe she presented the argument that the number of low-income people was increasing far greater than the availability of housing stock.
Moreover, the available housing is generally far removed from the available places of unskiled employment.
Others have mentioned the huge hurdle of “start-up costs.” If you have no job and no savings, how do you pay the first month down and security deposit for an apartment. Heck, it might even be tough to buy work clothes, if you don’t get paid until after working for the first 2 weeks.
This book made it seem as tho circumstances coerced low-income folk to do things more expensively than they might otherwise do so. For example, room in a hotel, instead of obtain an apartment. Or eat fast food, if your room/apartment did not have a full kitchen.
Also, apparently different cities vary hugely in terms of the availability of unskilled work, and the labor force competing for those jobs.
My conclusion is that although one could undoubtedly survive on minimum wage, it certainly is not a lifestyle I would wish, or would wish on anyone I know - even the few folk I don’t particularly care for.