The American Dream Has Turned into a Grueling Quest for Survival for Millions of People

http://www.alternet.org/labor/american-dream-has-turned-grueling-quest-survival-millions-people


On June 12, 2013, Low Pay Is Not Okay, a group fighting to raise wages for fast food workers, released a video criticising a budgeting guide created by McDonald's. The guide showed that McDonald's workers cannot survive on a McDonald's salary. Aside from including dubious figures - $20 a month for health care, $0 for heating - the guide left out essentials like child care, food, and clothing. Low Pay Is Not Okay noted that even by McDonald's' own calculations, workers would need at least $15 per hour to make ends meet. The video went viral, and the guide was widely criticised.

But some argued that the guide was reasonable. "When I lived in St. Louis, my roommate and I each paid $425 per month [in rent]," wrote the Washington Post's Timothy B. Lee, ignoring that St. Louis fast food workers are on strike because they cannot afford to live on their current wages. He praised the guide for "offering practical advice on how to live on a modest income", a sentiment echoed by Mother Jones' Kevin Drum, who deemed it "an extremely conventional collection of good financial advice".

Defenders of the McDonald's budget use the same word to describe it: realistic. (Both Drum and Lee use this term.) The logic is that if people can literally survive on minimum wage - that is, not drop dead - then their wages are justified. Ignored in the plea for realism is the day-to-day reality of McDonald's workers - not whether they can live, but how. In one of the wealthiest countries in the world, privation should not come with the job description, and survival should not be an aspiration.

"Worrying about the future is the hardest part, because at $7.25, I don't have a future," wrote Stephanie Sanders, a McDonald's worker, in an essay for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Like many fast food workers, Sanders is an adult who never thought she would end up in the food service industry. While the unemployment rate in America has remained largely steady in 2013, the underemployment rate has soared, and Sanders, a former saleswoman, has found herself trapped. Her temporary job has become a permanent sentence.