McDonalds and Wal-Mart aren't the only low wage jobs (a rant)

I have noticed a tendancy on DU to assume that only those who work for McDonalds and Wal-Mart earn low wages. There are many other people in the US who work in air conditioned office buildings who make far from a living wage.

They may work in your company mailroom. There were many people who work in the mailroom of my former employer who work two jobs to make ends meet. Yet people assume that they make a good wage because they work for an insurance company in a nice building located in an upper middle class suburb of St Louis.

The security guard who sits at the security desk probably doesn't bring home a hefty paycheck either. Yet, she (and the last three security guards at the building where I previously worked were female) are asked to try to keep the "bad people" at bay.

My nephew works as a janitor cleaning the offices of a large insurer at night so that he can go to school during the day. It's not easy work and if he did not live at home with his parents, who do not make him pay rent, then he would not be able to afford his tuition even at the local community college he attends.

Focusing only on the low wage workers at Wal-Mart and similar places ignores the millions of Americans who toil for little money outside of Wal-Mart.

EOR (end of rant and I thank you for listening)

It bugs me to see jobs posted in the "professional" job category that pay $10/hr.

Jobs where 2-3 paragraphs of training and experience are wanted that pay $8/hr.

What's up with that?

When I first started as a claims examiner at Blue Cross in the mid 1980s I was paid $7.75 and hour. We were real claims examiners and had to do a lot of calculations by hand. Now many of those same functions are done by a computer and all a human primarily does is enter the data. Consequently the wages have decreased to the point that the job is no longer called health insurance claims examiner but claims processor. Now one is lucky to make $8.00 an hour processing health insurance claims.

It is true that the more decisions the machine is expected to make the less money the human inputting the data will make.

there was a famous "help wanted" online posting. They wanted someone who was worth $40-$50/hour; someone who knew Quark, PageMaker, InDesign, Illustrator, FreeHand, Photoshop, Macromedia Director, could make flash movies, hand-code HTML, a "very deep" knowledge of CorelDraw...basically encyclopedic knowledge of every graphics application made since we traded in our Rapidographs for mice.

Salary $6.50/hour "depending on experience."

Illegal aliens with that kind of knowledge wouldn't work for $6.50 per hour.

but they most definitely will get what they pay for. It doesn't surprise me that some company would try to get an experienced web professional for salaries less than what is paid in India.

Not usually THAT bad - but close enough.

and living worse off than ever before. Tough to make ends meet when jobs just don't pay proper living wage. Pisses me off something fierce.

As of 2 years ago (the last time I worked there) the starting pay in Barnes & Noble for booksellers in NEW YORK CITY was $7.25. I don't imagine it has changed much since then. That's just one example of many I could cite in NYC.

job would be to work in a bookstore but not one of the big box corporate stores. There is a cool bookstore in St Louis I'd love to work in if I didn't have to worry about such petty things as eating, keeping a roof over my head, health insurance and heat and air conditioning.

for low wages. The company actually bragged about the large number of employees they had with advanced degrees in literature, if you can believe it.

It took that long before I actually netted $200.00 a week. And that was by applying for and getting any position that paid a "premium" as they called it. Then, Borders "restructured" and the "premium" paying position I had was eliminated. I went back to being a regular bookseller and took a significant cut in pay. That was the FIRST job I'd ever had where I had to take a pay cut--and they were paying shit to begin with. I was lucky enough to find another better paying job a couple months after the "restructuring". The thing is, if Borders paid better I'd still be there. After the restructuring, even though I was demoted, I (and everyone else there) took on a lot of other responsibilities. My workload was literally quadrupled though I was making less money. I consider working in a store like Borders or Barnes and Noble to be a "real" job. I don't expect to make a six figure salary there but to have to work three year before netting $200.00 a week is fucking ridiculous.

MJ Soffe is one of the biggest manufacturers of sportswear in the United States, and their major operation is right here in Fayetteville. This is an unbelievable plant; truckloads of ginned cotton lint arrive at the north end of the building, finished clothing emerges from the south end. They can produce cheaper than China and still pay living wages.

This is the problem: Soffe's sewing machine operators are paid based on experience with a particular item. This makes sense--sewing shirts is different from sewing shorts. But if you are moved from the T-shirt line to the sweatshirt line, which happens quite often as demand ebbs and flows, you are paid according to your experience level in the new garment. Sometimes it helps you--if you have 5000 t-shirts and 10,000 sweatshirts on your record, if you go from the t-shirt line to the sweatshirt line you get a pay raise; going back to the t-shirt line returns you to your t-shirt pay rate, and if you go to something completely different like tank tops that you've never made before, you go all the way back to your starting salary.

Starting salary there is $8/hour which isn't bad for this area, so the long-term Soffe operators I know have a strategy: they live on $8/hour and put anything above that in the bank. It's the only thing you can do when you can go from $8 to $14 to $9 to $8 in the space of four days.

Other than teach, that is...

that's what I'm doing and I have an MFA.

I manage temp employees that started their positions at 13$ an hour four years ago, where for the past two-three years, they're starting at 9$ an hour. Plus their benefits are nil. It irks me to no end, the way they are treated. I've been trying for two years to get a better temp agency here. Unfortunately, I'm not high enough in the chain to get much accomplished.

Also, my sister is actually the manager of a school cafeteria, and she doesn't make enough to afford health insurance. You guessed it; this private(catholic) school she works for doesn't have decent health coverage. If she signs up for it, there won't be enough left to eat and pay the bills. Add to this that standard rent or mortgage doesn't apply to her because her home is paid off. She has a minimal lot rent monthly. She needs meds that she can seldom afford and really isn't healthy enough to do a second job.

I think the Walmart and McDonald's references are made because they are the most obvious.

boarding school in Arizona and when she retires (she's 68 now) she will have no pension. She will have to live only on what social security she has coming in. Of course you will have people, Democrat and Republican, say "why didn't she save?" and my response to that is as follows:
Try raising seven kids on less than $10k per year in the 70s and see how much money you can save. When there isn't enough to pay the electric bill there isn't enough to put away in an investment account.
She has managed to pocket much of the social security she has received since she turned 65 and has continued working but that will take her only so far. Thankfully her property is paid for so she doesn't have to worry about that.
My mom's primary concern is affording meds once she retires and no longer has the group health insurance offered through her employer.

I just turned down an offer of interview from someone who wanted an employee to do three jobs (technical/marketing writing, ad rep, and sales rep) in one, all for $27-30K/year. That might sound like a lot, but the job was in Toronto, and it's barely possible to subsist in Toronto on less than that. Since I have three student loans to pay off and lots of medical expenses, I decided it was better to stay here on unemployment than to move to expensive Toronto.

I've also seen some very professional jobs for very substandard wages. One company I saw was advertising an Occupational Safety Coordinator position for $11K/a...

I think we have officially entered the Era of Lowballing, and goodness knows what it's going to take to get the pigopolists at the top (the ones making the seven-figure salaries and supervising the multi-billion dollar profits) to give the people on the front lines their share of the pie. A general strike? A resurgence of the Wobs? Who knows?

We have great benefits and lots of holidays, sick leave and time off. But my pay sucks. According to Atlanta standards, I should be making at least at least $10,000 more than I do now.

doesn't get you dick anymore.

I've been out of work for over three weeks now. I have had people lecture me that I should go find a job at someplace like Wal-Mart or Mickey-D's. Unfortunately, those minimum wage-style jobs will not allow me to pay my bills. Believe it or not, I would do better on unemployment.

This makes me sick. Big business is shipping jobs overseas, companies are hiring illegals to do the jobs supposedly "nobody" wants to do and bankruptcy is becoming an all-too familiar outlet for many Americans.

Unfortunately, I feel the problem is not a partisan one. This problem started long before Chimpy got into office, and will continue until we have a major alignment shift in this country. When the bottom line for a few becomes more important than the needs of the many, there will always exist a situation of scarcity.

How is this any different than what happened in the Soviet Union before the fall of Communism? Maybe, we don't have breadlines.... but we do have thousands without work. It seems to me that we are becoming as divided as the post-WWII Soviets. The divide between the haves and the have-nots is becoming so vast, that life within one camp is becoming unrecognizable to folks in the other.

Additionally, there also lurks a paradigm where the victims are being blamed for their situation. Folks like Rush Limbaugh, who persist in keeping their heads below ground surface and foisting the blame of not being able to gainfully employ ones self upon the unemployed. Now I agree that there are some folks who will suck the state teat, lay back and not act. However, for those of us who are trying, being put into the "lazy" box is not only discouraging, but also injurious to ones self image.

Things need to change in this country. As long as we have the false notion that wealth will bring automatic happiness, we will have a cultural divde between the haves and the have-nots.

Now THAT'S a joke.

what EMTs make - you know, emergency medical technicians, those people who come out in the aid cars and keep people alive. They start just a hair above minimum wage. After ten years of experience, presuming they survive, they might be lucky to make $14 an hour. That's purely insane.

many parts of the country they also risk their lives when assisting a sick or injured person.

I am looking for jobs. I've found several that want a 4 year science degree, 2-3 years experience, and a set of specific skills with starting wages of $9-10/hour. They obviously expect to find someone and evidently do. It makes me wonder how I can compete against that when I apply for a salary negotiable position. For $9-10, I could take a rather mindless job with little responsibility. Some people who went to college with the idea that it would help them make more money are probably wondering why they went.