This is why I fight for $15 minimum wage
I’ve been with the Fight for $15 movement for two years now, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with my fellow workers from across industries who are demanding the simple dignity of a wage that we can live on. I’ve seen so many different people working in these low-wage jobs: parents and grandparents who are working tirelessly to put a roof over their families’ heads, to put food on the table and to make ends meet. But as diverse and different as we all are, we’re all looking for the same thing: a better life for our families.
The poverty wages paid not just in fast-food but across industries from home and child care, to airport operations, to countless others, hurt our communities and hold us back. While these companies rake in massive profits, hard-working Americans across the country are forced to scrape by. These low wages mean we can scarcely afford to put money away for a home, for our kids’ education, for our own retirement or to invest back into our communities. Poverty wages hurt all of us, and they cost us, the American taxpayers, money.
When a worker gets a paycheck so small that they can’t even afford the basics — food, healthcare, transportation — we’re forced to rely on public assistance — food stamps, Medicaid, welfare and the like. This costs all of us, the taxpayers, money. And just how much money are the rest of us paying for companies that don’t pay their workers enough to afford the basics? More than $150 billion every year, according to a recent study by the University of California, Berkley.
Think about that for a moment and let that sink in. Taxpayers spend more than $150 billion every single year to help people, who already work full-time, to stay afloat all because large, highly profitable businesses refuse to pay their employees enough to afford even the bare necessities.
Every time a company writes a paycheck that someone can’t possibly live on, even when they’re working full-time, that company is counting on the rest of us, the American taxpayers, to make up the difference. They are, in the simplest of terms, picking all our pockets to make up for the fact that they refuse to pay workers enough to live on.
It’s not as if these companies are barely making ends meet; far from it. McDonald’s, for instance, the largest fast-food company and one of the largest offenders, made more than $5.5 billion in profit last year, but it still left the rest of us and Uncle Sam on the hook for more than $1 billion to help make sure that its workers could even afford to eat How does this seem fair? Whenever I hear industry types say that we can’t possibly raise wages and that companies can’t afford it, I just have to shake my head. At a time of record corporate profits, nothing could be further from the truth. What we, the American taxpayers, can’t afford is to keep padding their bottom line every time we send a check off to Uncle Sam.