Five years ago, I published a Money Crashers article on the Live the Wage Challenge, which I had taken in the summer of 2014. I wrote about the parameters of the challenge; the experiences of politicians, bloggers, and others who had taken it; and the limitations of the challenge as a way to understand the difficulties of living on the federal minimum wage, which at that time had not been increased in six years.
Fast-forward to 2020: The minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25 per hour, and my editors at Money Crashers think it would be a bit more relevant to show how difficult it is for real people to live on this amount today. Hence, the piece has undergone a complete rewrite. Instead of talking about the self-imposed challenge of living on an imaginary minimum-wage budget for one week, it's now about the real challenges of trying to do it for a whole year.
I've created a fictional minimum-wage worker, called Kai (the most neutral-sounding name I could think of, allowing you to picture a man or a woman of any age or race) who makes the minimum wage, 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, with no time off for vacation or sick leave. The piece goes through Kai's budget piece by piece, showing what they pay for taxes (which, yes, minimum-wage workers do have), housing, utilities, transportation, food, health care, and everything else — and how it leaves them with essentially nothing for emergency or retirement savings. And, since Kai is only one imaginary person, I also look at some media profiles of real people living on minimum wage to show what they have to do to get by.
I'm rather proud of this new piece, and I would go so far as to call it a must-read for anyone who really wants to understand the current debate over raising the minimum wage.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment