~a column by Colleen O’Brien
In the tradition of young girls going to work in America, I arranged for my first grown-up job by talking to a neighbor. Babysitting seemed the logical next step up from selling Kool Aid on the corner. I babysat three times and had to give it up because I learned that children were horrible and parents cheap.
The first 3-year-old I contracted to sit with appeared at the top of the stairs about half an hour into the job. He was dragging his blanket and looking unhappy. He came down as far as the landing and stood for a moment staring at me, a person he’d never met. Then he leaped to the window and proceeded to scream out and bang on the screen like he would jump if he could. A gray-haired neighbor lady let herself in the front door, rescued the little boy and told me to go home.
The second job was to babysit five children. This became a long night, my first opportunity in life to survive an endurance test. For a couple of hours, the children rode the dumb waiter up and down from floor to floor. Then they galloped through the house war-whooping, one of them leaping over the couch I sat on each time the tribe passed through the living room. I was being paid 10 cents an hour to watch the show; from my limited experience, I had no idea how to corral them. When the parents finally arrived home at 5 am, somewhat worse for wear, I told them they owed me 10 cents per kid per hour. They scoffed – the going rate was 10 cents per hour, period. I was handed one dollar. The somewhat inebriated father drove me home and I never went back.
The third babysitting job was a little girl who came downstairs to where I was reading at the kitchen table; she sat on the trash can by the back door, peed, and went back upstairs. She never opened her eyes. I was spooked, horrified, mesmerized. I remained for the evening I’d negotiated for and resigned from ever babysitting again.
Eventually I went to work as a soda jerk. The pay was 50 cents an hour, a steady stream of dough, half of which went into my bank account for college, the other half at my disposal. I worked at the drug store for five years and never got a raise.
By the time I made it to college, I hoped that my degree would make me more money than I’d so far earned.
It helped somewhat, but my first job as an adult brought about another problem I did not know existed. When my company fired a guy and put me at his desk, I soon learned why. He had been making $100 a week while I, moving up a step in the company by doing the work he’d been doing, would be making $50 week. Being a female, I was never going to make as much as the male doing the same job – there was no law against it.
Reagan and Rich Osborne, proprietors of Greene Bean Coffee House in Jefferson, Iowa, now pay their baristas $15 an hour. The initial employment ad for this position brought in 47 applicants the first day. The extravagance of the salary hit the national news.
According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a living wage in 2020 was $16.54 an hour. So, a $15 wage is close to reasonable. Not enough probably to buy a house, rear a kid, send it to college. But it does bring one out of poverty, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
California’s minimum wage is $14 per hour; Massachusetts is paying $13.50, Connecticut $13. Iowa remains at $7.50. For all its early days as a state of social justice tendencies, Iowa has relegated its workers of any ilk to low livelihoods unless one is a barista at the Bean in Jefferson.
A hundred years ago, Henry Ford realized he had to pay his car assemblers a living wage if he wanted to forestall the constant turnover of his factory workers. He raised his assemblers’ wage to $5 a day, twice the going rate. Retention improved immediately. The decent pay afforded some of his employees enough disposable income to buy their own Model Ts. This raise in wage was a voluntary move by an industrialist in an age like this one of rampant greed from on high. However calculated for his own wealth, Ford’s decision to pay a living wage was an early wedge that helped create a middle class in America, which in turn made us the most prosperous country in the history of the world . . . with an almost decent sharing of the wealth across the board.
Henry Ford was, and remains, an outlier; American industrialists have seldom been keen on paying a living wage out of their profits. To wit: According to the Economic Policy Institute, chief executives of big companies now make 320 times more than their workers. As of May 11, CEOs’ compensation has risen 1,167 percent since 1978; workers? 14 percent.
A capitalist system of economics, like a democratic system of politics, works best in holding the world together. But only if those in charge play fair
