Over at Feminste the classism is alive and in full force.
It’s the same load of crap I’ve heard forever.
I had the Kid a week before my 20th birthday. When I found out I was pregnant, I could have had an abortion. Actually most of my “friends” tried to push me into having an abortion.
But……..
My mother had been diagnosed with a terminal illness 3 years earlier (she’s still alive – I think she runs on anger and spite). I was working crappy minimum wage jobs. I didn’t have the money for college.
I wanted my mom to see her first grandchild. (I was still under the impression that at some point I could do enough to make her love me) I also knew that I could get more financial aid for college with a baby and that it wasn’t going to get any cheaper to have a child. At that point, waiting till I had established a career seemed ridiculous. I was printing t-shirts. There is no career path there. Having a baby at my age meant that 1) I still had a parent around to help me and 2) having a baby got me MORE access to an education, not less
So I ad the Kid. I started college when he was 6 months old and actually got more in financial aid and student loans than I had working. I made my schedule such that the Kid stayed home with his dad or my mom while I went to school at night so we didn’t have to pay for childcare. And until Kid’s dad rediscovered his love the crystal meth and tormenting me, I did well. When Kid’s dad left, even though I only had a year of college under my belt, I went from making $5.50 an hour to $9.00 and by the time the Kid was 4 I was making 35k per year. (then Bush became president and the world went to shit).
There are a limited number of good jobs in the world. Period. Not everyone can be a white collar professional. But that doesn’t mean that people in low paying jobs are failures. They do vital work. We could not live in a world where no one performs the shit jobs. And working a full time job should pay a living wage. Period. And having children while young or poor or uneducated is not a crime. It is, in fact, how the majority of people in the world have children.
So reading the comments at Feminste made me heartsick. Women, ostensibly feminists, who think that punishing someone with poverty for having children is acceptable don’t strike me as much different than people who think women should be punished with children for having sex.
As for the minimum wage part of the argument- why should it be okay for ANY job to pay less than what is required to live on for full time work? I’ll say here what I said there- a business that cannot afford to pay it’s employees a living wage is a failing business. If a business could not afford to pay it’s rent, we would not write into law a that businesses can pay less than the required rent. We would let the business fail so it’s place could be taken by a business that can compete fairly.
Businesses that don’t pay a living wage put more of a strain on society, not less. Sure, they provide jobs, but not jobs that pay enough for their employees to pay income taxes. And they increase the strain on social service agencies who then have to make up the difference with childcare subsidies and food stamps and health care.So they cost society more than they benefit it. Propping them up by keeping the minimum wage low and not holding them accountable for the strain they cause creates an unfair playing field for those businesses that can and do provide living wages (look at the difference between Wal-mart and Costco).
But we don’t look at it that way. We look at raising the minimum wage as a charitable thing instead of as the right thing to do for the sake of the economy as a whole and business competition. The working poor doesn’t need more charity, we need to be paid enough to live on as is fitting of working a full time job. There is no shame in being a minimum wage worker. There is shame though in being a business that would fail without being able to exploit your workers.