As it relates to the minimum-wage debate, there is an argument based on who deserves what and why; and knowing the subjective nature of well-principled American culture, the argument is fraught with attention to specifics rather than attention to the socioeconomic details of a city marred by poverty.
Consider: Chicago was the second-most segregated city in the United States for decades, and even saw Martin Luther King jr. fail to affect change in something as basic as housing. With a lack of emphasis placed on the basics of human necessities, it is no wonder wage turmoil remains extant in the city. We all remember when American political activist Jimmy McMillan uttered the famous phrase, “The rent is too damn high!” and that’s certainly because fair housing and living wages go hand-in-hand—both of which seem to be difficult to attain in metro areas for underprivileged and marginalized populations.
Historically, upward mobility has been illusive to lower-class Americans who continue to flounder in abject poverty, grasping at the insane notion that one day they will be successful if they work hard enough. The sad reality is that the American populace just keeps working harder and harder, putting in longer hours for lower wages and less benefits, and nothing changes; and, nowhere is this clearer than Chicago.
Take for instance that unskilled jobs pay $9 an hour in cities that requires at least $20 an hour for an adult who has one child to afford an apartment. In this instance, hoping and dreaming of a better life, or even a home, becomes rather difficult for a mother of one because the employment prospects are daunting. But that’s what cities like Detroit, Chicago, and Baltimore offer lower-class citizens— lower-class jobs. Jobs that demand workers to compete for endless hours of low-paying labor, which reaps them very little in terms of reward.
“Making it” in America has little to do with the tenacity of your work-ethic and has far more to do with what class you were born into, as much evidence points to the realization that the class you are born into is the class you will die in. As illustrated by Jason DeParle in the New York Times article, “Harder for Americans to Rise from Lower Rungs,” only 8 percent of men will ever leave the lower class and obtain stature in the top one-fifth, and 42 percent of men on the bottom fifth will stay there as adults. Couple this with the knowledge that many people never leave their hometown or home state, and a problem arises—whatever jobs are available locally are the jobs local people will work.
So, the notion that one can argue against an increase in minimum wage looks too narrowly at a topic that extends far beyond being paid $15 to flip a hamburger; it’s working any unskilled labor that is accessible and available to the poverty-stricken in a country hellbent on the benefiting its elites.
Thus, the argument shouldn’t be whether the 1.3 million people currently living in poverty in Metro Chicago deserve to get paid for only flipping burgers. It should be, how are we going to address employment and class disparity in the United States so that mothers and fathers can afford homes and apartments in the cities they were born, and in the cities where they will probably die?
