According to my calendar, Christmas has come and gone. I should be writing "2014" instead of "2013" and the slew of deadlines coming at my like a freight train starting in February are literally just around the corner. Snow hasn't landed yet (although the Brits promise me it will) and I can almost smell spring blossoms. Not a single assignment has actually been turned in, graded and sent back, and I'm already trying to make decisions about when to fly home, and from where. To budget that dream week in Spain or to find a way to volunteer my way across more of Europe while I'm here.
Had I done this graduate course immediately after earning my B.A., 11 months would have seemed like an eternity. Endless day after endless week. I would have gotten *so* *old* in the course of a year. I would have weighed it against lost opportunities, and other options. I would have been all of 22 when I graduated.
But given that it's been over 6 years since I walked across a stage in Forest Grove to get a piece of paper validating my existence as a Good American, a year seems like just a handful of days. Flitting by as the moments of my life drop by like bits of dew, falling into oblivion. The cold harsh morning sun breaking through the freezing fog reminding me that as young as I am, I'll be lucky if I am only 1/3 through the course of my life.
Lucky.
To hit my late 80's healthy, hearty and hale would be a blessing that not too many people are lucky enough to count as their own. Statistically, I could easily be halfway through a perfectly reasonable natural life. 60 is not too bad an age. It's time for a spring, summer, fall and winter. Time to grow, age, settle and reflect. Time to cry and laugh and live and love and wish you'd done more. Wish you'd stood in the cold and watched your breath dissipate. Wish you'd let fear ripple through you without shutting down. Wish for more tears and more smiles. Wish that you hadn't rushed through the morning just to get to the afternoon, just to make it to the evening so you could go home and relax.
All this, and I am in no way old. According to most standards, I'm young. Young enough to still be goofing off in graduate school. Uncommitted to a life of any real meaning. No career. No family. No serious goals beyond turning in a dissertation that passes muster and getting a job that both pays and leaves me truly alive in what I do at the end of each day.
And yet.
A year passes by so damn fast. Not the slow drag of my younger days. Of my 'now I can finally drink' years. A year rushes now, not waiting or pausing or giving me a chance to smell the cherry blossoms before the fade and fall. Paint dries and bakes and chips and flakes in an instant it seems now, instead of lazily staying sticky longer than I care to wait and watch.
I'll be going "home" or to "next" before I know it. And then in the blink of an eye, I'll be done doing or being whatever it is that's next. I get to know, while I'm here, the very inconsequential-ness of the time I spend at Cambridge. Me. One of tens of thousands of students, walking these streets over the course of literally almost a thousand years.
And it's mornings like that when I have to pause, watching my breath hang in the air and think, how incredibly wonderful it is to simply be me. To watch the droplets fall into oblivion. Precious precious glimpses of time in experience. Time that is mine. Experiences seen through the unique lens of me. And what a lucky, lucky me I get to be.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Paying the Bills: Minimum Wage in the US
As of Wednesday, January 1st, 2014, Oregon’s minimum wage will have gone up 15% to $9.10 per hour. This means that an average minimum wage employee working 40 hours per week will earn just under $19,000 annually, squeaking just under the national poverty threshold for a family of three. Oregon is among a handful of states whose wage is tied directly to inflation. Since a 2002 ballot measure, Oregon’s lowest paid employees can expect their buying power to rise with the cost of products and services. In tying the minimum wage to the rate of inflation, Oregon is considered by many (along with Washington) to be a leader among US states when it comes to wage equity.
In his 2013 State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama called on the Federal Government to address the growing inequity in the United States economic system. For the first time in American history class movement is becoming stagnant, and with the top 1% of earners in the United States owning an estimated 24% of the nation's wealth, while the bottom 80% of earners shared just 11% of the national GDP, the president stressed that without change America’s economic engine--driven by a once-strong and now-disappearing--middle class, would continue to struggle.
By the middle of the year Senator Tom Harkin (D, Iowa) and Representative George Miller (D, California), sponsored the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013 (FMWA). Based on the poverty threshold for a family of 4, and the idea that the buying power of any worker should rise with the cost of the goods and services they need to support their families. Perhaps more revolutionary even, is the idea that if the economy is growing, so too should the income of the low and middle earners.
For a nation whose collective dream is one of hard work leading to reward, the social and financial pressures that have been slowly squeezing the middle and working classes since the late 1970’s have reached what feels to many like a long endless plateau. Jobs are scarce and debt is high. Companies balk at increasing median wages, and Congressional Republicans hammer away at the benefits provided to the jobless while working hard to protect big business subsidies in the fields of agriculture, oil production and more. With production industries slowing and the service industry growing, many people across the nation are forced to take tip-based jobs. Jobs where the national minimum wage is $2.13 an hour. Outside of states like Oregon, Washington, California and (oddly enough) Alaska which legally require tipped employees to be paid the same minimum wage as other employees, these employees are expected to make ends meet by earning good tips.
Officially our economy has been in solid recovery since 2009. But with jobless numbers maintaining, and almost 60% of the jobs “regained” with the economic boost being minimum wage service industry jobs---not the middle class white-collar jobs that were lost--it can sometimes feel like the economic recovery has only been a recovery for the most well to-do Americans. Many continue to live paycheck to paycheck, without vacation, sick or even parental leave.
Unfortunately the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013 was dead on arrival in a Congressional House whose main legislative goals in 2013 seemed to be to drag their feet and work tirelessly to prevent any legislation sponsored by democrats, or supported by the president, from ever seeing the light of day.
That said, the State of Washington approved a ballot measure ensuring that employees at the Seattle International Airport would earn a minimum of $15.00 an hour. Allowing them to live reasonably, despite the high cost of housing and basics in the area. Proving that individual states, or even individual cities--as Portland did in requiring all employers to provide leave for employees who are ill.
Most Americans are not millionaires. And most Americans will never be millionaires. Maybe it’s time we remembered that and started looking at wage and employment law not as something that will be problematic for us when we own a fortune 500 and are trying our darndest to leech every penny we can into corporate pockets, but instead as a needed defense of the American Middle class, because after all--that’s always been the dream. To work hard, and have that hard work earn you enough to buy a house and raise a family well.
Sources include:
The Oregonian
US Dept. of Health and Human Services
Full text of the 2013 Fair Minimum Wage Act
The Article “Who Rules America” by Prof. William Domhoff, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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