Mar
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Blog Post #9 – Living Wage II – Tiffany Fan
March 19, 2015 | Leave a Comment
In response to Jane Kaspervic’s article, I’ve known that waitress jobs are below minimum wage, but after tips, I thought that they were making more than minimum wage. However, this does not seem to be the case since there is income instability. Has it been considered to pay waiters and waitresses the same minimum wage as other jobs and split tips amongst other workers at the end of the day? Thus, waiters and waitresses wouldn’t have to rely on customers for their wage. Or possibly eliminate the tipping system all together and pay waiters and waitresses a living wage? By doing this, customers don’t feel pressured to tip and they could increase their prices on menus slightly to account for this change.
After reading “Living on $2.13 an hour and tips: harsh inequality of the service industry,” I turned to Andrew J Hawkins’ “’Living wage’ inflation.” I think to increase wages to $15 for large retail and a food business is impractical. I strongly believe in the statement “The $15 floor would be indexed to inflation.” When I first saw the protest in front of McDonalds along 5th avenue and near 34th street, I also thought $15 was too high despite it being only incorporated in franchises. I also wonder who would pay a dollar or two more for a burger, fries, and drink at the already inflated Manhattan prices.
The first point in “The Give Biggest Myths about Income Inequality” that shocks me was “Having children without a husband tends to make you poor. Not working makes you even poorer. And there is nothing new about that. These are age old truths. They were true 50 years ago, a hundred years ago and even 1,000 year ago. Lifestyle choices have always mattered.” This statement practically blames single mothers without a husband for keeping their child, rather than putting the child up for adoption or abortion. It also makes it seem as if it’s the women’s fault at all matters, yet there could be many issues that might have occurred that wasn’t her fault. The low amount of women who are interested in leadership roles could possibly be taken into account here as well. To also say that it is a “life style choice” seems inaccurate since that would say something along the lines of the rich are rich because they chose to be, yet it could have been from inherited wealth.
As for the fourth myth, he disagrees with Barack Obama to increase minimum wage, which I’m still on the fence about. If the majority of minimum wage workers are young adults who are in the middle-income bracket, it could still benefit them with a higher minimum wage for college expenses or supplementing their middle-income family. It seems that the focus tis on the lower income individuals and leaving out the middle-income households, who need assistance as well. However, I don’t think it would be a good measure to prove that more people working in a household is a solution to poverty. By basing incomes on households and how many of them work in the household, it doesn’t take into account possible outlying reasons behind this. Why if the workers are only living together because they don’t earn enough income to live on their own and thus, decided to pool their money into one home?
In the end, these articles provided different perspectives to the income gap such as through a restaurant worker and behind certain myths. The workers in the service industry sector seems as if they should have a stable wage just as anyone else since some slow days, they could be earning $5 an hour, which is unfeasible to live on in New York City. As for the myths described by John C Goodman, it provided an outlook that I found convincing such as the government transfer programs.
