So I’ve been thinking a lot about healthcare reform. Listening to the arguments made by Republicans, I am led back over and over again to the “you work for it, you pay for it” and “be an adult and buy your own healthcare” statements- and it makes me think.
I have repeatedly argued that there are some jobs (i.e., most unskilled labor- retail, waitressing) that will never, ever pay enough for someone to take care of themselves and their families. Many of these types of jobs have it offered to their employees, but anyone who has ever tried to take advantage of it knows of the many loopholes companies use to prevent their employees from using it- long “trial periods” before benefits kick in, hiring enough employees so no one has enough hours to qualify as full-time, having yearly raises of 25 cents (I personally worked for a company that did this). And yet, while these people are involved in the discussion of success, they are told to get a second job or go back to school. (They are also told to “keep their legs closed” but that’s another post.) Leaving aside the issues of childcare and the impossibility of getting a schedule that doesn’t change long enough to know one’s availability for another job or school, there is another, deeper problem that no one seems to probe.
These jobs need to be filled. They exist. And since people like their coffee, their clothing on racks, their McDonald’s hamburgers, there must be people to fill them. Even if one person in any of these jobs manages to “make it” to school or a better job, there’s a hole that needs to be filled by some other person who will have dirt kicked in their face for “not working hard enough to succeed”. The problem is not the person, it is the job. And what I mean by that is this:
The retail economy of the United States has created a need for a perpetual underclass.
Since we want these services, there is a necessity that these positions be filled, and they cannot all be filled by teenagers on summer break with no dependents or expenses. Minimum wage isn’t doing anyone any good except the employer who will “move his company overseas or close down” if forced to pay his employees higher wages or god forbid, provide them healthcare. This isn’t true.
I know my ideas are far from original, but it is a growing concern now that this has become one of the largest bones of contention about healthcare. (Legitimate ones, unlike, you know, death panels.) The evidence needs to be published over and over again that the cost of doing business needs to include letting the workers we take for granted have lives and families. We require their services; we treat them like people. Not an underclass we can ignore, step on, and let live and die in poverty because “big business can’t afford it”.
