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In real life, minimum wage is a joke! If you are a teenager who is starting out in your first job and have absolutely no obligations aside from recreation, then a job paying only minimum wage isn't such a bad thing. If you are someone like me - a single parent with two boys to feed and raise - minimum wage is, as I said, a joke!

I have found it nearly impossible to work a minimum wage job and keep on living without having to ask for help. Daycare and gas costs pretty much eat up all that you make and leave you with the choice of paying the babysitter and keeping the job or buying groceries and getting evicted. It simply doesn't cut it. If a job is only going to offer a minimum wage to its employees then it should also offer either "A" or "B" or both.

"A" being paid trips to and from work equaling the amount of gas money spent, including the per hour rate for all travel time.
"B" being an on-site or off-site child care provided by the company. (preferred)

I once worked as a waitress (you know those pay rates) and was having difficulties with putting enough gas in the car to get back and forth. By the time I handed out what had to go, I found that it was costing me more to go to work than it was to not work at all. You have all seen the movie "Pay it Forward", right? Well, this was "paying it backward"! You can't catch up, much less get ahead or even comfortable, while making nothing for giving everything.

I have had to quit a minimum wage job in the past because after paying the babysitter each week and filling the car up with gas, I was in the negative in the cash department. It is so incredible how we are expected to survive on this! Even a double income family has super huge trouble surviving on minimum wage incomes. The sad thing is that, on top of this, beautiful children, who have done nothing to deserve it, suffer from it.

We want to work and are willing to work. Let us do so and not have to abandon our families. Minimum wage is a joke! You tell me who, and I mean WHO, wants to eat grits every single day just so they can have electricity? My tax dollars - which eat up a huge portion of my sorry minimum wage - pay for an inmates meal and I go hungry. Explain that!

Learn more about this author, Mae South.
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