Wages

I was thinking this morning about how things were when I first started working. I was making a whopping $1 an hour, thinking if I could ever make $100 a week I could have a new car, a house and a wife. Even at $1 an hour, I was still living at home and with $40 a week; I was living well. I had enough to spend and spend is what I did.

My first job at 15 years-old was working for a man who made chili and tamales and sold them to stores around town. It was fun making vats of chili, 70 gallons at a time, using a boat paddle to stir it. The chili was delicious, it sold well. He had a secret spice mixture, that he never revealed to me. I would get there after school and start gathering the ingredients, but the dried spice mixture was always prepared by him and waiting for me. He said it was handed down by his father and it would never be revealed to anyone. That mixture was what sold the chili in his mind. I however, thought differently. One of the things, perhaps the thing that made the chili so good was me grinding up the day old bakery goods he acquired and cooking them into the chili. That was part of the batch and there were several large bags of bakery goods that went into every batch of chili. Of course that added a sweetness that people loved and wondered what made it that way. Best of all, I got to sample the better goods as I ground them up.

By the next summer the boss was offered a deal he could not pass up and he sold the business and my labor with it. I started my new/old job at a food factory, working in a huge refrigerated space where everything came in on conveyors. I had to sort lots out from the one big conveyor onto several smaller ones that loaded the company trucks. On weekends I washed those same trucks. The company had those old style trucks where you stood up when driving and that was the highpoint of my week, driving those trucks. During the week I was cold all shift long in that refrigerator. I was working nights, was cold, still making $1 an hour and was not happy.

I gave notice and got a job at a service station, working days still for $1 an hour, but I was happy. The owner would get drunk, fire me, rehire me every few weeks. He was basically a good man that seemed to me like he was cast adrift and didn’t know what to do or how to change his situation or if he even wanted to do so. I worked there until I joined the navy and that was when my pay really sank down to something like 24 cents an hour, and there was a lot of verbal abuse to deal with in boot camp.

All my life has been influenced by making low wages, but now being retired, I live in a world of much higher wages. I just saw on TV the median income in this country is $56,000. Many people make $80-100,000 a year and even $250,000 and obviously, many make far less than that $56,000. That median is located halfway between the lowest pay and the highest pay. Median may be close to the average in some cases, but is not necessarily the average or even close in this case. I never made more than $32,000 in a year and that was for a very short time in San Diego, more than 30 years ago and that was with a lot of overtime.

I was just researching Walmart Jobs, some starting wages are as low as $7.50 an hour, while some are just over $9 and very few pass $24,000 annually. Walmart does offer health insurance, but it is very limited in what it covers (nearly worthless). I do not know how these people can survive with rent, car payments, groceries and bare necessities because those $7.50 jobs only come out to $15,000 a year and that’s with a 40 hour week which is not always common at Walmart. $15,000 is just over $1250 a month, those at the 56,000 median make 1166 a week. $80,000 makes $1538 per week. $100,000 makes $1923 per week.

I know that different skill levels and education levels make for different salary levels and that is as it should be. My issue is with my salary levels I did what I could to save and invest for retirement but could never dream or prepare for costs like I see today. I am not destitute, just not well funded as I thought I would be. Those working at low pay scales today do not have a chance. I also understand that people can do a lot to improve their situation in life, but not all have the skill and or the mental capacity to do that. That does not make them bad, like those who waste their lives; it just makes me feel sad for their future.