TWO MCDONALD'S WORKERS, two people in very different circumstances: Aleah Lee is 17 years old and lives in material comfort with her parents in Federal Way. Her mom is a bail officer at the Kent jail, and her dad a retired ironworker. Lee works after school for $5.50 an hour so that she can afford extras, like her own phone. In contrast, 42-year-old Rebecca Brown is supporting a family of three on her $6-an-hour salary, including her unemployed husband and their 4-year-old granddaughter. Brown can't afford to buy a burger for lunch, even with the 50 percent discount she gets with her job.
Each of these two represents one archetype that adversaries in the debate over I-688, the minimum-wage initiative, like to highlight. Proponents of the initiative, which would raise the minimum wage to $6.50 per hour in two steps by the year 2000 and subsequently tie it to an inflation index, stress that it would help primary wage earners, while opponents largely portray the potential beneficiaries as teens looking for pocket change.
Depending on which archetype you go with, it becomes more or less important that the federal and state minimum wages have been dropping in buying power. Both used to stick close to the poverty line for a family of three. Today, the federal minimum of $5.15 an hour—which, because it is higher, supersedes Washington's minimum of $4.90 for most jobs—amounts to annual earnings of $10,700—several thousand dollars below that line. The proposed increase to $6.50 would in turn supersede federal law and bring the local minimum back up to the poverty level.
Because of the booming economy, few jobs now pay as little as the minimum wage. But many more pay slightly over. According to recently revised figures by the state Employment Security Department, 212,000 jobs statewide—or 8 percent of the total—pay less than $6.50 and might therefore be affected by the initiative. (An unknown number of those jobs fall into exempt categories.)
Lee and Brown, who work side by side at the bustling McDonald's beneath the ferry dock on Alaskan Way, demonstrate along with their co-workers that people in such jobs include both teens and family breadwinners—and everyone in between, from a formerly homeless young couple to an ex-drug dealer on work-release from jail to a single man in his early twenties. Some have no job experience at all and some have been working at low-paying jobs for years.
Because she is supporting a family, Brown's attempt to make do on her salary is most poignant. An unassuming, thin woman who completed the 11th grade, Brown has worked a variety of jobs around Bremerton, where she lives, including cashier at a stationery store. Her husband, who was laid off a year and a half ago from a job as a mechanic, has had a hard time finding a new job because his toolbox was stolen. He stays at home with their granddaughter, whose mother is unable to care for her.
Brown has come to Seattle to work, she says, because employers here "are paying more than any place in Bremerton." The $6 an hour she now earns is 50 cents above the starting wage at this particular McDonald's.
Yet even if she could get 40 hours per week of work—and last week she could only manage 32 because business was slow—her monthly income of about $1,100 wouldn't add up to her basic expenses. She ticks them off: rent, $530; utilities, $160; phone, $60; food, $350$400; ferry to work, $50. Total: $1,150$1,200.
She says that somehow she manages to "stretch" her income. She pays rent in three installments over each month. Her understanding landlady only occasionally charges the $15 late fee.
Extras are more of a problem. She recently put two new back-to-school outfits for her granddaughter on lay-away. She'll get the clothes in a month and a half—"as long as I don't eat lunch," she says, meaning a lunch bought at work. Today she brought soup from home that she heated in a microwave.
Brown has had to forgo other items for her granddaughter, like school pictures for $12. "There's nothing I can do," she says. "I told her maybe we'll go to Kmart or Wal-Mart later [to get photos taken]." Asked whether the girl felt bad, Brown gets teary for the first time. "I felt worse than she did," she says.
GARRETT OCCIANO, 23, doesn't even try to manage a household on his McDonald's income, even though he's single and, as a manager, makes $7.50 an hour. "You can't live on your own, not with the check I get," he says. A high school graduate who has been working for McDonald's since he was 16, Occiano has been sharing motel rooms with four co-workers on Pacific Highway that rent for between $300 and $400 a week. The rooms typically have two beds; Occiano and two friends take one, a couple takes the other. In a few days, however, Occiano and his friends will move into a two-bedroom apartment in Federal Way, each roommate paying $100 a month.
The couple with whom he lives are Kevin Jones, 27, and Jennifer Stroude, 18, who moved to Seattle a month ago from California. Until they got this job a few weeks ago, Jones says, they were "sleeping under bridges, in cars, on the docks, basically anywhere." Though both make $5.50 per hour, this is Stroude's first job ever, while Jones has worked an assortment of jobs in fast food, construction, and data entry. Living off their salary is "not that easy," he says, "but luckily there's two of us."
