If you are at all competent at your job, you are able to earn more than minimum wage.
Everybody can give a great sob story about their life without falsifying any facts. We all suffer unfairly in individual ways. Women are particularly good at tugging on the heartstrings and manipulating to get what they want. Straight white men, generally speaking, find this approach beneath them. Can you picture a straight WASP standing up in public to give a tearjerker story about hard his life is?
Washington Post: Bernie Sanders did a town hall event Monday morning in Iowa Falls, Iowa. He asked the crowd for testimonials about the difficulties of sustaining a life off of $12,000 a year.
What happened next is both hard to watch/listen to and important. A woman is called on and she emotionally tells the story of her life — minimum wage jobs despite a degree, on disability and living with her parents. Here’s a snippet of what she said:
“It’s so hard to do anything to pay your bills, you’re ashamed all the time…when you can’t buy presents for your children it’s really really really hard – and I work 3, 4, 5 jobs sometimes, always minimum wage, I have a degree, divorced and it’s just I’m waiting for disability to come through so my parents have to support me – it’s just hard.”
Sanders thanked her and the crowd applauded. Then he said this: “It is not easy for people to stand up and say that but the truth is that until millions of people who are experiencing what you’re experiencing do say that we don’t make change.”
