How She Lives on Minimum Wage: One McDonald’s Worker’s Budget
More: How She Lives on Minimum Wage: One McDonald’s Worker’s Budget
Earlier this week, McDonald’s made headlines for offering a sample budget to its employees living on minimum wage.
Instead, the company’s goodwill gesture seemed to highlight the near impossibility of surviving on that level of pay. For example, the budget assumed the worker had two jobs.
To find out what it’s like living on minimum wage, we asked one McDonald’s worker. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation with Carman Iverson, 28, in Kansas City, MO.
When did you start working at McDonald’s?
I started working there in April 2012.
How much do you make per hour?
$7.35. When I first started working there, I was making $7.25.
When did you get the extra ten cents an hour?
When the President [of the U.S.] raised our minimum wage. [Ed. note: She was mistaken; On January 1, 2013, the minimum wage was raised to $7.35 because in 2006, Missouri voted for an annual cost of living adjustment in the minimum wage. The previous few years, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 was higher, so Missouri followed the federal minimum.]
How many hours do you work per week?
I work close to 27 hours one week, and then I might work 20 hours the next week.
How do they decide how many hours you work per week?
They decide by how many days you get on the schedule.
So, even if you wanted to work 40 hours a week, you couldn’t do it?
I couldn’t do it.
What’s the fewest hours you ever worked in a week?
18 hours.
How much do you make after taxes each month?
Probably $200-something, some paychecks are $300-something. Between $400-$600 a month.
How much is your rent?
My rent is $650.
How many bedrooms do you have?
Three.
Do you have children?
I have four — 11, 7, 4 and 5.
If you make, on average, $500 a month and your rent is $650 a month, how can you afford your house?
I have a landlord that works with us. I’m kind of on my last little leg, because I’ve been late on rent. I’m actually behind three months in rent.
If you only ever make $400-$600 and your rent is $650, can you ever pay your rent?
Sometimes I can pay it, sometimes I can’t. I get paid twice a month, and both checks go to rent and the rest of it goes to utilities to the point where I don’t have any money left to buy anything for my kids — to buy them clothes, shoes or anything they need.
If all of your money is going to your rent and your utilities, how do you feed yourself and your four children?
I get food stamps. I get about $543 a month.
Is that enough to feed everybody?
Not really, because they eat so much. They’re growing kids, so they eat a lot. The food can be gone by the time I get to my next food stamp day. And then we have to wait two more weeks before my food stamps come next month, before I can get something to eat, and then I have to ask my sister for food and all that.
The comments are especially sickening. The commenters, the usual frothing wingnuts. excoriate Carman for having four children. Why didn’t she use birth control? You would think that Birth Control is totally free and being handed out by Planned Parenthood on every street corner and you just have to be stubborn and a welfare queen not to take it.
Also, a few people did ask the logical question “Why pay the CEO’s such obscene salaries?” To which the wingnuts answered BECAUSE THEY ARE TOTALLY WORTH IT!! IF THEY DIDN’T GET PAID WHAT THEY ARE WORTH, THEY WOULD GO SOMEWHERE ELSE.
To which I say to all the CEO’s who think they are not getting paid what they are worth:
GET GOING!
