Let me tell you some fun stories, OP.
My best friend has a degree in early childhood education AND teaching home economics (there is an actual name for this degree, I just can’t remember it right now, she would kill me). Yes, she has an ~actual degree from a university~. I know it’s hard to believe, because we so adore thinking that everyone making minimum wage are barely high school graduates (as if there’s anything wrong with that).
Here’s the thing though, she can’t get a job with her home-ec degree because all of the things she could be teaching (culinary arts for example) are being cut from school’s budgets. So they’re downsizing those teachers, not hiring more.
So she uses her early childhood education degree, and she works at a preschool. Bear with me. I know it’s more fun to pretend that the only low-wage jobs in our country are in retail and fast food. Because it’s easier to look down on the people busting their asses to make sure you can shop and eat.
She teaches her students their letters and numbers, how to write their names, counting and sharing and art. She gives her students a solid foundation to be able to enter elementary school.
She makes $8 an hour.
In the city she lives in, depending on what preschool she works at she could make anywhere from $8-10 and hour. It’s not a matter of skill, it’s not a matter of ‘rising above’. There is no above in a preschool, unless it’s the director. And someone making $16,000-$20,000 a year and working 40+ hours a week doesn’t really make enough to go back to school for their master’s degree just for the hopes of making $15.
Before I got into my current field I worked at a different non-profit. Oooh, that’s right. A Non-profit organization. With my degree. I actually did ‘rise up’. I rose up as high as I could withing that organization. As high as ANYONE could, actually, without being either the Executive Director or Assistant Director. I went from making 7.25 to making 8.25. That’s right. I rose as HIGH AS I COULD GO and was still only making a dollar more than minimum wage.
That wasn’t because of my skill, or my drive. I rose from the most entry level position to the position directly under the assistant director in THREE YEARS. But it didn’t matter because greed is everywhere, even in non-profits, and the AD and ED were making six figures a year while the rest of us were starving. The AD and ED were also the only people in the org allowed to work full time. This wasn’t because there wasn’t enough work, this was because they didn’t have to give us any insurance if we didn’t work full time hours.
Greed is everywhere. THAT’s why people don’t have living wages. Corporations are making billions of dollars a year, their employees are getting their food from food banks.
