My story, from Auset Sesheta, former Community Organizer with Kentucky Jobs With Justice:

I was a wheelchair runner at an airport.  I wheeled people with disabilities from the front door to the plane, and helped them with every step in between. I worked 8 hours a day.  I loaded luggage, I took off shoes for security checks, helped people use the restroom, and helped them into the plane.  If we were short-staffed, I wheeled two people at a time.  It was hard work. 

For this work, I made 5.15 an hour plus tips.  I remember the one day that I made $49 in tips because I never made close to that again.  People tipped a dollar, maybe two, but it was never enough to get by.

When you work a minimum wage job, you have to decide what you can afford.  I couldn’t afford to make ends meet on this pay.  I was paying $400 in rent for a two-bedroom apartment for me and my son.  I had to cover utilities, so I let my phone go off.  The health insurance plan would have taken too much money from each paycheck, so I had to pay for medical care and prescriptions myself. 

The crazy thing about it is that this wasn’t a part-time job.  It was a full-time job.  But I still couldn’t afford to buy food, and I still had to live in public housing.  It’s hard for a single mom to raise a child on that limited amount of money.  It’s almost impossible.

I’m not saying that people won’t struggle with $7.00, but it won’t be as impossible to live.  And we’d put that money back into the community, at the grocery and at the corner store.  We’d have an incentive to go to work.  These jobs are hard.  These people are the ones cleaning your hotel rooms and scrubbing your dishes, the jobs that they say nobody wants.