Doing Work for Hard-Working Families
Problem:
Eric and I have held oodles of very different jobs. Here's a list: bookseller, McDonald’s cashier, factory worker, shop foreman for a construction company, maintenance worker at a state park, newspaper reporter, office assistant, courier, audio/visual equipment operator, audio/visual specialist, college professor, substitute teacher, children's writing instructor, home theatre sales associate, customer service associate in a bank, residence life assistant at a college, and phone surveyor. Most of these jobs are the kind that could best be most kindly described as “learning experiences.–
Partly because of these variegated occupations and partly because of where we've been lucky enough to end up in our careers, we have intense sympathy for hard-working families. We know first-hand how hard it can be to sweat all day and feel depressed by the lack of digits in our paychecks, to watch the walls of a cubicle, to live below the poverty line and live payday to payday, to run up credit card debt to make ends meet, to lack health care and have to struggle through illness because we couldn't afford a doctor's visit. Now that we're in better financial positions, we want to do more to help the kind of people we used to call co-workers, the kind of people we still think of as friends.
Work is something Americans think of as the most identifying quality of a person after their name, and yet we tend to treat our hardest working Americans as lesser citizens, as if their low-paying jobs are their own fault. It's a myth that working harder will necessarily make you more money: we know folks who've slaved away at 60-hour-per-week jobs with no advancement. It's a myth that a higher education means a better paying gig: we know PhDs who work in bookstores. There's a myth in
The American Dream shouldn't be work. The American Dream shouldn't be to make ends meet. The American Dream should be pleasure in all its permutations like spending time with your friends and family, doing things that strengthen, stimulate, and lift our bodies, minds and spirits.
We owe it to one another to care more about how we all make a living. It's that last word, “living,– that we seem to forget.
Photo thanks to this hard worker.
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Make Progress:
The Declaration of Independence reaffirms that we all have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But it's hard to pursue happiness when you lack health care, when you run up ridiculous dept to survive, when you can barely pay for meals, when you can't see an end in sight for a desk job that you despise. It's hard to pursue happiness when you bring work home with you, literally and mentally. Work is hard for all of us, nurses to farmers, temp workers to truck drivers, pastors and cops and folks who man the factory belts.
Dear readers, work is one of the few things that unites us all as people and states. It's about time we made some 9-to-5 progress.
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