sigh

[dragonlady7]

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i looked it up and minimum wage is going up for upstate NY this year.

I’ve been at this job since 2007, and I’d started just above minimum, and by throwing holy tantrums I’d managed to get myself a couple of raises, but these minimum wage increases have now caught up to those, and now every year they surpass them, and every year I get my first paycheck and it’s at last year’s minimum wage rate and we have to call the boss, who lives in PA where they haven’t increased the minimum wage in ten years or more, and we have to tell him he’s underpaying all of us, and after some kerfuffle I get my raise and now I’m making minimum again.

At this point I’m the only one who knows how to do everything I know how to do, and if I left they’d be screwed, but. Minimum wage, and if they could pay me less, they would.

It doesn’t entirely matter; Dude makes four or five times what I make, and even though he’s long since paid back all the money I spent getting him through his last year of college and paying off his car and all, he still figures we’re even and don’t need to keep track. Which is a huge privilege.

It just makes me think, you know, I’ve hung onto this job because they’re willing to let me work whenever, provided I stay within a range of availability, and the job’s not hard and is in some ways satisfying.

But really. They’re paying me the least they legally can. I could go out and get any other job and make this much, or more. Why do I bother? It’s basically charity, on my part, to keep coming in, with the decade of experience I now have, and the bachelor’s degree they’ve never cared about (it was supposed to be a temporary summer job in ‘07 while I lined up some other things…. ha).

Anyway.

I could be making more money right now if they laid me off and let me collect unemployment. Mostly what I’m doing is filling in and doing the work of the other employees who’ve cut their hours down so they can collect the unemployment bonus. I don’t mind, but it does sort of sting. You know what I could do if I were being paid to stay home? Well, we know what I did do, I went and taught MM’s kids how to read.

Anyway.

I shouldn’t complain; the fact that I don’t need to worry about money is an incredible privilege, and one I can only have because I’ve had such incredible fortune in finding a stable relationship with a reliable person. I can’t afford not to work at all, but as long as I’m earning something it doesn’t matter that much.

If only they could afford to pay me even a token amount at the farm, I’d walk out of this place and never come back. But they really can’t. So I’ll stay on there as a seasonal volunteer, and keep schlepping back across the state to put in some hours for minimum, here, because I have to come back here to see my dude anyway. It’s a holding-pattern of a life, but it is what it is. (Your picture was not posted)