WBEZ Curious City
May 22, 2013
A listener who hustles to make ends meet wants us to consider people who hustle for even less.
From WBEZ Curious City:
Listener Maggie Cassidy recently got a master’s degree in urban planning. She hasn’t found a job in her field yet, so she’s now working for about $10 an hour at two different part-time jobs. She said her own hustle has made her think seriously about people who hustle for even less. Little wonder, then, that she asked Curious City:
What is it like to live on a minimum-wage job in Chicago?
And Maggie got even more specific. She wanted to know who lives on Illinois’ state minimum wage of $8.25 an hour, and why.
“What is it like for people for whom this is their only option?” Maggie asked.
Well, it’s an opportune time for this question, because low-wage work is increasingly common in the Chicago area and nationwide. Since the 2008 recession, the majority of job growth has been in lower-wage positions, while middle class jobs have bounced back more slowly.
Recent debates at the national, state and local level about what the minimum wage should be, and whether raising that minimum wage is bad or good for business, have brought the issue to the forefront. Here I’m going to focus on Maggie’s very personal question: What is it like to live here in Chicago on minimum wage, and who does it?
Someone who’s been waiting for us to ask
Krystal Maxie-Collins was 28 years old when I interviewed her for this story. Her last birthday (May 23), didn’t go as planned.
“Last year sucked,” said Maxie-Collins. She’s worked at Macy’s downtown for two years at minimum wage, with commissions on top of that. She has another part-time minimum wage job conducting phone interviews for a research center. Last May 23 she was expecting a decent deposit — nearly $500 — to drop into her account in the early evening.
She planned to do something fun, maybe get her hair done or go out. “My check did not hit until 11:53 that night,” she said. “I’m like, it’s my birthday and all I did was sit around the house waiting on my money to hit my account.”
Maxie-Collins has four children (the oldest is nine, the youngest is three), a fiance who also works a minimum wage job downtown, and very little free time.
“I have been waiting for someone to ask me about how my day goes,” said Maxie-Collins, settling into a soft gray chair in her West Englewood home.
A typical day for Maxie-Collins starts around 6 a.m. She gets dressed, makes breakfast, gets her kids ready for the day and flies out the door to a bus to get downtown. Selling shoes at Macy’s is a grind: She has to meet daily sales quotas in order to qualify for commissions. She takes few breaks, she says. After Macy’s, Maxie-Collins often hurries to her other job, where she sometimes stays until ten at night. She attends jobs several days a week, but her schedule varies.
Her brother-in-law cares for the kids while their parents are at work, and her two older children are with their father in Indiana for the year because Maxie-Collins didn’t want them to be in Chicago Public Schools, at least not while some schools are threatened with closure.
Despite constantly working, Maxie-Collins says she’s barely surviving.
“At the end of the week, I still don’t have enough money to put food on the table or clothes on my kids’ back, buy them shoes or school supplies,” she said. She buys a weekly CTA pass because she never has enough on hand for the month, and she and her fiance barely cover the household bills.
