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He didn’t recognize me at all.
    With unwavering support like that, it’s not really a mystery why I’ve rarely felt huge personal drive to make more money for the people signing my checks. I’m as loyal as they pay me to be, basically. Most of the people I know are the same way. It’s only logical. See, if we perform really well, give it a full 120percent, we might make shift manager. That’s a whole extra $2 an hour. For that $2 or so, we get to be in the direct line of fire for the profit margins. We get to be held responsible for things outside our control.
    And we get to be stuck.
    If you’re working at your typical service job, shift manager is about as high as you can get, because for every four or six shift managers, there’s only one general manager position. But let’s say that the company treats everyone so poorly that turnover is high. Then you might make assistant or even general manager, at which point you’ll earn somewhere between $20,000 and $35,000 in exchange for physically punishing, emotionally draining eighty- or ninety-hour weeks. (Salaries in cities are generally higher, but both companies I worked for capped out in the mid-$30,000 range.) I’ll put it this way: As general manager for a chain restaurant, I got eight days of maternity leave after I had my second daughter. Unpaid.
    It’s not like we don’t wish for more, but really, what’s the better option? School is an investment that doesn’t make sense for people who aren’t the academic sort. You have to pay cash money for it, you can’t hold down as many hours at work, it’s harder to find work because your schedule’s inflexible, and dear God the cost of textbooks is enough to kill you. Hell, I
am
the academic sort, and for many years school wasn’t a good investment for me. It left me in debt with nothing to show for it.
    Before I moved into the service economy, I tried to make a more fulfilling, less backbreaking living working in politicalorganizing. To be clear: The jobs that I worked at in politics weren’t exactly highly paid either. They were typically in the $8 to $10 hourly range. I laughed my ass off when people went digging through my financial history after my essay on poverty was published and found the Federal Election Commission filings of my political pay. (Pro tip for amateur PI sorts: Those numbers? That’s how much I got for the
whole year
,
not per paycheck. Seriously, how much do you really think they pay someone to knock on doors or coordinate other people doing it?) The dark truth of many fulfilling, creative jobs and industries is that you are expected to accept very little pay at the start, just for the privilege of learning the ropes and working your way up. And that’s fine if you’ve got Mom and Dad helping you. But if not, you tend not to go into those fields. Which means that the people who do go into those fields are often pretty privileged; not many Congressional staffers come out of the lower class.
    And it’s not just about how little you are paid in fields like politics. It’s also the stuff you’re expected to do in addition. For example, there are constant training sessions during the off-season. Most of them cost money and are held in Washington, DC. All of my friends who still work in politics went to them. I didn’t. All of my friends who took short-term, low-pay jobs with people who could be mentors are still working in politics. I had to turn those jobs down—the ones I was offered, anyway. Often I didn’t even bother to send in my résumé in the first place, because I knew I couldn’t afford to workfor so little. Mostly, I found myself perpetually stuck on the bottom rung, watching people I’d started out with vault above me because they weren’t doing anything but this and they could afford to take the financial hits while they were paying their dues.
    Here’s another thing the poor can’t afford: unpaid internships. I’ve had to turn down offers that might have