August 21, 2013

When I was a youth I worked a string of minimum-wage jobs in fast food joints, most noticably when I worked for McDonalds full-time the year after I graduated high school.

I hated that job.



I was treated like shit, the hours were shit, the customers were (largely) shit, management was shit... everything about it sucked except my coworkers, most of which were young people like me.

Except Maria, our older badass morning lady. Who showed up at 5am like a boss Mon-Fri even though she had two kids who she never got to see between her full-time McJob and her other part-time gig somewhere else.

We all respected her in a work-mom kind of way.

One day not too long after I started working there she came in to work late, which was unusual, and looked like she'd been crying.

She told us that one of her kids had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Her little baby. She was heartbroken.

Luckily though, she said, she lives in Canada where a lot of that stuff is paid for or subsidized so she and her husband could afford to pay for all the doctor's visits and insulin and etc her little one would need for the rest of their life.

She thanked her lucky stars that she had a husband who had a job and contributed all he could and that she lived somewhere where the combination of her minimum-wage job and universal health care would be able to provide for her family even with this new burden.

I thought about Maria when I read the Washington Post article about the scheduled fast-food walk out on August 29th.

I thought about

all those people who get paid less than she did back in '05/06 even though it's 2013

who don't have any health care at all

who are working to support their families

sometimes without any help

working way too many hours to try and make ends meet

and

who really, really need things to change.

I hope they're able to get what they want.

*image via Salon

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