As the title says, if you’re willing to put forth a minimum of 40 hours per week to a job — full time hours, in other words — then you should be well off. Your income should reflect your efforts accordingly, and you should be living comfortably making more than enough money to meet all living expenses, and still have some left over to do with as you please — save up, treat yourself, invest, whatever.
That’s how it should be. Don’t let the overachievers and hard workers fool you: 40 hours per week IS A LOT of YOUR TIME to dedicate to ONE THING.
No more poverty wages for people willing to dedicate 1/3 of their entire day for five days a week. No more “barely making ends meet” for someone willing to sacrifice time and comfort in exchange for labor and pay.
Whether you’re researching and developing cures for diseases, marketing from an office cubical, sweating outside in the sun doing construction, waiting on tables, making phone calls in a call center, flipping burgers on a grill, hustling sick patients around hospitals, or taking money at a cash register counter, if you’re working no less than 40 hours, then goddamn it, you DESERVE wages to support yourself comfortably.
Oh sure, higher skills deserve to make more than lower skills. I recognize and agree with that notion.
Let me emphasize: If you’re working 40+ hours at a MINIMUM-SKILL job, you should be living COMFORTABLY above the poverty line.
If you’re working 40+ hours at a job that requires a certain trade or skill level, you should be living IN LUXURY — poverty should be so far behind you, it shouldn’t even be a thought in your mind.
Now, when I say “comfortably above the poverty line” I don’t mean settling for renting some room from a shady stranger in the airport district with bars on the windows where gunshots are the music of the night.
I’m talking able to afford a 1bd1ba house or apartment, rent OR own, complete with utilities, transportation, internet + phone, all while requiring ZERO financial assistance and NEVER stressing about not having enough to pay all bills on time, at bare minimum.
So, let’s make it happen. Let’s manifest this energy and make it so, because I’m tired of feeling like I get next to NOTHING for the 40 hours I am CURRENTLY working, and the shoddy pay that doesn’t keep up with the cost of living. (And I make $4 above the state minimum wage, so this shit is ridiculous.)