My boss (42F) grew up in poverty in another country but moved to Canada and married a man on a good salary in her early twenties. She has now become used to Costco shopping ($900 a WEEK for a family of 5, she says) fancy vacations multiple times a year, owns 3 homes, and has a Tesla, a Range Rover and another vehicle. She has a very “I did it, so can you” kind of attitude towards poor people and immigrants now, very pull-up-your-bootstraps, “nobody wants to work since the pandemic”. She’s always complaining about the government giving “handouts” to people and stereotyping other immigrants in racist ways, and also complaining about how renters have all the power and poor landlords are powerless.
About 6 years ago she decided to open a daycare out of the basement in her house and expanded it. Now she has 16 kids whose parents pay like $9k/ year each for childcare, plus her husband’s high wage.
I’m her teaching assistant and today she was saying that when the wage in our field gets increased by the government, “everybody will leave their jobs at the grocery store to get qualified in our field. Why would you work in this job if they pay more at (notorious grocery store)?”
I have worked minimum wage jobs almost exclusively up until now. The average wage for a preschool teacher is between $20 and $26 an hour here. When I told her that grocery stores do not, in fact, pay that much, she was SHOCKED.
“They pay minimum wage? Well why do people work there, then?”