Axe-to-grind Ten Percenters.

The other week I was at a protest for a municipality that was seeking to maybe exempt itself from a county-wide minimum wage hike, and then afterwards I stuck around for a beer in that shee-shee suburb and read for a bit, and then when I was leaving I asked a (later middle-aged) (Latina) woman smoking outside for a recommendation for another bar for a nightcap.

She was sitting on a planter, and of course she asked me where I was from, why I was there, etc., and when I mentioned the protest, she was like, "But do you really think that people with no skills should be making fifteen dollars an hour?".

I then tried switching the framing, and being like, "Everyone who works forty hours a week should be able to afford food and modest housing," and then when she replied something to that, I said that employers who paid less were causing "social pollution" and shouldn't be in business, since we regulate pollution pollution, and jobs like that are also harmful to society.

As it turns out, she was in HR negotiating with unions for the boss, and she said that she faced down racism and got an education and her kid was a latch-key kid while she worked 12 hour days, and minimum wage was only $2.65 an hour back then.

"But it's less now, proportionally," and I added that it's a numbers game, and some people might turn out okay, but the more you take away good jobs, the worse social outcomes you have, and we should plan for that dynamic; it's not that morality leads to good jobs, but good jobs lead to morality.

We went down that path a while, and then we both agreed that there should be a massive public works program where anyone who wanted to could work.

"We should have said that from the beginning," she was like.

At some point, too, when I pointed out that if she could front money for her college-age kids to take low-paid internships, she was probably in the top 10% of American families, that really didn't register with her, since she still wanted to claim her roots and lack of privilege.

Later, on thinking back, I realized that it was almost like a cycle of abuse, and that she got hazed economically in her time, and she wanted to turn that pain on others.  In discussing the economy and society, she really wasn't discussing how you make a better world, she was discussing how you set things up so she could feel good about herself in comparison to others, it was almost like she wanted to set everything up so we would just applaud her.

If I had to have that conversation over again, I think I would say that that was just awful how much she had to work while her son was growing up, and we should change things so no-one ever has to do that again.

I'd be interested to see how that approach goes down.