Of course not, at least not here in Aspen or Snowmass — unless by “living,” we mean being a bit player in the “nomad” saga, moving from place to place in whatever vehicle you have or with whatever can be conveyed on a bicycle.
This is a two-job lifestyle for service workers with absurd hours: “doubles,” meaning back-to-back, eight-hour shifts or even “triples,” working around the clock. My personal record is a “quintuple” of 40 hours achieved only twice by me but probably matched or exceeded by the young and the energetic determined to hold on to “the dream,” “living the life” or whatever sucks people in here for a few years or, in my case, most of a lifetime.
There was a time when I would have felt anger at the assertion that people don’t want to work and would rather stay home and collect a princely $300 a week on unemployment. Now that I have lost faith in the rationality of the majority of the Former Guy’s Party, I can only laugh. What for some of you people is hardly lunch money isn’t keeping people from working.
Sorry Mitch, but the unemployed are really more rational than you are — they aren’t going to leave the kids at home to fend for food with the family puppy; they’re not going to try to work at a business that’s closed; and they understand virus transmission enough to put their health first and $7.25 an hour in an unsafe workplace second.
My laughter at the arrogance of whipping people back to work or leaving them to starve is hollow laughter. We’ve been, as a nation, to that rodeo before. There is a serious movement in some states to cut everyone off from any extra support in hopes of pressuring people to go back to jobs that are no longer there, require leaving the kids at home with Power Bars, scissors and a bowl of water or return to workplaces where there is still a good chance of getting the virus from the denialists who believe they are immune to illness by virtue of their wonderful physical conditioning and immune system.
Reluctance to return to the good ol’ days has had something of the effect of a general strike. Some notoriously low-wage industries have come up with a solution of their own: raise wages. Are such employers good capitalists or closet socialists who are “woke” to the idea of a living, or at least a non-punitive wage? Whether it’s heartfelt or born of necessity, some employers are getting the memo at last.
As an observer of politics and public policy for 60 years, I believe relatively few of us are pure in our ideologies or our politics. Neither Bill Gates nor Charles Koch is all good or all bad.
Facebook is full of memes about employment on both sides of the argument. On the one hand, there’s a story about the employer who wants a minimum of a master’s degree and perfect background history in return for a shot at $15.24 an hour. Others tell stories about fast-food chains that have raised pay to $15, $17 or $18 an hour and been flooded with applications.
Overqualification is the norm, not the exception here in one of the world’s wealthiest enclaves. Forty years ago, I washed dishes with two guys even more overqualified than me, holders of advanced degrees and happy to argue about the possibility of truly random numbers. Time flies when you’re talking numbers, at least for me.
As so often happens, this valley is on the cutting edge of the wage/work issue and has been since long before COVID. Before I arrived here, I foolishly thought I could support myself on 40 hours a week with manual labor and a hard-won undergraduate degree from a very good school. I was soon in the multi-job lifestyle, where I have since been joined by much of the nation’s workforce — including doctors, lawyers and teachers, some of whom have only one job that really feels like three.
All of which circles back to the housing problem now being experienced by the rest of the country and resorts in particular. When tent camps start popping up behind your local Walmart, on street corners in middle-class subdivisions and along freeways and beach fronts, it creates an awakening dawn that isn’t fully “woke” in the much-maligned sense of the word.
The classic response to informal camps of the indigent has historically been to have law enforcement raid the camps and drive the denizens out of town, a whack-a-mole approach that is comparable in its efficacy to the War on Drugs: they just keep coming back to the Hoovervilles, the bonus army tents, the highway underpasses, the street corners.
What if, instead of declaring war on the indigent, we embraced their humanity and rendered help in the form of services and lodging that enabled work and supported rather than tried to punish?
The reality that we aren’t paying attention to is that housed and supported indigents costs us less than housing them in jail, responding too late to mental breakdowns and herding people from place to place in hopes they will disappear.
Mick Ireland is grateful to the friends, the fair-minded employers and the voters who made it possible for him to get a foothold in this community and wants to see others get that chance. Mick@sopris.net
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Ireland: Can you live on $15 an hour? - Aspen Daily News
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