By Evelyn Rafael
Seeing the insensitive article recently published by the Las Vegas Review-Journal took me back to my childhood and watching my mother struggle to feed our family of three on a minimum wage job. The circumstances surrounding her having to stop being a stay at home mom to having to go stock shelves in the middle of the night, come home get my sister and me ready for school, then go leave and work as a cashier, bore some semblance to the situation that many are facing now.
In the wake of the 2007 recession in Las Vegas, my mom no longer had the luxury of staying home and had to work to get us out of the financial hole we found ourselves in after we had lost our home.
My mother is what solely kept our household afloat. Now, minimum wage workers are what is keeping our society afloat. Without them working countless hours, every single day we would be lost. Not only did minimum wage workers deserve a raise back in 2007 when my mom was working tirelessly so that she could keep a roof over our heads, and food in our stomachs, but now more than ever do these essential workers deserve to earn a liveable wage.
The editorial thoughtlessly stated that “Seventy-five cents an hour may not sound like much — to someone who’s never had to make payroll.” But it’s obvious that the authors are ignorant to the struggles of those working minimum wage jobs where seventy-five cents often means the difference between being able to pay rent and afford food to feed your family, or having to choose between the two and figure out how to keep your family fed, and with a roof over their heads.
The essential workers providing us with the services we need to continue living a relatively normal life do not deserve to be having to stretch $8.25 an hour to make all of their ends meet. They should be making at the very least $12 an hour. It is understandable to worry about the small businesses who may struggle to pay their workers a liveable wage, but that is why it is an incremental wage increase, so all Nevadans, business owners, and members of the workforce alike are able to pay/earn a liveable wage.
With the COVID-19 crisis upon us, as stated in the editorial, “A whole lot of Nevadans are finding out that the true minimum wage is $0 an hour.” Everyone reentering the workforce is going to need that extra seventy-five cents when applying it to all the bills they’ve missed. But also so that they can spend money and increase consumer spending so that money can be injected back into our economy and so Nevada can come out of this crisis stronger than ever before.
Evelyn Rafael is an Organizing Fellow with One APIA Nevada, and an undergraduate student at the University of Nevada Las Vegas majoring in biochemistry.