This Fight is Our Fight: The Battle to Save Working People. Elizabeth Warren
Alexander replied that if he could decide, there would be no minimum.
No minimum wage at all. Not $15.00. Not $10.00. Not $7.25. Not $5.00. Not $1.00.
The comment was delivered quite casually. It wasn’t a grand pronouncement shouted by a crazy, hair-on-fire ideologue. Instead, a longtime U.S. senator stated with calm confidence that if an employer could find someone desperate enough to take a job for fifty cents an hour, then that employer should have the right to pay that wage and not a penny more. He might as well have said that employers could eat cake and the workers could scramble for whatever crumbs fall off the table.
For just a blink, I wasn’t in a heavily paneled Senate hearing room. I wasn’t sitting at an elevated dais. I didn’t have an aide seated behind me and cameras pointed my way.
FOR JUST A blink, I was a skinny sixteen-year-old girl, back in Oklahoma City. It was early in the fall, and I had just started my senior year of high school.
By then we were a small family: all that was left of us was Mother, Daddy, and me. My three older brothers had each in turn left for the military, gotten married, and were starting families of their own.
Like every family, we’d had our ups and downs, but from my teenage perspective, life felt a little steadier again. Mother answered phones at Sears, and Daddy sold lawn mowers and fences. Two paychecks. It had been a couple of years since the bill collectors had called or people had threatened to take away our home. Late at night, I no longer heard the muffled sounds of my mother crying.
But it was still tough. There was no extra money, no breathing room. I waited tables and babysat. I picked up a few dollars sewing and ironing, although nothing regular. I was sixteen—sixteen and watching the world slip away. This was my last year of high school, and it looked like everyone at Northwest Classen had a future, everyone except me. All my friends were talking about college. They went on nonstop as they compared schools and sororities and possible majors. No one seemed to worry about what it would cost. Me? I didn’t have the money for a college application, much less tuition and books. Some days it seemed like college might as well have been on the moon.
It was a miserable time in my life.
One night my mother and I had another fight about what I should do after high school. I look back now and realize that she was trying her best. She worked long hours, and she sometimes seemed stretched to the breaking point.
On this one night, it all spun out of control. She had been yelling at me. Why was I so special that I had to go to college? Did I think I was better than everyone else in the family? Where would the money come from? I did the usual: I stared at the floor in silence, and when I’d had enough, I retreated to my bedroom. But this time, retreat wasn’t enough. She followed me into my room and kept yelling. I finally jumped up from my desk and screamed at her to leave me alone.
Quick as lightning, she hit me hard in the face.
I think we were both stunned. She backed out of my room. I stuffed a handful of clothes into a canvas bag and raced out the front door.
Hours later, Daddy found me downtown, sitting on a bench at the bus station. My face was red, and I was still shaking. I was hurt—hurt and discouraged.
Everything in my life seemed wrong.
Daddy sat down beside me on the bench, and for a long time he said nothing. Both of us stared ahead. After a while, he asked if I was hungry. He walked over to a vending machine and brought back some cracker sandwiches. Then he asked me if I remembered the time after his heart attack, those hard months when he and Mother were sure they were about to lose the house.
I remembered.
It had been nearly four years earlier. After his heart attack, Daddy had been in the hospital for a long time, and when he came home he was gray and even quieter than usual. He spent hours sitting alone, smoking cigarettes and looking off into space. He moved into the tiny bedroom that had been left empty when my brother David joined the army.
For months, my mother carried around Kleenex or the cheap off-brand she usually bought. She worked the tissues into shreds, leaving them balled up in ashtrays and on her dresser. But she always had one ready in case she started to cry. And she cried a lot.
Daddy said it was the worst time in his life. Worse than when the doctors thought the lumps on his neck were cancer. Worse than when his best friend, Claude, died. Worse than when he was in a terrible car crash and smashed through the windshield and tore his shoulder open.
“Your mother was at home when they took the station wagon,” he said, his voice low. “And then they said they were going to take the house. She cried every night.”
He paused for a long time. “I just couldn’t face it.”
Sitting there on the bench in the bus station, he told me that he had failed and that the shame had nearly killed him. He wanted to die. He wanted to disappear from our lives and from the earth and from everything that had gone wrong. He would think about how bad things were and ask whether this was the night to leave my mother and me.
What happened? I asked.
Daddy sat silently for a long time, caught somewhere in his memories of those awful days. He still didn’t look at me. Finally, he took my hand in both of his and held it tightly.
It got better, he said. Your mother found work. We made some payments. After a while, I went back to work. We had less money, but it was enough to get by. We got caught up on the mortgage. You seemed to do okay.
Finally he turned and looked at me. “Life gets better, punkin.”
My daddy said, “Life gets better, punkin.”
And that’s how I’d always remembered this moment: my daddy telling me to hang on, that no matter how bad it feels, life gets better. I had carried that story in my pocket for decades. It was how I made it through the painful parts. Divorce. Disappointments. Deaths. Whenever things got really tough, I would pull out that story and hold it in my mind. I’d hear my daddy’s voice, and I’d always feel better. By now, his line was a part of me.
Life gets better, punkin.
IT WAS JUST a blink before I was back in that fancy hearing room again. But that’s all it takes—just a blink—to change someone’s life. My daddy’s life. My mother’s life. My life.
As I walked back to my office, I thought about how close my family had come to disaster. After my daddy’s heart attack, we were tumbling down a hill toward a cliff, and we had been just about to go over the edge when my mother grabbed a branch—a job at Sears. She was fifty years old, and for the first time in her life she had a job with a paycheck. She answered phones and took catalog orders. In a cramped room with no windows, eight women, mostly hard-pressed mothers like her, sat all day long, ready to help customers who called. She wore high heels and hose, and every day she and her coworkers took forty minutes for lunch and two breaks that lasted exactly ten minutes each.
And she was paid minimum wage.
So when Senator Alexander said there would be no minimum wage if it were up to him, I thought about how much that job had meant to Mother and Daddy and me. My mother’s minimum-wage job not only saved our house—it saved our family. No, it didn’t make our lives perfect. It took years to work off the medical bills from my father’s heart attack. My mother worked and reworked her grocery list to squeeze out every last nickel. The carpet in the living room got worn through to the bare floor. And there were times when my mother’s anxieties took over and she lashed out, and times when my daddy got scary quiet. But we hung together. We made it—shaken, but still standing.
What if Mother hadn’t earned enough money to keep us going after Daddy got sick? We’d already lost the family station wagon. What if we’d lost the house? What would the shame have done to my daddy? And if he had left us forever? What would the