Guest Author
Thanksgiving for us was a week in Arkansas with my parents. Despite all that time and the idyllic setting of my parents’ property, it still felt like a whirlwind trip.
There is always too much to do, too much to say, and never enough time for any of it.
In one of the rare moments of quiet, I sat with my father and talked. He will be retiring in a few years, and he is not sure what he wants to do. I have never known my father as a nervous man — just the opposite, in fact — but his uncertainty about his future was palpable.
I noticed similar anxiety with my mother when she retired not long ago.
It’s a tough conversation to have because my parents are people who love their work, appreciate a job well done and don’t quit until it’s done right.
I offered advice to my father, which in hindsight feels condescending and weird. What do I know about what he is going through? What do I know about coping with an arbitrary deadline to…just stop. And, by the way, why should he? He’s in his mid-60s and is perfectly capable of doing his work.
It wasn’t about me. It was about us, my family. (The way Thanksgiving should be.) My father, like many of us, struggled early, but he and my mother earned a good living for our family.
And then Finnegan, my 18-month-old son, toddled into the room.
I began to wonder about his working life. I started working for my father when I was a little boy. A little later, I had a job bussing tables at a Mexican restaurant. That didn’t last long. But I worked in the movie theater selling popcorn and tickets and cleaning up spilt Cokes and popcorn and candy.
It was a great job. Paid minimum wage, about $4.50 an hour. I don’t know if my dad ever had a minimum-wage job. If he did, it was probably about $1.25 or so.
What will Finnegan’s first job be? A minimum wage job?
Probably. But what will that get him? Not the same as what it got me (gas for my 1968 Camaro). Not the same as what it got his Granddaddy.
See, the minimum wage does get raised, but not enough to cover rising costs. The minimum wage has effectively remained stagnant for years.
The news gets even worse. It’s not just the minimum wage that hasn’t kept pace. Average wages have stagnated as well — wages that you’re working much harder for. Since about 1979, the average worker has improved his productivity by as much as 75 percent while the value of his wage has remained the same.
All of this news is worse still for Finn’s older sister, Emeline. Last year, the wage gap between men and women actually increased.
The gap between the wealthy and the rest of society has grown over decades, with no end in sight, and no apparent political will to fix it. For the foreseeable future, the exorbitantly wealthy will continue to accumulate vast amounts of money, while the rest of us work harder for significantly less.
My father provided us a good life, but he never worked for the money. He worked because he loved what he did.
That is the lessons I want my son — and daughter — to learn about work: to find the meaning in it, to make a difference, to be fulfilled, happy.
After a lifetime of hard work, my father’s conundrum turns out to be something of a luxury. He can afford to think about what he wants to do next (which, when he told me, sounds not unlike what he does now).
Wherever he works, will Finnegan earn a decent wage so that he’ll have the opportunity to plan his own future?
