My Low Wager Life

From March of this year until shortly before I left for school, I worked for minimum wage at a local batting cage. Although I had held another minimum wage job the summer before my sophomore year working as a lifeguard, this was the first real look into the low wage life. I was too immature at my first job to really see the value of it and did not care whether I was fired or not. I had no expenses back then, but that was definitely not the case with my past job. At the batting cage, I felt the pressure to work way harder than I ever expected to. As you work a minimum wage job, you realize that the work you are doing could be done by almost anyone. I was not any more or less qualified to get the job than any other teenager in search of a job. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. This makes you realize that you are completely expendable. The management made my fellow employees and me completely aware of that fact too. I went into the job thinking at working at a batting cage would be fun, but that was not the case. Half my job was running around the facility making sure that everything was running smoothly. I would constantly be moving back and forth through the place, even if it meant rechecking something that I had just checked. There was never a moment of downtime because if management saw you lounging around, they gave you a task that was much worse than anything else you would have been doing. This leads me to the other half of my job, cleaning. Never in my life did I expect to do so much cleaning at a batting cage, but clean that place top to bottom I did many times. It was difficult work, but I managed to get through it without a complaint. You could not complain, unless you wanted to be looking for another job next week. The business did not have time to deal with employees complaints. They needed people to show up, do the work they were told to do efficiently, and then leave.

Working a low wage job seems like it was designed for kids still in school. The ability to make money to fund their lives, but not have to worry about paying rent or buying groceries yet. With inconsistent scheduling, I would sometimes not even make enough money to do that. I could not imagine trying to live off of those wages and at my job, no one was trying to. It was a job for teens and should be for teens only. But as I was reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s story of her venture into low wage life, I could not help but notice the similarities between her work and mine. While people are not trying to support themselves off of a batting cage job, many people are trying to while working one or two very similar jobs. I would be exhausted after five or six hour shifts, I could not imagine working a ten hour shift or proceeding to work another shift right after finishing. After graduating, I hope to never work another job like that in my life.