One stereotype of customers who use food shelves is that they are lazy and should just get a job. The truth is that 60% of those who visit food shelves have jobs.
I recently visited an open mic at Ginko Coffee house in St. Paul where I met Lauren Martinez Catlin. I thought her spoken word poem, The Math Works, communicated the frustrations the working poor encounter.
Enter Lauren Martinez Catlin
I am a story teller. I wanted to speak to the misconceptions about the poor in our midst by telling the story of minimum wage. No amount of jargon and rhetoric can rival the power of a human story simply told. The story I chose is not complicated or remarkable in any way. It is one woman, working to support herself and her child.
The numbers I use in the poem were carefully researched to reflect the cost of living in the Twin Cities. The challenges she faces are utterly common: school supplies, doctor visits, worn out shoes, Christmas presents, escalating rent, hunger, and cold. These kinds of issues can pile up and crush the spirit, but none of them are unsolvable. They can all be helped, and we can be part of helping.
This poem started when my good friend invited me to perform a spoken word poem at an event she was organizing to promote A Minnesota Without Poverty, an interfaith coalition to end poverty in Minnesota by 2020. I’d never heard of the organization before, and I didn’t get any direction on what kind of piece to perform. When I sat down at my desk and thought about poverty, my first thought was about minimum wage.
What struck me was not that minimum wage is so completely impossible to live on, it’s that minimum wage is almost possible to live on. It kind of works on paper. A person could potentially pay rent, transportation, and groceries on minimum wage. But it doesn’t account for illness, for losing some hours at work, for rent hikes, gas prices, cost of food inflation, new shoes, schools supplies, or shifting bus routes.
Minimum wage leaves a person not only poor, but feeling stupid. The practice of paying a person a little less than they can survive on deprives hardworking people of their independence. But perhaps more insidious than that, it slowly dismantles their belief that they are capable of being independent. It first robs them of their power, and then shames them for being powerless.
