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High-School Bathroom Cleaner: "$15/Hr Salary Will Change Everything"
Presented without comment...
My job is what’s called a “restricted” position — the California education code’s name for specially funded positions that can employ only people who meet certain conditions (they’re from impoverished areas or have disabilities, for example). Restricted workers have a set wage rate, which means I haven’t been able to ask for a raise, and I can’t earn overtime.
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"work is not the hardest part of my life. The hardest part is saying goodbye to my 4-year-old son when he asks me not to go to work again."
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The one thing that hasn’t been good about the job is the pay. When I started 10 years ago, I made $8.65 per hour; now I make $9.85 per hour.
But I just learned that’s going to change. SEIU Local 99, the union that represents me and more than 30,000 other school workers here, just negotiated a new contract that will raise my pay to $15 per hour by 2016. This is a big deal for the 20,000 of us who make the district’s lowest wages and are covered by the raises. It might be an even bigger deal around the rest of the United States, since $15 per hour is the goal of a movement in cities around the country to improve the lives of working people.
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I’m not exactly sure how my life will be at $15 per hour. I’ve never made that much money, and I’ve been doing custodial work since I was 15. I started out while I was still going to school myself, as a part-time custodian at St. Nicholas, a parochial school in the San Fernando Valley. Back then, in 1997, I was making $7.25 an hour. After I graduated from San Fernando High School, the parochial school offered me a permanent position, and I worked there for four years, eventually making $8.50 per hour. Later, I jumped to Van Nuys High.
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So a raise like this won’t just give workers more — it will give the district happier parents.
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the janitor might be in for a big suprise, his 65% raise will surely affect his govt. entitlements, and get him closer to the dead-zone,( middle-class).
Say goodbye to Obama Care subsidies.....$6.000 a year in premiums plus a $5,000 deductable. Holy shit he just went in the hole for a grand!
LOL: The saint vs the sinner. Or the noble savage vs the salt of the earth. LOL
Cleaning is an art and skill, thats why those who have the means to do so hire people to clean for them. Yes romba helps keep up with what should be normal housekeeping.
But its a big gap to think even super romba could do any professional job without help.
Some dont consider cleaning to be a skill or an art. They are wrong, you have been cleaning your house and doing laundry with out understading how cleaning products should be used.
A sure sign you are cleaning wrongly is the over use of detergent. It damages and can interfere with cleaning if used wrongly.
As for value of janators, its a skill that only an experienced janator can teach.
Janators arn't stupid or lazy or even better or worse then anyone else. They happen to be just like you, whether you want to admit it or not.
Not like me, they have cleaner bogs.
"So a raise like this won’t just give workers more — it will give the district happier parents"
lets see how happy they are when their property taxes go up to pay for the raise.
20,000 currently earning the minimum x 2080 hours worked per year = 41,600,000 total hours x $5 raise =$208 million per year in increased wages, excluding the cost of employer paid payroll taxes. No doubt there are a lot of part time positions...but the increased cost will still be huge. But WTF...it's not like the district has to earn the money, I'm sure all the "happier parents" don't mind if their taxes increase.
Perhaps if the Rothschilds were to give 1% of 1% of their money into the payroll, it would fund everything.
The problem is the govt already steals enough money from the masses but always claims poverty. They have enough money to by MRAPs, lots of Ammunition, drones, NSA spying costs lots of money and DHS costs more. That's just domestically. Lets look at all the money they use to bomb people all over the world that for the most part did nothing to us but live in a nation that had something we wanted cheap. What about all the money given to foreign nations for their, wink wink, cooperation in keeping their people down. When stealing from peter to give to paul, paul is always more than helpful. The biggest obstacle for the poor to better their position in life is govt. Too many regulation and permits that regular people can't afford. Thanks to guaranteed student loans, colleges have no need to drop prices or be competitive. The opposite has rusulted. The price of education has gone exponential thanks to small well intentioned minds.
Let me ask the most obvious of questions:
Why THE FUCK does someone who makes less than $10/hr today in Kalifornia make the decision to BREED??? I felt bad for the guy until I read that.
At some point you have to either have to decide to make the best of your plight and work your way out of it ... or not.
Stone Age men would breed, and they earnt nothing by way of fiat currency. Perhaps they seek more money so that they can breed in comfort. Got a problem with that?
They pay them to breed in CA, literally thousands of dollars per kid in cash and benefits, and if you can work the system you can turn watching your kids into a full time union gig
Breed early. Breed often.
The real result of this is that there will be dirtier restrooms as they are cleaned less often. There are always consiquences.
Interesting to note, because the Union dues are calculated based on the hourly pay, the SEIU stands to benefit up to 31% increase in its dues revenue. Follow the money?
Obummercare and $10 a loaf bread should wipe that increase out.
Whistle while you work...
Whistle while you work...
High School Bathroom Cleaner
Siggghhh... my opinion of zh readers is being revised sharply downwards. Don't be so quick to pass judgment. Retail and service jobs that were once held by teenagers are now being done by adults trying to support kids. Ya know why? There's nothing else out there. Blue collar jobs you can live on are fucking gone. Nor is a college degree any guarantee. Do I sound illiterate to you? A year ago I was making $9 an hour packing meat. I'm now making much better money as a freelancer, but only because I have an unorthodox skill set and a family connection. Without the connection the skill set wouldn't have helped. The kicker? I hold three college degrees.
What the fuck do you expect people to do? Of course this guy wants a raise; granted that he hasn't thought it all the way through but he's desperate. The woman aluded to upthread who didn't want the raise was the clearer thinker; can you blame her for not wanting her benefits cut when without them she would probably fucking starve? You can't live on what the working class gets paid, even a lot of jobs that require degrees often don't offer a living wage, and jobs that pay well in any category are increasingly thin on the ground.
I suggest that all of you get off of your fucking high horses. An increasing inability to earn enough to survive on is one of the biggest problems of our times, and telling people to work harder or improve their skill sets is not going to help. The free market? Please. Left to their own devices corporations will enslave everyone and pocket the difference. Government intervention? The government is in collusion with the corporations. You could even argue that the free market is at work; those with capital have bought government at the market price... a price you and I can never hope to meet.
I don't pretend to have an answer; there probably isn't a non-catastrophic solution. You could mandate that all jobs must pay enough to live on... not gonna happen. You can subsidize cheap labor with public assistance... that's what is happening now but who knows how long it can continue? Or we can get grittily realistic and address the problem head-on: we have a larger population than can possibly be kept busy in a modern industrial economy, especially with the inevitable contraction peak oil is going to bring about. How do we ethically deal with that particular problem? I don't have an answer.
Worry not. Most ZH readers nowadays are the unemployed C-average BBA hopefuls. With no real-life experience and aspirations of becoming the next big hedge-fund kahuna thanks to the 1st-year BBA course they took three times (failed twice and barely passed the third time) and mocking articles they read on ZH, they look down on 99% for being stupid socialist money-grabbing losers that are humiliated by their socioeconomic position, and look down on 1% for being stupid corrupt money-grabbing losers that will be humiliated eventually. It is quite a useless exercise to argue with them or even read their juvenile parody of a thought.
That Blue Pill is delicious, isn't it?
Bugger, I double tapped it. Sorry.
The only answer (IMO) is a living wage from birth to death for everyone, and a "government" who's only policy is to aim for full unemployment (by mechanising as much as we possibly can).
Just let me put my crash helmet on after saying that haha.
Moar free money foar moar free stuff! Hell, pretty soon these politicians will have to resort to releasing sex tapes, pole dancing and having wardrobe malfunctions to get their votes.
Hillary in 2016!!!
There's a big difference between cheap labor and skilled labor. As I see it, cheap labor is what mows my lawn (right now that would be me).
Skilled labor is what fills my pharmacy prescription.
That takes a bit of brains and certification and could kill you if not done right.
But guess what that pharma tech drug slinger at CVS makes who is counting out your pills?
Not much more than $10/hr. And no bennies.
Overworked and underpaid is the new normal for skilled workers.
Mistakes happen, more and more often.
Get used to it.
Used to be farm work was a hazardous living.
Now just plain living is getting to be a chore.
The journey down the rabbit hole will not be much fun.
If it wasn't for basketball...... we would have a bunch of 7' caretakers..... Quote "Denis Hull"
About school janitors (custodians) up in my juridiction (Ontario) they make in the mid $20's with a good pension....A high school teacher with a masters degree makes in the 90k range
Bathroom cleaners make $20 an hour (or more) in Norway.
After taxes, the US worker take home pay is much more
This is an emotion-based article (written by someone else) followed by almost all emotion-based comments.
Just WHO is supposed to pay for this "raise?" Why is this job "specially funded" in the first place?
Price fixing (yes, even the price of labor) does not work. Most of you have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to economics.
But his 4 year old son doesn't want him to work! What about the chillrens?
Lol, yes that was a good touch. Humanities journalism at its finest.
The bank manager notices the new clerk is terrible when it comes to counting money and adding up figures.
“Where did you get your financial education?” he asks.
“Yale,” replies the lad. The manager is sure he’s misheard the man, so he asks his question again and the man again responds “Yale.”
That can't be right, thinks the manager. He decides he’s going to check it out online.
“And what's your full name again?” asks the manager.
“Yim Yohnston.”
LOL, funny. And sad.
maybe now he can buy a newspaper and look in the HELP WANTED section......
undoubtedly a special ed grad
his wife works at GS and they vacation at the Hamptons and get their on the flying faggot choppers
Government breaks your legs then shoves a crutch down your throat.
> My job is what’s called a “restricted” position [... and can not ] ask for a raise, and I can’t earn overtime.
Why in god's name would you trust the system that created "restricted positions" to look out for your best interests? They've stolen your ability to negotiate. You are a paid slave.
Run away.