5 Essential Minimum Wage Jobs

Because we value capital over people’s lives

Photo by Jay Heike on Unsplash

My recent post, “5 Jobs You Couldn’t Pay Me to Do,” did better than I expected. What about the converse? Are there critical, life-saving, soul-enhancing jobs that shouldn’t be minimum wage? As we say in Ireland, ‘Does the Pope shit in the woods or a bear wear a dress?’ A proliferation of them exists.

We live in a world that values gimmicks, tech-bro speculation, big pharma profits, and abstract concepts like currency and global marketplaces over survival of the species and the planet. Naturally, most of these survival-enhancing roles are dominated by women and young people, which is why states think they can get away with paying them scraps. We reward men and women for depleting our natural resources or fitting a kitchen more than for keeping vulnerable people alive.

I left writers and artists off. We know that unless you’re an SEO wizard with a massive marketing budget, you have two chances of making minimum wage in the arts: feck-all and sweet feck-all.

If it weren’t for the pitiful pay, my current health issues, and inadequate therapeutic backup for secondary trauma, I’d love to do any of these 5 essential jobs. Here is why they deserve a huge raise.

1. Lifeguards: Putting Fit Adolescent Surfers in Charge of Life and Death

We take sea-sports-loving students, hand them the responsibility of keeping people from drowning, and pay them minimum wage.

I’ve done the training. I’ve executed minor saves. Today, post-Long Covid, I couldn’t rescue a boot from a pond, but I’ve been rescuer and rescued.

On a blustery day in California (you might have read about this before), I went for a swim to stay warm, oblivious to the area’s notorious rip currents. Within twenty minutes, I was sucked and trapped into the barrel of a wave, like dust suctioned into a vacuum cleaner. As panic gave way to survival instinct, I tucked myself in and let the wave beach me like a stranded seal.

The lifeguard? He watched from his hut. When I dragged myself back to my towel, lay back and feigned nonchalance by reading a magazine, he ambled over to point out the no swimming and dangerous tides signs I’d missed.

Me? I would have intervened before youngish Kay went into the water or within five minutes of her starting to swim.

Some of my friends have worked summer jobs as lifeguards. It’s one of the most competitive summer gigs (I blame Baywatch and Bondi Rescue), and the responsibility is immense. Why are we paying them like they’re flipping burgers?

2. Social Care Workers: Rolling with the Punches for Families in Crisis

When a family has a violent, aggressive, traumatised relative they can no longer safely live with, they don’t call a Musketeer, they look for residential respite care, a day service or a residential home, staffed mostly by social care workers.

Accepting the inevitability of having to absorb shouting, physical aggression and violence, sexist or racist slurs, and verbal abuse is part of the job description (just after ‘rewarding and challenging’ in the ad).

I know how rewarding and profoundly challenging working with vulnerable populations is. I would do this job, but only for two days a week, because I have worked with these people in a different capacity for years and no longer have the stamina to work in the field full-time. Taking on work on behalf of families in crisis is skilled, emotionally taxing labour. It doesn’t belong at the bottom of the pay scale.

3. First Aid Responders: Doing CPR While Defending a Lawsuit

We can thank the proliferation of American litigious culture for making professionals reluctant to intervene in a life-threatening medical emergency.

If you’ve ever performed CPR, you know it is a brutal, sweaty, high-intensity workout. I once worked with a nurse who performed CPR on a stranger for an hour before help arrived. (They were on a mountain with no signal) She saved his life, but she said she was shaking and dehydrated, her arms and legs were aching from the exertion, and she had sweated buckets by the time they came. Normally, EMTs swap in and out after five or ten minutes because it is so exhausting. I tried CPR on my own mother when I was eighteen, but it was too late. They reckoned she was dead at least an hour by the time the ambulance arrived, and was pronounced at the local hospital ten minutes later.

I have also done the Heimlich manoeuvre on a choking child in the classroom, although the thwack between the shoulder blades is what dislodged the food from his throat. It pinged out with some velocity.

Why should a responder risk their career, their future earnings, and their physical strength to stop you from choking or drowning for minimum wage? Being forced to make split-second, life-or-death decisions should be compensated properly.

4. Childcare: Valued Less Than Your Broadband

Parents love their children more than life itself. They would die for them, but don’t want to pay anybody a professional wage to raise them. If the state doesn’t pay and they have to part with their funds, the person shaping their child’s brain gets less per hour than the mechanic who services their car or the technician who installs their broadband.

Studies, I vaguely remember, showed that looking after two children full-time at home is the workplace equivalent of 1.5 jobs.

Our future is in the hands of childcare workers. Yet, society expects parents to do it for free or external workers to do it for pocket money. If I had my pre-Long Covid energy back, I would find this work fulfilling. It’s a shame the economy treats it like a neglected, unkempt orphan.

5. Home-Based Healthcare Workers: Saving You and the State Billions

The annual cost of uncomplicated residential care is a minimum of $100,000 a year. The cost of similar-level home care is $25,000.

Home-care workers save the system a fortune, while managing health and personal care, and their own personal risks: lone-working in unpredictable environments, heavy manual handling, and delicately dancing around the emotional sensitivity of intimate care. They do all this while trying to preserve a vulnerable person’s dignity and independence.

Older people have stories I could listen to for hours. I would gladly do this work if the manual lifting was minimised — but the fact that these workers aren’t getting a cut of the savings they generate for the state is an economic crime.

Time to recalibrate our moral compasses

These roles aren’t unskilled. They were historically dominated by women, allowing systemic bias to minimise their value. It is time to stop rewarding abstract financial speculation and start paying the people who make our society bearable and safe.

Lovely and all as it is to be thanked for our service, I’d prefer these workers were thanked with good workplace benefits and cash.

Do you have an idea for a good list? Why not write for us at BLE?

[embed]Big List Energy: Submission Guidelines Want to write for us? Read this!medium.com

The theme for May, brought to you by Deanna Bugalski 💋, is about work culture:

[embed]Big List Energy May Theme Announcement: Big Work, Hustle & Corporate Nonsense Let’s get listing!medium.com