I’ve often spoken about invisible people and urged everyone to notice them. There are so many among us who work very hard each day for salaries so menial that they barely make ends meet. I often envision the mother of one of my students who worked two jobs for minimum age. She was an older woman who should have been able to retire and yet doing so would have meant having to sacrifice her home or perhaps the food she provided for her son. 

The young man often grieved for his mother. He spoke of how exhausted she was at the end of the work day. She would arrive home in the dark of night so tired that sometime she simply slumped over in the front seat of her car to sleep a few hours before it was time to leave for the first of her two jobs. When she did come inside her son would be waiting for her. He would notice how swollen her feet and ankles were and how she limped in pain. She would mostly collapse on the living room sofa and he would cover her with a blanket. It tore out his heart to see her that way.

He noted that his home was located near a city park that should have been a refuge for him and his mom, but instead it had become a hangout for drunks and drug dealers. He described how his mother had warned him to never go outside in his bare feet because needles littered the ground and she feared that he might come down with a dreaded disease if he stepped on one of them and punctured his skin. He and his mother had often reported what was going on but nobody ever came to chase away the rowdy residents of the park and no efforts were ever made to clean it and make it a safe place to be. 

The young man worked hard to graduate from high school so that he might enroll in a class to become certified to drive a forklift. He explained that with a job like that he might make enough to offset the low amount that his mother brought home in spite of working from six in the morning to eleven at night. His plan was to attend community college after work each day to learn how to maintain and repair airplane engines. 

The last that I heard he had achieved his goals but I still find myself wondering how his mom is doing these days. I knew that she was considerably older than I was when I taught this young man and must be well into her eighties now if she is still with us on this earth. She was a lovely woman whose job was to clean buildings, an oft overlooked but incredibly important task. I think of her whenever I see someone pushing a cart filled with cleaning supplies and I always make it a point to thank them for keeping things orderly and healthy. 

If I had my way such people would earn at least twenty or twenty five dollars an hour. Even with a forty hour week they would only make eight hundred dollars but that might actually be closer to being livable than the current minimum wage. Three thousand plus dollars a month is much closer to meeting the reality of existence than the $1200 a month that so many workers still make. Few of us would be able to maintain the rent on a house and purchase food with such a lowly amount of money. I should know because at the end of her life my mother was attempting to live on a bit less than a thousand dollars a month and it was so hard that she was often quite anxious. If not for her creativity and assistance from me and my brothers I don’t think she would have made it. 

We all too often act as though anyone doing jobs like cleaning are somehow inferior. Instead we should be incredibly thankful for their efforts. Those shining floors, clean toilets and dust free buildings are pleasurable just as places that are not up to par are disgusting. The person with the mop bucket who insures that a hospital room is free of germs is important in our recovery and yet he or she is often invisible and working for next to nothing.

I want to think that my former student has been able to enhance the life of his mother. She certainly worked hard to make his future more secure. He understood all too well the disparities of our economic system. There should be nothing wrong with creating and keeping programs that insure a modest level of existence for everyone. People should receive adequate wages for their efforts. Nobody should have to work seventeen hours a day seven days a week because the hourly pay is ridiculously low. It’s well past time to set the minimum wage at a more realistic amount given that inflation that continues to rise. Either that, or providing supplements without acting as though anyone receiving them must be lazy, would be helpful. 

I’d like to think that with the wealth of this nation those of us in the mid ranges of economic distribution would be willing to give a little more to insure that an older woman does not have to work herself to death. Even better would be to also require the wealthiest among us to pay their fair share. They don’t need fifty million dollar weddings but there are surely struggling people who really do require some help. When will we become generous enough to provide them with gratitude for what they do?