Before the recession, Amie Crawford was an interior designer, earning $50,000 a year patterning baths and cabinets for architectural firms.
Now, she’s a “team member” at the Protein Bar in Chicago, where she makes $8.50 an hour, slightly more than minimum wage. It was the only job she could find after months of looking. Crawford, now 56, says she needed to take the job to stop the hemorrhaging of her retirement accounts.
In her spare time, Crawford works with a Chicago group called Action Now, which is staging protests to raise the minimum wage in a state where it hasn’t been raised since 2006.
“Thousands of workers in Chicago, let alone in the rest of the country, deserve to have a livable wage, and I truly believe that when someone is given a livable wage, that is going to bolster growth in communities,” she said.
If it seems that workers such as Crawford are more prevalent these days, protesting outside stores including Wal-Mart, McDonald’s and Wendy’s to call for higher wages, it may be because there are more workers in these jobs than there were a few years ago.
Choosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor from
via Push for minimum wage hike intensifies as worker ranks swell – chicagotribune.com.
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