Minimum Wage for Maximum Stress

Here in the UK, minimum wage (if over 24) is £7.50 which works out fairly similar if living in the US. On average, based on a 35 hour week, a loyal, twenty-something employee will bring home something a little south of £1000 a month. Which gets you halfway to nowhere. After rent, bills, food, travel, and the essentials like a box of hair dye because you're too poor to go to a hairdressers or a new pair of jeans because your only other pair have more holes than what anyone could consider deliberately fashionable; most of us minimum-wagers are sustaining ourselves on a particularly stressful budget. So which is more important this month? A £70 prescription for badly needed glasses or an £80 renewal fee for your passport because without it, you're technically a non-existent citizen and regrettably ID-less. This relentless stress of deciding which way is best to spend our last remaining oner is just the flour in a cake of strains that will eventually be topped with the mother of all icings. The job itself.

The Zero Hour Contract

Sorry, but the sooner this bullshit is outlawed the better. This type of "agreement" allows an employer to take full advantage of you by never determining a minimum (or maximum) rate of hours. My first hand experience of this was very brutal. In one month you could be offered a grotesque 20 hours, while the next could be over 200. Which effectively means you're over-worked and under-paid, making your job an unreliable source for being used and abused in a place where you ultimately deserve the utmost respect. Our only source of income is not something to be fooled around with, thanks.

The Shifts

Tuesday 16.00 - 01.00, no break

Wednesday 06.00 - 14.30, no break

The legal gap between shifts, no matter the industry, is 11 hours. At my last job, and many others, I had been expected to work nine hours with less than six hours between consecutive shifts, without breaks. So when you're starving hungry, exhausted, and angry at the current situation, it's very hard to remember why you're doing it, even harder to keep up a good job. Especially when your minimum rate of pay at the end of the month is, quite frankly, disgusting compared to the labour that's demanded of you. If we're hungry and exhausted, how do you expect us to maintain a happy smile with your precious customers?

The Managers

Aging, power tripping conformists who have lost sight of basic human rights and work ethics. Probably because they have been treated appallingly themselves for a decade and therefore, thrive on the idea of getting their own back once given a little bit of power. Unless you are particularly lucky and land a decent human being as a managerial figure, most of them are assholes. They tend to contradict everything they ever said to you during "training" and then embarrass you when conflict arises between yourself and a customer as you politely explain that "No, I'm sorry, I cannot give you discount without a members card, it's strict company policy." Only to physically push you aside and condescend upon the rules they so furiously laid before you started, allowing the poxy discount to a now, smug AF customer who apparently "comes here all the time, duh?" The shame is mortifying. You feel so incredibly small that sinking into the cracks of time and disappearing forever seems entirely possible.

The Unnecessary Staffing Budgets

In my professional opinion, there is absolutely no excuse for under-staffing a shift, in jeopardising the service and sanity of your employees to save only a fraction of outgoing costs. It's selfish, insensitive, impractical, and it happens relentlessly. So often, in fact, I could sincerely guesstimate that 70% of my shifts within the gruelling world of hospitality have fallen from grace due to this massive, ongoing error. The stress of these shifts builds and builds to the point where an existential crisis sets in and you turn to God asking "What did I do to deserve this?"

The Non-existent, Unpaid Breaks

OK, so tying in nicely with the shifts, unpaid breaks are common, very common, and it's just about acceptable, right? That is until you don't see the back end of a 20 minute breather for days because the business is "particularly busy" like, all year round? We plunge through 9/10/11/12 hour shifts, without so much as a sip of water, hungry, shamed, and irritated, but when it's finally over, and you sign out wanting to add the 30 minutes of the horror you worked through today, you're told that you cannot take off your break, "because you know, what about all those times you were late or left early?" If I worked 30 minutes extra, I should get paid 30 minutes extra. Think how much money that would equate to over a month or even year?

The Customers

Depending on the establishment you are suffering for, the clientele are a huge factor in your day-to-day life. As mentioned, you may be lucky to enjoy the pleasure of serving genuinely nice people with genuinely nice smiles with sincere gratitude towards your service. However, it could be that you're not so lucky and have to put up with rich, patronising, middle class representatives who barely look at you while ordering, never say thank you or lose their patience very quickly over a misheard bottle of white. Tips are obsolete. Pleasantries are forbidden. Gratitude is alien. And yet, you're still asked to treat these people with the respect they don't deserve. And this brews an awful, churning turmoil inside of you because you're actually allowing yourself to be treated this way.

The Ultimate Crisis

All of this boils down into one hard, suffocating crisis. A quarter-life breakdown. Because from all angles of your minimum waged job, you're ordered to unjustifiably prosecute yourself for a wage that allows only your basics. And ultimately, with a looming depression and a rapidly degrading self-worth, you begin to think that your life might not be worth living, which by natural conclusion means minimum wage is not worth the maximum stress it carries and medically speaking, could trigger something much more sinister.