I need a dollar, $15 dollars are what I need

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Fighting for $15 for all

There’s a giant green balloon floating over a group of hundreds of people gathered on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. On the sphere, someone has painted “$15” in white.

The balloon was part of a rally called #Fightfor15, a movement to raise the national minimum wage to $15 per hour for all workers. A similar measure was recently passed in California, set to go into effect by 2022.

But according to 20-year-old Estefany Castañeda, $15 an hour is not enough.

“Yeah, California passed legislation, but that is for 2022,” Castañeda explained. “People need to eat now; they don’t need to eat a couple years from now.”

Castañeda, who describes herself in her Twitter bio as an activist, began working when she was 16 years old. She started at a small restaurant in the Los Angeles area, as a cashier, server, and hostess. She was paid minimum wage, which was $8 an hour at the time. She says the undocumented immigrant who worked as a cook in the kitchen worked for even less.

When the minimum wage was raised to $9 in 2014, her boss made it difficult to claim her higher wages.

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“I told her, ‘This is what is legal,'” Castañeda explained. “She tried to postpone it … that’s not how it’s supposed to be at all.”

So, she switched jobs. Now, she works as a sales associate in a Santa Monica location of a popular clothing store. She started at $10 per hour, and has since gotten a raise, to $11.75.

“Even at $11.75 with commission, I’m struggling,” Castañeda said. “It still gets difficult, sometimes you really do have to be paycheck by paycheck.”

She uses the money to pay for her education at Santa Monica College, where she studies psychology and film, in addition to helping her working parents pay for expenses at home.

#Broke is a show about why you don’t have money, and what you do to get it.

Castañeda doesn’t have money, so she works a low-wage job while attending school. Aside from working, how does she get it? She advocates for a higher minimum wage, and the right to unionize.

That’s how I met her: she was at a recent downtown Los Angeles #Fightfor15 rally.

Relive the rally with Castañeda through these SoundSlides, which you can download here

“There was a little girl that stood out to me,” Castañeda remembered. “She was with the spokesman from #Fightfor15.”

Castañeda said the girl was probably no older than 3-years-old.

“She was just kinda like, ‘I’ve been here before, I’ve done this, I can keep doing this all day,” Castañeda said. “And really, that’s true for all of us. We’re all thinking — we’re doing this again? Why does this have to keep going on? Why aren’t we getting through to people like we should be getting through?”

There weren’t many other reporters covering the rally, at least not in the crowd where I was -- probably because unions told their protests to not talk to any reporters. I found that out the hard way. I had to wonder if there was something more at stake here: maybe people were just tired of hearing and telling stories of entitled young people asking for more.

“There’s definitely that resurgence of movements that we had in america, in the 60s and 70s, where a lot of young people weren’t labeling it as an entitlement,” she explained to me. “I think it’s more us saying we have these problems going on in our society, and why not address them. Us being the younger generation, it’s our duty to do so.”

 

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Music: "For the Love of Money" - The O'Jays, "I Need a Dollar" - Aloe Blacc

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