From the researched to the researcher: one young worker’s journey
#Broke is a show about why you don’t have money, and what you do to get it. Reyna Orellana embodies the tagline.
She started at minimum wage, and now she’s conducting research that’s literally changing how much young workers get paid.
Orellana got her first job when she was 16. It was at a pizzeria downtown. The way she tells it, she did not have a good experience.
“I was the youngest worker in that company,” she explained. “They oftentimes made me close from 11 to 12, on school days, which was illegal. I brought up to my manager, and he said we could just hire somebody else do it … so I had to.”
She was earning $7.25 an hour — minimum wage at the time. Instead of spending the money on cell phones or going out, she used it to help her family pay for the basic necessities in their South Los Angeles home: rent, water, electricity, transportation.
“I often was the broker for our family. I was the one answering calls when the collections agent was calling us, telling us to pay a certain bill,” she said. “I knew our financial situation. I knew mom and dad had a lot of collections, bills they couldn’t pay at end of month … I knew as soon as I could work, I was going to work and help out.”
Eventually, she left the pizzeria job, and moved on to working as a security guard at Staples Center while also attending classes at UCLA.
“Sometimes, I worked … from 5 [p.m.] to 2 in the morning,” she said. “The next day, I had a 9 a.m. class.”
Plus, because she couldn’t afford her own car, she was often commuting to Westwood from downtown. The bus ride took 2 hours each way.
“That was a little bit challenging, to figure out my schedule. I’d miss classes because I couldn’t get up,” she said. “It was way too difficult.”
So difficult that sometimes she’d even sleep in her car, just to get some rest.
“During senior year, I almost thought of opting out of school because I needed to work more hours to support my family,” Orellana said. “Thankfully I was encouraged by my family to keep going.”
One more year, they’d tell her. Just a little bit left.
“I felt like that during that stage I was like a zombie, in automatic mode and a routine,” Orellana said. “I’d get up, make food, go to school, eat, go to work, come back home, and start all over again.”
Reyna said she didn’t know many students like her at UCLA – students whose lives depended on their jobs. She didn’t know anyone who was taking the bus for 2 hours across town, or who was scheduling their classes so they could work the most full weekdays.
She said her academic experience was alienating, so when she heard about a project about studying young workers, she knew she had to be a part of it.
“It really hit close to home. I had gone through very hard experiences during my first years of work,” she said. Irregular scheduling, gender discrimination, and wage theft, to name a few.
She felt so strongly about the research project that she attended meetings and volunteered her time -- despite not getting any course credit or financial compensation at the beginning.
“I didn’t connect with anybody who had similar experiences at UCLA, so I wanted to know what’s happening,” Orellana explained. “I wanted to know and understand what young workers are experiencing.”
The study features both quantitative and qualitative elements. The methodology, called research justice, is a little atypical, too. People with personal experience with the matter at hand – people like Orellana – were brought in to develop the questions.
Researchers like Orellana did some of the interviews, but they also had young workers interview each other.
“We’d stand in the parking lot of a Food 4 Less and chase people down on their breaks,” she said. “They seemed really grateful to have someone listen to them, though. They were interested in our results.”
And the results are interesting: One in every four workers in Los Angeles county is a young worker, under 30, four in five of those young workers are people of color, and despite the fact that they’re more educated than ever, wages are falling – fast. They have fallen almost 11 percent in the past 15 years.
Perhaps the most stunning: over half of all young workers in Los Angeles county are in low-wage jobs.
The study, released in three parts, got some media coverage, mostly local, but little to no national pickup — though Fusion did do a short online writeup.
I was curious what Orellana thought about how the media talks about the young workers who she studies — the people like her.
“I think they do us a disservice by grouping us together under the term millennial,” she said. “Sure, there are millennials, they’re mostly white, they sit in coffee shops, they go out – but that’s not everyone. That’s not all workers.”
Especially not Orellana, or the workers she was studying.
“Less than 1 percent of people surveyed said they were only using their wages for leisure,” Orellana said. “The rest were contributing to their families. You don’t see that in the media.”
Even if the media isn’t listening to Orellana, turns out — policymakers are. Orellana has been asked to present and testify as an expert on the minimum wage on young workers at local city council meetings.
This year, local city councils were considering making an exception to the minimum wage for younger workers. In Santa Monica, for example, one proposal contained an exception for “first-time workers.” If an employee has no previous experience -- like many young workers in their first job -- employers could pay them just 85 percent of the legal minimum wage for their first 480 hours or six months of working. For full-time workers, 480 hours can equal three months of wages -- a difference of $1080.
Orellana testified at the recent Santa Monica council hearing, and a similar one in Long Beach.
“This [proposal] gave the employer a lot of power. They could fire that person at 6 months and get a new person at 85 percent,” she explained. “We testified that given our research, they spend money on rent, food, contribute to household. It did not make sense to make dichotomy between young and old workers. There should not be two different tiers. We should pay all workers rightful wages.”
Santa Monica community members submitted at least 70 pages of testimony regarding the proposal both in support of and against the proposal to adopt the $15 minimum wage. This was before Governor Jerry Brown signed a statewide $15 minimum wage. In many of the emails and letters, supporters applauded the steps towards a livable minimum wage. Community members in the hotel industry criticized the proposal, which suggested a higher minimum wage for hotel workers. Few mentioned the trainee wages exception until Orellana’s testimony.
Pacific Park on the Santa Monica Pier, Perry’s, and the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce expressed support for a seasonal exemption, allowing the employers to pay less for temporary employment. Per Pacific Park estimates, up to 50 percent of their workforce are first-time workers. Perry’s reports first-time workers make up 35 percent of their workforce. If the minimum wage increased to $15, they argued, they would have to reduce the number of young people they employ.
The council moved to approve an exemption that allows employers to pay first-time workers just 85 percent of the legal minimum wage for their first 160 hours of working. For full-time workers, 160 hours can equal an entire month of wages -- a difference of almost $400.
Local stations and newspapers did not mention the first-time workers provision in their coverage of the minimum wage hearings and proposals. Because no news outlets mention Orellana or her research in their stories, I made sure to mention her in mine.
Brokebot
Since I started this project, the New York Times has been writing a lot about millennials, including a story titled "What Happens When Millennials Run the Workplace?"
So many thinkpieces decry #Millennials for staving off “adulthood” but never question whether society’s concept of adulthood is flawed.
— Lindsay Totty (@lindsaytotty) February 28, 2016
They've done it so much, that Fusion famously parodied them in "A trend story about millennials, by the New York Times."
"They have stacked up record student loan debt, and yet spend thousands on frivolous items like Beyoncé concert tickets and groceries," Jason Gilbert writes, alluding to the New York Times characterization of millennial employees. "They yearn for more than just a paycheck, and yet continue to be employed in jobs that provide them with paychecks in return for their labor; and they enjoy watching television and movies, but also Vine."
Inspired by an old Fusion robot that would suggest people who tweeted the phrase "illegal immigrant" other, more accurate, terms to describe people in the country without legal documents, I made a Twitter bot that searches The New York Times each day for stories that even mention the word millennial.
Probably not surprising: there's a lot of them. You can see them below -- though, word of caution, this is a robot -- not me. It automatically tweets anything that said millennial in it, and doesn't have much control over whether that content is offensive or not.
Tweets by @brokecast