Two weeks before I got married, I lost my job delivering pizzas because I had gotten three tickets for minor traffic violations over the previous two years. So when we got back from our honeymoon, I landed a job working at another fast food restaurant.
After I put four black olives on a customer’s sandwich, my manager yelled at me in front of the customer saying: “You should only put two black olives on their sandwich! If you put four, then you’re doubling my cost, which means I can cut your paycheck in half!”
Rick Pidcock
Shortly after that, another customer spilled a drink on the floor. So I grabbed a mop bucket to clean it up. Suddenly, my manager swooped out and raised his voice again with: “What are you doing? You only twisted the mop around once before ringing it out! You’re supposed to twist it twice! Do you even know how to mop?”
Four hours later, I still hadn’t paid off my uniform. So when the manager asked me how things were going, I told him, “Not well,” and then quit.
Working for $5.25 per hour
I eventually landed a floor cleaning job at $5.25 an hour. With my wife in school full time, and me still in school part time, we made a whopping $7,000 in our first year of marriage and moved across the country to help start a church. With an undergraduate degree in Bible from an unaccredited university, my resume was pretty rough. So I became a janitor during the week for a local school while planning to start my floor cleaning business.
After going through four $400 vehicles in our first year of marriage, I began to realize I probably should invest in something that wouldn’t break down so fast. So I borrowed some money from a friend to buy a $4,000 Dodge Caravan.
One month later, it was stolen. When the police found it four weeks later, the ignition had been ripped out, there were bullet holes in the windshield, the right side was bashed in, the number 13 was carved in the dashboard, and it was set on fire on the inside. After the police had it towed to my apartment, somebody stole the rear left wheel off it. And a day later, somebody shot it up with a paintball gun. To make matters worse, I couldn’t afford to have it fully insured. So I now owed my friend $4,000 with nothing to show for it.
My wife and I worked extremely hard during those next few years, paying off more than $60,000 of debt on about $45,000 of annual income between the two of us. And then my wife got pregnant.
“Nobody would hire me due to my resume of being a floor cleaner.”
After our son was born, we wanted to have my wife stay home with him as soon as possible. So I began applying for better-paying jobs. But nobody would hire me due to my resume of being a floor cleaner. I eventually realized that being the sole financial provider for my family was going to be very difficult. So in addition to my floor cleaning jobs, I also delivered pizzas.
Then the housing market crashed. My business began to dry up fast. And our house foreclosed. So up until last year, we couldn’t even get approved for a $10 overdraft cushion with our own bank.
We had a very small window to call it a chapter in our lives and move back home to South Carolina, where the cost of living would be much lower.
Moving back home
After arriving back in South Carolina, I applied for jobs that would pay below the median income level and yet would pay the bills. But nobody would hire me due to my resume of being in janitorial cleaning for so long.
So I began working at a retirement community full time cleaning their floors. I would wake up at 3:15 a.m. to get to work by 4:00. I was making just $1,600 a month. And we now had a family of four.
“I was making just $1,600 a month. And we now had a family of four.”
One evening, we went to our church’s “Shepherding Group” with an empty refrigerator and no money in the bank account. When I shared our struggle with the group, one of the single white guys piped in and said: “Well, God told Abraham to sacrifice his son on the altar. So maybe you should ask if you’re willing to sacrifice your children for God.” After he wouldn’t back down, I went off on him, saying, “Do you have any idea what it’s like to have a wife and two kids at home, with an empty refrigerator, and no money in your bank account?”
In February 2013, the executive director of the retirement community I worked for called a meeting and said somebody on staff had been stealing toilet paper. She told us that if things are so tight financially for us that we couldn’t afford toilet paper to ask her and she’d get us some.
A week later, I had no toilet paper for a family of four, with just $1 in my bank account to get us through the week. I called our executive director. And then she and her husband came and handed me the largest package of toilet paper I had ever seen. Little did I know that the day before that, she had been fired.
‘You’re just the janitor!’
After she was fired, corporate came in and began treating the housekeeping staff horribly. When I confronted them about it, they laughed. The next day I found myself in the HR manager’s office with a very angry representative from corporate. He yelled at me: “Who do you think you are? You’re just a janitor!”
“Who do you think you are? You’re just a janitor!”
I spent the next seven months applying to better-paying jobs, only to be turned down due to my resume. I even met with a businessman in our church who wanted to hire me for a $47,000 job. He told me he felt I had the ability to do the job really well. But their hiring consultant didn’t like my resume and scared the decision makers away. So I called one of my pastors, told him the news, and broke down crying.
I knew my only shot was to start my business again. When I got enough janitorial accounts to pay our bills, I walked up to the corporate manager who had yelled at me in front of HR and told him I was giving him a one month’s notice. Very few moments in my career felt as good as that one.
I worked so hard on my business, paying my workers far more than the minimum wage they’d get elsewhere. But with construction companies and retails stores we were working for beginning to close without paying me, the stress was beginning to get to me.
One day, I was cleaning a floor for a business that was owned by a father and son who looked and argued just like the father/son duo from the show American Choppers. A small grain of sand had lodged between a piece of my equipment and their break room floor and left a scratch mark. And the father started yelling at me, demanding that I fix it or replace their floors. I was desperate and scared. That night, I came down with shingles.
“I had four kids and no path forward for a career.”
As I lay in bed with the most excruciating pain, I knew my body was shutting down. I had four kids and no path forward for a career. So I simplified my business, cutting it back to mostly just me with an occasional helper. It may not have been the best business decision. But it was what I had to do to survive.
One morning, I was cleaning a retail store when I heard one of their managers say to one of their employees, “Who do you think I am, the janitor?”
I decided to speak up: “No. That’s me.”
The manager turned around and looked like they had just seen a ghost. As they apologized, I laughed it off. But I knew inside, these people don’t respect me.
Should we raise the minimum wage?
As President Biden begins to implement his economic vision, one of his desires is to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Of course, I am not an economist. There seem to be legitimate pros and cons for each side of the argument within the system we have.
But what I do bring to this conversation is 20 years of experience working alongside adults struggling just to survive in the food and janitorial service industries — people who mostly get paid minimum wage. And what I’d like to call for is a raising of awareness and empathy to this conversation.
“What I’d like to call for is a raising of awareness and empathy to this conversation.”
In the recent documentary Postcards From Babylon, Brian Zahnd says, “America’s original sin is white supremacy with the primary manifestations of stolen land and slave labor all for the sake of the economy.”
In her book Introducing Womanist Theology, Stephanie Mitchem explores how this original sin played itself out as slavery and how segregation set up a culture where Black women were expected to emulate the homemaking ideals of white women, and yet were economically not able to stay at home. So Black women became stereotyped as housekeepers and cooks for white people. Mitchem says, “Enslavement, followed by disenfranchisement, legal segregation and the general denial of civil rights, kept Black people from full social participation.”
Leith Mullings adds in On Our Own Terms, “Race was intertwined with class as populations from various parts of the world were incorporated at different levels of the labor force … producing a distinct experience for women of color.”
As a result, Bell Hooks says in Where We Stand, “Everyone in our world talked about race and nobody talked about class … . No one talked about the fact that no one had ‘real’ jobs at 1200 Broad Street, that no one made real money.”
Where do we stand?
I often hear conservatives say minimum wage workers are “just teenage hamburger flippers.” But it’s far more complex than that.
According to a 2018 study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Hispanics comprise 17% of the U.S. workforce and 49% of housekeepers.
“Hispanics comprise 17% of the U.S. workforce and 49% of housekeepers.”
Regarding education level, 70% of Hispanics or Latinos and 57% of African Americans currently in the labor force who are 25 and older do not have college degrees, compared to just 47% of white people.
Regarding job status, white people make up 78% of the workforce and account for 90% of chief executive roles.
The study notes: “The earnings disparity across the major race and ethnicity groups for men holds for nearly all major occupational groups. For example, median usual weekly earnings of Asian men and white men working full time in management, professional and related occupations (the highest paying major occupational group), at $1,732 and $1,488, respectively, were considerably higher than the earnings of Hispanic men ($1,174) and Black men ($1,164) in the same occupational group.”
Simply put, white Americans have a distinct advantage in paying for education and in making significantly more money once they receive their education than their Hispanic and Black counterparts in the same industry and gender.
But what about abortion?
When many of my white conservative evangelical friends hear these things, they often say it’s impossible to vote for progressives due to their stance on abortion, forcing them to ignore systemic oppression as one-issue voters.
According to the National Institutes of Health, 40% of women who seek an abortion cite financial reasons, while 29% attribute it to their struggle to raise their current children.
Given the immense stress I shared in my story earlier, I can only imagine the amount of stress and obstacles women have placed on them by our systems that have been set up to hold them down.
“Do you want to reduce 69% of abortions? Then how about figuring out ways to help those who are struggling to gain financial stability?”
Do you want to reduce 69% of abortions? Then how about figuring out ways to help those who are struggling to gain financial stability? How about figuring out ways to help single moms get child care so they can provide for their kids?
Instead of supporting these policies, my white evangelical friends choose to share memes that call these women murderers.
What will it take?
Jonathan Merritt says, “When you really get down to the things that actual Black people will tell you they want and need in order to embrace their full humanity in order to achieve equality, evangelicals will almost always oppose them.”
So should we raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour? I believe giving these struggling workers a significant raise would drastically help their ability to exercise agency in their lives.
“This is the system that white conservatives established.”
Would the system break down if we do that? Perhaps. But this is the system that white conservatives established. If the system continues in 2021 to show a disparity of opportunities and income, then the problem is with the system white people set up. So perhaps we need to rethink the entire system.
Lisa Sharon Harper says white Americans need to approach their Black and brown neighbors and ask: “‘What will it take for things to be made well for you?’ And let them speak it, and let their word be an exercise of dominion in this space.”
Let’s not simply throw our hands up in surrender to the system white people set up to promote white supremacy through slave labor for the sake of the economy. Let’s have some awareness of what our country has done and some empathy for those who are barely able to breathe financially, whose bodies are breaking down under the weight of our economy, and ask them, “What will it take for things to be made well for you?”
Rick Pidcock is now a stay-at-home father of five kids. He and his wife, Ruth Ellen, have started Provoke Wonder, a collaboration of artists that exists to foster child-like worship through story and song. Provoke Wonder’s first album, Consider the Stars, was released in March 2020. Their first children’s book, What If, will be released soon. Rick is pursuing a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary.