30 Days Minimum Wage - Lauryn Marriott

 3. Do you feel that race played a role? Not having children? I feel that race was a factor in Morgan and Alex getting an apartment so easily. As Morgan says himself at the end, as white people they had it better off than some people of color that had the same things going for them. The fact that Morgan and Alex were white, I think, gave them credibility. This is white privilege. I think that in finding an apartment, although the landlord didn't check that much for the couple, took them more seriously and didn't doubt that they were good people because they were white. In finding a job, Morgan was treated fairly nicely by the man or men who hired him to  work in their houses, but I believe that if Morgan weren't black, he may have been treated differently, they may not have talked to him as much and they may have even been scared of him because of the automatic assumption that a black male is aggressive or lazy. I think that Alex, being a white woman, was easily hired at a coffee shop because she looked like a nice blond woman, where as a black woman may not have been hired. Not having children worked in their favor because the landlord would trust the occupants more if they were just living in a small apartment and there were no children to mess anything up in the apartment.

8. Define who the "working poor" are. The "working poor" are the people that are working for minimum wage. These people may not have the greatest credit score or may not have come from families with money so they are already ten points behind in the working system. They are working and making money, but really just working to live. They work from paycheck to paycheck and can't afford much other than the basic necessities of life. Even though they are working, they are poor and they're stuck in a situation that is very hard and almost impossible to get out of. Over the years, the cost of living has gone up and the minimum wage has not. This makes it harder for the working poor to live from paycheck to paycheck because it costs so much more for the basic necessities of life. The working poor are stuck there because the minimum wage has not increased for over 25 years, and everything now costs more.