I am on my way back from Mexico City to my family in D.C. United has a direct flight, but it goes to Dulles. Since my wife can’t pick me up, I’m flying American through Dallas. The trip to Mexico was good, albeit crazy busy.
There is something ridiculous about coming back from Mexico City and getting a shoeshine in Dallas. My excuse is that I was run ragged in the D.F. and never got around to getting a shine. Moreover, in my defense, the shoeshine booths are far rarer than they were back in, say, 2000. Mexico has been following the rest of Latin America into downright American levels of slovenliness, and the number of people who wear leather shoes (or care how they look if they do) has been in precipitous decline. The occasional boleador will still come by if you’re sitting outside in a Condesa restaurant and offer a shine, but they seem a lot more desperate than they used to.
I didn’t get to Condesa this trip and the Insurgentes glorieta (where I would normally get a shine) was mysteriously full of tents selling ... something. I’d never seen that before. Why were they there? Is this a permanent thing? It seemed to be a combination yuppie knick-knack market and jobs fair, if you can imagine such a thing. Either way, the tents displaced the boleadores, which meant that I wasn’t about to grab a random shoeshine during a transfer from Line 1 of the metro and the Metrobus.
So I got my shoes shined in DFW, while changing planes. The cost is $8, about four times what it costs to hire a boleador in Mexico City. But don’t envy Mexico. Pity the United States. Especially Texas.
I had a long discussion with the guy shining my shoes. He’s a little older than me, with five kids, four still at home. (The fifth is married and recently gave birth to his first grandchild.) He was happy to see me, since he’d had only six customers all day. (Meaning me walking by around 1pm after he’d been on-duty for seven hours.) He enjoyed the work but he did not enjoy the working conditions. The firm paid him $6 an hour. Now, that is below the federal minimum wage, but because shoeshiners used to be expected to receive tips, the standard minimum does not apply to them. The problem? Most customers don’t tip. So while his salary is more than $12,000 per year, it’s not much more than $12,000 per year. Rather, it’s a bit south of $18,000.
So far, so awful ... I made $12 an hour at a northern California gym back in 1994, around $18.40 today. I was 24. But it gets worse. When you add in the fact that grandma lives with him, his total family income between his wife and him is less than $31,970. Which means (click the link) that he does not qulaify for Obamacare subsidies.
In D.C. or Maryland, his family would qualify for Medicaid. In Texas, not so much.
Yes, that gives his wife and him strong incentives to find better-paying jobs. So far, said jobs have resolutely failed to materialize. It is hard for me to believe that someone spending 10 hours a day shining shoes — and has a family to insure — lacks motivation.
So he is looking for a new job with benefits. He seemed optimistic.
It is a travesty. Anyone want to defend Texas’ decision to reject the Medicaid expansion? Because it is beyond me. All the more so in a country where parents in the computerized 21st-century computerized earn barely a little more than third of the income I sleep-walked into 20 years ago.
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