The American Dream Has Turned into a Grueling Quest for Survival for Millions of People

On June 12, 2013, Low Pay Is Not Okay, a group fighting to raise wages for fast food workers, released a video criticising a budgeting guide created by McDonald's. The guide showed that McDonald's workers cannot survive on a McDonald's salary. Aside from including dubious figures - $20 a month for health care, $0 for heating - the  guide left out essentials like child care, food, and clothing. Low Pay Is Not Okay noted that even by McDonald's' own calculations, workers would need at least $15 per hour to make ends meet. The video went viral, and the guide was widely  criticised.

But some argued that the guide was reasonable. "When I lived in St. Louis, my roommate and I each paid $425 per month [in rent],"  wrote the Washington Post's Timothy B. Lee, ignoring that St. Louis fast food workers are  on strike because they  cannot afford to live on their current wages. He praised the guide for "offering practical advice on how to live on a modest income", a sentiment echoed by Mother Jones' Kevin Drum, who  deemed it "an extremely conventional collection of good financial advice".

Defenders of the McDonald's budget use the same word to describe it: realistic. (Both Drum and Lee use this term.) The logic is that if people can literally survive on minimum wage - that is, not drop dead - then their wages are justified. Ignored in the plea for realism is the day-to-day reality of McDonald's workers - not whether they can live, but how. In one of the wealthiest countries in the world, privation should not come with the job description, and survival should not be an aspiration.

"Worrying about the future is the hardest part, because at $7.25, I don't have a future," wrote Stephanie Sanders, a McDonald's worker, in an  essay for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Like many fast food workers, Sanders is an adult who never thought she would end up in the food service industry. While the unemployment rate in America has remained largely  steady in 2013, the underemployment rate has  soared, and Sanders, a former saleswoman, has found herself trapped. Her temporary job has become a permanent sentence.

As economic analyst Robert Reich  observes, "Being wealthy in America today means not having to come across anyone who isn't."  For the last decade, the American media have railed against the  "obesity crisis", blaming fast food outlets for poor public health. That the people who prepare this food lack the money to eat, or feed their children - "We all worry about going hungry or ending up homeless," writes Sanders – attracts far less outrage.

Journalist Mark Oppenheimer calls the elite Americans obsessed with local and organic food  "the new Puritans" - and like the old Puritans, they tend to have a Calvinist take on those less fortunate. "Most of the middle-class 'liberal' parents I know have allowed lifestyle decisions about what they wear, eat, and drive to entirely replace a more ambitious program for bettering society," he writes. The plight of the McDonald's worker, like McDonald's itself, is seen as outside their purview.

The myth of upward mobility

This lapse in priorities - in which things we buy are thought to be morally superior to people who sell them - parallels a change in the American perception of employment and social status. Jobs are no longer jobs but symbolic positions, indicative of where you come from and determinative of where you go.

The McDonald's worker, the argument goes, deserves what she gets because she is a McDonald's worker. The professional, it is said, deserves her success because she is a professional. But over the last decade, the barriers to entry for white-collar professions have dramatically increased while the pathways out of poverty have eroded. The job you work increasingly reflects the money you already had.