The need for a higher minimum wage has been apparent for many years now, and anyone who claims $15 is too much too soon should study the issue a little more (if wages had kept pace with corporate profits since the 1970s, the minimum wage would be about $23 an hour). Even songwriters have been pointing this out for decades.
Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers wrote this song for the band’s 2010 album “The Big To-Do,” when the slow recovery from the Great Recession was still young. Hood’s protagonists are often the same disillusioned people who populate Trump country, but they don’t watch Fox News and blame the even further downtrodden. They just tell their stories, and they’re seldom happy ones.
Workin’ this job, I thought it sucked when I had it
Now it is gone and I’m learnin’ what that is
I’m tryin’ to hang in to the worst of places
But a family can’t live on these fast food wages
The video produced to promote the album stars Ray McKinnon, who might be familiar from “Deadwood” or “Sons of Anarchy.” He also played campaign manager Vernon T. Waldrip in the Coen brothers’ “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
