As a Cuban, I Am Voting On Amendment 2
By: Alex Barrio
When my family fled Cuba to the United States in the late 1960s, this was a very different country, though one with important parallels for today. In their first year here they lived in a basement, with my grandfather washing dishes and my grandmother working as a seamstress in New Jersey. Within a year, working those jobs, they were able to save up enough money to get their own apartment and car. With this new opportunity, my grandfather was able to get a job working as a union Longshoreman and they made their move into the Middle Class like so many of their generation.
That sort of rapid upward mobility no longer exists and the primary reason is the low wages around the country and especially in Florida. The federal minimum wage sits at $7.25 and hasn’t risen since 2009. In Florida, thanks to a constitutional amendment passed in 2004, minimum wage is at $8.56, or about $17,800 annually on a full-time basis, before taxes. That’s about $1,483 per month, before taxes. The average rent for an apartment in Tampa is $1,359 per month, in Orlando it’s $1,435 per month, in Miami it’s $1,702. Right now we live in a world where the average person earning the minimum wage cannot afford to pay rent; forget about food, transportation, health insurance, or utilities.
It was not always this way. Back when my family and many others came to the United States in the late 1960s, the minimum wage was $1.60 an hour, or the equivalent of $12.06 today. How have rents changed? When adjusted for inflation, the average apartment in this country cost $670 per month instead of the $1,000 national average we have now. What this means is that, once you adjust for inflation, when my family arrived they were earning a minimum of $25,000 yearly; over $2,000 per month before taxes, with rent at just $670 per month. This allowed them to save money to move up in this country instead of scrambling every month for years just to keep a roof over their head.
In Florida, things don’t have to be this way. In 2004 we voted for and passed a constitutional amendment that automatically increases the minimum wage here according to inflation, giving us a minimum wage more than a dollar over the national average. However, we know this is not enough, so this year we have another amendment to improve things further: Amendment 2. This amendment will increase the minimum wage by a dollar every year until 2026, when we reach $15 per hour.
This amendment will dramatically increase living standards for people across the state of Florida and provide an opportunity for families to finally begin, once again, to advance economically. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 4.8 million people in Florida are paid hourly wages. Of these, at least 112,00 are at or below the minimum wage, with at least 104,000 actually earning less than our state’s $8.56. Many of these hourly workers already earn $10 per hour, the wage that our minimum wage will increase to in 2021.
These hundreds of thousands of people earning at or below $8.56 per hour are all around us, picking, serving, and delivering our food, cleaning public restrooms, taking our tickets when we go to the movies or to a theme park, and making our beds when we go on vacation.
What Amendment 2 does is provide a path to economic freedom and independence. There are many who are concerned that this will be a shock to the system but Amendment 2 provides a glide path toward higher wages, raising the wage to $10 per hour in 2021 and then a dollar a year through 2026. This is a reasonable way to get our state towards a wage that will ensure everyone who works full-time can afford to pay their rent and basic living expenses.
Decades ago, workers like my grandparents and their generation had a path to economic growth. In the last few decades, though, that path has disappeared and people are trapped in a cycle of poverty, unable to get a raise or lift themselves up economically. Years of stagnant wages and lack of economic opportunity have destroyed the bridge to the future that many families need. This year, Amendment 2 seeks to change that. Once again, opportunity will be restored for hundreds of thousands in Florida, now and into the future.
