An Open Letter to the Distinguished Gentleman and Lady Representing the Fine State of Tennessee

Dear Senators Blackburn & Haggerty,

I hope your day is going well. I am sure that you have a lot of things you have to deal with in Washington as you help see to the legislative governance of our country. It is understandable, then, that you would not know about me or people like me. Therefore, I wanted to provide you some context as you and your fellow Congresspersons continue to look at Stimulus packages and future legislation.

5 mornings a week, I wake up at 4am, or earlier, so that I  am able to get to work on time at 5am. I work for a Big Box Retailer, which we will refer to as BBR for the rest of this letter. My specific employer is unimportant. My job for BBR is a Personal Shopper, which means that I am one of the people who goes out into the store to pick items that customers are purchasing from their online orders. It is a physically demanding job, requiring 4 to 8 hours straight of walking (depending on the length of my shift any given day), as well as heavy lifting of products that can be 50lb or more  (dog food, cat-litter, birdseed, and the like) as well as pushing carts with loads that can exceed  two to three-hundred pounds.

I do this every day with a mask on. With my asthma, I found wearing masks troublesome at first. It’s funny, but when you have periods where you have trouble breathing, you often find anything that covers your mouth or seems to restrict that breathing difficult to bear. I have grown accustomed to it, however, because my asthma means that if I catch COVID-19, I will probably die.

But I have to work for my family to eat and have a roof over its head. I do not have what you would call a “traditional family model” so I will not go into the details. Suffice it to say, however, that if I caught COVID-19 it is very likely that our minor children would find themselves orphaned. I take this into account every day. I wear my mask. I do my best to stay as far away from people as I can manage (as I will expand on momentarily). I wash my hands frequently and use hand sanitizer constantly throughout the day, especially between my “pick walks” (that is the term for each round of going out and gathering items for customer orders).

I have had one close-call with this pandemic, so I find myself fortunate. Or perhaps my precautions work. I was put on COVID Leave once a couple of months ago not because I was sick, but because someone I had unfortunately come into close contact with had tested positive for COVID-19. I did not get ill, thankfully for reasons that I explained above. However, for reasons that I explained above, I had to quarantine from my family as much as our living situation and finances allow. That meant two weeks of no close contact with my spouse of 16 years (who would also die if he contracted COVID-19).  No cuddling. No kisses. None of the things we often find reassuring to our emotional connection with our spouse.  I could not hug or hold or cuddle my children. My teenager was fine with this. My toddler, not so much. But we managed. And hey, for two weeks I did not have to wash dishes or cook, so why not look on the bright side!

All of that is to say that I am very, very careful at work with how I interact with my co-workers and our customers. However, BBR is a busy store. While I have a good hour or two most days where I can do my work without customers present in the aisles, once those doors open (or before sometimes, as we have a few customers who literally pry the doors open in order to get into the store early …  I wish I was being facetious there) it is a very different story. I do not know what your life is like, so I do not know if you have to shop in large stores like BBR. Customers who shop in these stores tend to shop in the same manner. That means that even back when we had up directional markers for people to follow (which they rarely did, so while I was disappointed to see those go away, it really had little effect) people tend to cluster into aisles. The idea of maintaining 6ft distance between customers is laughable in stores, where aisles can be tight to begin with and tighter once multiple customers are in them. Understand that BBR limits the number of customers that can be in the store at a time. We are not even at that limited capacity but still, because of how customers shop, aisles can be crowded. This is worse on days where we do near our limited capacity, such as Saturday and Sunday (days I almost always work).

My ability to stay 6ft away from customers is … limited at best. Once customers clutter aisles, I cannot maintain distance from them because I have to be able to get the same items they are shopping for. When customers ask me for assistance, they almost always come within 6ft of me. Backing away is almost never a possibility as I either have my cart between me and space or other customers would then be within my 6ft radius.

While many of our customers now wear masks, some do not. Even those that do often wear them incorrectly, with their noses uncovered. Some do not wear masks; they wear bandanas over their faces instead. This is not to mention the number of times that customers feel it is okay to touch my cart (customers do not, for what its worth, wear gloves) or the rare but yes existing times that customers feel it is okay to touch me.

Even with my precautions, I can only do so much to mitigate risk at my job. Every day my job puts me at risk of contracting COVID-19 despite my precautions, and bringing the disease home to my family.

I am thankful for my job. I moved to Knoxville in 2019. Before that I had been living and working in Raleigh, NC. I had a good job there and was making good money at it. I will not give exact dollar amounts, but I was making about the median wage for an Administrative Assistant, which was my job title at that time. When I began looking for similar jobs here in Knoxville, can you imagine my disappointment to learn that the median wage here was between $2 and $4 less for a job with the same requirements and responsibilities that I had in Raleigh?

I did not want to work for BBR, but early in 2020, just before the pandemic blew up in the US, BBR was what hired me. I am making $5 less than what I made in Raleigh. I do not make a living wage, which is why I also work a 2nd job. I am fortunate, however, that this second job is a work-from-home job. I have a unique privilege in  that I know a lot of different types of people, and with that  a comes solid connection for a solid, though only part-time, job. So even when my shift is done at BBR, I still come home and work another 2 to 4 hours, depending on my workload for the day.

While BBR is not my first choice for a job, I am thankful for it. Had I gotten any of the other positions I had interviewed for in late 2019 and early 2020, I would probably have been laid off. Those same types of businesses were the ones closing their doors last winter and spring when the pandemic hit, and laying off workers. Being new, I would have been one of the first let go.

So between 2 jobs, I work over 40 hours a week. I actually work more than that, as I am a parent and I am a creative person (writing, making and editing videos, and livestreaming multiple times a week). The schedule that I keep in order to try to breakout into a career that would support my family means that I am exhausted a lot, which only adds to my risk of contracting COVID-19 from a job where I am already at high risk for contracting the disease.

In all of this, however, I have seen something unique. I am an essential worker. In early 2020 when the country shut down, people like myself – retail workers, fast food workers, delivery drivers, the postal service, and other service jobs – we were what kept this country going. We were the ones who helped ensure that people got food and goods they need for survival. We were the ones who made sure that lights stayed on. That food was picked, produced, processed, and delivered.

In 2020, we finally got to hear from the rest of the country that yes, we matter in the work we do. We already knew that. We see the important work that we do every day. But finally other people saw and understood that too. We got a new name:

Essential Worker.

We were praised. We were thanked. For a while, we were thanked multiple times a day. I still have customers who thank me for working.

You acknowledge that we are essential to the functioning of our society and the economic stability of this country.

And yet … you don’t treat us like we are. You see, praise and thank you’s are not what we need. What we need is to be guaranteed a living wage.

Let me break this down for you.

I do not make a living wage. While I make slightly more than the current minimum wage, it is not enough to live on. To give you an idea of just how much it is not enough to live on, to help ensure that I had the money to put gas in my tank or scrape up enough to get Christmas presents for my family, I was donating Plasma twice a week, every week. On top of the job that I described to you, I was also exhausting my body further by giving plasma twice a week.

Do you know what that entails?

I go into a building. I get my finger pricked to make sure that I have enough blood protein and iron to safely donate plasma. Then I am hooked up to a machine via an IV needle. It is not a small needle, for what it is worth. My blood is then drawn out of my body and into a machine where it is run through a centrifuge to separate the plasma from the red blood cells. The red blood cells are then returned to me with a saline solution and blood thinner into my body. The blood plasma, by the way, contains the protein and sugar in my blood that my body needs to operate. So already exhausted, I give up a large portion of this, leaving me feeling weakened. I did this twice a week to help ensure things like gas money, lunch money at work, and Christmas for my family.

I DO NOT MAKE A LIVING WAGE.

Again, I am fortunate that my part-time 2nd job now offers me enough work that I do not have to give plasma. Now, if I choose to, it is to just have something extra. But it is not required as a part of the basic functioning of life and the special occasions that I really want to ensure my children have to build special memories.

I do not make the $15 an hour that people are currently pushing for as a minimum wage. I do not make near that at BBR.

While $15 is not really enough to be a living wage, especially in some urban areas, a $15 an hour minimum wage would be significant to me and my family.  It would mean that we are not living paycheck to paycheck (in a good month). It would mean that with my 2nd job, I could actually begin a significant savings that could go to purchasing a house (I am 47 and still renting … no it is not just millennials that were crushed by the 2008 crash, they are just the majority of those who were crushed by it). It means that I would have money the money to afford a sudden medical bill or sudden breakdown of my vehicle (things that would cripple us right now ) without having to decide what bill doesn’t get paid this month. It would mean that the months of looking and going “well, this is a lean month, so this bill will have to wait” would be behind us. Yes, that happens, even working 2 jobs.

I wanted to write this rather long letter to you because when I saw that the Senate took out a $15 minimum wage hike, it hit me. You and/or your peers in the Senate do not understand what it is actually like for workers. You do not understand that we struggle every day to make ends meet. Retail and service workers, as much as you like to imagine are teenager and college students, largely are not. We are parents. We are people who work the jobs that YOU ADMITTED OUR SOCIETY NEEDS. But you are not willing to actually give us a living wage.

I could advance, you say? I could apply for supervisor and manager jobs, you say? I could. I more than meet the qualifications for them. But here is the thing. I do not want to do them. I am, again, 47. I am not interested in doing to manager-climb. While my job is very exhausting and BBR is not the best company in the world, I actually enjoy the work that I do. It is tiring, but I am also physically active. I used to go to the gym multiple times a week when I liven in Raleigh in order to get in shape and lose weight. I cannot do that safely in a pandemic, so this job has been good for me, even when it also puts me at risk of a deadly disease.

But those benefits: liking my job, my job keeping me active which is good for my health … those do not replace the necessity of a living wage. And when my job is, as everyone has put it for over a year “an essential job” it is stupid that I cannot make a living wage at that job. It is not just stupid. It is cruel, unethical, and immoral. And it is ludicrous to suggest that when we work an essential job that if we want to actually have a living wage, we have no choice but to compete for supervisor and manager jobs that are fewer in number than the essential jobs we already work.

So I am going to urge you. If my story has moved you at all, understand that I am not alone. Understand, I have some benefits that other retail, labor, and service workers like me to do not have. Understand that for my struggles, so many struggle even worse than I do. While I make about $4 less than the proposed $15 minimum wage,  some of my retail, service, and labor peers, make even less than I do. So I urge you, if you have been moved in even the slightest, please push for your peers in the Senate to put the $15 minimum wage hike back into the Stimulus Package and pass it.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Lynn Perretta

More Life … as in new life

So I have not been around for a while. I’m sorry. Life has been catching up. I have been working on some projects and trying to get them wrapped up ASAP.

Why is it important to get them wrapped up, you ask?

Simple.

I’m having a baby.

About Life

I have decided that I’m going to put some personal stuff up here once in a while. Why here and not over at my author website? My author website is also my portfolio. It just doesn’t feel right to have personal stuff over there. This is my place that I come to talk about being a writer.

Part of being a writer is having a personal life.

So there you go.

I think I’m going to start with cats.

This is Sheba and my very cluttered desk.