The only moment TiAnna Yeldell has to herself is when she’s sleeping, and that doesn’t happen much.
The 44-year-old single mom of three works 80-hour weeks to provide for her children, ages 8, 14, and 18. During the day, she is a driver for Pizza Hut, where she earns $9.50 an hour before tips. At night, she cleans trains for Houston’s Metro system, where she earns about $17 an hour.
The times that she pulls both shifts, Yeldell sleeps for just two to three hours before getting her kids up and ready for school. Then she does it all over again.
Yeldell is among the millions of fast food workers across the U.S. scraping to get by. About two-thirds of them are women, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and many are supporting their families on minimum wages set at the federal government's floor of $7.25 an hour.
Fast food workers are disproportionately Hispanic, making up 24.6% of the industry's workforce compared with 18.8% of the overall workforce. And more than half of all U.S. fast food workers are 20 or older, “contrary to the myth of it being a teenage job that they just do for pocket money,” said Tsedeye Gebreselassie, an attorney for nonprofit advocacy organization National Employment Law Project.
President Donald Trump, who manned the fry station at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania while on the campaign trail last year, has acknowledged that the federal minimum wage is “very low” and that he would consider raising it, but that doing so would be “complicated....
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