Gabriela would love, every once in a while, to take her two sons – Carlos, 15, and Steven, 8 – out to their favorite Mexican restaurant in Brooklyn for chorizo tacos with guacamole and breaded chicken cutlets. That's their favorite meal. But she can't. In fact, most nights, she can't afford to serve them meat of any sort in the single room they share in an apartment inhabited by others. They mostly live on rice and beans.
That’s because Gabriela, 47 – who withheld her last name because she is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico – pulls in a little more than $2,000 a month as a housecleaner working at the current New York City minimum wage of $15 an hour. (One employer, she said – speaking in Spanish through translator Guadalupe Cortez, an organizer at New York Communities for Change – actually pays her below the legal minimum, $14 an hour, but she can't afford to complain.)
Her monthly rent for that room is $670, which leaves her about $1,330 to cover all other expenses, including food, transportation and the boys' clothes and school supplies. But with the U.S. Department of Agriculture having recently reported that, with current inflation, food prices were up nearly 11% from last summer, Gabriela is really feeling the squeeze. “A dozen eggs have gone from $5 to $6, and meat has gone even higher. I’m very stressed and start crying, and then my youngest starts crying and saying, ‘Oh my God, we don't have money again.’”
If the New York City minimum wage went up to $20,...
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