| Martha Tharaud, the labor lawyer in Cerriere's Answer, wonders about the working lives of people she sees, such as the Ying's server and the Dean & DeLuca? cleaner. I also wonder in this same way about people I see, and I think most union people do. Oddly, Martha has the minimum wage wrong. In 1996, the New York State minimum wage was no more than $4.25, not "five dollars, roughly." That leaves the server’s post-tax income, if you use the same calculations Martha did, at $6400 year, not $7500. (In fact, if the server was a tipped employee -- I can’t tell from the story -- her wage would have been $2.90, putting her post-tax, sans-tips annual income at $4400.)
I'm not sure if we as the audience are supposed to read anything into Martha's mistake. Is writing about a labor lawyer who doesn't know the minimum wage a subtle comment by the author? Or was it just an editing mistake? The New York minimum wage actually went up in 1997 and 1998, to $4.75 and then $5.15. That could have created confusion for whomever fact-checked the book.
If Martha's mistake is supposed to give the reader a sense of her character, I think there is not much to derive from it that we don't know already from the other signs about her. She says that she has worked for the New York-area unionized dockworkers, that her most recent client was sexually harassed by a high-paid executive, and that she has never worked anywhere other than lower Manhattan. These are not contexts in which you interact much with the minimum wage -- even when you "help[] change considerably -- and for the better -- the living standards of hundreds of thousands of people," as she says her old boss did.
I think if Robert Cerriere had overheard the minimum wage mistake -- and somehow knew himself that the rate was only $2.90 -- he would have taken advantage of it to taunt Martha. But that would not change the fact that she is rich as a result of trying to help people who are in disadvantaged relationships to their employers, while he is rich as a result of trying to help the employers.
-- AmandaBell - 15 Apr 2010
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