When I first moved to Cape Cod, I got two jobs.
One was at a big box store at the Cape Cod Mall taking items out of their shipping boxes and preparing them to go out on the floor for sale. I worked from 5:00 a.m. until 09:00 a.m. with people who, like me, would leave that job and go to another. We were working for minimum wage, and multiple jobs were necessary.
At my second job, I worked with people who also had multiple jobs.
I had had a good career before I got to the Cape, so I was not as totally dependent on these jobs as a career, but more as a way to learn about my new community, keep myself occupied, and make some extra money to afford living in a place I found more expensive than I had expected.
When my first spring there came and the seasonal people began their annual return, in total naivete, one of them looked at me and asked, “And where did you winter this year?”
I was to hear this question often that spring as did my co-workers, who heard that question every spring.
Before World War II, Cape Cod pretty much belonged to the residents. In spite of the two bridges that spanned the canal, having a car to get there and money to spend once you did left a lot of people out, so the fishermen and farmers made up most of the population who lived in quaint little New England villages of local shops and cottages with grey, weathered shingles.
They could survive on the work they produced.
Immediately after the war and for at least two further decades, even though more people owned more cars and the economy made vacations possible, the two main routes to the bridges consisted of two two-lane highways which made for a long and often congested trip.
It could take a full day to get from Boston to anywhere on the Cape.
The Cape grew at a reasonable pace.
The process of building and moving to the cape did not really become manic until the two six-lane highways were built, each approaching one of the two bridges, while, having seen a much larger view of the world in three wars between 1941 and the end of the Viet Nam War, some Cape Codders gave up farming, sold their land to developers, and moved away.
During the manic period little cottages that once sat semi-isolated on country roads found themselves being surrounding by hundreds of cookie cutter homes whose manufactured grey weathered appearance seemed to mock the very quaintness they were destroying.
There is no industry on the Cape to speak of beyond that of supplying goods and services to tourists and new comers who, having fallen in love with the cottages, villages, and quaintness when they visited, decided to move there and then slowly destroyed what attracted them in the first place by wanting to have some of the mainland conveniences they were used to, but the Cape lacked.
Malls sprang up as did large box stores, chain restaurants and fast good franchises moved in, and larger roads were built to answer this need.
And as all this happened, property prices rose so quickly that affordable housing lost out to homes locals could never afford. And since most people who spend time on the Cape mingle with those most like themselves, the assumption grew that anyone who lived on the Cape had to be as affluent as they.
Through no fault of their own, and without malice, the tourists saw the locals who addressed their needs as being there for them. The Cape was for the tourists, and the people who saw to their enjoyable experience just happened to be there, well, because they just were. They were supposed to be.
And, for all intents and purposes in the mind of most tourists, when the cape was closed down for the winter, all those service people just went somewhere else to rest up for their return.
But reality is vastly different.
There are four seasons on Cape Cod.
The spring and fall shoulder seasons, the high tourist season, and the dead of winter.
The spring shoulder season that begins about the end of March is the time of year when people with seasonal homes and rental properties begin to show up to get their properties ready for the summer, and summer seasonal businesses take down their plywood, and prepare for the summer crowds.
The fall shoulder season is the time when this process goes in reverse, and the people who show up are older, don’t have kids in school, or just don’t like the crowds of summer. These are the people who aren’t interested so much in beaches as they are in the quaint restaurants, the little shops, and the scenery.
Tourist season is just wild and over populated as most towns see their population inflate to 5 times their off season sizes.
By the end of December what seasonal businesses haven’t already closed do, and that leaves little for the locals to do, and little need for the locals to be employed.
A prime example of the deadness of winter would be Provincetown where parking in the summer is exorbitant, and parking meters seem to run fast, but where in January, February, and March things are so slow, the coin collecting parts of parking meters are simply removed and parking is free everywhere. If you accidentally put a coin in a meter, it rolls out and falls at you feet. A sign of the approaching spring shoulder season is the return of the coin collecting compartments.
Many employers all over the Cape lay-off a substantial number of employees for those three months as well, employees that have to survive on what they saved, hoping to be called back in April, and forced to accept whatever wages the employer offers then.
These wages are usually minimum wages, unless a person is lucky to have a job where they pay a dollar over.
Some places even reduce their mainland employees during the tourist season when patrons there go off on vacations, bringing those employees to their places on the Cape and eliminating employment for the locals.
In the winter months necessities are affordable because people have to be able to buy things for their needs and because businesses rely on those consumers. But in the summer, with tourists trapped on the East side of the canal and needing to shop where they are, prices rise to the point where the wages of many locals do not buy as much as they do in the winter.
To the tourists, this is also a false measure of the condition of the locals as they are under the impression that if things are as expensive as they are, the locals are affluent enough to afford them.
When you go to Disney World you see the magic of the place and judge everything by that, but you do not see the behind the scenes workers disheveled and sweaty, and the unattractive mechanisms that make Mickey dance and the magic happen.
Sadly, this is what most of the people on the Cape face.
The general impression is that if you live on the Cape, you are affluent and have everything you need. The state that benefits from the money brought in each year from the Cape is glad to take that money but slow to accept that it needs to take care of and support its golden goose, while the locals have to settle for what crumbs the state invests.
The false impression of conditions on the Cape is why any complaint about how tough it is to live there on the wages you make is seen as whining greediness for more affluence, and why, when a local pulls out a SNAP card to buy necessities those not from there see it as an example of scamming the system. After all, if you think the locals make as much money as those who can afford a second home there, they obviously do not need public assistance.
A local Boston conservative radio host constantly uses the Cape as the reason he rails against SNAP. If you can afford your home on the Cape, you certainly do not need SNAP. He doesn’t realize that those expensive homes are not owned by the ordinary local, but main-landers like himself.
Many locals live in generational homes that are passed down from the times housing was affordable.
And before someone suggests that if a person wants to improve their lot they merely have to sell their home at an inflated price, it must be realized that some homes are of an age that before selling them, the plumbing, electric, and septic system have to be upgraded at the seller’s expense which reduces what they can invest in a move up.
I say all this because while watching the latest GOP debate, I was appalled with the comments that the minimum wage does not have to be raised because people are making enough already, as if people can survive on it.
This is obviously the opinion of those who do not have to try to live on minimum wage, and, like tourists on the Cape who, blinded by their vacation, assume their affluence is that of the Cape Codders who are just too lazy to get higher paying jobs, or to better their lot
The GOP candidates are like the tourists who see the glitz, but not the reality behind it.
According to Donald Trump, “People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum.”
It is not there.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio thinks it could end up speeding automation, and eliminate minimum wage workers.
“If you raise the minimum wage, you’re going to make people more expensive than a machine. And that means all this automation that’s replacing jobs and people right now is only going to be accelerated.”
The waitress in a cozy and quaint eatery is not going to be replaced by an auto-mat.
Dr. Ben Carson believes, “As far as the minimum wage is concerned, people need to be educated on the minimum wage. Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases.”
Carson even wants to lower the current wage threshold.
“It’s particularly a problem in the black community. Only 19.8 percent of black teenagers have a job, who are looking for one…And that’s because of those high wages. If you lower those wages, that comes down. I would not raise it, specifically because I’m interested in making sure that people are able to enter the job market and take advantage of opportunities.”
Where there are limited but necessary jobs, and people who have to work them, the ones who will get hired will be the ones who will accept the lowest pay, all others will need to move off Cape to “take advantage of opportunities”, something many cannot afford to do.
Knowing from experience how tough it is for the behind the scenes worker, those comments are a sign of how out of touch the politicians are.
Only Kasich gets it.
“In the state of Ohio — and I’m the only acting executive on this stage today — we do have a moderate increase in the minimum wage. I come from a town where if the wind blew the wrong way, people found themselves out of work. An economic theory is fine, but you know what? People need help.”
Meanwhile Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley favor raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, while Hillary Clinton backs a jump to $12 hourly.
The GOP is happy with the assumption that when they sit for a lobster dinner at a quaint waterfront restaurant, the waitress can eat there too.
She can’t.
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