A living wage?

Today I'm not packing books and I won't get paid. Instead I've chosen to realize the death of a woman with whom I've shared laughter and joy and dance and wonder, I'll be attending her funeral.

I've been asked to read a poem; it was found after her death among her belongings and it now serves as her self-subscribed  legacy (there's no ISBN no.), it can't be ordered online and it's not recorded in any publication to be packed in a box and transported, so it'll be delivered to you directly, it's as follows:



Restless

Sweet summer has come.
Roses are bending
Turning their painted colours to the sun,
Children heard calling
Whoops and hollers
Important things we all must do can wait
While we look outside for signs of rain

Surely the time has come to change things
To change the essence of my existence
To let thoughts run free and take hold
Finding places, finding the place where 
I am not mean or discontent.
Sometimes I think I am there, but not
Yet, though I have seen colours in 
The fields where love has embraced me.


I was forced to think of death on my way to work yesterday I noticed a gravedigger at work in the Cemetery as I cycled past, the vision of the grave digger tossing soil up from the deep hole, the final resting place for a dead person, it got me thinking.  Thoughts of living and dying, thoughts of my inevitable death. And then of my life, and of my work, my work in a book packing warehouse for less than a living wage.

I begin to get angry.  The Tory new minimum wage is not a living wage.  A living wage would be a level of income that affords me to realize my life before my body wears out and dies.  Working for a wage should facilitate living. Pay rates below subsistence block the living afforded by those on a real living wage: so, my hourly rate has risen from £6.70/hour to £7.20/hour; according to the Living Wage Foundation that would be £8.25, so it's still not a living wage.

No compassionate leave to bury a parent for us non-living-wage workers on zero hour contracts.

Today I choose to live, 

and tomorrow I want to live, I choose not to work to die, 
so I said no to the shift offered me for tomorrow.