This lady has a PR problem.  No, not public relations.  Personal responsibility.

Brenda Kelly leaves for work at 2:30 p.m., quietly saying goodbye to her sister. The youngest of Kelly’s six children remains occupied in another room. She shuts the door and heads down Baxter Street.

But it’s too late. Her 3-year-old, James Campbell, runs out the door and onto the porch with a scowl on his face, watching his mother go.

“He doesn’t like it when I leave him,” she said.

Her sister, Jenny Johnson, 36, follows behind and takes James inside as Kelly walks toward Chicora Street to her $6-an-hour job. She keeps her eyes to the ground, careful to avoid eye contact with strangers, her mind wandering to her children.

James is her baby, transfixed by Power Rangers. John Campbell, 5, is her cranky child, who when upset can take hours to speak again. Ambur Kelly, 10, is her outgoing one, the exact opposite of her mother growing up. And Christopher Kelly is her shy one, who makes statements far wiser than his 9 years. “I can’t wait to see what he will be when he grows up,” the 38-year-old Kelly said.

There’s also Ernie Crespo, 18, who is headed into the Navy soon, and his sister, Sybil Crespo, who is 15. Kelly lost custody of them after she took them out of Virginia illegally.

Ah, it’s an “increase the minimum wage” advocacy piece.  Let’s find out more.

With the loss of her children weighing on her, she met Chris Kelly. They had two children, married and separated. She then had two children with a third man, but she no longer has a relationship with either of the fathers.

Kelly pays child support for her two oldest children, but she receives none for her other children, despite being a single mother.

Now the picture is a little clearer.  Ms. Kelly simply lacks the capacity to exercise self control.  Apparently every time she meets a man she can’t restrain herself from procreating despite the fact that she already has multiple children (that she already can’t afford on $6/hr.) at home.  Great decision making.

So Kelly walks to work to provide for all six of her children. The path to her $6-an-hour job takes her by fields littered with paper, broken beer bottles and assorted garbage. The chimney smoke rising from Chicora homes smells of burning paper. She pulls her coat closed in the 40-degree weather.

So we’re supposed to feel bad that she lives in a dumpy neighborhood?  She makes $6 an hour, what do you expect?

I like my job,” Kelly said. “I like the people I work with.”

But she would also like to earn more money.

It might be a year before she receives a raise, unless the South Carolina Legislature passes a bill raising the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7 per hour before then. A measure in Congress would increase the minimum wage to $7.25 by 2009 in incremental steps.

Why, pray tell, does Kelly have to wait a year to get a raise?  If you lack the basic job skills to get a raise on your own merits at an entry level job, then you are a sorry worker.  Period.

Most weeks, Kelly works 40 hours, taking home $260 to $300 every two weeks after the court takes out $117 in child support. When Virginia’s Department of Social Services set the payments Kelly worked as a gas station manager earning between $35,000 to $40,000 a year.

“Considering my income and what I was paying, it didn’t seem that much to me,” she said.

She quit that job when Ambur was born in 1996. With only a high school education, Kelly has been unable to find a job that pays similar wages.

Oh, so she had a better job once and she lost it because of her own bad choices.

In December, Kelly used her rent money to buy Christmas presents.

Hmmm… Presents or housing?  Another bad decision by Kelly.

I’ll be honest, stories like these do more to solidify my opposition to increasing (or even having) a minimum wage than they do to mollify it.  It’s not because I hate poor people.  I do not.  I hate being bludgeoned over the head with emotionally charged stories about people who are in a tough spot due to a lifetime of making bad decision on top of bad decision.

Ms. Kelly makes $6/hr. for lots of reasons.  She has little formal education.  She probably has relatively inflexible hours due to her home life.  I would bet that she has had to call in sick or leave early numerous times (at least more than other workers) to tend to the children.  The fact is she makes $6/hr. because that is all that the she merits.  If the government sets the minimum wage to $7.25 maybe she keeps her job and the extra money helps out until inflation erodes her buying power.  She could actually work harder and earn raises (a novel concept!) to offset inflation like the rest of us, but she probably won’t.  Of course, her employer might find out that a technological or process improvement that costs $7/hr. is now cost effective and Kelly will be on the unemployment dole.

I support helping the kids, who are the real victims, not Ms. Kelly.  Every year my wife and I purchase gifts for poor families through Operation Santa Claus so that the parents don’t have to make another bad decision like Ms. Kelly did.  There are other programs, such as Big Brothers/Sisters, that I (and probably my wife) will dedicate our time to once our kids get a little older and less needy themselves.  One that I recently learned about, Girls Inc., seems like an organization worth supporting.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 6:08 am and is filed under Social Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.