This just in...Abilene: a cheap-ass town

The local paper has announced stunning news (free registration may be required to read). Abilene has low wages. Yeah, no duh. As stated in this post, there are a lot of poor people in the fair mother city for a reason. The news story states that Abilene ranks 5th to last in state-wide wages. Houston is first with at $900 a month. Abilene is $526 and Brownsville area is at $450.

I can see the injustice with the border towns that rank the lowest. Most of those communities are made up of immigrants or illegal aliens, therefore employers can easily get away with paying their workers magic beans since immigrants will work for any wages greater than those of their friends and family in Mexico. I'm not justifying this act. It's still a crock.

I've long suspected that the primary reason for the fair mother city's sucky wages had to do with the hyper-religious culture she's infected with. And secondly, like the border towns, we have a fair sized population of immigrants too. Thirdly, college students-a-plenty. They'll work for pop tarts.

I have no scientific proof on the religious culture theory. Just a lot of speculation and 17 and a half years experience in the fair mother city working for some of these outlets.

A year ago (when I contemplated my calling as an undercover agent) I interviewed for a local mom-n-pop business. It was a very technically involved job requiring a lot of customer service skills. It sounded great. They needed a sales rep who'd do other various tasks including local deliveries. This company was on the fast track to franchise out nation wide in 10 years. All in all, it sounded like a great ground floor opportunity, as in I or whoever got the gig could become part owner someday if they played their cards right. Then the stale-mate. "We pay $7 an hour". Well...good damned luck finding a COLLEGE student who'll work 40 hours a week. $7 an hour, eh? I've got a mortgage and a family. I've upped my standards, so up yours.

It seems most every business in town (or at least the ones I use to work for) is owned and run by christians. They had the control and power on wages in their establishment. Plus, many of these same business owners served on local community development boards that supposedly help bring new jobs to town. So these business owners would appear to have more influence in the job market and economy than just their personal business. I would hope that they'd take a more justice filled role and raise the standard of wages within their own businesses, and let healthy wage competition run amuck with new companies that come to town. That is, if they'd give incentive for new companies to be here in the first place.

It's well known that local waiters & waitresses are frustrated with the church crowd. Local christians are notorious for being the cheapest tippers around. They'll under tip (if any at all) or even pull out a calculator to figure out exactly 10-15%, down to the nickel or round down. So much for giving our all...

I bring up the tipping ordeal because I assume it might parallel my low wage conspiracy theory. Christians tip bad. Therefore, maybe they pay their workers bad too.

A religious spirit seems to make people cling to what they have. This spirit might have people take care of their own in a Galatians 6:10 kind of way. But that's it. Little generosity beyond their own boundaries.

Again...nothing scientifically proven here. Just a bunch of conspiracy theories. And I enjoy dabbling in conspiracy theories, which is probably not safe hobby.