Ava Hoyle is rinsing canned beans in her new apartment. She recently moved to Atlanta with her boyfriend to start college. They just found this place after living in-and-out of motels for three months. “It could have been worse. They were only, like, a few crack-head knocks, just a couple. We only had a few police incidents.”

Ava makes sandwiches at Jimmy John’s for minimum wage, and her boyfriend Vyse is waiting on GI benefits. He spends the better part of his day crunching numbers. “That’s, just simply basics, nine-hundred forty-four dollars split where...to live here…once I get into school, I’ll be making about seven hundred dollars a month, she’ll be making five hundred dollars a month” The two were only able to secure a place with help from Ava’s mom. “She was like ‘we’ll just put in on you tab, so to speak. You can pay it back later, whenever you actually get on your feet, or can start actually making payments on it.”’

State Senator Donzella James (D-Atlanta) sponsored a bill last year to raise the wage to ten dollars and ten cents. The bill did not even get enough support to go before legislators. Currently, Georgia and Wyoming have the lowest state minimum wage. “Five dollars and fifteen cents. That’s ridiculously low, that’s shameful. And I can’t imagine how someone who’s working on a minimum wage could even sustain themselves, and take care of themselves. They definitely couldn’t feed a family.”

That wage level can apply to anyone working in food service or domestic care. Lovette Thompson is the Atlanta director for the Domestic Healthcare Alliance; she says more often than not, those jobs belong to young people, and African Americans. “The work that has primarily been done by domestic workers has been done by African Americans. And there’s a long history of African Americans doing that particular work, especially here in the South, in Georgia, since slavery. To this day, a lot of those same methods, and same mentalities and ways of thinking and doing things have not changed.”

Opponents to raising the minimum wage include business owners like Allen Peake. The State Representative is a restaurant franchise owner in Middle Georgia. “Businesses like mine, small business that employ a large amount of individuals who may be at a minimum wage, would have no option but to raise prices significantly, or to cut hours for those who are currently working for us; and/or potentially cut jobs for those in order to make our margins. We cannot operate at a loss, or we’ll be out of business and then everyone will lose their jobs.”

Both New York and Los Angeles recently passed bills raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars. Georgia State University professor Fred Brooks says that the results of these bills could influence policy makers in Georgia. “If those experiments prove successful, then I think there will be more momentum in Georgia to step on board.” This issue is clearly a complicated one. Still, for Ava and Vyse, it’s a simple equation: “I am kind of….excited but mostly terrified to see how it all pans out. It doesn’t really…the numbers don’t look like they’ll add up, it looks like it will be a struggle.” Senator James plans to reintroduce her bill to raise the wage in January. Until then, workers like Ava will have to get by on $5.15 an hour.

Tags: minimum wage, Donzella James, Allen Peake