Maria Fernandes, the woman who died while napping in her car between shifts at the three different Dunkin' Donuts stores she worked at, is a powerful symbol of the horrors of America's low-wage economy. Rachel Swarns, writing in the
New York Times,
profiles Fernandes, seeking to make her "more than an emblem of our nation’s rising economic inequality." She was a Michael Jackson fan, an animal lover, and more. But you can't get around that her life—not just her death—was defined by her work, and by the low wages and impossible schedule it left her with:
She dreamed of the bustling streets of Los Angeles and the leafy towns of Pennsylvania. She dreamed of working two jobs, not three. She dreamed of sleeping, really sleeping, for six or seven hours at a stretch.
But dreams rarely pay the rent. So Ms. Fernandes worked three jobs, at three Dunkin’ Donuts stores in northern New Jersey, shuttling from Newark to Linden to Harrison and back. She often slept in her car — two hours here, three hours there — and usually kept the engine running, ready in an instant to start all over again.
She had an apartment, but was falling behind on the $550 rent despite those three jobs. Dunkin' Donuts said she was a "model" employee, but wouldn't say how much she was paid or how many hours she worked. Which makes sense—it probably is in Dunkin' Donuts' best interest for us not to know how they treat their model employees.
Fernandes was certainly an individual who deserves to be remembered for who she was. But in a way her death is a reminder of how many people are one accident away from becoming emblems of rising inequality. And it shouldn't take a death to make us see the rank injustice of Maria Fernandes' life. The minimum wage should be higher than New Jersey's $8.25 an hour. Fast food chains like Dunkin' Donuts should offer workers regular schedules with enough hours, so they aren't forced to spend their days going from job to job, grabbing naps in between. Someone like Fernandes should not only be able to pay $550 a month for a basement apartment, she should also be able to afford her dream of going to cosmetology school. Maria Fernandes may have died in a way that focused attention on her life, but some of the attention should go to how sadly common the details of that life are. It should not be so ferociously difficult to get by, let alone get ahead, in this country.