Ope Pardon, No. 3: 45K and 7 Weeks Vacation

I was planning to save this subject for later, to continue to tiptoe toward the personal via sports and entertainment musings, but half these paragraphs came to me while I was taking a shower and when something writes itself, you just kind of roll with it. So let's talk about money! (If the subject spooks you, know that next week I will be going back to the safe embrace of writing about sports fandom.)

There's an episode of Friends that's stuck with me for approximately 20 years, even though I'm pretty sure I had only seen it once before rewatching it this week. In the episode, the friends come into conflict because Rachel, Joey and Phoebe are frustrated with Ross, Monica and Chandler's lack of consideration that they don't make as much money and, consequently, have a harder time affording spontaneous nice dinners and splitting big group expenses, like spending $62 per person on a birthday gift for Ross. "I never think about money as an issue," Ross says. "That's because you have it," Rachel responds.

I don't know if I knew it then — for reasons not worth getting into, I can pinpoint the age I saw the episode as sometime between the 7th and 10th grade, and this would have been an odd realization for a 13-year-old; more likely the memory of the episode emerged from the recesses of my mind to lodge itself in the forefront of my socioeconomic identity at a later date — but for as long as I have thought of myself as a financially independent being, I have always felt that I would be on the Rachel, Joey and Phoebe side of that table. I have never not thought about money; never ordered without checking the price; never bought something without considering whether I really needed it. I have never entered a nice apartment and not wondered what the rent was and who was paying it. With respect to exact jobs and income, I would guess I align most with Chandler, and I would rather get hit by a bus than budget myself on a birthday gift, but I am also fairly certain that — with a couple exceptions and varying circumstances as my friends passed in and out of grad/law school — I was often the lowest paid person at the table anytime I went out during my working years in the U.S.. (I threw as many qualifiers into that sentence as possible because true to social norms, my friends and I have only ever talked about money in the abstract.)

This has never really bothered me. It helps that the Ross/Monica/Chandlers in my life have always been exponentially better at navigating income discrepancy than their Friends counterparts, to the point that it is not so much a problem in my relationships with them as it is a problem with my relationship to society. But I've recently gone through the process of finding a new job, at the same time one of my friends got a new job, while another is weighing a salary cut if he switches jobs and while, of course, the Great Resignation carries on unabated and a bonanza of union drives and strikes finally begins to give American labor some much-needed momentum. Unsurprisingly, then, I have been thinking a lot about salaries and pay and what it means to earn what you're worth.

Because, see, I’ve never known how to feel about how much money I make, which has always been both more than I need to live and less than I know I’m worth. I've only been really, truly angry about my salary once in my life. (I was angry about it for almost two full years but let's say once.) I was angry not because the figure was substantially lower than what I had been making at my previous job — I have taken substantial pay cuts every time I have switched jobs; we will return to this theme! — but because it was substantially lower than that of my coworkers. Nominally, they were senior editors and I was a junior editor, but after about six months in the role, I had basically the same responsibilities and was performing comparable work. There was another editor, I came to learn, who was in the same salary boat as me; he was simply not bothered by the inequality. But for me, it was the principle. I can accept a low salary with my own justifications, but only if I feel I am nonetheless being valued fairly within the context of the company. I will begrudgingly accept your "we just can't right nows" or "the parent company of the parent company said next cycle" when I see layoffs ravage competitors, but not when I hear through the grapevine that a colleague got a consolation raise just to soothe his ego when he was passed over for a more senior job that he was not qualified for to begin with.

No Millennial — no one, really — should write about money without disclosing their family situation, so here goes. My family is upper (possibly upper-upper depending on how you are measuring) middle class and the fact that I am not and have never been intimately aware of my parents' finances already gives you a sense of the tax bracket I grew up in. With my parents' approach to money, this meant we never wanted for anything — took vacations, always had Christmas and birthday presents, big houses with yards and my own room — but I also didn't get everything I wanted whenever I wanted it, did not have free rein on a credit card billed to my parents and when I started to receive an allowance, I also became responsible for buying my own toothpaste and tampons. I never thought we were rich because I thought rich was My Super Sweet Sixteen and I didn't understand then the wealth required for the kind of financial security and lifestyle we enjoyed.

I have also benefited from my family's ability to build generational wealth. My dad comes from Illinois farmers, which might connote a certain class, but at the same time, his mom's family, in particular, weathered the Dust Bowl just fine and could afford to send my grandma to both private boarding school and college in the 1940s, which is not nothing. Both sides of my mom's family came to Detroit as working class, nearly every one of her grandparents, great aunts and uncles worked in the car factories. (They also dabbled in bootlegging and one uncle learned to cut hair in prison, a trade his grandsons still practice today, but that's another story.) In any case, that changed with her parents and she grew up upper middle class, complete with a move from Detroit proper to one of the most affluent suburbs in the country. My dad's family is Irish and my mom's is Italian and French-Canadian and, during those pivotal generations, that meant both were white enough for the American dream of homeownership and kids' college funds even if no one had a job that would give you either today.

There's more I could say, of course, but honestly, the single most important thing to know about how my family's wealth has shaped my perspective is that my parents paid for my college tuition and I do not have student loans. They also loaned me money for grad school last year, which I ultimately did not need, but having it in my bank account saved me from watching every cent I spent and allowed me to continue to circumvent the succubi at Sally Mae. Second, then, is the knowledge that should I end up penniless in Paris, my parents could and would not only buy me a ticket home but feed and house me until I got my life together again. The third is that, as was the case for them but is certainly not the case for everyone, I do not need to financially support my parents or extended family members. At this stage of my life, my only dependent is my dog.

I have paid for all my expenses myself since I moved out of my parents' home six months after graduating college. The one exception was my phone bill: I was on the family plan until I moved to France — I wrote my parents checks for my share when I remembered but that was admittedly not very often and they have yet to come collecting on that debt.

(Along with not having student loans, a luxury that simply cannot be overstated, I do not have a ton of expenses, generally, which is not a credit to austerity so much as it’s a result of a lifestyle of laziness and a thrifty disposition. Additionally, because I didn't have student loans, I was able to spend much of my 20s diverting income into a "fuck off fund" — i.e., a savings account that would allow you to quit a job, break a lease, move or do any other kind of financially substantial thing to get out a bad situation. I almost used it in the spring of 2019, but I didn't, and I've since cashed it in to fuck off to grad school in France, though not due to any one particular bad situation, unless you count the general state of the world in 2020.)

I don't take any of these things for granted, and you may find this a superfluous addition of 500 words to what is quite the lengthy essay but I think it's important context as I take you on my self-indulgent spiral about salary and self-worth.

During the aforementioned two year period when I was angry all the time, I went to this talk organized by Ladies Get Paid — surely I don't need to explain the mission of that group — and asked a question, some variation of "how do you decide how long to accept a lower salary in pursuit of bigger dreams?" The speaker didn't so much answer or acknowledge the question as say simply that if you aren't making what you're worth, you should quit on the spot. While I appreciated that on principle — I do love my principles — I felt it didn't quite capture the nuance of my situation or the industry I was trying to make it in. For someone in my position without dependents or loans, did I really want to give up on journalism, not because I needed to like so many who are pushed out of the profession for financial reasons, but on the principle of, I don't know, girl boss feminism?

As I mentioned, I've taken pay cuts every time I've changed jobs. The first time, I was changing industries to Pursue My Dream of becoming a culture and entertainment writer and the paycut was about 15K. Over the course of the next three years, I was promoted and received raises with my new titles. Still low when you saw figures coming out of the increasingly, gloriously aggressive pay transparency conversations happening on journalism Twitter, but I was happy with my choices, because as I've said I was making enough to live my life without needing to check my bank account every week. And the more I learned, i.e., the more my colleagues and I talked, the more I was aware that I was, in fact, better treated financially than many at the company. Still, when I decided journalism was not, after all, for me, I was excited that the prospect of going to marketing would bring with it a more substantial paycheck. After all, selling out implies a certain, well, monetary reward.

Not so when you also move to Europe!

The other week, a friend of a friend told me about a friend — this is how most salary conversations go, with at least two degrees of separation — who made around $120K in the U.S. and was told she could expect to make 60K in Paris. (The exchange rate favors the Euro, but not that much — to save you a search that would be about $68K.) There's variation by industry, of course, and whether you're working for a French company or an American company operating in France, etc., etc., but salaries are low here. A French headhunter told me to expect between 45-50K and I ended up accepting an offer for 45. On the other hand, I will start with 7 weeks vacation in a country where people actually respect the concept of out-of-office. So between me and my god, I am perfectly content with my salary, especially because I get visa sponsorship and the near impossibility of getting fired. Still, when I talk to my friends or read about the latest rounds of editorial union wins raising minimum salaries, I can't help but feel bad about myself for what I've accepted.

This moment in labor, American in particular because we are the furthest behind, is objectively good. Most of the people agitating for better pay are overdue and deserving of that pay and most of the conversation around earning what you're worth is not about making everyone billionaires but about providing everyone a baseline level of financial security and stability. (As much as I hate what's happening with Netflix's TUDUM, there is simply no begrudging the logic of the journalists choosing to work there when no one else is offering a livable wage for that kind of writing.) Negotiating for more money is great; potential employers seeing your worth and throwing money at you from the start is even better. Similarly, I believe it is objectively a good thing to talk about money. Hard, because no one has any practice at doing it, but good. Salary talk is one of the most invigorating forms of work gossip.

And I don't want to sound like I am advocating for settling for low salaries, for getting paid in "exposure" or "opportunity" or ping pong tables or cold brew taps or any of the other perks companies offer to justify paying under a living wage on contracts with no healthcare. I don't like feeling like my desire to separate individual worth from income is at odds with my politics, in so far as I fear the implication that my desire to devalue salary suggests money isn't vitally important. This isn't meant to be some money can’t buy happiness bullshit: it absolutely can and does and anyone who tells you otherwise does not realize how much money it takes to make "no money" happiness happen. (In this way it is exactly like "no makeup" beauty.) But it hardly feels healthy to add a layer — that I am fully willing to admit might exist only in my mind — of self-worth to already-fraught conversations about pay.

It also bothers me that this feels like another manifestation of the tendency to turn structural, societal problems into an individual and/or moral imperative. (See: All messaging surrounding the pandemic.) The problem is low wages and labor exploitation; the responses I see are mantras of "ask for more" "don't settle for less" and "take your talents elsewhere" framing a personal responsibility to seek out or negotiate a better salary for yourself. (Gosh, even journalists writing newsletters fits that mold — go earn your worth with Substack subscriptions as an individual when your legacy pub won't pay you, nevermind that hundreds of $30/year newsletters is not a sustainable solution to the collective crisis of news media.) (Also in case it bears saying, I see an obvious difference between the self-help empowerment language of "don't settle!" and like, the John Deere workers not settling until their third contract.) My situation is far from a grave example of the reasons people accept lower salaries, me taking a salary cut to stay in France is not at all the same as someone accepting less than their worth because they have kids to feed and need health insurance, but no one should feel bad about their salary.

Am I projecting my anxieties onto a distinction no one else has problems making? Maybe! But I am nonetheless ashamed — no, that is too strong of a word. Embarrassed? Also not quite right. Maybe shy? Let's go with shy — I am shy about the salary I accepted for my new job not because I am embarrassed to be making a literal 1/10th of what at least one, possibly two, maybe even three, of my friends make but because I am afraid that it will suggest that I am someone who does not know my own self-worth, someone that doesn't have the self-esteem or confidence to demand more money. That I am in some way weak. In sharing all this now, I'm afraid that, instead of being that friend with a litany of trash boyfriends behind them, bringing a new scrub to brunch when we all know they deserve better, I will be seen as the pitiable friend that keeps accepting job offers with low salaries. Only, it's a lot easier to hide a low salary than a trash boyfriend unless you put it in the subject line of a newsletter.

Anyways, this is all just to say I am starting a new job with a shit salary and great self-esteem, and the fact I was happy to accept the former doesn't negate the latter, and maybe I just needed to put it in writing at the end of a 3,000-word essay to believe it myself.

For fun, transparency and gossip purposes, here's a complete list of all the salaries I've ever had —

Content Writer (Content Farm) - 30K USD

Junior Content Writer (Advertising Agency) - 34K USD

Copywriter (Advertising Agency) - 47.5K USD, thanks, Obama!

Junior Editor (Digital Media Publication) - 31K USD

Senior Editor (Digital Media Publication) - 47.5K USD

Associate Editorial Director (Digital Media Publication) - 55K USD

Head of Content (Digital Media Publication) - 70K USD

Content Strategist (French Startup) - 45K E/50K USD