My response to someone's comment about what minimum wage should be

As a mental health professional with an undergrad degree, I worked in community mental health with people who had attempted suicide (met many at the hospital while they were still in the ICU and had just come off ventilators) or were thinking of suicide, people with homicidal ideation (who had already threatened others and threatened them when they were with me, which meant I had a duty to warn the threatened individuals and had to share that with my clients who were having homicidal ideation), severely depressed people who could barely function, people with bipolar disorder, children on the autism spectrum, children with ADD, children with oppositional defiant disorder, people with intermittent explosive disorder, people with obsessive compulsive disorder, and so many other diagnoses. I was a frontline crisis worker who met with individuals in a severe mental health crisis--adults and children, and I never made $15 an hour in all of my years working in that field. When I retired, I was making $14.98 an hour. There is no money for mental health services. I was an undergrad so could not provide therapy, but I worked as a crisis case worker and was required to provide psychoeducational information at each meeting with my clients. I was also required to transport my clients wherever they needed to go that was part of their treatment plan. I was also required to transport clients in the middle of the night, when I was on call, to the crisis unit if the therapist who evaluated them felt they needed to be in crisis placement. Many times, the hospitals I met my clients in were in the middle of nowhere as I live in a rural area. Many times, the clients were still having psychosis and active hallucinations when I left the hospital with them, and many times, I was on back country roads at 2 AM with spotty to no cellphone service--curvy, narrow, dark country roads with deer running out frequently and no one but me and this new client I had just met in my car. Depending on which hospital I was called to, that trip to the crisis unit could take a minimum of 15 minutes and a maximum of 1.5 hours. Just me and the client and old, windy dark country roads. The therapists made more then 15 an hour, but when you figure the money it took them to get their degree and the hours required for licensure, and the hours above and beyond their clinic hours (we all had on-call--the therapists were on-call for this county only, but I was on-call for the 8 counties in my region and many times, I was out all night getting called from county to county--driving as much as 250 miles in the middle of the night, and then having to work the next day). If I had been trying to live on my paycheck alone, I don't know how I would have made it. The priorities in this country are not in favor of taking care of the sick, the marginalized, the suffering, the ones wanting to take care of themselves and their families. They are not concerned about people in need and what is fair. The minimum anyone should make is 15 dollars an hour, and I felt that the nature of my work meant I needed at least 20, but we all do what we have to do and are called to do. Sorry for blowing up your thread. Your post just made me think about my working life. I am so sorry for all of the folks out there who did not get any UI this week and who do not know what they are going to do.