Recipient: Maceo Lovings Occupation: Recently Unemployed Responded On: January 26, 2005 Bill Received At: Marathon Gas Station Cermak Road and Kedzie Avenue Chicago Originally Dropped At: Neighborhood Grocery Lotus Street and Harrison Avenue Chicago On: January 25, 2005   See who else has received this bill. Follow the Money >>

 

Maceo Lovings's Comments

Are people paid fairly for the kinds of work they do?
My total belief is: I don’t think people are paid fairly at all. For instance they just went up on minimum wage. I mean minimum wage is still not enough. Jobs want you to perform so many acts of duties, you know, strenuous hard jobs, for the little money and that makes the individual lose interest in the job.

They ask for too much. I’m thirty-seven years old and I been out here in the working field since I was sixteen years old. But the only things has been little jobs here, little jobs there. My goal for this year is to stay on the job, for some years, with benefits, because there’s a lot of jobs out here that don’t give you benefits and stuff.

And like I say, they expect so many duties, want you to perform so many duties for the little money. $6.50. That’s no money. It’s no money. I think even about the teenagers. They don’t even want to get a job: “I ain’t working for no minimum wage.” That’s what pushes them out here to sell the drugs and to do the stupid things that they do out here. Because they don’t want to work for that little money. I see this with my own eyes.

Do young people take that attitude, “I'm just worth more than that?”
From my perspective, the generation behind me, the young men, I’m not going to say the young ladies, mostly young men, they figure [that] they are worth more than that.

Like I’ll always tell them, you have to crawl before you walk. You have to work your way up. And then their response will be, “I’m not going in there to work at no McDonald’s or Burger King for no $5 an hour.” They make it seem like it’s beneath them. A lot of them do.

What is the worst thing you've ever done to obtain money?
The worst thing I’ve ever done to obtain money … I tried it … Back in the day, I tried to sell marijuana. That was the worst thing I ever done. Right today, I still regret it.

For you personally, if I could wave my magic wand and say, you could have a million dollars because either you won the lottery, or because, if you work hard across the next five, ten years, you're gong to earn it … do you have a feeling which way you would enjoy that money better?
I would rather work for it because I can say, “I earned this. I earned it. And it paid off.” The lottery, you know. We ain't going to talk about that lottery because I’ve wasted so much money on that. We was getting addicted to it.

How much do you think you wasted on it?
Oooohhhh. I was basically spending almost $400 a month on it. Almost $400 a month on the lottery. It was back in 2000.

For how many months did you do that?
About half a year.

And this may be a stupid question, but did you really think you had a chance? Why were you doing that?
Got addicted. We were winning sometimes. We’d win $200 here, $80 here, $40 there and you know it just drew us more and more and more to it. But then I came to my senses. I told my wife. I said, “Uh uh. This have to stop. We spending too much.” Mid-day. Evening. Mid-day. Evening. It was too much and right to today, we don’t do it.

Even though you were winning, weren't you logically thinking the odds are so against us? See, I can never understand that when I
see people throwing their money on the lottery. It makes me feel bad. I feel like, “Just go flush it down the toilet, because it's not much different … ”
You know I didn’t really think about it until, what you just said, what the odds were … Because I was even spending money on those little scratch tickets. Until I started reading the back of the tickets and seeing what the odds were … One in 500,000 or one in a million, and that’s what made me come to a halt.

Do they write the odds on the back?
On the back of the scratching tickets, yes. And I never knew that until I read the back of the ticket.

Do you think that amongst the different races people think of other races as having a different relationship to money? … Do you think that African-Americans feel that other racial groupings have kind of a different relationship to money?
Yes, they do. Why because … they say someone outside of our race or our culture come from a wealthy family and they have the money to do a lot of things that blacks don’t have the money to do. But then you look at it like this. Maybe they’ve worked hard enough to get the money to do what they want to do.

But I bet there's plenty of African-Americans, and I wouldn't disagree with them, who would feel like—wait a minute, why are there so many more white people who seem to have more moeny than black people? Now why is that?
You know why? Because the black people don’t invest they money the way that they should. My perspective. They don’t invest money the way that they should. Like I say, I born and raised here in Chicago on the west side. And me coming up as a child I seen. You know I don’t see no—how many black-owned businesses?

Then you have Arabs come over here, got stores everywhere. Everywhere. Blacks don’t try to get a store. And I look at that. And then if they come from a wealthy family or have money, they don’t invest that money. They just spend it on the fancy cars and you know just splurge it on unnecessary things. Whites. They invest they money. They want to see where they money going. And a lot of blacks don’t.