Passion vs. Paycheck

Rush hour traffic can be slow and monotonous. But five days a week, JJ Lim drives to work from Burbank, California to Long Beach. Both to and from work, they’re existentially aware of accident statistics that suggest longer periods of time on the road lends itself to increased risk of accident mortality, but every day, they schedule an hour and 15 minutes of commute time both ways to come to work at the Aquarium of the Pacific.

In the morning, they walk into the main education office sporting pink-framed glasses, a blue knit cat-ear beanie, and pronoun pins placed high. Lim is an informal educator there, and I met them while working in the same department — in just over twelve months since I had been hired as an informal educator, Lim has become a good friend of mine.

Lim takes their break in the aquarium's designated classroom. "That's probably the best photo of me out there," they said. (Photo taken by Angie Pulmano)

Most of the time, Lim works behind the scenes, diligently sketching illustrations of aquatic animals or doing research on conservation topics to help update visual storytelling pieces in exhibit galleries. When they’re on the aquarium exhibit floor, they speak warmly about the types of sea life they know best. When explaining concepts to children, Lim stoops to their small height to meet their eye level, to teach jellyfish anatomy or sea lion behavior. Lim, in their enthusiasm, put simply,"I like working in a place where I can talk about the things I like talking about."

For Lim, finding community and safety in the job was something that they were especially glad to experience. As a non-binary person, they take pride in the visibility they can express at work in such a public facing job.

This winter, they plan on moving to Long Beach with a new roommate, and they’re eager to be closer in distance to the aquarium. No longer would the three hour long commute consume their life or contribute to an increased carbon footprint.

Lim would have more time to hang out with friends and focus on developing their own creative work — they went to art school at the Rhode Island School of Design, where they studied film and animation. Working at the aquarium gave them a window into a career of using animated storytelling for education in environment justice.

Over a raspberry tea in a little coffee shop on Broadway and Redondo Avenue, we talked through their budget journey in finding a place to rent in Long Beach — starting with a thought experiment.

Long Beach is a city that’s easy to romanticize. The city’s downtown area is alive with generic retail clothing stores, fusion food restaurants, neon night clubs and graffiti-covered high-rise apartment complexes, but a look through census data and increasing rent trends calls into question the reality of taking on meaningful work at a job where one has built a community, while also meeting the cost of living.

We speculated about a “theoretical JJ Lim", an ideal version of Lim, who would be able to live independently based on the average costs of living needs in Long Beach and the hourly rate paid by the aquarium. Long Beach is home to almost half a million people, and data collections from last year’s city census shows the median resident who worked full-time earned about $40,000 annually. Lim falls into this category—working at approximately $20 an hour.

This year, Lim’s highest bi-weekly paycheck amounted to $1,145 after taxes and benefits were deducted, so we doubled this number to generate a monthly starting income for “theoretical JJ Lim” to determine their living expenses for a one-bedroom apartment in Long Beach.

We started with a total of $2,997, doubled from Lim's highest bi-weekly paycheck, and discovered that renting a one-bedroom apartment in Long Beach would be unsustainable at even their best monthly wage.

Rent rates from Apartment List reported the current median rent for a one-bedroom apartment at $1,577 per month. According to the United States Department of Housing and Urban development, “affordable housing is defined as housing on which the occupant is paying no more than 30 percent of gross income for total housing costs, including utilities,” so to follow the affordable housing 30 percent rule for a one-bedroom apartment in Long Beach, one should earn at least $5,300 per month.

A 2023 research study from the UCLA Labor Center examined the challenges that young people face living in California independently.

While the study specifically followed data of young people aged 16 to 24, Dr. Sophia Angeles, assistant professor of education at Penn State College and research contributor to the UCLA Labor center study, explained how these economic stressors could trickle into their young adult life after graduation.

Angeles said, “I think a lot of our young workers are living with roommates or maybe still living at home, especially if they’re commuting…I think it’s very hard to be a young worker, especially to be a young worker and live independently, and I think it speaks to the need for more protections.”

To maintain the 30 percent rule for affordable housing, “theoretical JJ Lim” would have to earn almost double the wages they make currently. Lim is 26 years old and, like many young adult renters in the United States, Lim has found that moving into the two-bedroom apartment would be more sustainable at their current wage. They also acknowledged that without the financial help of their parents, renting apartment space out of Burbank, originally, and Long Beach, in the future, would be objectively more difficult.

An analysis of data collected from Zillow’s observed rent market rates, rent in Long Beach has nearly doubled in the span of a decade.

Lim is not the only person at the aquarium reckoning with the cost of living, while working a job that nurtures their career interest. During my time at the aquarium, I’ve also gotten to know my colleagues Michael Mcghee and Emily Smith.

They’re aquarists — they specialize in taking care of fish and soft-bodied invertebrates like starfish and sea anemone. When a starfish starts to release white clumps to begin their reproductive process, I call the aquarists to remove it from the exhibit before it clogs the water pipes. When there’s a broken jellyfish, I radio the aquarists to scoop up the slimy carcasses out of the water, and Mcghee or Smith walks over from behind the scenes.

“Aquarists” might sound glamorous, but a century ago, they were called ‘tank men,’ and their entire job was ‘to scrub the tanks and throw in the food,” said Mcghee. “But we’ve progressed from entertainment as the primary component of aquariums into education and conservation.”

Recently, Mcghee, along with his fellow coworkers have participated in research efforts to help breed, grow and restore populations of a critically endangered species of starfish back to their kelp forest habitats, and he explained the value of the aquarium as an institution that helps make climate change education accessible.

“We’ll see probably within the next four years, a shift away from climate protection policies that make our work even more vital, that we need to get this information out to the public,” said Mcghee. “We need our husbandry staff to be able to do the research and try to conserve these animals or these plants or these organisms, and then we need to relay that information to our educators, so our educators can get that information out to the public.”

Mcghee’s 27 years old, and has grown up immersed in all things aquarium. He began volunteering — not in animal care, but in the Education department at the Aquarium of the Pacific when he was 14 years old. He would stand in front of touch pool exhibits teaching guests about the animals. When Mcghee went to college he left Long Beach to become more well-versed in marine science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, but he returned to the aquarium after college and was hired as an aquarist in 2022.

But, being surrounded by like-minded coworkers who care about fish and invertebrates as much as he does, motivates Mcghee and his aquarist colleagues to stick around.

Smith’s interest in ocean creatures began as a young child. She would write letters to Sea World — and staff at Sea World nurtured that interest by writing her back.

“After that, I knew that I was going to be working with animals in some way,” she said, reflecting on her early ambitions.

She’s 33 and has been working as a paid aquairst for almost seven years, but she began volunteering her time educating aquarium visitors in 2012. She went to a four-year college for an undergraduate degree in marine biology, and interned at the California State University of Long Beach, which was where she really deepend her interest for marine invertebrates.

“It’s an expectation that you have a bachelor’s degree at minimum, and a scuba certification and that previous experience in the field just to get the entry level job,” said Mcghee, pointing out the traditional career path to landing a specialized position at the aquarium. “So it’s like you got five to six figures of college debt now, plus several hundreds or thousands of dollars for scuba certifications, depending on how far you go into it, and then you have all the hours you put into unpaid internships or volunteering.”

Aquarist, Emily Smith's adored sand tiger shark, Big Guy swims at the aquarium's shark lagoon. (Photo courtesy of Emily Smith.)

Sunflower star baby in its juvenile stages of development. (Photo courtesy of Michael Mcghee.)

Aquarists Emily Smith and Michael Mcghee talk about their favorite moments on the job.

When Mcghee was first hired onto the Fish and Invertebrates department, his starting wage was $20 per hour, and since being hired, his pay rate increased to $23 per hour.

“I think everyone’s kind of feeling the economic pressures, but you know, it’s also like, my cherished animal of 10 years is dead. I’m not getting [research] approval, or I’m having setbacks with my conservation project, and I can’t afford rent, you know? It all builds. It’s all very cumulative,” said Mcghee.

Among their cohort of 20 people in the department, they have grown close, joking at times at the “trauma bond” they formed together working at the aquarium.

“I have never been surrounded by this many passionate people in a workplace, and so it creates a strong sense of community,” he said. “Because we’re all kind of driven by that care and passion, but on the other hand, it’s a meat grinder. People get overworked and burned out.”

This past fall, the aquarium’s Fish and Invertebrates department moved to organize under the United Auto Workers labor union, but this class struggle extends beyond the aquarium and the city of Long Beach — and they are not alone in their efforts.

At the same time, the aquarists’ decision to unionize this year also reflects a movement that the Shedd Aquarium workers in Chicago also went through this past fall. At Shedd Aquarium, according to a blog post from their representing coalition, the AFSCME Cultural Workers United union, workers were met with anti-union sentiments, and Shedd management was accused of "violating federal labor law in its efforts to prevent workers from exercising their right to organize."

The workers at Shedd Aquarium were ultimately successful with their efforts to unionize, and at the Aquarium of the Pacific, the Fish and Invertebrates team were bothofficially recognized by the NLRB in November.

Alissa Quart, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, has focused much of her reporting outlining the middle-class “implosion” of the “American Dream, and in her book, “Squeezed: Why our families can’t afford America,” she explains the growing pressures faced by today’s generation of workers.

“The price of a four-year degree at a public college — one traditional ticket to the bourgeoisie — is nearly twice as much as it was in 1996,” she wrote. “The cost of healthcare has almost doubled in that twenty-year period as well. And rent, not to mention homeownership, has also become substantially more expensive, though not on the same horrifying level as education and medical care. Meanwhile, the ongoing decimation of unions and employees’ rights continues.”

On a larger scale, Quart, in her book, explains that the frustration that fuels labor movements today stems from the growing wealth disparity between the ultra rich and the middle class. The solution to these struggles could no longer be found in passive individual action, but rather through collective movement by people who love what they do.

“The problem of not being able to afford to live in America can’t be cured by self-help mantras. It can’t be mended simply by creating a resume that utilizes several colors of printer ink or a regimen of cleansing green juices. The problem is systemic.”

President-elect Donald Trump may have won the vote of many working class Americans, but the former president leaves much of the labor movement concerned. During his first term, the National Labor Relations Board — the independent federal agency tasked with protecting the rights of private sector employees to organize union efforts — released a report suggesting a “bleak future for American workers,” and as President, Trump has the power to appoint board members to the NLRB

Mcghee also expressed his concern for the next four years of a Trump presidency and the influence that tech billionaire Elon Musk, who discussed firing striking workers on social media, might have over the NLRB, but he finds hope on a smaller scale, in that the shared common values that have brought his coworkers together in the first place will help them build a community that can advocate better for sustainable working conditions.

“That’s the price you pay for being passionate, right? It’s like you’re not going to get paid as much, but then you get to, like play with the fish all day," said Mcghee.“It’s that kind of passion versus pay."