There’s this great sandwich place a few blocks from my office where I go a couple of times a week. You probably know it – it’s one of those big chain places that I try to avoid when I can, but hey, they make a great feed.

The people that work there seem to be recent immigrants to this country, from South America, parts of Asia.

As I sit and eat my sandwich, I notice that sometimes they don’t get all that much respect from the people they serve.

Having worked in jobs like this myself I always make sure to say g’day and ask how things are, and be grateful that someone is making my food. But many of the customers’ attitudes range from indifference to rudeness.

To me, this is more than about manners, and is an example of the class and racial divides which still exist in this country and many others.

And as much as it has to do with people’s thoughts on immigration and the age-old skin color and language issues that have been paralyzing people’s brains for centuries, I think it has a lot to do with an economic prejudice.

The state of Washington sets its minimum wage at $8.55 per hour, which, from what I can find, is the highest in country. This should be a good thing – for a teenager working part-time bussing plates at a restaurant, $8.55 plus tips probably isn’t too bad.

But thousands of families in Washington state, many of them recent immigrants, rely on entire salaries of minimum wage hours, often with no insurance or holiday benefits. A lot of this work is in the service industry — landscaping, cleaning motels, picking up people’s towels at the gym.

It is an ugly truth to say it, but the people that do these jobs are still often looked down upon by those who have the luxury, and this prejudice and the economics of it are broadening the divide between those that have and those that serve.

At the heart of it are our notions of worth, which we have unfortunately learned not from what we know about how hard it is to do some jobs and the value that it has for the community, but from an economic system which unfathomably rewards some people disproportionately more than others.

The idea that a guy who makes money appear from the ether by buying and selling stocks for other people is somehow more valuable than the guy who drives your kids to school or grows and cooks your food is ridiculous, until you realize that that idea has been economically validated by our society.

Not only does it decide how much people earn, it decides where they live, how they travel, how good their education is, how they appear to others, and how much the government will care for them. All these things elevate one class and repress another.

I read the other day about a guy named Michael Harrington, who worked on President Johnson’s poverty task force in 1964.

It was Harrington’s idea that poverty creates a subculture of its own, a “separate culture, another nation, with it’s own way of life.”

In these prosperous cities on the Eastside, the division between these two cultures is crystal clear, like two teams at either end of the field. More often than not they are divided by color.

Which is why the Habitat for Humanity groundbreaking in the Issaquah Highlands the other day was so significant. The cost of housing is one of the biggest factors segregating minimum and low wage workers from the communities in which they work.

It has created an army of workers on the freeway, who must drive for hours each day, from the neighborhoods in which they are equals to the neighborhoods in which they are servile.

The success of programs like this is a great step toward eroding the class divide that is a characteristic, but not a goal, of some Eastside cities.