Quote:
Originally Posted by raymor
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, even many fast food places and gas stations are paying $12.50 or so. So if you need to earn more than $7.25, either start showing up sober so you qualify for McD's or better, or wait until you're 18 to move out.
When you talk about minimum wage employees, these are the ones who aren't responsible and hard working enough for even fast food. Darn right you can't make a decent living showing up an hour late and stoned out of your mind. Tough. Show up on time and you can make $12.50.
|
This is a gross oversimplification of a larger problem. On one hand you are correct. A guy working a minimum wage job is much more likely to flake off, do a bad job etc than a guy making $15 or more. The reason is that the minimum wage guy is likely a kid who is just doing the job so he can make a few extra bucks while the other guys is likely supporting himself or others. Also, the more you pay, the larger the pool of prospective employees is so you can choose to be picky and select the best.
However, one of the main problems we are having now is that there are a ton of people who built a middle class life for themselves on a manufacturing job that paid $15-$25 per hour. That job is now gone and it isn't coming back. Many, hell, most, of the new jobs being created are lower paying service industry jobs or higher paying tech jobs. This means the guy has to make a choice. He can either take the lower paying job, declare bankruptcy and start over from scratch, but still not be able to provide much of a life for himself and his family or he can go back to school, get retrained and get a higher paying job. Neither one of those is a fast, easy fix nor is either other of those a pretty situation when you have kids to feed, but that is the way the world works and it is a situation a lot of people are facing today.
What I'm getting at is that getting a better paying job, a job that you can afford to support a family on and make a decent living on is a lot more difficult to get than just showing up sober or working hard. removing the minimum wage is not going help these people in the slightest unless it has an immediate effect on prices and brings things down in cost dramatically and quickly and that isn't going to happen.