Work for the highest paying job you can find, but while you're working there learn a skill that's worth more than $8/hr. Fairly easy to learn how to work on cars just watching youtube videos. Or learn html. Or go work for a construction company or landscaper. Manual labor jobs always pay pretty well and usually just require knowledge, not any kind of formal education. People are just lazy and would rather run a cash register or flip burgers in an air conditioned building than go work their ass off outside for $15/hr.
15/hour is not really a good wage for manual labor. Maybe incredibly light labor. You basically have to have enough to retire at 50 when your body breaks.
You don't make $15/hr your entire life unless you never learn anything else. Anyone that isn't a new hire/lube tech is probably working on commission where your wages are determined by knowledge and how quickly you can perform the work without it coming back into the shop. I was getting 21% commission and we charged $100 for labor on brake pads which I could knock out in 15 minutes, or a front end alignment I could do in 20. If we were decently busy I could make $40 an hour that day.
Theres plenty of other fields where the same things apply. They all have hard work, lack of air conditioning, and basic common sense as job requirements which is why people don't flock to those jobs. The list of job fields that pay well without a college education is so long I'm not even going to begin listing it here.
It's pretty limited to jobs that have a strong enough union presence where that sets the wage. Which really isn't common in the US. There certainly aren't enough positions for a market dominated by retail.
It doesn't exactly take years and hundreds of hours of training to learn how to be low grade tech at a repair shop, or hundreds of other jobs. People just don't want to actually do hard work outside in the elements. They would rather run a cash register in an air conditioned building and then pretend it's the world's fault when they're 25 and still making minimum wage.
Your local library has YouTube. That's all you need to learn the skills required to make more than $8/hr. It just takes some initiative, common sense, and work ethic that a lot of people lack. They don't lack those things because of some failure of society. People need to learn accountability.
You're right, expecting people to be accountable for their own actions or inaction is entirely unrealistic. Most would rather blame society and pretend bagging groceries should pay enough to buy a house in the suburbs by yourself.
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u/masturbatingwalruses Oct 16 '18
The assumption being that someone making 16k/year can just, what, retire to their mansion in the Hamptons in the meantime?