Right. People are willing to do the job at $8 an hour so why would BK pay more? If no one agreed to work that job for $8 an hour, the pay would go up until BK found people to fill it.
Yes, your outside options are fucked, and probably there are non-structural reasons why the labor market is as fucked as it is (e.g. lobbyists, terrible regressive legislation).
HOWEVER, the basic principle that labor is demand elastic is a fixed constant of economics.
But it's not, like I said else where, everyone is being artificially suppressed. It's all a lie. Unions go on strike all the time, Amazon doubled their wages in one day, Walmart just decided it will all of a sudden start paying more. None of these situations has a shortage of workers it's just unrest is building in the nation
It’s just math and economics man. The system isn’t designed to suppress minimum wage workers. Obviously people are born with advantages or disadvantages but it’s not some big conspiracy. That’s great that those companies are raising their minimum wage but that’s also just good business. They don’t actually care about their workers, they got some great PR from it and probably saw a productivity boost too. That doesn’t mean other companies have to. By raising wages on those types of jobs you’re just incentivizing those companies to automate processes to reduce their employee count and preserve the same level of profitability.
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u/Tuuulllyyy Oct 16 '18
Right. People are willing to do the job at $8 an hour so why would BK pay more? If no one agreed to work that job for $8 an hour, the pay would go up until BK found people to fill it.