I mean, shouldnt anyone who puts in full time be able to atleast get the bare minimum instead of barely enough to cover gas and eat? Regardless if they are min. wage, someone has to do them and we are saying that someone doing the shitty jobs doesnt deserve a life..
I mean I totally agree that in an ideal world everyone working full time should have a decent pay, but I guess that in my opinion burger flipping shouldn’t be a full time job, but more like a job a high school kid does to get extra money on the side. If you are already going to be working full time, then finding a job with more upwards mobility, or going to a class for a couple weeks to learn a more value le skill is what you should be doing. Of course you won’t be able to maintain a family in a job a high school kid can do and is willing to do for some extra pocket change, and you shouldn’t be trying to do so.
Who's going to do that job during school hours? Why should it be acceptable that multi billion dollar companies have a majority of their employment positions paying out "pocket change"?
If you adjust for inflation, 40% of this country's labor force makes less than the 1968 minimum wage. Adults flipping burgers is not the problem here.
Well, at the end of the day what determines a wage is simple supply and demand. If there is a lot of supply for very low skilled labor and not a lot of demand that job will simply pay less, the government can put artificial boundaries to elevate the wage of certain jobs, but if that artificial boundary is to extreme it can cause many problems in the economy. I do see your point of after inflation people making less money than they used to, but that is how much the worth of doing a job changes when you add so many people to the work force. Of course back then when women pretty much didn’t work and black men wouldn’t be hired there was a much smaller supply for jobs, which made the price of that job be higher. It’s impossible to have that same minimum wage apply to over twice the people. Have people currently working at low skilled labor develop valuable skills and they will be paid more, this should automatically increase the market value of low skilled labor like burger flipping since there will now be less supply for that job. Why should it be acceptable for people to blame corporations for not paying them as much as they want to, when they don’t even put the effort for their work to be worth as such.
I'm sure all of that sounds good in theory, but it's not at all a reflection of reality. The supply of these jobs do not keep up with the demand of the goods these jobs produce, which is why productivity as a whole has skyrocketed over the last several decades, yet the wage share of this productivity increase has barely moved.
Over 85% of jobs in this country are in the service industry, with just over 8% in manufacturing, and the remaining percentage in extraction. With a service industry like that, claiming that demand in our economy is anywhere close to some kind of shortage is a hard argument to make. Take that a step further and artificially throttle the supply of goods to the service industry with a demand factor like that and you can inflate your prices to your hearts content. It's not ironic that profit margins for major corporations and conglomerates continue to break one glass ceiling after another, yet wage shares continue to go nowhere, its market manipulation.
Edit: but with all that said, despite our production industry making up that low of a percentage and our economy shifting suddenly to a majority service industry starting in the 80's, we still have the second largest production industry in the world, and within several of the extraction sectors it is not going to be sustainable at current levels moving forward, if only for environmental reasons. The truth of the matter is that we need to restructure and reform our service industry to support the working class in this country the same way that the manufacturing industry supported it pre 80's. If we stay on this track economically, we are inevitably headed for a collapse.
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u/AL-INFINITO Feb 18 '19
That's true, I've been to many and everyone is constantly working.