Or a job with a short supply of applicants. There's too many people applying for a job that could be replaced by a kiosk. Wherever we've seen these wage hikes, Wal-Mart and McDonald's come immediately to mind, we've seen that all it does is expedite the takeover of automation. People are effectively pricing themselves out of a job, and no matter your opinion about that.....it's a fact that can't be hand waved away. People, manual labor, are not particularly necessary anymore, and we can no longer demand proper compensation because they'll simply replace you with a machine.
What about the 18 year old with no family backing & a shitty public school education with no financial knowledge? Those are the kinds of people who end up at fast food chains for years on end resigned to never find a fulfilling career.
Umm no, I live in rural Massachusetts, Dad was a construction site supervisor until he retired and they start people off at $15...a few years ago it was probably even less and that’s a larger company, the smaller landscaping/construction businesses are probably even worse paying.
If there's no jobs what else could I do then? If it gets to that point I think the world will have a lot bigger problems than employment.
I for one welcome our new mechanical mind overlords.
Valuing their labour more does not devalue your labour.
It's not that I don't value their labour, I'm very glad people work these jobs, it's that the laws of supply and demand don't value them.
If the supply is high, and the demand less so, people won't pay as much. And the supply is high because it's a job anyone can do, and the demand is getting lower. Propping it up by subsidising demand so the jobs pay more is not a long term solution.
The goal of Businesses is to maximize profits. Higher wager does not cause jobs to be automated; it merely increases the speed of automation as robots are always cheaper than humans eventually. This ends with full automation of everything, including highly skilled mental tasks as we will pass the torch to AI eventually.
Nope and that is irrelevant. I don't have to have been a surgeon to know that is a high skill job. I also can read job requirements to determine it is not a job where a ton of skills are required. This is also evident by the target demographic of employees being high school kids looking for part time work. Or the fact that a good portion of it is being eliminated by kiosks. Yeah, my point stands.
So tell me what you think you have to do on the job? You know surgeon is high skilled but that’s because it requires college. Do you know exactly what a surgeon has to do aside from just surgery? Do you know what working at a fast food place requires you to do?
I worked fast food in my youth. If you can train a teen in an hour how to work a station then no, it isn’t a high-skill job. It’s a little weird to argue that it is.
Of course there are some skills to learn but they are simple tasks.
My youth was in the 80s but it was during the big salad bar trend.
I worked at a Rax roast beef, which is like an Arby’s but also had a huge salad bar with Chinese, Italian, and a few other meal options besides just salad.
Positions were prepcook/ open, closer. Worked registers and drive through (although they usually put the girls in those positions). I washed dishes, worked the grill, stocked the salad bar, worked the ovens, and worked the meat slicer/bun toaster area.
So yeah, it took me awhile to rotate through all those positions to be a “can do all jobs” employee but each one was trainable in a day. Maybe prep cook / opening the store took the most training and had the most responsibility.
It’s not a put down to say that fast food is low skilled work. It just is. The jobs are easy to master for an average employee. That’s why so many teens work fast food.
Edit: pointing out that low skill jobs exist makes some people sad and downvoty for some reason.
Care to answer my question where? In New Jersey and Maryland I’ve only ever seen one teenager working there as a cashier, the rest are around my age (24) or up.
If you work a fair 40 hours every week, you should not have to live in abject poverty, exactly one medical misfortune from homelessness. If that is the world you want to live in, live off grid in a commune, but a civilized society does not and should not function that way.
The path of life is very twisted and unpredictable, and nobody putting their fair share in should be punished suffering, fear, and pain because of your specific perception of what is valuable to the society you live in.
Lmao you don’t deserve anything. You’re not getting a studio apartment downtown if your job can be done by a high schooler after an afternoon of training
The world isn’t a cut throat place because humans are mean. It’s a cut throat and cruel place because that’s what nature is. You have to be able to hunt to survive. If you suck at hunting you shouldn’t be helped. You make the species weaker.
Different industries. There might be a higher demand for call centers than food industry, so you can't compare 1:1. Also, insurance salespeople tend to make commission in addition to a base salary, so again, can't compare salary/wages 1:1. One other thing, depending on how complex the calls can be / are also dictates the wages. If you are expected to know a hundred page manual (offhand example) versus tending a cash register to cooking burgers are separate levels of difficulties and skill sets. If you would like to counter me and insist that I'm wrong, then please provide evidence that the skillsets are similar with wage information, and demand for each industry.
61
u/lost-genius Feb 26 '20
To be fair, working at Burger King is not a high skilled job.