xantav wrote:
You know what, I am real sick of people saying customer service jobs aren't real jobs.
I didn't say that customer service jobs aren't real jobs. I said that the kid working the counter at a burger joint probably shouldn't earn enough to support a household on from that labor. You decided two things from this all on your own:
1. That this means it's not a "real job". False. It's a real job. It's just not a high paying job. Which it shouldn't be because the relative value added by that labor is pretty small.
2. That the entire sum of "customer service jobs" consists of the equivalent of working the counter at a fast food joint. That's another bait and switch. I'm sure there are many customer service jobs that require sufficient skill and provide sufficient value to the customer that those working them can make good wages. Say a concierge in a high cost hotel, for one obvious example.
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Tell you what, I want you to stop using any service that relies on minimum wage work. Since they aren't real jobs, and the workers don't deserve a real paycheck, stop using their services.
That's your false dilemma, not mine. I pay for minimum wage work exactly what it's worth. Minimum wage. I'm not sure why this concept that people should not be forced to pay more for something than they think it's actually worth is so hard to grasp.
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But I know you won't, because you realize they do more to keep society running on a day to day basis than any guy sitting in an office posting on the internet.
Ok. But now you are comparing the collective "they" of all minimum wage earners, to one person. That's not a very fair comparison, is it? Each individual earning minimum wage does so because that one specific job they are performing by itself isn't that valuable. Sure, if every single minimum wage earner in the country decided to stop working, that would throw a wrench in the works, but to what point? It would certainly not be as much of a problem as if every single bank manager stopped working tomorrow, or every single programmer, or every single engineer, or doctor, or chef, or any of a thousand other occupations that earn more than minimum wage.
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Nobody is going to miss your "real" workers, but they sure as **** are going to miss the minimum wage grunts they look down on.
It's not the value of the person, but what the person does. And frankly, part of that value is based on replaceability. If a doctor decides to stop doing work, you can't just grab someone off the street to do this job. Same deal with pretty much any skilled labor position, from construction work to architecture. Pretty sure I could teach a random person off the street how to operate the POS system at Burger King in about 5 minutes though.
Value assignments to labor isn't arbitrary. This idea that we should pay people a given wage, not based on the value of the labor, but because we want to ensure that every job pays a "living wage" is absurd. What incentive would the guy working the counter at a fast food joint have to improve the value of his labor? Zero right? I mean, sure he could earn "more" by going out and spending the time and effort improving himself, but a whole lot of them would be perfectly happy just working said menial job and living off of it. It's a lot easier work.
Um... And there's some value in said improvement on it's own merits. People who actually go out and work hard to improve their skill sets and then earn more because of it tend to feel a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. Hand people that success for basically just showing up and putting on a paper hat, and they wont feel good about themselves at all. I guess I just don't understand what you're arguing
for. It's easy to say it's unfair for people to earn low wages. And it's easy to equate this to some kind of nefariousness and wanting to keep people poor (or whatever other rhetoric you want to toss around), but what is the solution you're proposing?
"Just do something" is a crappy alternative. Tell me what you'd do different, and then tell me how the result would be "better". Because all you're doing is complaining that the status quo is somehow unfair. Is it? I don't think so at all. But if you think so then instead of just saying it is, tell me what alternative would be fair.