Kuwoobie wrote:
The bottom line is, if you get a job that starts you at or NEAR minimum wage, you MORE THAN LIKELY are not going to double, triple, quadruple your pay, or come anything even close to that-- not after any amount of hard work or years of sucking the boss's ****. In fact, most places that pay wages that low don't even expect to keep you for more than one or two years. They are counting on you to realize what a waste of @#%^ing time the job is so they can replace you with someone young and naive who will take one or two years to become complacent and/or completely disgruntled.
Yup. That's the point. Those jobs pay very little because the output of them isn't that valuable. Those who want to earn more will gravitate away from those jobs, right?
Raise the wage for flipping burgers to $15/hour and more people will stay flipping burgers instead of leaving that job and seeking one with greater advancement (and more value to the economy as a whole). That's part of the problem, and yet another way that it weakens rather than strengthens the middle class. If more people stay at those crappy jobs because we've made it so that they can earn good money there, then fewer people will ever become middle class.
As I keep saying, the reasons not to have a minimum wage at all are massive. The reasons to have one, much less try to raise it to a "living wage" level are right around zero.
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At this point, having a low wage job, whether it is ACTUALLY minimum wage or close to it, is not even worthwhile.
Yes. That's because what the job does isn't worth much. We want to discourage people staying in low productive jobs. Anything which does the opposite is
a bad thing.
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People only work these jobs until they can't take it anymore, or realize what a sucker they've been. This is no way to run a business, no matter how you look at it.
It's not about the owner ******** people over. It's about the product of the labor not being worth that much. The day people will pay $30 for a burger at McDonalds is the day that McDonalds can pay its burger flippers $15/hour. Get it? Wages are relative to the value of what the labor actually does. Arbitrarily raising the wage doesn't make the thing the wage is paid for more valuable. It just makes it more expensive. And, as I keep saying, one of two things will happen:
1. The labor costs become higher than people will pay for the product the labor makes, and the business will fold and the labor will become unemployed.
2. Inflation will occur, nullifying any value of the increased wage to minimum earners, but retaining the harmful effects to everyone who's wage wasn't raised.
Um... I suppose there can be some combination of those two things. Point being that it's all bad. Aside from just a knee jerk "but we should pay people more" rationale, can you actually tell me why you think this is a good idea? Cause I've listed off like 3-4 very simple and obvious negative effects. Are there any positives? I just don't see it.