Yeah, I kind of figured this comment would stir the turd. But you’re right in that expectations are the perfect vantage point for this topic.
The expectation for a minimum wage job is that its high turnover and temporary be design. Its meant for high school sophomores to earn beer money over summer break. It was never meant to be someone’s entire career, its by definition the very bottom rung of the ladder. The fact that its become many people’s entire career is a symptom of a deeply broken capitalist system, but that’s another conversation altogether. And if you’d bothered to read my comment to its conclusion, you’d see that my point was that we should be teaching skills to those caught in the perpetual minimum wage cycle, not lowering expectations for everybody.
If expecting someone to move past the bottom rung at some point in their lives is “shitting on them”, then I guess I’m just thankful that people shit on me when I was growing up.
It is utterly naive to presume that we can have both a perfectly meritocratic system, and doctors who are not employed as janitors. The reality is that those positions at “the bottom rung” as you so eloquently phrased it, need to be filled no matter what, and there is a finite supply of wealth. If you’re a sucker who bought into the pyramid scheme early enough to get a little lucky, good for you.
You presume that I’m not okay with the minimum wage never rising. I’m perfectly okay with it staying where it is. I have zero interest in fixing this system, and since a higher minimum wage would help keep the system going a little longer, I’m not terribly concerned if it never rises. You think the system is broken now? I’m happy to let your philosophy really break it.
The purpose of minimum wage has no moral foundation beyond limiting exploitation, and attaining certain market-driven goals depending on the industries and economy of the jurisdiction employing it. To put it bluntly:
looks like you’ve sure made quite a few presumptions there yourself. still, the long and the short of it is that minimum wage jobs are a starting point, not the finish line.
“And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”
I’ll bite. How is it that someone is supposed to learn a new skill for a higher paying job when they’re putting in 90 hours a week so they can afford food, clothing, and shelter?
I mean this genuinely and without hidden agenda. I’m not even going to try to make a rebuttal to your response. I will acknowledge what you say, so you can be sure I read it, and that’s all.
As I already noted above this is factually untrue. Maybe that’s what YOU think minimum wage should be for, but the people who actually introduced minimum wage laws in the United States were very clear in their rationale for doing so and the purpose they expected those laws to serve.
The minimum wage was meant to be a decent living wage from the very beginning. The fact that it no longer is so is due to our failure to uphold that social contract, not a failure of people on the bottom to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Don’t they have parents to help put them through college? Doesn’t the government pay for that anyhow? It did for me back in the sixties when we were in a cold war with the Russkies.
i’ll bite. the last time i lived in a 1 br there were 5 of us, sometimes 4. 250/mo and i made 4,40/hr. so 50 or 62.50/mo. currently i pay $250/mo for rent uts and food, 10 of us in a co-op in a former barber shop. havent worked for wages in 10 years.
Very few young adults have parents who can afford to put them through the current cost of college. And not everyone’s parents thinks they have to do so, anyway. You can’t force anyone to fund an adult, even if they’re related.
That’s socialism. We don’t believe in that stuff.
Back in the seventies, at least, you couldn’t get anything from the government that would apply toward college costs if your parents didn’t sign certain papers. Not even loans, or EARNED scholarships.
Besides, a college degree now comes with 5- to 6-figure debt and in most cases no reasonable assumption of a career-oriented entry-level position anywhere. Going to college is no guarantee there won’t be many years of minimum wage work after you’ve graduated.
Well, considering tons of businesses already find ways to pay their workers literally nothing based on lies and false promises, I’m going to guess… literally nothing?
There’s some internships and jobs that actually attempt to make the employee be the one paying the employer.
For instance, the scam that is Vector marketing. I got snagged by them at the beginning of the great recession and discovered the hard way that racking up college debt and not having a job, is much better than racking up college debt and being charged $300 to sell knives to people who don’t want to buy them.
Some people’s honest desire is to bring back slavery, but without all those worries like having to pay for food. Someone who rants about eeeeevil marxists wanting to have people starving in the streets doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.
Minimum wage guarantees a cap for the level of shittiness in your life (holding all else equal). The higher the minimum wage, the lower that maximum of shittiness is. No minimum wage means maximum shittiness is infinite, ie slavery.
You’re advocating a view that a corporation with basically limitless negotiating leverage will willingly negotiate with what amounts to an ant in its eyes when we stop forcing it to.
