SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
$15/hr for flipping burgers – are you flipping kidding me?
Jul 11, 2013, 11:09 PM | Updated: Jul 12, 2013, 11:03 am
Dori worked minimum or below-minimum wage jobs for 12 years; he maintains they shouldn't be expected to support families. (Photo: MyNorthwest.com/File)
(Photo: MyNorthwest.com/File)
Dori writes…
Local liberal idiocy has reached a new level.
Let me provide a basic economics lesson for the labor unions, local politicians, and local media who have all been shilling for $15/hour minimum wage for fast food workers.
For 12 years of my life, I worked at or below the minimum wage. Mindless minimum wage jobs are not a career. You’re not supposed to be able to raise a family of four on your minimum wage job. They were never designed to provide a “living wage” (the nonsense phrase that trendy progressives have come up with for this cause).
My minimum-wage jobs included: supermarket bag-boy; stuffing game pieces into plastic bags; operating a shrink-wrap machine; restaurant busboy; video-tape logger; and several others.
They were jobs that literally billions of people on the planet were qualified to do. That’s why those jobs didn’t pay more. It’s called supply and demand, a basic economic principle that is an absolutely foreign concept to the $15/hr crowd. The supply of potential workers for those jobs is virtually unlimited – so the pay is very low.
Those jobs can be a means to an end. A way to pay for college – to acquire more skills that qualify a person to reasonably aspire for higher paying jobs.
You think it’s unfair that Lebron James and Tom Cruise make $75-mil a year? Tough. The fact is there isn’t another person on the planet who plays basketball like Lebron. There isn’t another person who can guarantee a studio a $100-mil minimum gross like Cruise can.
The supply of talent at that level is scarce – so the demand is high for their services. Hence – the sky-high compensation.
Here’s a question for the $15/hr crowd: Why stop there? Why not $20/hr? Why not $40/hr? If $15/hr will make your life better, wouldn’t $50/hr make your life fantastic?
If you’re going to have the tyranny of government determine what you’re worth to your employer, why don’t you shoot for $100,000/year for flipping burgers?
Here’s the sad truth of the real world and of basic economics for all of the unions, politicians, McD’s cashiers and my media brethren: everyone is worth what someone is willing to pay them.
But of course, that puts the responsibility in the hands of the individual – not in the hands of government. And that’s a concept that is outrageous in our increasingly looney region.
