Well, it seems the FF workers have a national movement going so it can't be that difficult.
I still remember walking past an Einsteins bagels downtown with my Dh and chuckling that the workers there made more hourly than he did AND had weekends off.
I think we just disagree on the fundamentals of what needs changed. I don't think you can take a job not meant to support families and then expect it to support a family somehow. I don't agree with everything about the system, but it's not always the system that needs changing.
FF workers have a national movement going because nearly all of them are living the reality of this issue. If half the country's fast food workers were making $15+, the national movement would have fallen flat... and the situation of the higher-paid workers would undermine the public perception of their cause. Which is exactly what would happen if someone tried to organize this issue around EMTs - people who know their local EMTs are making much more than $15/hr would view (and call out) the effort as lies and distortion.
And no, it isn't always the system that needs fixed. But the growth of wage inequality is a system-wide problem that has developed over the last few decades. It isn't "just how it is", as though it is some immutable fact of a primarily capitalist system. And when the minimum wage was created, it wasn't intended as a sub-subsistence level wage not intended to support the worker. It was intended to assure no hard working person was living in poverty or depending on government hand-outs to get by. We've forgotten that in the "Its for teenagers" rhetoric opponents of a higher minimum use to make their case.
The track our country is on now is brutal for the working class. We have capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich. It is as though we went back to the Great Depression and instead of the WPA and TVA and other works programs to help the everyday people, instead the gov simply compensated banks and investors for their losses. The entire recovery from this recession has been on Wall Street. Wages aren't growing, unemployment is only low because the share of the population being counted as part of the workforce is at/near historic lows, and the fastest growing job fields are mostly low-wage, dead-end positions. Something has got to change.
Having over-qualified employees doesn't change the fact that the jobs are still unskilled jobs. You can't confuse the person with the job.
And that's why this issue takes a systemic solution, not an individual one. Because the problem is structural - our economy is structured in such a way that 42% of jobs pay less than a living wage. No amount of preaching at a particular individual to make better choices can fix that.
I think when people go to college, they should be very judicious in choosing a career path. MBAs, Lawyers, teachers- those markets have been flooded since before the recession. When looking at educational options, people should do some research and go toward a field that has job growth potential and stability.
The same thing is happening right now with nurse practitioners. There has been a big rush among many RNs to go back to school and become NPs. Now the market is saturated with NP grads who have $60k-$100k in student loans and can't find jobs paying more than about $60k a year. Meanwhile bedside nurses and nurse educators are being offered way more than those with the higher degrees, because those jobs are heavy workload careers that most people do to want to deal with for very long.
We do a poor job in this country of helping people select college majors. 18 year old kids choosing $80k degrees in English or Psych, colleges and parents should be ashamed.
But when only a minority of professions pay enough to live on, to raise a family on, then what? And when people stop choosing to go into teaching or nursing or other "not worth the degree" professions, many of which are public sector and as such bound by forces other than the market that render them unable to simply raise pay to attract applicants?
The cost of labour is typically the largest cost an employer has. If a small business is forced to increase the hourly wage it pays its employees it will look cut costs and most small businesses have stated that means hiring fewer employees or laying off existing employees. How does that help?
But that ignores the effect of increased business volume. In places where the minimum wage went up in recent years, evidence is that more spending at restaurants and shops and service providers offset the higher labor costs. I'm not saying no business was negatively impacted - if that was our standard, nothing could ever change, no environmental standards, no property tax increases, nothing - but the net effect has been positive in the places this has been tried so far. Because low wage workers spend nearly every dollar they earn, so increasing their wages results in an immediate bump in spending in the area.
Did you all know that less than 4% of hourly workers (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) are paid at or below the federal minimum wage?
The rest of the hourly workers are paid above federal minimum wage. Maybe I'm thinking about this all wrong (which it's getting late and I very well might be thinking about this incorrectly), but doesn't it seem weird that the 4% are trying to change so much for the overwhelming majority?
My Economics professors brought this point up and I thought it was interesting.
That figure is somewhat misleading... the federal minimum has been unchanged so long that a majority states have imposed higher minimums on their own. And that includes most of the states that are home to America's largest cities, like CA, MA, IL and NY. So every worker in those states (29 states in all) is making more than the federal minimum, though often not by much ($7.50 to $8.xx in most).
The more important figure, IMO, is that 42% of American jobs pay less than $15/hr. That's why there's a national movement, not because of the small percentage actually earning the federal minimum.
