SCENE: Avery LIBRELLE is marching at a minimum wage protest outside a local coffee shop. Mitch BERG walks out. LIBRELLE sees him.
LIBRELLE: Hey, Merg!
BERG: Oh, hey, Avery.
LIBRELLE: People who work deserve to earn a living!
BERG: Hm. OK – let’s say that you need your pipes repaired…
LIBRELLE: I do! I have eco-friendly biodegradable pipes in my house.
BERG: Of course you do. So – I, an English major, come over to fix your pipes. I have no plumbing skills whatsoever. But I will no doubt work very hard to try to do the job. So – do I “deserve” $15 an hour?
LIBRELLE: Well, if you can find a plumber who can work for $15 an hour, that’s an incredible bargain!
BERG: Not if he can’t do the job. And you’re deflecting. The point is, if I have no skill worth spending any money for, why do I “deserve to make a living”.
LIBRELLE: [Holds arms up across face]
BERG: What’s that?
LIBRELLE: I’m blocking you.
BERG: Huh?
LIBRELLE: That’s what I do on my “Minimum Wage Activist” facebook page; I block people who just don’t get it.
BERG: Huh. [Holds up arms across own face]
LIBRELLE: Why do you hate communication?
And SCENE
What a bogus argument you posit.
First of all, plumbers earn more or less based on their level of expertise and licensing – which is largely the case due to their belonging to unions, not just that they are skilled.
That has no impact on people earning a minimum wage, as for example wait staff or other jobs, where due to job availability the workers in point of fact have skill levels that far exceed the requirements of those jobs. There is in fact no justification for anyone to work a 40 hour work week, and not make a wage on which they can live. To contrast the base wage with other jobs is falsely to equate apples and oranges.
Over half a million or more workers earning minimum wage have college degrees — like you do. They are underemployed. Half are women, and half are over the age of 24. It is not accurate to characterize these jobs as entry level minimum skill any longer. Rather the current minimum wage, when adjusted for purchasing power (inflation etc) is LOWER than it was in the 1960s.
Conservative policies since then are largely responsible for the stagnation in wages and the increase in wealth and income inequality.
If you really believe in capitalism and free enterprise, you would demand that employers pay an adequate wage. Because when they do not, instead the balance of what is required comes out of your pocket, just a different pocket, in the form of health care subsidies, nutritional supplement subsidies,and other subsidies that we ALL pay towards. There is no legitimate reason that someone working at Walmart, making them quite large profits, should not be paid adequately, but instead have to rely on food stamps to make ends meet, for example.
We need to require that businesses operate with adequate wages. If they can’t then they need to revise their business model to pay their employees.
And before yo go off on your usual whine about teens and entry level jobs, other countries have show a better solution than stiffing workers on decent pay; they offer a ‘junior’ minimum wage for those who are teens, making a more competitive job market for people in those age brackets, without stiffing adults.
It’s been pretty clear that higher minimum wages result in economic growth and better stability, and that many businesses, like Costco, are thriving while doing so, even when they are in direct competition for the low-ballers like Walmart.
No one wins with low minimum wages.
It is another failure of conservative economic policy.
To take just one example:
“We need to require that businesses operate with adequate wages. If they can’t then they need to revise their business model to pay their employees.”
They will revise their business model to automate the task or off-shore it.
Maybe we could start increasing wages by reducing the number of immigrants? It’s a supply-demand thing with labor. Reduce supply and the price will increase.
For all her prattling about people with college degrees being unemployed, Dog Gone supports the importation of degreed workers to compete with American degreed workers. The latest scam our wonderful federal government has come up with is to give a work permit to the spouse of an H1-B imported worker. Doubled the number of H1-B’s overnight, that did.
It used to be that you had to have an advanced degree to get an H1-B. Now they are handing them out to people with freshly minted degrees in IT or CS.
Jeff Sessions has the back of American workers on wages. No Democrat does.
I was going to respond to Dog Gone, but it’s really is too baseless, unconnected with reality, and ignorant of economic theory and policy: exactly what I’ve come to expect from Dog Gone.
“.. they offer a ‘junior’ minimum wage for those who are teens, making a more competitive job market for people in those age brackets, without stiffing adults.”
So you are going to discriminate based on age. You are a filthy bigot DG.
Penigma’s Chihuahua: look up analogy. It is a real thing.
A “living wage” is too niggardly. Why be pikers about it? We should set our sights higher. As the sainted William F. Buckley, Jr. asked decades ago: if $7.00 an hour is good, why not raise it to $100 an hour and we can all be rich? I trust Dog Gone will deign to answer.
Lessee; Doggone sees a benefit in skilled plumbers and will pay more for one, but will not see the benefit in a halfway attentive burger flipper, nor pay more for a good one or less for a poor one. It is not, after all, like the person’s work product is going into your stomach or anything like that.