To:\u00a0 All you folks “striking” for a $15\/hour minimum wage
\nFrom:\u00a0 Mitch Berg, uppity peasant
\nRe:\u00a0 Money from nothing<\/p>\n
“Protesters”,<\/p>\n
Today, you’ll be out and about around dozens of McDonalds, Taco Bells, WalMart and other low-wage employers.<\/p>\n
I saw one of you on “Today” this morning; a cute, blonde, twenty-something single mother (what else?) and front-counter worker who notes for the camera\u00a0that sometimes she has to choose between work clothes and bus fare.<\/p>\n
I feel for you.\u00a0 I do.\u00a0 Twenty-odd years ago, I was in my twenties, had a couple of kids and a $7\/hour job.\u00a0 It was hard making ends meet.\u00a0 Really, really hard.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Of course, it was hard because of choices I’d made, not my diabolical employers.\u00a0 I’d devoted myself to my first career – radio, which paid really badly, too\u00a0– with a monastic intensity.\u00a0 That career crashed – and\u00a0it took me a few years to realize it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And after a year of floundering, I got the aforementioned $7\/hour crummy job.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Where I learned a couple of things; how to work in an office.\u00a0 How to use a computer (that wasn’t something people were born doing back then).\u00a0 How to work days instead of nights.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I had made a few good choices, of course; when I was a teenager, I’d stayed in school and learned\u00a0a few useful things, and kept it in my pants long enough to get through college (with a BA in English, which was no more a ticket to wealth then than it is today).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Point being, that lousy $7\/hour job was\u00a0how I found my next job for $9\/hour.\u00a0 And thence got into technical writing.\u00a0 And then into the career I have.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And if that $7\/hour job had gone away because legal document coders had decided to strike for $12 an hour, causing most of the crummy entry level jobs to be eliminated, where would I be today?\u00a0<\/p>\n
The same place you’ll\u00a0 be if they double the minimum wage for working the counter.<\/p>\n
By the way, the woman on “Today” also parroted the same thing I’ve heard from ostensibly smarter liberals: without workers, there’d be no business.<\/p>\n
That’s 180 degrees wrong, of course; without the business, there’d be no jobs.\u00a0Don’t believe me?\u00a0 Let’s try a quick thought experiment.\u00a0 Find a vacant lot somewhere.\u00a0 Put on a fast food uniform, and stand there saying “May I help you?”\u00a0\u00a0 Wait – where’s the burgers?\u00a0 Where are the customers?\u00a0 Where’s the counter and the till?\u00a0 Where’s the building<\/em>?\u00a0<\/p>\n What?\u00a0 The SEIU goons behind the “strikes” never mentioned this?<\/p>\n Huh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To:\u00a0 All you folks “striking” for a $15\/hour minimum wage From:\u00a0 Mitch Berg, uppity peasant Re:\u00a0 Money from nothing “Protesters”, Today, you’ll be out and about around dozens of McDonalds, Taco Bells, WalMart and other low-wage employers. I saw one of you on “Today” this morning; a cute, blonde, twenty-something single mother (what else?) and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,308],"tags":[283,249],"class_list":["post-40360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market","category-entitled-america","tag-minimum-wage","tag-open-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40360"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46936,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40360\/revisions\/46936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}