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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
I can see needing $15 an hour to work tech support, box office attendant or a clerk at home depot, but a burger or fry cook? Sorry, that job is way too simple to justify $15 an hour.
I'm old.
And, yes, I have worked in fast food. It may not be physically or mentally demanding, but it's still a shitty job that I wouldn't ever want to do again.
Exactly. How exactly does that work?
How much you earn isn't based on how easy your job is. I'm sure some of those CEOs do little to earn their millions.
The guy cited in this post is retweeting people who are saying that fast food workers don't deserve $15/hour, typically in really shitty language, such as calling low-wage workers "whiners". The guy then has been going back into those people's Twitter feeds and retweets stuff they've said about being broke, needing jobs, needing second or third jobs, and complaining that people who have second or third jobs are making it impossible for someone to find just one job. Once you get used to the Twitter format, it's pretty funny/enlightening when people do this sort of thing.
Let's put it this way: If you pay people a Living Wage, then you DON'T have to supplement their cost of living via other means, such as Food Stamps, public assistance, rent vouchers, paying higher health care costs in order to cover all those expensive ER visits that poor people can't afford to pay, etc., etc. Doesn't it make more sense to simply pay them upfront for the work they already do, so that they can carry their own load, not to mention contribute more towards the common good (in the form of taxes), rather than pay them piss-all on the front end and have to absorb all the additional back-end contributions we end up making on their behalf (usually manifested in the form of higher taxes)?
First, poverty and particularly income equality are bad for society. That's not eve a controversial statement. Countries that have less poverty have lower crime rates, especially violent crime; lower mental illness rates; lower rates of general health problems; and higher reported happiness within the population.
Second, the new economy, largely due to the "global economy", has been leaving more and more people in permanent low wage work, even though increasing numbers of them are 30-somethings with children and college degrees. That's also not a controversial statement; that's a statement of fact. Without considerable investment in the populace or the economy (and both the government and private business have been doing fuck-all on that front), this isn't going to change, despite any platitudes about Americans getting better educated and going back to school. Not everyone can be a software engineer, and there aren't enough of those jobs to go around anyway.
So the question you need to consider is whether consigning people who work full time to permanent poverty is a good thing for our society. I argue that it's not.
Think you may have stumbled onto the wrong site;
Robots not here. Repeat. Robots not here.
Didn't think Dan was necessarily calling twitter-gentleman an asshole, only because he was not supporting $15 an hour minimum wage for workers/ maybe also, it was his rude and offensive words (again; emotion involved on this site; ), telling same workers to get an education/ go and fry something( no, think these are the words from some movie, but, same drift).
And $15 an hour minimum, for adult wage? Of course that is reasonable.. And of course, a 40 hour a week worker should expect to actually be able to live on the wage they earn.
For the greatest country on Earth, you guys sure have shit wages/ but some of your states have legalized gay marriage/ but you'all can carry guns?/ and Bob Dylan et al come from there..
A mighty confusing story. Think I'll stay in Australia( just have to get rid of this fascist govt)..
If you want to think about this topic without emotions and platitudes, I believe that you will find that emotions and platitudes are costing this society a lot of money while also placing a ton of people in poverty. First of all, I am ethnically Norwegian, so Im very into a social safety net. But that isn't what we have here. The US has a huge class of people who are basically camping in the net because the companies they work for don't pay them enough, and they don't have a direct pipeline to other sectors that need workers. If we got over the platitudes, like "they dont deserve it", and "thats not a job for grown-ups", the workers would be better off, and sociey would be better off. Arrogance, judgement and indifference have a moral cost, but they also have a very substantial monetary cost.
For the most part, the minimum wage debate is really about which people are "good" and "deserve" to be able to do pretty basic things like feed, clothe and otherwise care for their families comfortably and as they see fit. As such, much of what non-sociopathic people are saying means something along the lines of, "For fucks sake, shouldn't we at least include people who work ?".
So, unless if you keep addressing that underlying point, it is basically impossible for you to discuss what you think reasonable compensation from your employer should be for various types of work, because you can't not be declaring "I'm a fucking sociopath!" otherwise, even if you really do think everyone is "good" and "deserving", as above.
Further, you really should expect people's responses to reflect the fact that you're screaming "I'm a fucking sociopath!" into the conversation, every time you, supposedly inadvertently, argue against these people being "good" and "deserving".
Best of luck.
1. Pay the living wage that workers are asking to be paid. It's their money; their life and work produced it. Let them keep more of it. We all will enjoy a bit more peace and prosperity.
2. Keep stealing the earnings from the workers and hoarding it among the banks and investor class. Prepare for a highly fractured, but steadily escalating and destabilising series of revolutionary reactions from the working class. A group of millions, properly motivated, are more than capable of creating their own economy, market and government and permanently altering the status quo. Keep pushing them, and you will soon learn the hard way the errors of your foolishness.
If you hate your children and don't plan to live much longer, feel free to continue on the selfish, self-serving and shortsighted path...to hell...on Earth...
A word to the wise is sufficient, but all wisdom is wasted on fools.
Who are you to judge the worth of another human being's life and work?
Are you so foolish and arrogant to believe that you exist apart from another's compassion and mercy?
Slither back into the shadows and ponder how wretched and worthless your existence in the sight of those who suppose themselves your betters.
May you live as the least among your view of the world until you know that none are beneath you.
Society depends on the work of people who do shitty jobs. Bagdad used to be a Dubai-ish advanced oil wealth metropolis. Then garnage collecection stopped during the war. Goat hearders came into town and tipped over the garbage bins for their goats to eat the food waste. After a while the garbage clogged up the sewers and troughput the city lakes of sewage became big enough to show up on sattallite photos. After a while the shit of untreated cholera patients started seeping into the water lines and Baghdad went from Dubai-ish to hundreds dying of diarhea in a cholera epidemic in no time.
If you don't pay shitty job trash collectors and plumbers enough to show up for work you get cholera in your home.
Fortunally if we all have jobs and chip in for taxes then life expectancy doubling trash collection, sewage treatment, drinking water and treatment for other peoples infectious diseases is dirt cheap. It's a fraction of the price of your flatscreen tv or fancy car. You don't have to thank me for paying my share, just pay yours.
Of course with free labor markets and without slave labor people can choose to be a fry cook or a trash collector so wages for all shitty jobs have to be living wages.
You can't have middle class jobs if people can't live of a shitty job.
I know, I know you are a unique snowflake with special skills but for most of us if a hundred fry cook types had no choice but to show up with fake resumes for our job interviews our middle class job would have gone to a better looking smooth talking friend of the boss who will do the job for minimum wage.
Any profitable business that pays wages so low that their full-time employees must seek public assistance to survive are de facto tax-payer subsidized. We the tax payers are making up the short-fall in McDonald's payrole.
Why are we, the tax payers, doing that? Public money is basically being used to guarantee private profits while working citizens are getting the shaft. That is not democratic, capitalist, pragmatic or just.
@ 21 - Harlingen, Texas is the cheapest city in the United States. A living wage for one adult and one child in Harlingen, Texas is $17.04 per hour. For two adults and one child, it's $15.98.
http://livingwage.mit.edu/places/4806132…
@ 30 - Why should my tax dollars be used to facilitate profitable businesses paying their employees poverty wages? Surely our government could find a better use for that money than subsidising the profits of their (already obscenely wealthy) owners and CEOs. What you are advocating amounts to "social welfare" for the rich. How can you possibly justify that?