Minimum wage, that old bugaboo that never ceases to amaze those who look at it in awe, wondering what went wrong. Mind you, these fast food worker strikes, wherein they ask that they get paid $15 an hour for their labors, can’t help but rankle those amongst the middle class who don’t make nearly as much working “regular” jobs. Especially in places like the Midwest where the cost of living is so low, and with it, the wages as well. It was something I was reminded of when listening to the local right-wing talk show. Caller after caller would phone in talking about themselves or others who were making $12 an hour working a job that required a degree. They were incensed that a (not spoken aloud) lowly fast food worker was demanding $15 for shoveling crap food in to the gaping maws of their fellow man. An d honestly, I couldn’t agree with them more.
But…here’s the rub…I think fast food workers should be paid $15 an hour, just not all of it wage based. I wouldn’t be opposed to, say $12 an hour, with the rest of that $3 paid towards a basic health insurance plan. So that they can get sick, miss work, or just be able to breath a bit easier knowing that they can live life without fear of losing what little foothold they currently have on life. Restaurant work is indeed hard, and like the right-wing likes to flaunt, if someone won’t do a job, someone else will rise up and do it instead. Doubling this, sickness from the hundreds of people that they have to serve, not least amongst themselves. I stopped in to a Taco Bell a few weeks back, not only was one staffer waiting for a ride in the restaurant proper, sick, but quite a few of the people behind the counter, making food, were coughing and sniffling. That I didn’t catch something is a godsend.
The biggest argument the pro-minimum wage hikers have is that long ago, in a land far far away, a man named Henry Ford paid his employees double the wage rate at the time so that those who made his vehicles could afford to buy one. Our old libertarian friend, Lane Filler, comes through just in time for Christmas with a benumbing of an article attempting to defeat this argument.
This entire article is Lane Filler just wasting time, mostly. He doesn’t really disprove the point of those who drop the Henry Ford when talking about wages, and certainly in the context he’s framing his argument, he kind of makes the point for why fast food workers, especially McDonald’s employees should get paid a fair wage. Mr. Filler concludes that of the $5 he was paying his worker half of that was profit sharing. This is the entire argument of the pro-wage hike movement. McDonald’s could use just one billion of it’s four billion dollar annual profits, and pay their employee’s a decent wage, with benefits.
This faulty libertarian idea that the “free market” is a trap door under wages is absurd. Why this idea that perhaps paying wage earners a better wage would then lead to an overall better product is seen as absurd and a fallacy remains puzzling to me. At least Mr. Filler isn’t going all “minimum wage hikes = job killer”, so I can at least respect his attempt at perverting history to make a free market point.
Mr. Filler takes it further by saying that those places that do pay their workers more, like Costco for instance, aren’t interested in bettering their workers lives, just trying to push a better P.R.. This really doesn’t make much sense in the larger argument, and if anything just torpedoes the whole “free market decides all” mentality that infects the right-wing and by extension it’s libertarian practitioners. This is further deepened by Mr. Fillers use of “I think”. So, he doesn’t know, he’s just sort of guessing that this may be why, and not that paying your employees more has the added benefit of making an overall better product top to bottom.
The pro-minimum wage hike supporters argument is pretty simple. The anti-minimum wage folks only have one defense: small businesses will get destroyed. When pressed for examples, umm well, there’s that one place like in rural somewhereachussetts…and Obamacare. So they don’t really have an argument with any weight to it. Supply and demand ultimately decide the fates of most businesses, be they small or gigantic.
The billion dollar profit corporations that make the most money off their wage slave workers are the ones correctly in the cross-hairs here. It’s absurd just how rich these people are, that just taking a tiny fraction of their profits to better care for their employees would do absolutely nothing to their bottom line. It’s becomes an argument of just how much these people plan to take with them when they die? So instead of perhaps correcting this problem, the rich would rather pit middle class worker against middle class worker. These people will always be game to play along, because they are ignorant. They view fast food work as young person’s game, and something you do in the interim before the big job comes along. But what about that big job that never comes? Life gets in the way, any number of other things happen, and that fresh faced 17 year old is now 26 with two children and renting an apartment that he can barely keep ends together? Too often, as middle class people rise up the ranks they forget just how hard it can be at the bottom. This isn’t helped by a pundit class who’s mantra is “I got mine, fuck you, get yours!”, like Mr. Filler, who can write these kind of navel-gazing pieces that pad out their yearly quota.
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