Quote:
Originally Posted by Buster
Not necessary...most minimum wage jobs are FOR non-high school graduates anyways. There's no reason to have any qualification system for minimum wage and really, no reason to raise it. Working at these jobs are not permament arrangements, not intended for or used for raising a family (mostly kids looking for their first job or a summer job and retired people looking for something to do take the jobs) and it would actually hurt the entire US economy to raise the min wage. It would force the employers and businesses to raise prices to make up for their lost profits from the government-mandated payroll expense. McDonald's wouldn't pay for the rate hike, their customers would. Also, it would make a lot of employers have to cut the number of minimum wage employees they can afford to keep, so the "feel good" political tactic of raising the minimum wage would end up puttting a lot of the people they want to help out of work instead. We haven't even gotten into the higher-paid employees' demands of raises to stay the same "value" ahead of the kids at the counter or cleaning the windows.
If you have ANY skills at all, you can do better than a minimum wage job. Sure there are a lot of kids having babies, but they better not be relying on burger-flipping to support the child.
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I agree with all of this... except the bolded part. Salary inflation in the country has been about 2-3% per year over the last 7 years. Over that time, the minimum wage has not been raised, not even to adjust for inflation. So speaking in relative terms, the working poor have lost value to the higher paid employees. To be truly fair, we should give minimum wage a boost to make up for 7 years of inflation. I don't think minimum wage should be raised in that min wage employees should have more money in their pockets, but they certainly shouldn't have less than they did 7 years ago, which is exactly what happens when the wage doesn't keep pace with inflation. A 14.8% boost in the min wage would put employees on the same footing as they were 7 years ago, assuming inflation was 2% per year.
But you are right, minimum wage is not intended to support a family, and it should not be expected by anyone to do so.