Something that has not been mentioned here is inflation. The minimum wage has never been tied to inflation, so we have to periodically go through this same argument when Democrats have enough votes to push through a Minimum wage bump. But then the cycle starts all over because money just keeps getting less valuable as time goes on.
My question to OLB is this, what if everyone got tired of the low pay and crappy conditions and got better educated and got better jobs, so there was no one to flip a burger for you? Economic laws would predict that burger prices would sky rocket because there would be no one to flip them, and that would likely lead to the end of the fast food industry, just to mention a miniscule fraction of such markets.
I don't think anyone would realistically suggest that the most menial of jobs pull in six figures, but what would society really look like if a burger flipper pulled down $25/hour? Would that really be so bad? How much money would that take from the franchise owner? From the restaurant execs? The big stock holders? Maybe they would have one less luxury car to drive. And if we're criticizing what people do to earn their money, can anyone really say a board member who goes to a handful of meetings deserves 7 figures for their trouble?
Unions served several important purposes. Not least of which was forcing the greedy industrialists to improve working conditions, hours and pay to at least a humane level. And union contracts historically set the basic level of compensation for the rest of the general workforce. It's a common Republican myth that "unions destroyed industry in the US". Unions were infiltrated by organized crime; that much is true, and they certainly made mistakes, but they were not the cause of decline in American industry.
All of this stuff has deep, deep economic roots as far back as the Roman Empire, perhaps further. Perhaps we should just go back the guild system developed during the days of Diocletian just so no one gets uppity ideas. The struggle for the worker has always been how to increase egalitarianism while oligarchs push against such progress. And yes, socialism has played almost as important a role in shaping the American system as any other ideology.
My question to OLB is this, what if everyone got tired of the low pay and crappy conditions and got better educated and got better jobs, so there was no one to flip a burger for you? Economic laws would predict that burger prices would sky rocket because there would be no one to flip them, and that would likely lead to the end of the fast food industry, just to mention a miniscule fraction of such markets.
I don't think anyone would realistically suggest that the most menial of jobs pull in six figures, but what would society really look like if a burger flipper pulled down $25/hour? Would that really be so bad? How much money would that take from the franchise owner? From the restaurant execs? The big stock holders? Maybe they would have one less luxury car to drive. And if we're criticizing what people do to earn their money, can anyone really say a board member who goes to a handful of meetings deserves 7 figures for their trouble?
Unions served several important purposes. Not least of which was forcing the greedy industrialists to improve working conditions, hours and pay to at least a humane level. And union contracts historically set the basic level of compensation for the rest of the general workforce. It's a common Republican myth that "unions destroyed industry in the US". Unions were infiltrated by organized crime; that much is true, and they certainly made mistakes, but they were not the cause of decline in American industry.
All of this stuff has deep, deep economic roots as far back as the Roman Empire, perhaps further. Perhaps we should just go back the guild system developed during the days of Diocletian just so no one gets uppity ideas. The struggle for the worker has always been how to increase egalitarianism while oligarchs push against such progress. And yes, socialism has played almost as important a role in shaping the American system as any other ideology.
Why is it so?
~Julius Sumner Miller
~Julius Sumner Miller
