Seattle City Council Approves $15/hour Minimum Wage

[thesummerqueen]

So, there is a mindset out that there will realize, hmmmm, drop out of high school and make more $$$$. Mebbee the council should have put a little more stick and a little less carrot in the measure ??

I watched several of my friends go all the way through good colleges only to not enter into their chosen field (and many of them had business or science degrees) because the economy was tanked. Some of them went back to school for masters or phD's and STILL couldn't get jobs because now they were worth more than employers were willing to pay. I watched people who already had amazing jobs lose them and become waiters because industries had to downsize massively after investor fuck ups. People who did get jobs had to accept less than what they expected or take pay cuts if they were already employed.

Going to school is not going to guarantee you a job or a high salary. My generation was promised that it would, as long as we showed up and put forth an effort. This simply isn't true anymore, and many people are not only working jobs for less than what they expected, but they're saddled with exorbitant student debt.

Further, salaries for everyone across the board have not risen with the cost of living changes in the country as a whole. I'm trying to find the chart I've seen floated around in a couple different places that talked about this, but so far the only link I can find as I try to hide my non-work activities here is: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/...ht-charts/

Lots of my coworkers are against raising the minimum wage because they feel those minimum wage jobs belong to students who don't need as much money anyway. Before the recession, this might have been largely true, but it wasn't the average white-collar worker's fault when the economy tanked because of conniving and irresponsible investors. Now those people working minimum wage jobs because their positions were filtered out to save the bottom line or protect stock holders are stuck in ruts. They can't even afford to go to school to learn new skills and 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps' because they can't afford to feed their families, much less pay college tuition costs or buy the materials they need. My community college's cheaper classes tended to be around the same price as rent or a car payment. You can't save up that much when you're trying to feed a family as well as make those payments, especially not on minimum wage, even with a second breadwinner.

People don't drop out of high school to make more money because the government is somehow rewarding them. They drop out because they're disillusioned with what schooling has to offer and what reward they'll get later in life. I make a decent enough salary now to live in a fairly expensive area with my boyfriend's help (he pays most of the bills). I have only some college behind me, and that nearly 10 years after graduating high school. They drop out because their family is desperate and they need a third or fourth breadwinner.

For the record, there are people who work skilled trades who earn a lot of money without having to have gone to a four-year college as we think of it, or even finish high school. But no one is encouraged to do these jobs because they're frequently dirty or seen as undesirable. Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs advocates for these people, and does a better job than I could, so you should look that up. I will say, though, that my hair dresser when I first moved to NC worked only part time because her boyfriend worked with air conditioning units. He made a good deal of money. I don't know about the rest of you, but my parents wouldn't have wanted me to work in a trade - originally their vision was for me to do something 'important'. I guess that's everyone's vision for their kids. It skews how we show them what careers are actually available (my school SUCKED at this).

Something people also don't keep in mind is that we're essentially paying people shitty, shitty, shitty amounts of money because they're somehow SUPPOSED to work. That's our mindset. And yet, many of the shit jobs people hold could be done easily by machines. We just insist on having a human touch, despite outrage at fast-food workers doing terrible things to your food because they're, well, human. If you want to have a different perspective on how the world is moving and what we might want to keep in mind as things grow increasingly mechanized, I suggest listening to the Cracked.com podcast on Millennials. Before you shut down because of the source, give it a try - it's incredibly interesting and a good supplement to the rage-blog-type articles from "legitimate' news sources that complain about the current generation's perceived laziness.