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In Reply to: RE: minimum wage posted by DPM on April 27, 2015 at 15:57:54:
Actually what you say does make a lot of sense. Minimum and "low" paid jobs used to be mainly stocked by 15/16 year olds. I worked at 15 at McDonalds - the jobs were meant to give some pocket money for High School Students and or to people wanting a side job going to university. You were not meant to live on these wages - 100% agree with what you're saying.
But the problem is that we currently don't live in that world and now what is happening is that a bunch of people who came out of university and landed $45,000 (equivalent) a year jobs find that those jobs don't exist in any sort of numbers.
I'm a teacher in British Columbia and you talk to all the boomers and it basically they had their pick of schools. They got their University teaching certificate (for some that meant high school diploma with one year of teacher training) walked immediately into a full time teaching job and stayed for 40 years - no student loan debt, low housing costs, and better than your average job pay.
But that's all gone. Now you have to 5.5 years full time University and land yourself $50,000 in debt - probably more in the US. So you come out in debt and there is no full time job to go to. Indeed, in Canada there are 11 teachers for every 1 full time position. So you work as a sub - fine but the problem is you are on call and you MUST show up when they call - if you turn down 3 call-outs you are dropped from the sub list for the year and have to reapply. But you may only get called once every 2 weeks to teach. So 2-5 work days a month is difficult to live on. But remember you MUST be available Monday to Friday if called so you absolutely can't take a job that requires you to work on those days.
So that leaves you weekends and evenings - not exactly the jobs where you will be paid much if anything over minimum wage. But you take your job at McDonalds or Starbucks and work 6pm-12am and Saturday and Sunday from 10-6 to make ends meet - but then you get lucky and some teacher goes on maternity and you land 4 months full time. So now you're working 8am to 4pm Monday to Friday - 6pm-12am Mon to Friday, Sat/Sun. Do you quit those other two side jobs?
Well you shouldn't because once the maternity leave is up you're out of work again and the line of university graduates working at McDonalds and Starbucks or department stores is getting pretty long.
And then someone will say - tough luck go into another line of work - which is a fair argument but the system isn't geared (like it used to be) to hire people who don't have "specific" degrees for a specific so called skill set. A teacher can't roll into a management position even though they manage people and time well - if you don't have the specific degree in management or the field it is next to impossible to convince an HR manager to hire you - too risky for them to put their butt on the line.
The average age of the min/low wage work is now 35. More than half are over the age of 30. When you take hundreds of thousands of jobs and you put them in China/Mexico and you don't replace those positions with anything then what are people to do? I don't think the massive number of university graduates want to be working at Subway or Wal-Mart.
And with growing wealth disparity and companies wanting to sell premium goods well the population needs to be making enough money to HAVE disposable income to spend. The billionaire may buy five Rolex watches but it is a LOT better for a society to trade the billionaire for 10,000 people each with a $100,000. They can then sell 10,000 Rolex watches. Rolex sells more, they grow, economy gets better, more people hired into better paying jobs.
The only reason we get into the mess of raising minimum wages is because the minimum wage low wage job is no longer the 15 year old looking for pocket money it's because there's 11 people competing for 1 position all of whom are equally talented have degrees but the hiring manager liked one or pulled a name from a hat.
Economies can't survive when large amounts of money sit and do nothing - stuff has to be bought and sold.
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- RE: minimum wage - RGA 17:43:58 04/27/15 (0)
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