Why minimum wage jobs are bad

a reply to: xstealth RE-point, and ive said this many times. That 15$ an hour you are saying burger flipping is not worth? When I started working, minimum was 4.25 an hour....but that 4.25 an hour back then was close to the same, after inflation, cpi, etc, that the 15$ an hour is now. So I don't see why flipping a burger now should accrue less actual buying power than one from 20 years ago. This illustrates my point of how the same jobs are having a declining standard of living, and is the reason for the collapse of the middle class. I am comfortable enough, but I know my children will have to work much harder than I do to have a nice home, nice car, etc, and forget about retirement for that generation, that will be a fond myth that people will look back on as "once upon a time".

originally posted by: pexx421
a reply to: NavyDoc No. What I actually described is how a place with no worker protections and representation contrasts with a place WITH those things. I showed the difference, the reality, that business will exploit to the fullest given the opportunity. There are 100 MILLION unemployed americans, one third of the work force. There is an infinite labor pool. This situation is maintained and exploited, as I pointed out many times, through price fixing, wage fixing, lax immigration policies, and outsourcing, in order to force wage costs down. The business market and legislation is intentionally manipulated to extract as much profit as possible from workers and customers. Businesses have NO care for society or the community, and only give what they are held to the fire to give. That is the point, my friends. I am not that worried for myself....I don't care to work at a minimum wage job, I have skills and know that they will provide a lucrative and enjoyable life with the things I want, like a nice home for my family, travel, etc. I also know, from my observations of current events and history, that if my children follow in my footsteps to my career path, they will have a lower standard of living than I do.....no matter what it really was that I chose to do. I am not happy with this. I am not happy with the idea that my children will need to do a much higher skilled job or a market manipulation job (banker, finance), in order to match the lifestyle that we can have now with a middle skilled labor job (ultrasound).

There isn't an infinite labor pool. Depending on the labor needed, it can be very finite or very broad. You went from a pool where a high level of education was required and with it a limited pool to a pool where almost no education and training was needed thus making it much larger.

That your children will have to have more skills or a different skillset than you to maintain the same lifestyle is not new nor unusual and has been part of history throughout history. What happened to horse buggy makers after the invention of the automobile? Did they insist that their children make the same wage they did making horse buggies even though there was no demand for it or did they adapt and learn other skills.

Businesses don't care for the community but government does? That's rich. All of the things you explain above have come about by governmental interference in the marketplace. It is an argument for less government, not more.

a reply to: NavyDoc You are detracting. I never said government cared about people. However, government is the way businesses manipulate the market in their favor, and its also the way the public can push back to work it in their favor, though yes, business has much more power there. Our only other option is civil disobedience, which we have neither the unity nor stomach for at this point. Further, we are not talking about decline in compensation as positions become obsolete as you seem to be implying. We are just speaking of businesses taking a larger portion of the profit produced by the workers each year. It seems to me that your stance is that this is normal and acceptable, and that you refuse to recognize the end result, which is that all jobs will move steadily closer and closer to minimum wage as time goes by, just so business owners, CEO's, shareholders can steal more of the workers productivity.