Posted on 12/09/2013 10:56:48 PM PST by servo1969
Fifteen dollars an hour to say, "Would you like fries with that?" or "Welcome to Wal-Mart?"
PLEASE.
My very first position out of college in a terrible job market was as a Wal-Mart portrait studio photographer. Around the holidays, we'd have long lines; trying to get kids to smile after they've been waiting in Wal-Mart for two hours is no picnic. On my off days, I didn't dare pick up the phone because my district manager regularly called people and demanded that they fill in for employees who were sick in other locations. There was no chance of advancement because that same district manager was sleeping with one of his employees and she was being groomed for a promotion. It was a crummy job and to top it all off, my hours were curtailed so much for reasons I never understood that I was in essence laid off.
Of course, even that job was better than working at Burger King, where I did two stints. The first was as a teenager, where I had a feminist boss who deliberately assigned the men the lousy chores the women didn't want to do in between yelling at us. If there was mopping to be done or taking out the trash, she made sure a man was doing it. Combine that with the fact that I was an immature 16 year old who didn't like the job and it's no surprise that I quit the moment I had enough money in my pocket to get by for awhile.
In retrospect, even that was better than being an assistant manager there, which I did for the better part of a year after my job at Wal-Mart. The manager would do things like assign you a breakfast shift, mid-day shift and night shift over three consecutive days. My feet hurt incessantly from standing around in dress shoes for 12 hours a day. There were managers stealing money and you always had to stay on top of your game to make sure you didn't get blamed for it. Although we were paid a salary, when you factored in all the overtime hours we worked for free, we made less per hour than most of the employees.
Both jobs were low paying, difficult and generally unpleasant. There was never a time when I said, "Oh boy, I get to make Whoppers today," or "I can't wait to wake up a two month old baby and try to get decent pictures of him before he starts screaming his head off!" However, those were both starter jobs for people with minimal experience. The whole idea is supposed to be that you gain some basic skills and either move on or start working your way up. You're not supposed to try to support a family flipping burgers or stocking the shelves at Wal-Mart. You're also not supposed to make $15 an hour at a job where you work side by side with unreliable high school kids.
There are all sorts of economic arguments against paying $15 an hour wages to people who aren't worth the money. It certainly causes companies to hire fewer people. High labor costs can even hurt the bottom line so badly that it threatens the survival of the business. Chrysler and General Motors could tell you all about that. Is putting even more people out of work when so many Americans are already unemployed something we should be doing?
Furthermore, the unhappy truth is that some employees aren't worth the minimum wage, much less $15 an hour. There's one guy I still remember to this day from my assistant manager days at Burger King, primarily because I could never understand why it took him so long to make a hamburger. Other employees who were generally more competent wouldn't show up for work if they could score tickets for a concert or basketball game. If you tell a fast food restaurant to pay these people $15, they're just going to fire them and replace them with robots. You may laugh at that, but it has already happened in banking, farming, and the movie rental industry. It's a matter of time until it happens in restaurants as well.
All of that aside, as conservatives, we have a fundamentally different vision for people in starter jobs than the Left does. Liberals look at poor Americans, think they're hapless losers who don't deserve any better and see decades of food stamps, welfare and the minimum wage in their futures. However, nobody should want that for themselves, their children or their neighbors.
As a conservative who has worked those jobs and now works for myself, I think we should be encouraging people to aspire to be more than a minimally-educated, minimally-working, minimally-skilled minimum wage employee. There's nothing wrong with any honest job, but there is something wrong with people squandering their potential. As Abraham Maslow once said, "If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life." Ninety nine percent of Americans are capable of doing more with their lives than settling for a job most 16 year olds can be trained to do in a week. Instead of asking the government to force businesses to pay people more than they're worth, we should encourage these employees to build up their skills so that they'll genuinely be worth more. We should want all Americans to be all they can be so that they can have what they deserve out of life instead of encouraging them to settle for lives they would have never intentionally chosen for themselves.
Whoops.
That was just supposed to be Townhall.com for the source.
What a lousy employee!
Show up on time, if not ten minutes early. I have seen good employees who did their jobs well not get raises because they walked in the door two to five minutes late every day. It wasn't their work that got noticed, it was their tardiness. If you are there a few minutes early, that gets noticed, too, and it can work for you.
Whatever you do, do your best. Make that a habit. Work to just a little higher standard than that which is required, if you can do so in the same amount of time.
Learn all you can about the operation, even if it is just "temporary" work. You don't have to rub that knowledge in everyone's face, just be quietly competent.
Do your best to understand things without being intrusive or offensive, keeping in mind that there are always those who will feel threatened and may even go so far as to try to make it appear you have done something wrong (they will set you up, if you run into one of the really bad ones).
If you don't see advancement in your future where you are, start looking for better opportunities.
No whining. If there is a problem, take it up the food chain, explain the problem, why it is a problem (or causing economic loss to the employer), and be prepared to offer a solution, especially one which saves money. Even if that is rejected, you will have stated your case in a professional manner.
And last, don't let your job define you. Don't become Billy-Bob the burger flipper, but just be Billy-Bob, who is working at the burger joint until he can find a better job. You will have more opportunities open to you, especially if the public see you as competent.
Remember, that next customer might be your new boss some day, or a client for your own business.
People still respect those who pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
high schools in many places need to be doing a better job of teaching people the skills needed for the modern work place.
“Remember, that next customer might be your new boss some day, or a client for your own business.”
Years ago I worked for a moving company after college while looking for a “real” job. I was low-man on the crew, but one client took to talking with me a bit. At the end of the job he said he had retired, but was looking to start a new business, and if I would help him start a moving company! I politely declined.
Who knows though. A buddy of mine that worked for the same company stayed in the business, and now owns one of the largest moving companies in his major city. Not bad for a college drop-out!
I’m starting to like the idea of a $15 minimum wage.
It guarantees that robot and automation research will dramatically increase, always a good thing when competing against Third World countries.
Second, it means that the Chamber of Amnesty and low wage corporations no longer have a reason to support massive low skill immigration.
Third, it means that the quality of workers at fast food shops, where I often eat, will improve.
I just don't know
After a week, he asked if I could work another week, which I did, and as there were eventual delays getting things rolling (my new clients experienced a temporary setback), I ended up working there three months, and could have stayed longer.
While I was there, we reorganized part of the inventory to improve efficiency, modified backorder filling procedures to streamline filling those, and eliminated steps in materials handling which led to substantial time savings.
I like to keep busy, so when I ran out of things to do, I'd grab a broom and clean.
That caught on, too, and every part of the warehouse would be cleaned at least once a week.
When I left, it was on good terms, with an offer of a job any time I wanted one. I felt as if I had contributed something, and so did my employer.
“While I was there, we reorganized part of the inventory to improve efficiency, modified backorder filling procedures to streamline filling those, and eliminated steps in materials handling which led to substantial time savings.”
Sounds like you learned a bunch too, which probably helped you in your business.
Talking about minimum wage always reminds me of when I first started working for my dad as a kid on his jobs.
“Well son, I’d pay you what you were worth, but I don’t think you’ll work that cheap. So how does $5 an hour sound?”
Basically the rising cost of labor is going to make promotion less pallatable and moneyed, except for a very few.
Way to destroy your hopes of job advancement and future wages with this government price fixing hoax.
I'd be happy if they could walk on two legs..... ;-)
1. For a moment, let's leave aside the economic distortions caused by minimum wage laws. Even though they are critical aspects of this issue, most employers tend to look at this in more pragmatic terms without necessarily understanding the larger economic picture. One major problem employers will face -- even if they can offset the higher labor costs with improvements in efficiency (for example, the employer can double the wages of his entry-level staff and reduce his work force by 50% without any impact on the operations) -- is the "wage compression" that will occur and destroy the employer's entire compensation structure in the process. A low-level employee who earns $7.50/hour will see his wage doubled, while someone who earns $12/hour in a more responsible role will see his wage increase by 25%, and someone in a supervisory role who is already paid $15/hour will see no change at all. And from that point forward, all three of these employees will be paid the same even though they are doing jobs where the supervisor should probably be paid twice as much as the entry-level employee and 25% more than the senior employee.
2. One of the more disturbing points I've heard in support of a $15/hour wage came from an economist who suggested that a large increase in the minimum wage -- while it would certainly create a distortion in labor rates -- might be the best way to address two separate issues in the labor market today. The higher minimum wage would incentivize the long-term unemployed, who have job skills but no prospects in the job market for their area of expertise, to move into jobs that had previously been low-wage positions. This would also address an ongoing labor problem that nobody likes to talk about -- that is, the fact that many (if not most) of the people currently in minimum-wage jobs would be unemployable in almost any other era due to poor work habits, criminal history, poor interpersonal skills, etc. In addition to promoting advances in productivity through automation, a higher minimum wage would also clean a lot of people out of the work force who don't belong there.
I worked my way through college. One of my jobs was window girl at a hamburger joint. I cleaned the men’s toilets. I dropped the tacos into the grease. I took the orders and entered them into a “picture based” computerized screen. I bagged the fries and put them into bigger bags. I stocked the catsup and mustard, the napkins, and the sauces. It was one of my first real paying jobs.
Most of these skills don’t even require literacy or even demand that these people count back change.
The next round of jobs I got were office based. I had to learn a skill: TYPING. I became quite proficient at it and have a 70-90 wpm speed. It was a skill and added at least $3-5 to my hourly rate.
The next skill was writing, then editing. Then I earned my college degree. Now I was up to $24K per year.
And it goes on. A person needs to add to their portfolio before they can demand a higher wage.
We have a dearth of people who can build and repair things. For crying out loud, call up the local jr. college and learn how to fix HVAC’s, or do carpentry if you don’t like working inside a building.
I always knew I didn’t want to get stuck with the type of people who worked in fast food. I also knew I didn’t want to be a secretary for the rest of my life. I sucked it up and saved every penny and paid my way through college.
It was easier back then, because Reagan was president and life was a lot more sane. Good luck to these idiots now who demand that they be given everything for nothing.
My first career job in ‘92 paid $13,500 annually. I took a pay cut when I took that job ... going from a $6.50 per hour job in a print shop.
Unless you were working un paid OT 13500 is very close to 6.50 and hr for a 40 hr week.
Bump! Excellent advice.
Bingo! No more calls, we have a winner. I cannot tell you how many times I have had my order created incorrectly, even when they've got an automated system with the details of the order right in front of them.
If you tell a fast food restaurant to pay these people $15, they're just going to fire them and replace them with robots. You may laugh at that, but it has already happened in banking, farming, and the movie rental industry.
But, but - the esteemed John McCain tells us all the time we need illegals to pick the lettuce that Americans won't pick for $50 per hour. Mr. McCain is surely smarter and more honest than this man.
“One of my jobs was window girl at a hamburger joint. I cleaned the men’s toilets. I dropped the tacos into the grease.”
Not necessarily in that order I hope?
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