I agree with both of you. Minimum wage jobs were designed as entry level teaching tools. The benefit to the consumer is that they can get reasonably priced goods because of unskilled labor.
The purpose is to teach skills for later jobs. Today how many of us are aghast that these employees cannot even make correct change? The food quality is all there, but is sloppy. Food orders are often incorrect. Personal appearance is ... unique. Ability to follow direction is tenuous at best, but in each location there are shining examples of people who learn and grow, appreciate the opportunity, and are eager to move on to bigger and better, and better paying jobs.
Then there are the others, who begrudgingly show up late for work, when they are there, are argumentative, or insolent, are non performers, do their jobs poorly, do not interact well with the public, as well as their co-workers, and have no drive to work any more than they absolutely have to, and often complain about too many hours, or not enough, or the wrong days, the list goes on and on.
And these people just described, are the ones who want $15/hr wages. Because they have no desire to improve themselves, resent having to work at all, and hate THE MAN for expecting them to be grateful for their job.
In this scenario, everybody loses. The owner/operator, co-workers, the public. The biggest loser is those employees who do not learn the valuable lessons being taught to them in an ENTRY LEVEL JOB opportunity. And it will dog them for the rest of their working life.
Entry level jobs are there for a reason. They were never, never intended to be careers, and that is the crux of the issue IMO.
>>Entry level jobs are there for a reason. They were never, never intended to be careers, and that is the crux of the issue IMO.
I agree completely. But when the government and economists think that giving a $25/hr manufacturing job to China and replacing it with a $7.25/hr fast food job constitutes “no net job losses”, you effectively turn these crappy little jobs into a career because the Elites say that the only career the little people need is a weekly paycheck.
$15 for a typical minimum wage job is ridiculous. But so is a grown man with a family who is forced to apply for one because the stock value needed a little bump this quarter. They use the $15 minimum wage ruse to distract us while they ship our jobs overseas and replace the rest of us with H1b holders and illegals sharing a social security number.
We claim to hate the welfare state, but every time a worker becomes an unemployed worker, the busines owner has moved a self-sufficient citizen over to the care of society and those of us left working pay the price.