Related thread: Small Businesses Have Big Job Openings, But Can’t Fill Them.
Try to fight a war with lawyer and not a factory worker.
We have 330+ million people in this country.
Questions for our government:
1) What are they supposed to DO? Burger flipping is out. Manufacturing is out. Is collecting welfare a primary career option?
2) Should we be bringing in millions of low skill workers to add to the mix?
Honestly ? Semi-skilled assembly-line workers are going away.
Skilled trades ? Not so much, although the skill and training levels required are trending upwards (i.e. mechanics on assembly lines need to upgrade to robot maintenance technicians. . .)
As long as trained skills are required, those factory workers will have stable employment, but are under notice that they have to constantly up their game as well . . .
What an employer pays an employee is no business of the federal government.
Face it.
The $15 per hr minimum wage push is just another tax increase.
Someone good with numbers see what the take would be for the parasites in government if it gets passed.
The solution isn’t to make McDonald’s pay more, it’s to make the taxpayer pay less.
The regulations in the US are causing manufactures to do only the bare minimal manufacturing in the US, this is mainly just short term work where they aren’t making a long term investment which translates into low wages.
2/3s of the cost of an employee isn’t in their paycheck.
IF your business model includes low wages supplemented by my tax dollars, then you should not be in business to begin with.
On occasion I was hit by little globules of molten metal coming off the spot welders. My gloves were soaked with machine oil and the occasional slip sent the edge of a steel sheet skittering off my wrist leaving a nice even slit. I became somewhat familiar with the nurses in the plant infirmary. I was paid a union wage of $5 per hour, $2 of which was deducted for taxes, health care, uniforms, and dues, and felt lucky to get it. I remained sane those two summers by immersing my brain into the minutiae of doing the simple repetitive tasks before me fast and to perfection. It was almost like Zen.
So I empathize with factory line workers. It's an odd existence. But in terms of the talent and training required vs. the actual value produced during each hour of the individual's labor it really isn't hugely more productive than a burger flipper burning a few dozen beef patties during the same span of time.
Sorry Rush, Ted, GOPe, et.al.
THIS is why the voters are rejecting Milton Friedman/Movement Conservative Supply-Side Economics.
They’re done with their thirty year test drive, and it’s NO SALE.
“...who say that some guy mopping a floor at GM...is somehow doing more than a scientist making a cure for cancer”
Because the politicians have sent manufacturing jobs overseas, leaving no jobs except burger flipping. The way the liberals “solve” that is to demand that burger joints pay $15 per hour.
The people against the Keystone Pipeline claim that the oil will be converted to gasoline in the US and then sold to China. Even if true, doesn’t that mean that the pipeline increases manufacturing? We take raw materials from Canada and manufacture a finished product: gasoline. And if we sell it to China, isn’t that exporting? Manufacturing and exporting goods and paying taxes and providing jobs? It’s all good.
In the last two months, I’ve walked out of McDonalds three times because the service was so slow. I think they’re cutting back counter staff because of the rising minimum wage.