I didn’t say that anyone could do it, just that almost anyone can fairly easily get into a position to find out.
My first interview in high school boiled down to, “Do you use drugs?” and, “Will you reliably show up on time?” Next schedule I was slinging pizzas.
I had a repeat of that interview while I was in college with the same outcome. Well, almost the same outcome. I wound up frying chicken for two years.
So yes, a person can develop skills while slinging hash, but they just had to have a pulse to be able to learn.
Skilled or not is irrelevant. What matters is that labor is not immune to the laws of supply and demand. Regardless of what people say about wanting a so-called worker to make their behavior stands in stark contrast when they buy from literal slaves to save a few dollars. For services that can’t yet be automated their is some ability to mandate a wage floor but outside of that capital moves to where labor is cheap or people skirt the law by dealing with labor that is disincentivized to raise a stink.
Funny you should say that, since fast food places in at least one state have been caught using constitutionally permitted slave labor to staff their kitchens.
I can’t claim to have all the solutions here. I tried to be a “good boss” when I was in fast food, but it’s a system that incentivizes exploitative behavior, and my bosses forced me all too often to be the bad guy who was cutting labor hours with no notice, rewriting schedules on the fly to meet targets, cut or lay off good workers or find any excuse to deny raise requests, and so on. I’m glad that I now work a quasi-union job where me and my coworkers are protected from arbitary or capricious firings or labor cuts and we have collective bargaining rights, and I’m in a position where the only time I have to be the bad guy is when refusing alcohol sales or kicking out unruly customers or busting shoplifters.
It is generally defined in accordance with the price of a one bedroom apartment. I haven’t seen any arguments that living wage should be defined in accordance with six times the average number of children. Can you give us a cite for that argument?
A living wage is what one full-time worker must earn on an hourly basis to help cover the cost of their family’s minimum basic needs where they live while still being self-sufficient.
Which means it varies by family type. The MIT project, oft cited in these boards, calculates it for twelve family types, 1–2 adults with/without both working, and 0–3 children. They don’t bother to calculate up to twelve, but nobody is going to argue that increasing the number of children doesn’t increase a family’s basic needs. The federal government certainly doesn’t with their poverty lines and SNAP criteria.
into Google returns the MIT project first, followed by sites with similar definitions. Absolutely nothing about one bedroom apartments in the first few results.
The term, in the context of labor as a resource, doesn’t mean “workers who have no skills.” It means “jobs which do not require specialized knowledge.”
If a worker can show up and hit the ground running with little or no training, it’s unskilled labor.
It’s a shitty term and reinforces an idea that these jobs are low value, and gives people leeway to say things like “well if they want to get paid more maybe they should get a grownup job.”
Robots break down and need repair. So the fantasy that you buy robots to do the work and never have to worry afterwards is just that, fantasy. So then it comes down to whether or not over time human workers (with their call in sick, etc.) are more or less expensive than robot workers (with their breakdowns, etc.)
Not even that; in practice it means “poor people jobs”. And leads to bosses who buy their own propaganda making a mess when they throw actual unskilled people at it and watch things crash and burn.
At any rate one important point is that poorly paid people can’t buy what is being sold. The constant drive to lower wages from business shrinks their own customer base, but they are ideologically devoted to ignoring that.
I dunno why this is going to break things. I’m not that smart of a dude, but they have been paying $20 an hour or more for fast food workers in my part of Vermont since I’ve lived here (second half of 2020).
Burger King seems to be Burger Kinging along just fine. And they are hiring, full time and part time according to the flyer taped on the drive-thru window.
The subway down the street from my job says they start at 18.95 an hour for entry level, over 22.00 for shift leads. Its built into the side of a gas station.
The question is, to what degree will it advance housing inflation?
Where I live, housing prices are completely out of control–not due to high wages, but in spite of low wages. It’s a community with an extremely active tourism promotion board, with huge amounts of hotel taxes going toward ads encouraging people to vacation here. As a result, lots of housing is converted to AirB&Bs or the like, and landlords are raking in the cash thereby. The smaller stock of long-term rentals are much sought-after, and landlords are jacking up the rents to whatever they think that they can get.
Raising the minimum wage here wouldn’t have much effect at all on that: landlords are still going to charge whatever they can get, it’s just that the working-class folks who are being priced out of the area would no longer be as priced out.
Anyone currently making $16-$20 who is eligible under the new law will be bumped up to $20, so the average wage increase across all eligible workers will be something under 25%.
How much of a fast food meal’s cost is currently attributed to employees making less than $20/hr?
As you note, a twenty dollar an hour minimum wage exists in many places and businesses in those places haven’t collapsed.
What’s happening in California is a show. Business owners are trying to pretend they will collapse in order to try to reverse the minimum wage hike and increase the profits of the business owners.
Around here (the Corpus Christi area in Texas) I’m sometimes served by someone who appears to be in their 50s or 60s, especially during the weekday daytime shifts when it’s not summer.
Depreciation on the robots is probably going to cost more than maintenance. Or interest payments on the loans to buy them.
A big electronics company didn’t fully automate its factories in SE Asia because the workers worked for less than the depreciation on the machines that could replace them. Probably hurt productivity and quality, but that’s not as easy to measure.