# Should the Minimum Wage Be Increased to $15? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 28, 2021, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-the-minimum-wage-be-increased-to-15/933945 "2021-02-28T14:26:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 12
**Author:** ![etasyde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/9f8e36/32.png) [@etasyde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/etasyde)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2021, 4:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-the-minimum-wage-be-increased-to-15/933945/221 "2021-03-15T16:37:11Z")
> [@Quintas](#): > > What part of the country is this $166,400 per year waitstaff job? Yes, inquiring minds would love to know. While I likely lack the titles and assets associated with such a lofty tip rate, I’ll gladly swallow my pride and dress in whatever uniform is required for even half that pay. My dumbass has been working 60-70 work weeks for far less. ---
**Author:** ![DavidNRockies](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/davidnrockies/32/6279_2.png) [@DavidNRockies](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidNRockies)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2021, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-the-minimum-wage-be-increased-to-15/933945/222 "2021-03-15T16:41:41Z")
That required a lot of assumptions that, I would guess, aren’t going to be valid. Such as: that it’s full-time, year-round work. ---
**Author:** ![pkbites](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pkbites/32/204_2.png) [@pkbites](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pkbites)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2021, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-the-minimum-wage-be-increased-to-15/933945/223 "2021-03-15T17:15:51Z")
> [@Quintas](#): > > > [@pkbites](#): > > > > His waitstaff makes about $80 an hour just on tips. > > What part of the country is this $166,400 per year waitstaff job? Lake Geneva. Keep in mind most of his staff work 18-20 hours per week, which I stated in a previous post, and all but 1 are college students. At no time did I insinuate these were full time positions. ---
**Author:** ![etasyde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/9f8e36/32.png) [@etasyde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/etasyde)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2021, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-the-minimum-wage-be-increased-to-15/933945/224 "2021-03-15T17:22:51Z")
> [@pkbites](#): > > Lake Geneva. Keep in mind most of his staff work 18-20 hours per week, and all but 1 are college students. At no time did I insinuate these were full time positions. So… you intentionally gave an extreme outlier and very misleading figure for… why? That’s also still ~74k/yr or almost 2x US median individual income… and on a third of my hours, too. Maybe I’m in the wrong industry? > [@pkbites](#): > > Employees generally get paid what they are worth, or they go elsewhere. This assumes that A) people have the option of not working at all - necessary, because if _all_ the jobs offer the same wage they have zero choice but to accept less than they are worth or make zero dollars at all and starve to death, and B) people can transition without any friction. Both assumptions are outright false. ---
**Author:** ![Quintas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/48db29/32.png) [@Quintas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quintas)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2021, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-the-minimum-wage-be-increased-to-15/933945/225 "2021-03-15T17:57:13Z")
> [@pkbites](#): > > Lake Geneva. Keep in mind most of his staff work 18-20 hours per week, which I stated in a previous post, and all but 1 are college students. At no time did I insinuate these were full time positions. 20 hours a week is still over 80k per year at that rate. Where do we apply? I think what you are probably saying is they can make $80 per hour when there are customers there, however there are only customers there maybe 90 minutes out of a 4 hour shift, meaning the waitstaff goes home with a little over $100 per day. If that’s what you mean, then by that logic I can claim to make over $100 per hour if I divide how much I earn in a month by how much time my fingers are actually engaged in entering figures into Excel vs doing other things. ---
**Author:** ![Oredigger77](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/oredigger77/32/3181_2.png) [@Oredigger77](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Oredigger77)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2021, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-the-minimum-wage-be-increased-to-15/933945/226 "2021-03-15T18:03:30Z")
Pretty much any high end restaurant (non-COVID times). My cousin did that for more than a decade before she got tired of moving around. She would work summers in Martha’s vineyard and then winter in Aspen and then maybe bounce to San Francisco the next season. She basically lived in whatever the current tourist hot spot was and had a long list of World Class restaurants on her resume with great recommendations. She averaged close to 120K per year with no college education all the way through her 20s. Of course, now she is living in a teepee with no college education, home or close relationships but it was glamorous as hell while she was doing it. ---
**Author:** ![pkbites](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pkbites/32/204_2.png) [@pkbites](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pkbites)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2021, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-the-minimum-wage-be-increased-to-15/933945/227 "2021-03-15T19:31:41Z")
> [@Quintas](#): > > I think what you are probably saying is they can make $80 per hour when there are customers there, however there are only customers there maybe 90 minutes out of a 4 hour shift, meaning the waitstaff goes home with a little over $100 per day. No. Wrong. Completely wrong. I’ve already explained the hours, days, the prices, and the amount of tables his staff services in previous posts. Please go back and read what I actually said and not what you want to see. Waitstaff in high end, expensive establishments can make a pretty penny from tips working only part-time hours. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2021, 8:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-the-minimum-wage-be-increased-to-15/933945/228 "2021-03-16T08:47:30Z")
Didn’t you bring up this tangent about $80 an hour tips to illustrate how your son who owns two restaurants would be screwed by paying Rockefeller waiters a minimum wage? Then, when called on the details of that, it’s been watered down to only a minority of waiters that can earn so much, if they are working at high end, expensive and successful establishments. So, combining these two framings, why would your son complain about paying a few extra dollars an hour, when he owns two high-end and busy restaurants? How much does _he_ make an hour? And what’s the relevance to the overall discussion on minimum wage? If I know a guy who earns a lot driving an Uber in mountain view, that doesn’t have much relevance to whether drivers in general are earning enough to live on and whether anything should be done about that. ---
**Author:** ![doreen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/858c86/32.png) [@doreen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/doreen)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2021, 12:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-the-minimum-wage-be-increased-to-15/933945/229 "2021-03-18T00:07:47Z")
Of course there are - in addition to the people mentioned by @[k9bfriender](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/k9bfriender), when I worked in minimum wage jobs there were two other groups that didn’t need assistance. One was women who didn’t have any skills and had been out of the workforce for years so all they could get were minimum wage jobs - but their husbands earned enough that they had been supporting the whole family for some time and the women got jobs as the kids got older to pay tuition or for extras or to save. The other group was retirees who were actually collecting pensions ( not Social Security, pensions ) ---
**Author:** ![doreen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/858c86/32.png) [@doreen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/doreen)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2021, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-the-minimum-wage-be-increased-to-15/933945/230 "2021-03-18T00:28:06Z")
> [@bump](#): > > It’s not like people making $12 /hr today are going to make $19.75 under a $15 minimum wage; they’re just going to basically get a 4.75 pay cut relative to minimum wage. Which is going to hurt if there is inflation, etc… associated with the raise. Maybe. Or maybe something like what happened at my job will happen. After 2008, managers didn’t get raises for some number of years (I forget exactly how many). But the union-represented employees did. After a few years , it became impossible to fill vacancies in my title because it would have been a pay cut to take on more responsibility. . And the same thing may happen to the job that pays $12/hr today - if I’m going to get paid $15/hr whether I’m the entry level worker or the supervisor, I’ll just stay entry-level. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-the-minimum-wage-be-increased-to-15/933945.md?page=11)