#scrapper256

I don’t know… I think you should be paid based on the value that you provide society and the effort that it took for you to be qualified to provide that value. From this standpoint it makes a lot of sense why doctors make a lot more money than fast food workers… the work of doctors is more valuable and it takes more effort to become a doctor. You can’t expect businesses to pay employees more than the value that that employee brings to the company.

You don’t understand capitalism, then.  Or the minimum wage.  What people get paid for various jobs under capitalism has nothing to do with the “value the person working those jobs provide to society and the effort it took to be qualified to provide that value” and everything to do with supply and demand.  Jobs that pay more pay that much because there is a scarcity in the supply of people who are able and willing to fill those positions + a high demand for the services those jobs provide.  That’s it.

And as they demonstrated in the late 1800s/early 1900s before the minimum wage was implemented, employers are more than willing to pay their employees as little as they can get away with, and if the minimum wage law wasn’t in place, they would pay less than that.  And also treat their employees any way they saw fit.  I refer you to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire as a prime example.

And no, the effort it takes to become qualified to do those jobs doesn’t have a direct effect on that scarcity - except when you examine the efforts to gatekeep the schooling/training for those positions.  Such gatekeeping is either through wealth (making college/university expensive - seriously, we’d have a lot more doctors in this country if the cost of getting a medical degree wasn’t $200,000-$300,000; similar situations for nurses, we have had a shortage of nurses in this country for a while, and RN programs cost anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000), on racial lines (making it more difficult for non-whites to access the training than it is for whites), gender lines (more difficult for women to access the training than it is for men), restricted to certain areas or groups, etc.

(We’d have a lot more doctors and other medical professionals in this country if the schooling wasn’t so expensive.  And the cost of the schooling helps drive the cost of the medical care they provide - if doctors didn’t have to pay back such high loans, and if there were more of them, they wouldn’t be able to charge as much as they do.  (The insurance companies help drive costs up, too.)  And the thing is, at least for now, medical care, unlike manufacturing or phone customer service, is something that cannot be outsourced to other countries to reduce labor costs.  It has to be supplied here, in this country.  Again, supply and demand.)

A prime example of this is what happened in the computer networking field about 8-10 years or so ago.  It used to be, a 2-year/associate’s degree or a 6-month intensive training program certificate could easily net you a $60,000/year entry-level position in the computer networking field.  About 8-10 years or so ago?  The requirement for that same job changed to a 4-year degree, because enough people had obtained the 2-year/associate degree or intensive training certificate, and the employers could demand more qualifications.  Now, a bachelor’s degree is required for an entry-level position paying that much.  Sure, you might still be able to get a job in the field with just a 2-year degree or a 6 month certificate, but you’d be earning a lot less.  Same training, same job, earning half or less than what the same job was paying just 10 years previously.

Another example: the construction industry.  Most jobs only require a high school diploma, and some don’t even require that.  The median wage in 2017 in this industry was $18.70 per hour.  Does someone who hangs drywall all day really provide $18.70 per hour of value to society?

But those aren’t minimum wage occupations.  So let’s talk about a perfect example in the fast food industry - what happened in 2014 in Williston, North Dakota and the surrounding area.  People working entry-level crew positions at fast food restaurants there were earning up to $15 per hour, in 2014.  Why?  Supply and demand.  Or rather, a low supply of workers and a high demand for them, because of the energy job boom in the area at that time.  They weren’t doing a different job than a single mom earning $7.25/hr at a McDonald’s in, say, Mississippi.  Same job.  And yet, earning almost and in some cases more than twice the hourly wage in North Dakota.

Value to society has nothing to do with it.

But let’s examine that value to society for just a second.

Doctors save people’s lives when they get sick, right?  They help prevent sickness too.  They save lives.

Without the ability to get food - and a number of people out there either can’t cook to save their lives or are too busy - people would die, too.  This covers stockers and cashiers at grocery stores, too.

If a person preparing food doesn’t follow proper sanitation procedures, people who eat the food those people prepare - as well as others who come into contact with them - can sicken and die. 

Am I getting my point across yet?

The only reason the discussion of relative value of different jobs comes up when people agitate for a higher minimum wage or socialism is because of the artifical value society has assigned to certain positions that don’t reflect the actual value of those positions.  Remember, employers can and will pay employees as little as they can get away with.  They want those positions to be valued so little because it helps keep their labor costs low and their profits high.

(This doesn’t even get into how mass incarceration, especially among Black men, helps keep wages in certain groups artificially low, as those who have a conviction record are among the last hired at the lowest rate, the first fired, and the ones most likely to take whatever they are given and not demand a livable wage.)

Also?  “You can’t expect businesses to pay employees more than the value that that employee brings to the company.”

The companies aren’t even hitting that benchmark.  Since the 1970s, we’ve had a growing gap between the productivity of workers and wages.  Wages haven’t kept pace with the value workers provide to their employers.  Since 1948, productivity has risen 241.8%; wages have risen only 115.4%.  Where has the difference gone, you might ask?  Profit.  There’s a reason we have such wild wealth inequality in this country right now - because most of the economic gains in the last 50 years has gone straight to the already wealthy elite.  Which is a design of capitalism, BTW.  It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

In closing, I’ll quote FDR, who campaigned for minimum wage as president:

“Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day, who has been turning his employees over to the Government relief rolls in order to preserve his company’s undistributed reserves, tell you – using his stockholders’ money to pay the postage for his personal opinions — tell you that a wage of $11.00 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry.”

and

“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.”