Thursday might be a tough one for fans of the Big Mac, as the "Fight for $15" movement is set to stage a massive, nationwide protest in the pursuit of higher minimum wage and the right to form a union. In more than 150 cities throughout the United States, fast food workers employed at McDonald's, Wendy's, KFC, Domino's and the like will walk off the job in an effort to spur management into increasing their base salary to $15 an hour.
During a speech in Milwaukee on Labor Day, President Obama was quoted saying, "You know what, if I were looking for a job that lets me build some security for my family, I’d join a union. If I were busting my butt in the service industry and wanted an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work, I’d join a union. …I’d want a union looking out for me." These words have quickly become a rallying cry for organizations like Fast Food Forward and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the two groups who are spearheading the "Fight for $15" campaign.
Buoyed by these words, and having already seen success in Seattle (where $15 an hour is on its way to becoming the city-wide standard), Fast Food Forward and the SEIU are poised to make their biggest statement to date. Using the ongoing issue of growing income inequality as a springboard, the movement claims that the only way to get everyone on an even keel is to raise the wages paid to our lowest income employees. Understandably, this goal has set some segments of society on edge.
Now, it would be foolish to side with that small contingent who claim that the minimum wage should be abolished. Those folks have stated that a federally enforced minimum wage has the negative effect of killing jobs and raising prices (which in turn acts to discourage consumers from buying stuff). Without such a weighty anchor around a corporation's neck, they would be free to pay people the amount they actually deserve, which would in turn lower prices (because companies wouldn't have as many expenses) and increase the number of available jobs. These experiments, however, are always run in the context of a perfect capitalistic society.
Guess what, folks, America isn't a perfect capitalist society (though it'd be super if we were). Corporations don't care about their employees as much they'd like their customers to believe. Corporations are in the business of making money. In spite of recent court decisions that claim companies do have religious preferences, they still don't have loyalty (just Google "corporate inversion" if you want to know what I'm talking about) and they're under no sense of obligation to make their employees' lives any better than they absolutely need to be. If left to their own devices, companies would be totally fine with moving us back to the partial fiefdoms of the Industrial Revolution.
It's due to that lack of compassion that forces the need for minimum wage in this country, and it's due to ongoing lobbying on behalf of corporations that the minimum wage is so criminally low in this country. As long as the conversation's been going on, you've no doubt seen some chart or graph (like this one from the Pew Research Center) that explains that as the cost of living has increased, the value of minimum wage has plummeted. People making the federally mandated $7.25 an hour are currently living in a more complete state of relative poverty than any generation that's come before. Most of this has to do with Congress' seeming unwillingness to consider its poorest citizens by legislating regular increases in the minimum wage.
While we're there, here's another factoid that's being bandied about: if Congress had regularly raised the minimum wage to coincide with cost of living, the federal minimum wage today would be $10.90 an hour according to raisetheminimumwage.com. That would theoretically guarantee that fast food and service employees would be making a minimum wage designed to allow them to live with moderate comfort. It wouldn't be an easy life, of course, but it would still allow a low income individual to, say, afford rent in a two-bedroom apartment (which is impossible for any fast food worker at the moment). That's not all "woe to the poor" sentiment, either, because according to the Department of Labor, "more than 600 economists, seven of them Nobel Prize winners in economics, have signed onto a letter in support of raising the minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016." In other words, tons of people who should know, are advocating for an increase in the minimum wage.
http://www.examiner....mum-wage-unions
These people are asking for too much money. No way they deserve 15 dollars to reheat frozen food.
