This is what everyone seems to think lately. The news is full of articles that talk about how raising the minimum wage is all good and most Americans are in favor of raising the minimum wage. According to a Gallup poll in early November 2013, a full 76% of Americans support raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.00. The Obama administration indicates support for the Harkin-Miller bill, which would raise the minimum wage to $10.10.
That Americans in menial jobs make so little money ($7.25) is not just getting headlines in the U.S. The foreign press is full of references to this. Recently I saw an article in Der Spiegel, one of Germany’s foremost intellectual magazines, ridiculing the food drive within Wal-Mart employees for their colleagues for Thanksgiving.
Within our own country, there has been outrage about McDonald’s telling its own employees to sign up for food stamps. The argument is that McDonald’s, a highly profitable international corporation does not want to pay its employees enough money to get out of poverty, and rather sends them to the government welfare dole. McDonald’s doesn’t want to pay its employees; it wants us all to pay them.
McDonald’s has proven it’s capable of making a profit abroad while paying workers $15 an hour or more. That may be true. But have you ever eaten at a McDonald’s in Germany? All its staple foods are much more expensive. If you want ketchup with those fries, you have to ask for them. The girl behind the counter does not give you a fistful when you ask for ketchup. She passes them out one packet at a time, at an additional cost of 20 cents each.
There is only one reason why Wendy’s, Burger King, Jack in the Box, McDonald’s, Taco Bell and all the other fast food places pay such low wages: There is a large supply of people willing to work for those wages. That’s why.
Working behind the counter at McDonald’s is probably not an easy job, but it also does not require much of an education. An acceptably clean, groomed and literate teenager can do it with minimal training. The toughest intellectual challenge is making change, and that problem is eliminated by fully automated cash registers, that do all the math.
Working in fast foods is just not a life career. It’s a great job for kids in high school and college, part-time. That’s what it’s designed to be.
If we raise the minimum wage, and all the fast food restaurants have to pay out more money, inevitably the competition will be the same, since all are affected evenly, and prices will go up. All of us will pay more for our burgers, fries and sodas, in other words, food is getting more expensive, and the poor will again not have enough money to buy food, so we need to raise the minimum wage. This is called inflation.
Raising the minimum wage is not solving the problem. This country needs to get back into manufacturing goods, exporting goods, and actually creating value that other countries want to pay us for. If we simply focus on service industries (restaurants, fast food) and consumer industries (buying Chinese products from Wal-Mart) we will never dig ourselves out and get back to the days when America was the manufacturing powerhouse of the world.
Rather than being a creator of value, we have become a consumer of value. And we’re spending ourselves into a hole. We need to focus on education, innovation and efficiency. We need to contribute more and we will get paid more.
Asking for more money for menial jobs does not work. There are other people right behind us more than willing to take our menial job at the current wages.
Everyone is talking about raising the minimum wage.
I don’t think it will solve our problem.