I hate to start a post with a vulgarity, but it may be appropriate here.
What if the sign was more like this:
“I can’t get enough help these days because government aid during the pandemic had made it possible for people not to work for assholes like me who don’t pay well or treat them with respect.”
Particularly when it comes to jobs in restaurants, we treat workers in this country far worse than Western European countries treat their workers.
We pay much less, especially in restaurants that allow tipping. If employees get tips, their employers can pay them far less than minimum wage.
Even our minimum wage is obscenely low. If we were to look back to 1967, when the minimum wage was $1.25 an hour, and if we just let it rise with the cost of living, the minimum wage would be in excess of $20 an hour.
It’s currently $7.25 at the federal level.
The big push to increase it to $15 an hour would still leave minimum wage workers behind the 1967 level, but it would help.
The problem is that people have become so adept at confusing the issue that there’s a belief that raising the minimum wage will cause an increase in unemployment.
It just isn’t so.
The real truth, which corporate media won’t tell you, is that the biggest difference between us and other industrialized nations is in the obscene level of wealth the people at the top make.
In most European countries, a full-time employee making minimum wage can support himself or herself, and it many cases even can raise a family.
In most European countries, the CEO of a company makes only about 20 times as much as the average employee at their comany.
Here, of course, it’s more than 300 times as much.
Of course we help the folks at the bottom with things like food stamps and Section Eight housing, but all that does is make the folks at the top even richer.
A $15 minimum wage for a full-time employee would be a little over $31`,000 annually.
Nobody’s getting rich off that, but maybe people could live with a little more dignity.
There’s a change coming, and if business owners don’t accept it, they won’t be happy with the results.
Things can always get worse.
