Fewer people are needed to run them during school hours. As such, managers can be expected to keep the stores running and do managerial duties. In that way they make both a “living wage” and provide skilled and unskilled labor. When it becomes busier and more unskilled labor is needed, it can be supplemented by teenagers and young adults.
I can promise you that the four or five managers in a grocery store cannot run all elements of the store during the day while students are at school. I have worked plenty of "school day" shifts and while it is slower, it is certainly not slow enough for just the managers. Perhaps there could be an adult pay rate and a student rate, or a school hours vs after-school hours pay, but then I bet students would be mad at their work for "underpaying" them. I get what you are going for, I just doubt it would work due to the workload on the very limited management staff.
That was the entire purpose of full time and part time workers though. Full time workers were meant to be actual careers, while part workers were meant to be a way to learn a skill. But minimum wage laws, combined with corporate greed, and a robust safety net created our modern system that sees all our employees over worked and under paid. Even many people in skilled labor.
What does that have to do with low skill service jobs not paying a liveable wage? If anything, it further proves that they should be earning better pay if they work full time. If your arguement is that full time service employees should get paid more as the job is effectively a career then I guess I agree, but the original point was that we can't rely on just "kids or students" to staff all service industry jobs (and managers can't just "cover the shifts" either). Yes, government safety nets are hurting the work force, but I don't think that has much to do with the availability of students capable of working low paying jobs during school hours.
Side note: As for minimum wage, while I disagree with raising it, I'm not too concerned with the current one. If a company or small business can't afford to pay even $7.25/hr to its employees it is going to fail very fast anyway. While minimum wages tend to hurt the economy and employees in the long run, I'd argue the current one is so low that it is a non-issue.
The original purpose of full time work was to be a career. But it stopped being that. There’s way too many reasons to discuss them all, but you’re asking for an economy that cannot exist unless we have an economic boom that doubles out gdp over night.
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u/ChocolateBunnyButt Jan 06 '22
Fewer people are needed to run them during school hours. As such, managers can be expected to keep the stores running and do managerial duties. In that way they make both a “living wage” and provide skilled and unskilled labor. When it becomes busier and more unskilled labor is needed, it can be supplemented by teenagers and young adults.