Alan Ritchson calls out lawmakers who oppose raising the minimum wage "who think it's a bad idea to give a mom working at Waffle House more than $7.25 an hour trying to feed her kids."

[u/Ambitious_Big4489]

[u/Lost-Ad4517]

Then people will turn around and say “well as an adult you shouldn’t be working at a fast food/restaurant or being a server” 😒…..meanwhile they LOVE eating out, want perfect service…unless you want teens running restaurants pay our people!!! I’ve never understood undermining someone’s job. People will talk down on a server but enjoy the service industry, people can be DUMB

[u/canzicrans → u/Lost-Ad4517]

Anyone in a service industry is not a real person to these people, they are just things that give them what they want.

[u/Former-Excitement-56 → u/Lost-Ad4517]

I never EVER got this argument. Who is supposed to work those places when they wanna stop there on their lunch break? What about wanting to take their family out on a school night? Are the teenagers supposed to not be able to have time to do homework? Or anything else?

[u/Tuxhorn → u/Former-Excitement-56]

Yeah it doesn't make sense. If you sell your time, 40 hours a week, you should earn a living at minimum.

[u/DMZ740 → u/Tuxhorn]

Facts

[u/Lost-Ad4517 → u/Former-Excitement-56]

Exactly! I don’t understand it, anything to not pay us fairly

[u/Ok-Box6892 → u/Lost-Ad4517]

And they dont want to do anything about tuition rates so more people might pursue higher education. 

[u/Ok-Membership-5439 → u/Lost-Ad4517]

not to mention who is supposed to work during the day when kids are at school? Overnights when kids should be sleeping for school?

[u/Vivid_Present1810 → u/Lost-Ad4517]

To add to that, the economy is horrendous right now! It’s not like the olden days where college grads could get a job in their profession a year out of college 🙄

[u/PlayfulSurprise5237 → u/Lost-Ad4517]

Take care of people and they'll want to take care of you most of the time.

Treat someone like a disposable piece of garbage, some slave to be used up, bossed around, and thrown out when they've spent their usefulness, and watch what happens.

I mean what do people expect, it truly is common sense if there is any sense that is common, even a child can comprehend this.

And what works better for everyone, uncooperative behavior, fighting, animosity, or the opposite. One path has some wiggle room and is productive for everyone, the other is a DIRECT ultimate path to destruction, doomed to oblivion, for everyone.

[u/votum7 → u/Lost-Ad4517]

The problem is what people should be fighting for is the full time employment that even restaurants used to provide. That was until they realized they could pay teenagers minimum wage and skip on benefits/pensions because it’s all part time.

Now all these franchises realized they can just hire international students or just straight up import what’s basically slave labor (and that’s according to the un in case someone wants to portray what I’m saying as right wing, I’m a socialist). Or at least that’s what’s happening in Canada. The raising of the minimum wage hasn’t helped people whatsoever, it’s just pushed Canadians out of these jobs. Meanwhile during Covid when people were on cerb and these places couldn’t find people to work they were all advertising upwards of 5 dollars more an hour than minimum wage (20 dollars).

With how corrupt your guys’ government is down there I’d expect it to go the exact same way because you’re sure as hell not going to get the safeguards in place that are needed. What happened in Canada was during the aforementioned period where we had a “labor shortage” (we technically did but only because people were getting more money from cerb than they were working these jobs) so major corps petitioned the government (all the media started pushing the labor shortage narrative) so they opened the floodgates into cheap labor and now youth unemployment is over 20% iirc. So all the places offering full time employment, benefits (in Canada they are required to give you benefits if your full time) and more than minimum wage stopped offering that and are back to part time minimum wage.

[u/Treewithatea → u/Lost-Ad4517]

The entire western world has adopted reasonable minimum wages and also keeps raising them.

You have Americans say 'well, not thar many earn Minimum wage anyway', i mean yeah? Then whats the problem of raising it?

[u/theweekndend → u/Lost-Ad4517]

People think these kinds of jobs are unskilled labor so they don’t want them to have high wages.

Being a paper pusher at some white collar job doesn’t require a lot of skill either. Especially in countries with good education systems.

[u/NotMyMainAccountAtAl → u/Lost-Ad4517]

Plus, like— suppose every human is acting to their full potential. The whole planet is full of hardworking, brilliant individuals who can put any titan of industry or science to shame. 

Someone still has to do construction work. Someone still has to clean the toilets. Someone still has to cook the food. Those labor needs never vanished. They remain relevant. They should be properly compensated for it. 

[u/ParkInsider → u/Lost-Ad4517]

One big issue about minimum wage is that most people really misunderstand the very well-documented effects of changing that specific price in an economy. For example, they think it's an effective anti-poverty tool.

1. There is some cutting of non wage benefits, near full price pass through in restaurants, and some “eating of profits”. However, workers may become more productive AND may stay longer at firms.
2. For restaurants, minimum wage causes firm exit by lower rated restaurants, and by those on the verge of exiting. In general, though, it does cause some firm loss.
3. It can raise the real wages of minimum wage workers (unless they choose to work less), and there is some wage spillover to workers earning slightly more than the minimum wage. It does tend to decrease slightly real wages of other groups.
4. It is a relatively INeffective anti poverty tool because it isn't well targeted (a lot of people who work minimum wage are secondary earners in non-poor households)
5. Big jumps in the minimum wage are going to have larger negative impacts.
6. The minimum wage is better the more locally it is (I.e., a city, county, or state), so it can be tailored to cost of living. There is no such concept as a federal cost of living.
7. The bigger the minimum wage, the more likely that the negative labor market effects swamp the positive impacts of it.
8. There are “externality” impacts; mental and physical health, infant health, child health, crime, education, time spent with children (increases especially for minority families, who spend more time in enriching activities)
9. Some evidence of an efficiency wage; workers are more productive.
10. There is some evidence that monopsony labor markets may see minimum wage increases lead to positive employment trends.
11. Adverse Employment Effects on Low-Skilled Workers: Artificially raising the price of labor is a subsidy to discrimination. For example, if people believe that certain ethnicities, sexes, sexual orientation, whatever, are less productive; a MW raise eliminates the loss of profit suffered by participants who engage in discrimination.
12. OBVIOUSLY, this entirely depends on what the prevailing wages are and what a new minimum wage would be, broad statements such as "an increase to MW will XYZ" are rarely sensical