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Originally Posted by signupdamnit
No. But I can't really blame you. Some of these right wing sources are releasing insane amounts of propaganda on this. You actually have billionaires paying people millions and setting up front organizations just to spread misinformation and half truths on this. And to be fair sometimes the liberals do it too.
Please check out this link, Robbie.
http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#00-0000
Firstly notice the first row labeled "All Occupations". Now find the column labeled "Median hourly wage". Note that it says "$16.87", What this means is that about half of the working population (in their FAQ they narrow down who counts exactly) makes $16.97 an hour or less. So in other words probably about 45% or so of people make $15 an hour or less. So if we are talking of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour then that means we are talking about directly raising the minimum wage for about 45% of the working population and not just 1.1% of the population.
Also on that same link please note that the column headings are sortable. Click the one labeled "Employment" and sort it in descending order. Then find the row just a few rows down from the top labeled "Food Preparation and Serving Related Occupations" and find the corresponding column for "hourly median wage". You will see that it has a value of "$9.15". Again this means about 50% of people in that industry make $9.15 per hour or less. Now note the value for that row under the column "Employment per 1000 jobs". The value here is "89.861" which as a percent corresponds to about 8.98%. This means 8.98% of the employed workforce works in "Food Preparation and Serving Related Occupations". Half of this just a little under 4.5%. So 4.5% of the population makes $9.15 per hour or less in Food preparation and serving industry alone.
However, there are many others who make less than $10 per hour too. For example the median wage for "Retail service workers" is $9.58. That means about half of them make less than that. That is about another 4.2% of the population. right there.
As you can probably see a much higher percentage of the population makes under $15 per hour than you think. And this is still true for those making under $10 an hour. |
You and I agree that there is a large portion of the population who has worked for free (internships, volunteer work, entrepreneurship) or gone to school (probably with concomitant debt load) or worked extra hard at whatever they started off in or stayed loyally in the same company for a long time . . . who earn over minimum but $15 an hour or less.
Most employers want to pay more than minimum wage, so only people who are just starting off or who have very little they are willing to do or who are severely disadvantaged (like the Ronald McDonald House workers) are likely to be making minimum.
So, if the people who really can't or won't bring much value to their jobs get $15 per hour, should all the income brackets above that be raised by the same %? If so, is there an income level you would say should be the cut-off for this raise? Or are you saying that people who work hard, put a lot into learning, are loyal to their employers, etc. should earn the same as a starting fast food worker at a low end fast food restaurant?