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[blcartwright]

104. I agree

and I always want the employee to have to leverage to walk away from a bad situation.

Employers need incentives to treat workers fairly, and workers need incentives/rewards to maximize productivity. If you work your ass off, but your coworker sleeps the shift away and gets paid the same as you, how long is it before you either kick his ass or slack off yourself? If someone is not rewarded for their work they will start to lose desire. This is abusive if done by an employer, but no less so if it's by govt mandate (pay everyone the same)

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As employees we are selling our labor. How much is that labor worth? If someone is doing $5 worth of work but the govt says to pay that person $8, there's an increased chance the person will lose their job. Too high of a minimum wage can then cost jobs.

It's up to us to make our labor worth as much as possible. If anyone else off the street can do the same job with little or no training, why would an employer want to pay anything more than minimum?

I made $3.50 an hour delivering pizzas and flipping burgers to pay for college, then got a $4.82/hr ($10k/yr) job doing data entry in a bank. When I had an interview for a job in my field, I told them I was making $5/hr.

I've been with the company for 27 years now and make 7x that in the same job description. I know more about computers than my coworkers and have been given responsibilities. Now I'm 53, but over the past 5 years I've taught myself database programming. Even tonight I found (through LinkedIn) a website that has free books, downloaded a couple to brush up on my probability & statistics and learn some new programming techniques. All the data, software & instructional materials I've found free on the web.