A 16 year old should absolutely make $31K

[My Good Babushka]

73. Without unions

Without unions we've gotten very comfortable dictatorially stating what we think the value of other people's labor is worth. I support $15 because that's what the worker's are fighting for, and as I set the price for my work, I think they should set the price for their work. I support unions, so they can negotiate with their employers, themselves, and we can all stop armchair economizing on their worth.

I read really derogatory remarks about labor all the time on this site, names like burger-flipper and broom pusher, which is dehumanizing and minimizing. People work as cooks, they must cook all kinds of things and work very quickly, on their feet all day, and then they clean up and restock and break down boxes and remove trash, clean restrooms, handling cash, credit cards, using a POS system, among other things. Custodial work is as important as medical work for public health and hygiene, and it's derided as "unskilled" labor all the time. Even using that word "unskilled" is insulting. These are demanding jobs. I don't believe there are jobs that take no skills.

Then they want to carve out lower wages for sixteen-year-olds, or drop-outs, or someone with damaged cuticles, or on and on! They have tons of excuses for not paying people a moral wage. They think people from "poor towns" should get lower wages. Do you know why there are poor towns? Why they have expensive medical problems, drug addiction, untreated sickness, slummy houses, homelessness, bad diets, high crime rates, crumbling schools and infrastructure from eroding tax bases? It's because when you pay people less than they need to live on, it unwinds an endless skein of misery and high-cost problems on everybody. And many here want to volunteer all of us to take on these socio-economic problems so businesses have a steady supply of cheap labor? When did that become the primary objective here? A federal minimum wage is necessary. Anything less will just perpetuate the problems of wage stagnation, which even economists are urging the country to do something about.

There is just a really ugly, patronizing tone in all of these minimum wage debates, and I don't want it to go unrecognized. I want to call it out. It's as elitist and classist as anything I've read in any comments section.