We are talking about minimum wage jobs, so how do you come up with different wages? Are you talking about the differences in the cost of living throughout the country? If so, life is still a requirement to do a job. Wages tend to follow the cost of living of the area where the employees are working.
What I am trying to point out to you is you are arguing for a living wage. To me that means enough for a person to live on. So figure it out some time. What would your expenses be just to survive? Do you really think that's going to be the same things for any two people? And I'm not talking about two people with the same job in two different parts of the country. I'm talking about two employees that have the same job, are of the same merit, that work for the same employer in the same place. Let's take two production workers that work for the same company I do. They both have the same job requirements. They are both equally proficient at it. One of those people is a single mother of two. The other is a single male. Obviously the mother of two requires more money to meet the needs of herself and here children then the single male. People are going to have different living expenses as well. One person will have to pay a mortgage and property taxes while another may be a renter. One will live further from work than another and thus require more gas money. It goes on and on. These are the logistical things I am talking about that make a well intended idea immoral. Rarely are you going to be able to come up with one figure that is going to cover everyone's basic needs and no more. Thus the premise of my original question. To meet your demand that everyone make a living wage, I see no way to meet that without having to pay two people (or more) different wages for the same work. Again, how do either a) get around the obvious moral problem with that or b) how do you justify that requirment of your position?
My point is your argument is that everyone deserves enough to live on even for jobs that require the most basic of skill sets. The problem is for you to get what you say you deserve, someone else must earn that and more. They must hold themselves to a higher standard than you are willing to hold yourself to provide that which you say you deserve. There are all kinds of ways a person's income stream can be improved. What bothers me is you only advocate for solutions that require somoene else to give a person that extra income flow rather than advocate for the many things a person can do for themselves to improve their income flow.
You people who object to minimum wage increases say all kinds of things that don't really apply. Almost every minimum wage job has basic requirements that must mastered. You keep acting like someone who can only run a cash register or make hamburgers half as fast can be paid half the rate and it will work. It doesn't work that way on jobs. The customers aren't going to want to wait twice as long in line or twice as long to get a hamburger. There isn't usually room to have twice the people doing a job slowly. You may consider all those jobs unskilled, but many require abilities, that everybody doesn't possess.
They are, in part, indeed unskilled. It's also that the skills they do posses are common to a lot of people. That's why they get paid what they do. Again it goes back to supply and demand. If there is excess supply of something its cost goes down. Labor is no exception. Those jobs pay low wages because there is a surplus of people who can do it. If one person won't accept wages for that skill set, someone else will. One person may be trying to make enough to live on. Someone else may not need that much and will be fine with it. That is the beauty of the free market. Two parties can enter into whatever agreement they feel like without outside interference posing unneccessary rules. Who are you, as a third party, to get in the middle of agreed upon compensation between two parties? Maybe it isn't a living wage, but if it's fine with the employee, what business is it of yours? Why is an employer not allowed to pay as little as an employee will agree to?
