Fast food workers in NY just won a $15/hr wage.
I’m a paramedic. My job requires a broad set of skills: interpersonal, medical, and technical skills, as well as the crucial skill of performing under pressure. I often make decisions on my own, in seconds, under chaotic circumstances, that impact people’s health and lives. I make $15/hr.
And these burger flippers think they deserve as much as me?
Good for them.
Look, if any job is going to take up someone’s life, it deserves a living wage. If a job exists and you have to hire someone to do it, they deserve a living wage. End of story. There’s a lot of talk going around my workplace along the lines of, “These guys with no education and no skills think they deserve as much as us? Fuck those guys.” And elsewhere on FB: “I’m a licensed electrician, I make $13/hr, fuck these burger flippers.”
And that’s exactly what the bosses want! They want us fighting over who has the bigger pile of crumbs so we don’t realize they made off with almost the whole damn cake. Why are you angry about fast food workers making two bucks more an hour when your CEO makes four hundred TIMES what you do? It’s in the bosses’ interests to keep your anger directed downward, at the poor people who are just trying to get by, like you, rather than at the rich assholes who consume almost everything we produce and give next to nothing for it.
My company, as they’re so fond of telling us in boosterist emails, cleared 1.3 billion dollars last year. They expect guys supporting families on 26-27k/year to applaud that. And that’s to say nothing of the techs and janitors and cashiers and bed pushers who make even less than us, but are as absolutely crucial to making a hospital work as the fucking CEO or the neurosurgeons. Can they pay us more? Absolutely. But why would they? No one’s making them.
The workers in NY *made* them. They fought for and won a living wage. So how incredibly petty and counterproductive is it to fuss that their pile of crumbs is bigger than ours? Put that energy elsewhere. Organize. Fight. Win.
Jens Rushing (via albinwonderland)
#quote#politics#economy#minimum wage#I don't have an issue with the idea of raising minimum wage#not really#what I get intensely frustrated about and what you see in the misdireted frustration of others not at the top#but not having to try to live on minimum wage either is simple and deserves some understanding#yes it's misdirected#but here's why they're upset#they've worked and scraped and invested time and money and education trying to get this purported 'better future' that hard work is supposed#to magically earn us and they're hearing $15/hour MINIMUM wage that is the same or better than what they've achieved with#more resources and money spent to get to that measly damn wage#and they know that as business costs go up via worker wages the price of things they buy will go up passed down the line by rich execs#instead of absorbed into operating costs#it may take a couple of years before the increases trickle out to become really noticeable but it will happen#it's a coming cost of living increase and they know it#and these people not working a min wage job have ZERO FAITH that their own wages will increase to match or offset these increases#because for years now our execs have cited the economy as cause for not increasing their wages#there hasn't been a reasonable cost of living wage increase for many of us in years and years and we don't see one coming#because we've got no cause to believe in one in an improved economy where we're still not getting a cost of living increase to our own wages#in a place where the cost of living does keep rising and our wages don't#it's not that they don't know the minwage should be higher DESERVES to be higher it's fear of not being able to afford the living you worked#your entire life for in the aftermath of a higher min wage that doesn't change their own wages#it's frustration that all that work and investment to earn a better life seems to have been worthless after all becaue they've been shown#repeatedly that their own status quo won't alter to match and they're angry and afraid#and maybe they know it's the execs faults but they also know they can't change the execs they can vote though and they vote to not#increase their cost of living any further when it's already rising but that same vote votes to strike down higher minwage#that doesn't make it right but the reason they're against it isn't so simple as hate for poor people or greed it's a hopelessness for change#where change really needs to happen and its frustrating all around