It isn’t about race:
Think of the path to successful middle class living as a ladder; the lower rungs on that ladder are not nice places to be, but if those rungs don’t exist, nobody can climb. When politicians talk about creating jobs, they always talk about creating “good” jobs. That is all very well, but unless there are bad jobs and lots of them, people in the inner cities will have a hard time getting on the ladder at all, much less climbing into the middle class.
Many sensitive and idealistic people in our society work very hard to keep from connecting these dots and admitting to themselves that bad jobs are something we need. Quacks abound promising us alternatives (“green jobs” is the latest fashionable delusion), but ugly problems rarely have pretty solutions. We need entry level jobs that will get people into the workforce, and we need ways that they can learn useful skills at affordable prices that will help them climb the ladder and move on.
To get these jobs, we have to change the way our cities work. Essentially, we have created urban environments in which the kind of enterprises that often hire the poor — low margin, poorly capitalized, noisy, smelly, dirty, informally managed without a long paper trail — can’t exist. The kind of metal bashing repair shops that fill the cities of the developing world are almost impossible to operate here. Plumbers, carpenters, electricians, pushcart vendors and day care operators need licenses; construction work has to comply with elaborate guidelines and city bureaucracies disgorge the required permits slowly and reluctantly.
The minimum wage is part and parcel of this problem.
Wait a minute, who says these are “bad” jobs? Some chair-bound spreading-ass MBA hothouse flower who cringes at the thought of a salty word bending his delicate shell-like ear, or of dirt getting under his fingernails?
I thought my “bad” job pumping gas on the night (10pm to 6am) shift at an all-night gas station just off a US route was grand. Sure, smelling exhaust and listening to enraged car horns all night wasn’t great, and I got plenty dirty — we were required to check the oil and clean the windshields in those days, plus about 30% of customers didn’t actually know where their fillpipe was, so you had to search around a bit. Then there was the fact that part of my job was, when business got slow at 4 am or so, to clean the restrooms, which was generally OK unless a customer had had the runs or woofed after drinking too much. All for a princely $3.45/hour (I got a 35 cent diffferential for the night shift, w00t.)
I’d hate that job now, of course, being accustomed to the luxury office with a nice view. But to my 16-year-old self it was great. Easy work, clearly useful, and every single week I got a nice fat check all my own, that I could use to buy gas, take my girl to dinner and a flick, anything I wanted, without having to grovel to anyone for a dime. Sweet!
Tastes differ, I know, but…where do modern thinkers start to equate working in a noisy shop or heaving lumber around to slaving in a 19th century coal pit or being press-ganged into the lower deck of Nelson’s Victory? It’s odd.
Essentially, we have created urban environments in which the kind of enterprises that often hire the poor — low margin, poorly capitalized, noisy, smelly, dirty, informally managed without a long paper trail — can’t exist.
Indeed. One reason a number of inner-city kids enlist in the service is to get on that first rung. Call it ‘job experience’ or ‘learn a trade’ or ‘just to get the hell outta that place’ (my reason) but it’s … climbing the ladder to the good job.
I never connected the dots to think about why they just didn’t stay home and ‘get job experience’. Thanks for that link.
Also: the military isn’t available for a whole lot of people: health issues, a jail record, handicapped, all will disqualify one from that route.
Also: the military isn’t available for a whole lot of people: health issues, a jail record, handicapped, all will disqualify one from that route.
Add to that the fact that the US military only brings in about 200,000 recruits each year. IIRC, about 3 million kids graduate high school each year and a sizeable number of others don’t graduate. That means the military is only open to about 1 out of every 15-20 kids who turn 18 each year. The days of a multi-million member US military are long over.
To today’s middle class the first rung is college and, if you ask college kids, the next rung is a “good” job.. and by that they mean to imply there are “bad” jobs. In fact, to consider yourself middle class you have to assume there is a class above and, more importantly, below you. While I’m sure many middle class people assume the lower class has higher unemployment, they have to assume this lower class has jobs and that those jobs are obviously inferior.
Or you could just not believe in classes.
Trent Waddington – I believe there are two classes, as some wag over here in the UK once said. The working class and the shirking class.
Blink. Carl Pham, the city hasn’t kicked out the unregistered auto body shop in your neighborhood because it offers sub-standard jobs, but because your neighbors complained about the noise. The friendly lunch wagon driver was closed down after the county found salmonella in his tuna sandwiches; the cheerful Honduran ladies selling t-shirts at the local beach were warned off because, unlike the old farts selling merchandise in buildings, they hadn’t paid the city 5000 bucks per year for a sales license. And your $3.25/hr gas station job went when the city council finally decided pump-your-own gas stations would reduce fuel prices. I don’t insist that these are all good reasons for eliminating low paying jobs — I wouldn’t have eliminated them myself — the point is the “quality” of the jobs wasn’t a high concern.
Rand. It must be true, since conservatives testify to it so often, that if people were willing to work at hamburger joints for $2.50 an hour rather than $7.50, Macdonalds would hire three times as many people. But why stop there? There are so many occupational fields where high wages reduce employment below the optimum. If movie stars would only act in films for say 5 million dollars rather than 20 million, we might have four times as many movies to see each year. We could certainly revitalize the aerospace industry if beginning engineers took $15,000 salaries. The backlog of untried court cases would clear up quickly if would-be judges agreed to $40,000 salaries, and prosecuters weree paid on commission. We could have four times as much weather if TV weathermen were paid $25,000 per year. And if enough bankers and corporate executives settled for million dollar salaries, America would probably have ten times as many large corporations and our unemployment problems would be over!
It must be true, since conservatives testify to it so often, that if people were willing to work at hamburger joints for $2.50 an hour rather than $7.50, Macdonalds would hire three times as many people.
Surely you intended to write something more intelligent, and less strawmannish, than that?
Nah, it’s dumb, it’s snarkish, but it get’s the job done. People will presumably look at it and say something like “That’s silly. What provoked it? Oh, I see.”
My work here is done. Thanks for the opportunity.
Nah, it’s dumb, it’s snarkish, but it get’s the job done.
What “job” did it get done, other than to demonstrate that you understand neither economics or the classical liberal position on the minimum wage?
People will presumably look at it and say something like “That’s silly. What provoked it? Oh, I see.”
I think that most sensible people would look at and say, “WTF?”
Not being the sensible sort (as Rand and others know so well) I find this statement a good jump off point for a liberal education…
if people were willing to work at hamburger joints for $2.50 an hour rather than $7.50, Macdonalds would hire three times as many people.
We all understand this statement to be incorrect, but I strongly suspect the reasons left and right believe so to be different.
The childish reasoning of a marxist would be that the evil business owner would just pocket the $5/hr. difference producing no new jobs.
Adult reasoning would see a number of different results…
1) First that labor cost is not the only variable determining how many to hire.
2) Skills demand a certain level of wage. Lower wages allow more people to qualify for jobs so they can learn more skills and demand higher wages.
3) Wages are only static for those unwilling to work for more. You normally earn more by enhancing experience and climbing the ladder (which always means changing jobs regardless of changing employers or not.) Keeping a minimum wage job should be highly unusual. Being poor (speaking from experience) is the incentive people need to do better.
4) Anybody that doesn’t see that it’s easier to create lower paying jobs providing more opportunity is beyond idiot.
5) I have a partner. Partners get paid nothing (until sales kick in and overtake expenses.) Perhaps business owners should all demand a minimum wage supplied by taxpayers. Yeah, that would stimulate business… Dumb ass…
Mike, if a minimum wage of $7.50 an hour is such a good idea, why not raise it to $100 an hour? That way, everyone could be rich!
Carl,
I’m with you!
My first couple jobs were JUST like that. I’ve humped 50 pound back of potatoes hand cranked enough McD’s french fries to fill the Exxon Valdeze, and cleaned enough bathroom tile to redo the NYC Subway Stations. And I got a whopping $3.65 at the House that Kroc built.
My first full time job was a F/T, plus some, cleaning a bakery. A-l-o-n-e. From 6 PM, until. Front to back, floors, walls, utensils, bathrooms, if it existed in that building, it was MY job to clean it. The promise was, do this 90 days and you can become a bakers asst. My G-grandfather was a baker and I grew up in and around restaurants, food purveyors, etc so it looked like a ‘career’ to a 17 y/o HS drop out. And that was for the, then huge amount of $5.15 an hour.
Two things come to mind when I read these kinds of articles and I’ve spewed them here before. First, Mom and Dad American don’t WANT there darlings to do that type work. (as if learning to clean or carry 50 lbs will ruin there lives!?) Second, WHY should a kid who is GIVEN a car, clothes, cell phone, iPod, computer(s), his / her own room, all the food they can eat on demand and god knows what else…well WHY should that kid GET a job!?
By 16, I had two choices, get what mom and dad could AFFORD to buy me, or get a job. Now the (igmo) parents I see daily and talk to are 6 seconds from bankruptcy over stuff Little Johnny or Sweet Susie cannot do without.
As far as I ever read, you can go a couple weeks without food depending on body size and onboard fat. You can go 3 days without water. In all the reading I’ve ever done, I’ve never seen anything that said a teenager NEEDS a car, clothes, cell phone, iPod, computer(s), his / her own room, or their bodily functions will cease.
I’m pretty sure this is how the Roman Empire fell apart. Overindulgent parents and worthless children. After a couple of generations, the whole Empire was wimps, wusses and n’er-do-wells. Can you picture American men under 25 lining up to enlist if the Iranians nuke Pearl Harbor?
Just like December 7, 1941…how many Americans would even know where that is?
My first job, after high school, was at a hamburger joint. In 1964.
It paid 90 cents an hour, for 60 hours a week. No overtime.
You guys are wusses.
As for the point I originally wanted to make, go up to the top here and look at the graph Rand put in today showing the unemployment rate over the course of this recession. Do you folks SERIOUSLY believe so many people are out of work and have been for so long simply because they suddenly demanded too much pay?
Do you folks SERIOUSLY believe so many people are out of work and have been for so long simply because they suddenly demanded too much pay?
Do you SERIOUSLY believe that anyone has made such a claim?
Yet another straw man.