Paramedic's Response to "Burger Flippers" Making an Equal $15/Hour
Jens Rushing like so many people, took to Facebook to rant about something. Rushing, a paramedic, wrote an angry post about fast food workers winning a $15/hr wage that has since gone viral. But instead of getting angry that his skilled job only pays him the same amount, he stood in solidarity with the underpaid workers and had this to say to everyone complaining about the wage increase: “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.”
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.
http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/paramedics-response-to-burger-flippers-making-an-equal-15hour-is-beautiful/
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Those at the top have more money than they'll ever spend in 16 lifetimes. And they just keep wanting more. How many billions does one need? 
increase (to what level I don't remember. This was about 20 years ago. He called in to complain). The pathetic bozo had been on the job for 10 years or somesuch and so was well experienced, and the proposed minimum wage increase meant that he would only be making a bit more than someone new with no experience waaaaah waaaaah waaaah oh how horrible!!! 
Even though this was about 20 years ago, I never forgot it. Such stupid fuckheads.
...were part of the landscape, so to speak. In the mid 1980s the "salary equivalent" jobs were Secretary II (me plus a few cents per hour because of being "confidential"
and Groundskeeper.
Secretaries at the university were expected to have at least some college, though on paper you needed a high school diploma. In our town they had their pick of women with Bachelor's degrees, and again, that was me. Of course you needed to know how to skillfully operate a piece of machinery and ultimately to upgrade your skills to an entirely different piece of machinery. You needed to have an excellent command of the English language. You needed to have the social skills to multitask with competing personalities -- shall I go on?
Groundskeepers (same salary and in theory equivalent if different skills) did not need to know the English language, or even to read very well. They needed to safely operate a piece of machinery. They needed to follow instructions.
Just for giggles I checked the public records (now online) again in the early 2000s. Yeah, still the same. I suspect a gender bias, but who am I to notice?
Our urban area is not huge, and we have only a few really big employers, namely the County and the University. We used to have Raytheon and some others before the Cold War ended -- we still have a lot of tech firms, but they are skill-specific and not big. We're a hundred miles from Los Angeles and 350 miles from San Francisco. There is no competition for people not in the tech sector when it comes to wages. I suspect this may be the case for a lot of the country.
Making less-skilled jobs pay more gives fustrated skilled workers an option, or at least a temp job while changing careers or getting educated or something, so it will push employers to raise wages.
Min wage workers make more then you'll make MORE. DUhhhhhhhhh!
Gawd!!
I worked summers at an amusement park (Cedar Point) for $2.30-$2.50 an hour. We didn't make minimum, seasonal labor. That works out to around $9.80 to $10 today factoring inflation. When I dropped out of school for a bit, I walked into a place, got hired that day with a laborers job making about $4.00. (around $14.50 today)
So these employers today balk at even paying minimum, get there cheap crap from who knows where, skirt all sorts of industrial and environmental regulations, pay as little tax as possible and still complain they don't rake in enough.
