Evidently the minimum wage should be adjusted to meet new standards in regard to inflation; however, $15 per hour is completely unacceptable. When you encourage higher pay for more basic work, you are eliminating the drive for improvement. Fry cooks or cashiers are not meant to be lifestyles. The low pay should encourage one to learn more valuable skills; that way they can earn higher pay.
Your minimum wage job is not a career.
Whether it be perfecting the art of flipping burgers, carefully crafting that Cheesy Gordita Crunch or specializing in the practice of french-frying, your wage should be well over $7.25. After all, a lot of expertise is required for those tasks to get completed, and you should get the pay you deserve!
OK, enough bullshit. Lets get something straight here. I go to college. I am placing myself in tens of thousands of dollars of debt like many other Americans, because we deserve a salary that will show for our work. Now I am completely baffled as to why people decide to make fast food or whatever it be a career, and then complain about the pay like they should be handed more money.
Here's the thing: a salary will reflect the capacity of investment you made in yourself, the hard work and dedication you put forth and the level of expertise you acquired. When McDonald's worker Joe comes along and demands a higher wage for the expertise he obtained through his career experience, that pisses a whole lot of people off.
There are many highly valuable jobs that are below $15 per hour.
The Congressional Budget Office concluded that raising the minimum wage to just $10.00 would "reduce total employment by about 500,000 workers." As the saying goes, for every reaction there is an equal reaction. By raising the minimum wage for group A, you are taking away jobs from group B. Its a simple concept. Yahoo Finance states that stock clerks, bakers, bank tellers, farm workers/laborers and nursing aids all make below $15 per hour -- does a McDonald's cashier seem to have almost double the set of skills that these professions possess?
The wage should be reviewed in order to meet inflation adjustments.
Every single day the dollar is devalued -- that's no secret. The minimum wage has been at $7.25 in some states for quite some time now, and the wage should only be adjusted to meet this devaluation. $7.25 from 2009 has the same buying power as $8.05 today, which means that a minimum wage around $8.25 is a lot more logical.
