Minimalism

I’ve recently been posting short opinions of the current situation with fast food workers and their attempt to raise the minimum wage.  These short posts have been on the Arctic Specter Facebook page if you would like to check them out, though this post will likely be comprehensive of them all and save you the time.  Though, gratuitously, please go like and share the Facebook page if you get the chance.  There are a lot of short posts that fill in the gaps in my blog posts, which might provide some insight and background. 

No, you are not worth more.

So where to begin.  I suppose if you haven’t followed, there has been a push lately to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and at the forefront of this movement are the fast food workers.  Now, considering the primary source of this movement, I suppose I should expect that they don’t grasp the consequences of their actions, and that is why they are working in the fast food industry as adults to begin with.  Most other people with marketable skills or a passion for success will have moved on to more fulfilling jobs, instead of dunking the fry basket at McD’s.  However, since this community of minimalists wishes to clog my news feed like the arteries of the people who eat their food, I will respond in like by explaining why they neither deserve this farce of a raise, nor can we as a society afford to give them this raise.  

Now, I am not a heartless bastard… usually.  I admit, it sounds great that people need more pay to be able to support their families and to be able to afford a place to live.  I also acknowledge that they possibly work hard in the jobs they have.  In the time that I worked in the minimum wage territory I did come across a lot of people that busted their asses to bring in $5.56 an hour (nearly a third of the proposed raise increase mind you).   But, never did I find people who worked so hard at menial tasks that they needed triple the amount that they got.  I would determine that not much has changed in those regards.  I do, however, acknowledge that the cost of living has gone up since then as well, but not so steeply that it warrants the proposed amount either.   

Fast food workers (disclaimer: not everyone in the restaurant industry) work in entry level jobs that require no real skill, technical education, or extended education.  These jobs are comparably easy work and often a very unprofessional, lax atmosphere with little, if no standards.  Don’t believe me?  Go stare at the pictures of the burgers in the next fast food place you’re in for a solid five minutes before you order.  Get really excited about how pristine that delicious slab of beef patty looks between layers of cheese, onions, special sauce, and a sesame seed bun.  Then immediately open the paper wrapped mess they sling out to you and hold it up next to the picture.  The parts may all be there, but it will look like the picture burger was in a terrible car crash before being handed to you on your plastic tray.  The amount of times I’ve received tacos with more of the ingredients outside of the shell than in is astounding.  And I get it.  I never raise a stink about it.  They have a crappy job with no hope of real fulfillment and they are producing a quality that they think befits their pay.  I can assure you of one thing here though, the quality of your received food will not increase with the amount of pay the workers get.  

Bullshit is what it IS

The amount of sympathy I have for these workers is about as small as the wage that I received when I slung pizza for a living.  I understand that some people really can’t get anything better for work.  But why is that?  Do they have anyone other than themselves to blame for them not improving their own situation?  There are some that ran across some shit circumstances and for them I feel sorry, but for the most part most are there because they simply can’t, won’t, or once upon a time didn’t put forth the effort to work and support themselves properly.  Many have some sort of criminal record based on their poor decisions that caused such a low income job to be their only option.  Some never took the time to care about educating themselves, and will continue to not to because it’s easier that way.  Some have made it their status quo in life to do as little as possible to get by and choose to not do anything harder than what they have to.  Then there are the ones who are willing to work hard, show up on time, do their job, do the latter mentioned person’s job as well, and have some sort of life goal which that position is merely a stepping stone.  That maybe compromises 5% of the fast food workforce and these people, if they find that they can’t move beyond this job for whatever reason, will likely get promoted to manager and make their $15 an hour anyways and deserve it.  The rest are just drifting along and have likely jumped from fast food chain to fast food chain along the way when they couldn’t hold the job, got bored with the job, or thought they might make 6 cents more an hour at the next place; all of which making them fast food careerists.  

Now, we’ve established a bit of a profile for our fast food careerists, lets talk about education.  They usually are lucky to have a high school diploma.  Their lack of commitment and effort extends back all the way to their school days where they likely drifted along there as well.  So we can rule out the idea of the dropouts having any professional schooling, the rest will likely have attempted college, but couldn’t commit or were too busy playing Halo to show up for class (and that still carries over to work).  Keep in mind, this doesn’t apply to everyone, but the raise that is being requested is for just that, everyone.  It doesn’t discriminate good workers vs bad workers.  It is for every low life that takes 10 minute smoke breaks every hour on the hour and forces the other guy to do his work so that they can actually go home at a decent hour at night (I know this because there was many a night when I was pleaded with to stay and help someone else get their work done so we could all walk out together).  For those individuals I have the largest amount of apathy.  With that said, allowing people who have not furthered their education to improve themselves to gain equal pay to those who have (in some cases) does nothing more than sully the idea of gaining any sort of education.  We will effectively create a society that will believe its ok not to further their education because realistically they can go flip burgers for a few bucks less an hour and not have to put forth any sort of effort in doing so.  This will pave the future for America being an overpaid, under educated society of shiftless layabouts that scrape by while bitching about they don’t have being someone else’s fault, instead of having an inkling of responsibility for their own life choices.  

By now you should have a well enough appraisal of the average fast food worker which should also give you a reasonable idea that they don’t understand the consequences of their proposed pay raise.  They see a state of self-entitlement and would like nothing more than to line their pockets for the minimal amount of effort they have to put forth.  They are looking for a socialist society where they get equal amounts to everyone else who has given the effort to advance themselves, and that simply will not work.  If they are given the hourly amount they ask for it will play out as follows:  employers will be out cash that would have been going to them.  In an effort to make the same amount they did before they will either lower the quality of the food they produce or will raise the amount each food item costs to the public to compensate.  The public (including the fast food workers themselves) will have to pay a higher cost to eat this food and then everyone else in society will be out more of their hard earned money while simultaneously trying to compensate by asking for raises in their respective jobs to adjust for the inflated cost of living.  Further inflating this cost will be the employers who’s educated workers are asking for more money themselves.  These employers will then have to raise their prices for the product they sell, making all things slightly more expensive.  These rising costs also effect the apartment managers who provide low income housing to the fast food workers.  The rent then goes up as well.  And now we are back to fast food workers needing more money because they can’t afford rent, and choose not to work two jobs, or work extra shifts, or work a job that simply pays them better to work harder.  As well, the quality of work will draw further and further down until we are making no new advances as a society and are simply just forging out the iphone 9 with new features that regress it back to near being the second or third edition of the device while costing one thousand dollars a piece.  

Not only are the fast food workers trying to dick themselves down by asking for $15 an hour, they are trying to dick you down as well.  You will have to fight your own battle to match the rising cost of living and they will continue to slink by doing the bare minimum that they have to, while continually asking everyone else for more.  This kids, is called inflation.  The value of the dollar literally becomes pennies because everything will cost thousands of dollars.  Look at other countries that aren’t super powers and how much their money is compared to the dollar already.  Last I remember, the exchange rate for a dollar in Iraqi dinars was about 1000 dinar to one dollar.  I was buying a pack of cigarettes in Iraq for 25 cents.  That is because their economy wasn’t inflated like ours.  They can literally live off of 6 dollars a month, much less 6 dollars an hour.  Meanwhile we are so busy trying to be greedy that we only see the money in our pockets, despite the fact that it might be worth nothing by the time we get it there.  

Need further proof?  Go look up the Russian Revolution of 1917.

 

You could take out all of the names and dates and replace them with “now” and “America” and it would sound like the predicament we are currently in.  This all lead up to people living in cities being 16 people to an apartment, 6 to a room, and they were shitting on the floor because they couldn’t afford running water.  Costs inflated to four times their original cost with the working class people gaining no additional earnings to compensate.  When I tell you that history repeats itself I don’t do it idly.  Pay heed to the history of Imperial Russia, because that is where we are headed.  Soon we will have our own comrade Lenin and his Bolsheviks staging a coup.  Though time will see when that occurs, I can say for sure, allowing the most basic of workers to be paid more than double what they are worth is only going to speed up the process.  

So when you are faced with a ballot in the near future asking for your vote towards raising the minimum wage, I urge you, please don’t let minimalism win.  Make the endeavors of those who put forth the effort worthwhile.  Don’t let their accomplishments be tarnished by someone who can barely get off the couch to do their job demanding more money.  That is damn near robbery of the entire society.  

Stay hidden; stay safe.