Is the $15 minimum wage just for fast food workers?

Last updated on: March 1, 2015 at 10:23 pm by Jane the Actuary

Is the $15 minimum wage just for fast food workers? 2015-03-01T22:23:56-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Let’s start with the fact that I find the idea of a $15 minimum wage preposterous, but “a $15 minimum wage is preposterous” doesn’t make for a very interesting blog post.

When all these protests first started making the news, I observed that it was peculiar that the fight was centered on fast food workers, or even was limited to fast food and retail workers, and, if it’s all about the hardships that families face when the breadwinner earns less than $15 an hour, those hardships aren’t any different if you’re a forklift operator or a barber at SuperCuts or any number of jobs that pay less than this rate.

But I had kind of concluded that, as far as fast food goes, the attitude of the protest organizers was that “fast food” produces the most unsympathetic foe, since McDonald’s is a favorite villain when it comes to childhood obesity, homogenization of culture, farming sustainability, and any number of favorite liberal causes. (Never mind that there are plenty of non-chain fast food places who would be more handicapped by a higher minimum wage law, with fewer resources to spend investing on labor-saving devices.) If a higher minimum wage law means that McDonald’s raises its prices and fewer people eat there, then I suspect that to these activists, that’s a feature, not a bug. (And if people lose jobs as a result, that’s easily solved with more generous unemployment/welfare benefits and/or a minimum income, so nothing that should stand in the way of this project.)

But perhaps I was mistaken. The AP reports, via Drudge, that the SEIU is expanding the fight to home health care workers. No, there’s not any more detail than a single sentence: there are a new wave of protests planned, and “ home health care aides will join the actions in some locations.”

All rationales about how these are just big corporations that can afford to pay their workers more by cutting executive pay fly straight out the window when it comes to home health care aides. Home health care is generally paid for by individual families, isn’t it? When Dad needs help getting washed up and dressed in the morning (*not my Dad — just generally speaking, mind you), or even needs someone to come for longer periods or even all day long, most of the time (right?) this is coming straight out of the family’s pocket, to a home healthcare company or directly to the caregiver. And this isn’t the sort of splurge for which you can simply say, “well, just cut down on your spending.” Sure, I suppose the activists could make the same claim that if only the company pocketed a little less they could absorb the increase, but not with a straight face.

To be sure, there’s the segment of the market that’s paid for by Medicaid, but the SEIU already has that covered via their union negotiations and political donations to keep the generous contracts coming — and even here, the objective is to fleece the taxpayers.

Which means that the only next step that makes any sense is for the SEIU to insist that the home health care needs of ordinary middle-class Americans, now raised to an even higher cost, be covered by, you guessed it, the government, in a quest to move this to yet another “third-party payer” situation.

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