Anyone who has had the pleasure of receiving right wing viral emails has likely seen this screed or a closely related version of it:
Subject: Hamburgers and Minimum Wage...
For those fast food employees striking for $15 an hour, let's do some math.
At $15 an hour Johnny Fry-Boy would make $31,200 annually.
An E1 (Private) in the military makes $18,378 annually.
An E5 (Sergeant) with 8 years of service only makes $35,067 annually.
So you're telling me, LaTisha McBurgerflipper, that you deserve as much as those kids getting shot at, deploying for years in hostile environments, and putting their collective asses on the line every day protecting your unskilled butt!?
Here's the deal, Baconator, you are working in a job designed for a kid in high school who is learning how to work and earning enough for gas, and hanging out with their equally goofy high school pals. If you have chosen this as your life long profession, you have failed. If you don't want minimum wage, don't have minimum skills.
I'd like to rip into this. Please join me as I take it apart below the squiggly thing.
First of all, those figures are the GI's basic pay.
Along with their basic pay, they get free room and board which, depending on what part of the country they live in, is worth at least another $1200 a month, bringing the E-1's pay to $32778 per year. Given that a basic trainee (E-1) may not even have the skills of a fast food worker, that's pretty good.
They also get completely free medical and disability insurance. So add several more thousand dollars to their annual compensation.
Now, assuming that the E-1 makes it through basic training, he gets promoted to E-2 and let's also assume that he completes his enlistment honorably. We then provide him with very generous VA benefits which include college tuition and access to VA healthcare (means tested).
But it gets better. BAH (2014 Basic Allowance for Housing) is variable so if an E-1 (We'll assume he's a bad soldier and got busted back to E-1) is stationed in NYCity, for instance, the BAH alone for an E-1 with a dependent is worth $41688 per year, making the recruit's total compensation over $60k per year. An E-5 with 8 years would be getting an additional $45108 in the same situation, making her total yearly compensation $80175.00.
I also like to remind old people like myself that the world is different from when we were young. Since our lawmakers have provided big corporations with tax incentives to move their production to other countries where they can pay people $.50 an hour and they have no environmental laws to keep them from polluting the air and water, we have lost millions of middle class jobs over the past 3 decades. That situation has done nothing but accelerate with the trade agreements like NAFTA, CAFTA, and now the proposed SHAFTA (Southern Hemisphere and Asia Free Trade Agreement AKA The "TPP" and the "Trans Pacific Partnership"). Add a high degree of automation to the mix and now we have a situation where people who used to work in factories or for the phone company are trying to support their families working multiple minimum wage jobs and/or part time jobs for low pay with NO BENEFITS.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, over a million veterans are working in those minimum wage jobs…
http://www.epi.org/...
Per an article published 4/23/15 by the Economic Policy Institute, raising the minimum wage over time to $12 per hour would benefit:
37.7 million workers (more than one in four)
32 percent of wage-earning women (which equals 21.1 million women)
37 percent of African American workers
40 percent of Hispanic workers
16.6 million working men
Adults: 90 percent of affected workers are 20 years old or older
Parents: 27.6 percent of affected workers have children
Lower-income families: Half of affected workers have total family incomes of less than $40,000 a year
College-educated workers: 47 percent of affected workers have at least some college experience
Children: 18.7 million children (24 percent of all U.S. children) have at least one parent who will get a raise
I don’t believe $12 per hour is enough. I think that the minimum wage should be ramped up as quickly as possible to $15 per hour and adjusted up from there for high-cost-of-living areas. It will be very interesting to see what the final results are in the Sea-Tac experiment. While diehard supply-siders insist that raising the minimum wage will lead to high unemployment, it hasn’t in SeaTac. In fact, their unemployment rate has declined in proportion with national trends and remains lower than the national average.
But some folks will voluntarily give up their full-time minimum wage jobs with a raise in their hourly wage. Dave Jamieson writes in Huffpo about Sammi Babakrkhil, a minimum wage worker who gave up one of his two 40-hour-per-week jobs so that he could spend some time with his family. This is exactly what I assume FDR was getting at with his “2nd Bill of Rights”when he proposed that everyone has “The right to earn enough to provide adequate food, clothing, and recreation.”
If a person is working 60-80 hours per week, they really have no time for recreation. People have a right to relax and spend time enjoying life itself in any manner they choose.