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Originally Posted by stevo
So is it one big conspiracy amongst all companies colluding to keep wages low?
If you can't find a job that pays you enough than you either don't have any desireable skills, you aren't looking hard enough, or you just don't care. Why should someone with no desire to increase their value to employers by obtaining a desireable skill set be automatically compensated for "just showing up?"
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Ok and exactly what jobs are out there that pay decent wages?
So you blame the worker and it's never the companies?
I am not pro-minimum wage. It is inherently a bad policy to have. It promotes companies to pay as little as possible. However, again, in the atmosphere we have now, the government must do the policing because private industry refuses to.
When my parents got married my father was a meter reader for the electric company and my mother was an operator for Ma Bell. They were in dead end jobs and knew it.
What was available to them were government programs that allowed employers to hire, train and promote growth in the workers.
Thus, my father was given the chance to become a land surveyor, train him help him through college and get more marketable skills. From there he was able to move onto becoming a civil engineer and then project manager, pretty much being able to dictate his price to companies that wanted his services. This continued to where he owns his own multi million dollar construction business.
My mother was able to be a housewife because of the oppurtunities the companies gave my dad. The companies were able to give my dad his start because the government provided the incentives to hire and train people.
My mother was able to use that system to when she was ready in the late 70's, through her desire she became an LPN, and then the hospital helped her through loans from them and grants and scholarships for good grades become an RN.
The point is with my examples is this..... because government promoted growth, companies promoted growth, tax base increased and it was a win-win situation for everybody.
Today, those incentives are gone. Government would rather just police a minimum wage and be done with it.
What I believe is if government allowed and promoted what happened for my dad and 1000's of others like him in the 70's to happen today and companies policed themselves and invested in the workers, then we wouldn't have a need for this discussion.
But neither the government nor the companies seem to want that. Instead they make it progressively harder to advance. Today, there would be no way my father could advance the way he did. The programs are not in place to promote the training, you need a college degree. No longer can you just be interviewed, have the boss like your drive and you be trained and then sent to college while doing the job.
Take my industry for example. Used to be that a person would get the on the job training, some college and be able to help addicts recover. Today, you need college, you need the hours in and when all is finished you make barely enough to pay off the loans and live. You are a professional, you had the drive, you worked your ass off and now you don't get rewarded for the hard work?
When you see the increases in CEO pay and the stagnant growth in wages for the worker and the disparity, there is a severe problem.
What happens as these good manufacturing jobs (and that is the true backbone to any country's economy) leave, and shit waged jobs come in, you are destroying yourself economically.
You say move to where the better paying jobs are..... ok let's say you can and do, then you flood that market and the wages decrease.
It is important for companies to hire people, train them and move them up. This doesn't happen when, like in today's marketplace, companies pay very little, offer little growth and try hard to get rid of people when they reach a certain point so that they can bring in someone else cheaper.
The system needs fixed, if the companies refuse to do it then government must.