*Apologies in advance to any monkeys reading this rant…

I see a lot of posts and memes saying something along the lines of, “If you don’t want minimum wage, don’t work minimum jobs.” I understand where this is coming from, but a lot of people don’t seem to understand exactly what it means. Do we still need people to do these shit jobs? Absolutely. But the people working them shouldn’t have to constantly worry about where their next meal is coming from or whether they will be able to keep the lights on.

But hey, I’ll humor you.

Let’s just say that tomorrow everybody becomes electricians and plumbers and software engineers, etc. What then? Now we have no one working the low-end. We also have an excess number of people who are qualified for these “skilled” jobs, which in turn means a lot of people with no jobs in their field of expertise. It also means that employers can pay these people shit wages because they are now essentially a dime a dozen, which puts us right back to square one. Now those skilled jobs are the new minimum wage jobs. How does that help anybody?

Everybody is so worried that their tiny little piece of Earth is going to be taken by one of their peers, that they seem to have forgotten their humanity. Or maybe the only thing that can describe humanity is selfishness and greed. In that case, are we really any better than the other mammals on this planet? No, we are not. Rise above your primate tendencies, and help your fellow man, or go live in the jungle with the rest of the monkeys, you savage.

/endrant

“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.”
– U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933

Author: Scott Becker lives in Austin, TX, where he does his best to apply logic to clothed primates and offend people who are in dire need of being offended.

“When you get down to basics, and you talk about morality, it seems to me that the least we can do as a nation, a nation that has more income and wealth inequality than any other major country on earth, is to say that nobody in America goes hungry. That, I hope, would be the least we could say as a civilized, democratic society.” – Bernie Sanders