Thursday was a day of protest in cities across the nation, with fast food workers calling for the $7.25 minimum wage to more than double, to $15 per hour.
Even some of Topeka’s Pizza Hut employees joined the protest, although a cook there said workers would be happy with much less than $15 – even $8 an hour would help, he said.
Congress instituted the minimum wage – 25 cents an hour – in 1938 as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Since 2009 it has been $7.25 an hour. Adjusted for inflation, the value of minimum wage has been up and down over the years, averaging (in today’s dollars) $6.60 since 1947. When minimum wage jumped from $1.40 to $1.60 in 1968, that was like $8.67 in today’s dollars.
It used to be that minimum wage jobs were for young people who were just starting out in the workforce. In fact, most Americans’ first “real” jobs were for minimum wage or close to that amount, and then they moved on to better paying jobs.
“Now,” the L.A. Times reports, “workers are older and depend on the work to feed families. Analysis by the Economic Policies Institute shows that the average age of minimum-wage workers is now 35, and that 88 percent are 20 and older.”
But higher wages may not be in store for the fast food industry. As the L.A. Times article notes, “Meanwhile, the Employment Policies Institute, a Washington-based think tank, has placed a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal with a picture of a robot making what looks like pancakes. It explains that restaurants have to reduce their costs of service to keep prices low, which might mean switching to robots if wages get too high.”
Earlier this year, President Obama proposed increasing minimum wage to $9 an hour by 2015, and then indexing it to inflation. Back in 2008, the President wanted to increase minimum wage to $9.50. Surely $9 is affordable. Here’s what the President said in February:
“This single step would raise the incomes of millions of working families. It could mean the difference between groceries or the food bank, rent or eviction, scraping by or finally getting ahead. For businesses across the country, it would mean customers with more money in their pockets. In fact, working folks shouldn’t have to wait year after year for the minimum wage to go up while C.E.O. pay has never been higher.”
We might add, although robots can probably learn to flip pancakes, they will never be able to do all of the minimum wage jobs out there. Every day at lunch time, multitudes of hard-working humans scramble to produce the fast food we consume. If that work is not worth more than $7.25 an hour ($290 a week, before taxes, for 40 hours), let’s build those cooking robots and teach people do something else.