What Happened To The Fight For Fifteen?

The Fight For Fifteen, Fight For 15 Movement and variations thereof started in 2012, campaigning for a $15 per hour minimum wage. Little has been heard of it recently, and, one would have thought, with the inflation caused by the lockdowns and the Biden Administration’s insane policies (foreign as well as domestic) it would now be called the Fight For Thirty, but according to a June 1 report in the Long Beach Press-Telegram, it has yet to rebrand.

In what was once the Golden State, McDonald’s employees are currently striking over working conditions, and representatives from the movement were present at a picket. Working conditions aside, few people would argue against workers being paid a living wage. This cartoon may be a little over the top, but more people will probably side with  than against its sentiments. There is though a very big problem with the minimum wage, indeed there is more than one.

First though, where does it come from? According to the late Walter Williams, who knew a thing or two about economics (unlike the Biden gang), the minimum wage originated in America to prevent black workers in the north from undercutting white unions. It also had a devastating effect on small farmers by forcing them to pay unrealistic wages to seasonal workers. Let’s take a deeper look without the racial politics.

For a minimum wage to mean anything, it must be more than employers are normally willing to pay. If the market rate for a particular skill set is $200 per hour, a $15 minimum wage for that profession is clearly meaningless. If though it is above the market rate, employers will have to either take a dent in their profits or find some way to reduce costs/increase productivity. That applies only to private sector employers; public sector employers can always increase workers’ pay by dint of increased taxation, be it national or local (rates). But who really pays? 

Jobs such as serving in McDonald’s were not always considered full-time employment for breadwinners. Difficult though it is to believe now, at one time most married men could support their families on a single income. If their wives worked outside the home, it was generally to earn pin money. They might work part-time at McDonalds or similar, as might students, in short these were at best entry level jobs. When women entered the workforce en masse, wages and salaries dropped, as might be expected. It isn’t all bad news, because inflation aside, technology has never been cheaper. If you want to see how much cheaper, check out some old advertisements for computers and software.

Talking of technology, most larger shops, franchises and the like, have embraced it. Supermarkets have self-service tills, even McDonald’s has a degree of automation. Automation destroys jobs, and the more unpleasant jobs it destroys, the better. The solution to this, what many misguided people regard as a problem, is universal basic income, a brief discussion of which can be found here. There are problems instituting this though, the big one being you can’t have UBI with open borders anymore than you can have a national health service with open borders; Britain’s National Health Service is swamped because of a massive and unrelenting influx of low skilled and no-skilled, mostly illegal immigrants.

McDonald’s aside, large employers are generally not averse to the minimum wage because their economies of scale give them a relative advantage over small businesses. A café owner who might once have paid a pensioner to clear the tables can hardly be expected to pay such an employee a living wage. 

Fight For Fifteen’s best known supporter is Bernie Sanders, a man who has been exposed as knowing precisely zilch about economics. This bodes ill for the future of the movement, which will probably be a good thing, because Bernie is far from the only socialist to support this nonsense without thinking it through.