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While I’m at it can I just add one more thing? The other rationale often offered for the rock bottom wages of many of their workers is that it’s a “starter job” like flipping burgers at MacDonald’s.
I suppose if everyone who is graduating college has cushy middle class parents who can supplement their income and offer them healthcare and a place to live this would be a consideration. But of course we know that that’s not the case for many people finishing college.
Many many many of them are leaving college with mountains of very intimidating debt the likes of which people in my generation never had to worry about. They can’t waste time on a “starter job” with that sword of Damocles hanging over their heads.
But more importantly, when you employ them you are exchanging a value for a value. You are not bestowing benevolence upon them. You have negotiated and agreed to terms. If you do this much work I will pay you this much money.
That’s why it’s absurd, btw, for employers to object when their employees want to do things with their healthcare they find morally objectionable. It’s like following them home and telling them what they can and cannot buy to eat with the money they have been paid for their work
It should matter not a whit who is doing a job when calculating what to pay them. If they do the work, they get the money. Period. The fact that a person is young or just out of college is utterly beside the point. Unless it’s Olivia Jade. Then that’s a special case of course.
But there is something much more insidious about this claim because it renders invisible all the hard work of the other people who take, and keep, and raise families on that minimum wage. Everybody doesn’t rise. Everybody can’t.
Toilets will always need scrubbing. And I know a lot of young college grads. Not one of them has spent their first year out of college happily scrubbing them. You are using those fresh young (usually white) faces to distract us from the real lives of the (usually brown)
People who are doomed to a lifetime of poor pay, poor conditions and disrespect. And you are evoking an image of upward mobility that is not available to everyone equally.
Women, people of color, transgender people and many more want to rise just as much as everyone but somehow gravity exerts a harder pull on them than on all the more visible kids pouring sodas and taking tickets.
I know that you’ve done a lot of good things in regard to diversity in management and for that you deserve credit. Bravo.
But the starter job boondoggle is just another appeal to the gauzy neo-liberal indoctrination from which we are finally (hopefully)awakening
