I know what you’re saying. Maybe you just have a lot more faith in hospitals and the free market than I do. You’re making an assumption that the hospitals are going to voluntarily give them proportionate raises above the new minimums. I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen. They’re going to get bumped up to the new minimum until market factors force them to go higher, and the industry and employees will suffer until that all shakes down. Anyways, it’s sending a message that saving someone’s life in a crisis on a daily basis is only worth 25% more money than running a cash register. Perhaps you agree with that. I don’t. We’re both entitled to our individual perspectives on this subject.
You’re hung up on individual positions, so let’s use the two I mentioned. I looked up EMT Salary Central California: Average annual salary is $39,152. Divided by 52 weeks, divided by 40 hours in a work week is $18.82 an hour.
Now these new laws will almost double the income for fast food workers, but give EMTs and Phlebotomists a far smaller increase for work that is more stressful, more dangerous, and requires more training. Why should their equivalent income go down proportionately?
I think you’re maybe reading what I’m saying as “fast food workers are getting too much”, but what I’m really saying is “healthcare workers aren’t getting enough”.
We’re already in a healthcare worker crisis. What do you think is going to happen when they can just quit their stressful, dangerous job, and go work at McDonald’s, making $2 more an hour than they were before? There’s going to be an even bigger shortage. Sure, you’re probably going to counter with “well then the market will demand their pay goes up!”. But that’s what this whole post is about. Right? The workers getting their fair value. I don’t think the healthcare workers are getting their fair value, and I think it has the potential to cause an even worse shortage of healthcare workers. Sure, it’ll probably be temporary, but how does that help anyone affected by it during the crisis?
Edited for a bunch of mobile phone typos and formatting.
You’re latching onto the examples meant to illustrate a point, instead of understanding the overall message. And no, they wouldn’t necessarily be making more. EMTs are notoriously underpaid. Since it still hasn’t been clear to you, I’ll try to spell it out plainly: Working at a hospital in the healthcare industry is orders of magnitude harder than working at a fast food restaurant, and I don’t think $5 more per hour reflects that reality.
Nobody is saying it’s not a job. You’re required to be there and commit your time for both industries. But the effort required to get a nursing job is magnitudes greater than the effort to get a McDonald’s job, and the pay should reflect that. $5 an hour more isn’t enough to justify all the hoops a nurse has to jump through to get the job, and the ridiculous shit (sometimes literally) they have to deal with. Some other commenters pointed out that the $25 is for anyone who works in a hospital, not necessarily for healthcare workers in the traditional sense, which makes more sense.
It’s pretty wild to me that healthcare workers would only earn $5 more per hour than McDonald’s workers.
It’s also wild that the $30,000,000,000.00 that the UPS drivers are splitting, would have only gone to a few incredibly wealthy people, had the workers not made a stand.
I never said they don’t deserve it, I said it’s 275% above minimum wage for menial labor. Seems pretty great to me, but the person I was replying to still seems to be complaining about it.
Edit: regarding NBA players, they’re the absolute best in the entire world at what they do, and they’re part of an industry that makes money hand over fist. There’s only a few hundred people on the planet that can play at that level. They’ve trained their entire lives to get to where they are.
So you don’t think $20 an hour to work at McDonald’s as a brand new employee, living somewhere like Tulare, CA is fair? What do you think is fair then?
Dude, it’s McDonald’s. Like, almost anyone can do it. It takes an hour’s worth of training, and no specialized skills, and they’re paying 275% above the federal minimum wage.