Or they drink on the job, refuse to learn job tasks that would promote them, show up late and go home early, bitch when it gets busy and they actually have to work.
These are all the things our lowest paid worker does who makes roughly 1 dollar over OR min wage.
Oh and they promised to get their drivers license shortly after being hired and it's been 9 months with no license.
Being someone that often hired ex-minimum wage/close to people into better paying ($11/hr was a normal start for a kid, $12-13/hr for 30-40 yr olds - at least pre-$7.25 bump [what was that $6.50?] when min wage was around $5.25 when I started with them it was $9-11 instead - basically company philosophy was to pay double minimum wage to people college grad+ and little less to kids and little more to older folks I'd imagine [I just went with what I was told, never discussed the meaning behind it with the powers that be - so just my interpretation]) untrained labor, that's a complete load of shit - either because:
a) As soon as they got paid more they gave up those bad habits (which would defeat the entire - "they should never be paid more because they'll never work harder" argument)
b) Because they were being exploited by businesses because they didn't have the skills to be used in a more meaningful business.
Literally, I can count the number of people that come from minimum wage jobs to work for us and still kept habits like you talk about on a single hand out of a few hundred hires over the years that came from a minimum wage background previously - the same 1-2% ratio also existed in the workers I hired with histories that came from jobs getting paid equal or more previously. Hell, one of our biggest shoplifters I had hired at my last location was a head baker that had earned $42k at his previous job, we were paying $45k and he was still a thief that came to the job drunk a few times. [The only hire bad enough that I ever made that I got scolded for by the company owner in fact - every talk we had over my 15 years was sunshine and roses besides that one]
Bad workers are bad workers - they'll always exist, but they're outliers - it might be more of them fall to the bottom in the inner cities and such, but for my experiences dealing with fancy suburbs (which keep in mind, more than a few did have mass transit straight to downtown nearby - last location had a light rail literally 200-300 ft away that connected straight to the worst parts of Baltimore - plenty of our workers commuted from downtown) - the 1-2% was universal of pay level.
Perhaps they WERE shit workers before I got a hold of them and paid them well - but if that was the case, that just lends more validity to the argument, not less.
[And note, due to our amazing benefits, probably more equivalent to say we were paying them closer to $15-20 really - there's a reason the company is a regular Forbe's Top 10 for places to work...]
