Thoughts On The Minimum Wage
Let’s consider the minimum wage.
Like you, my first job was a minimum wage job. That’s because I had no skills that an employer could use to benefit his company.
Sure, thanks to my Dad I knew how to weld. Thanks to my Grandfather I knew how to nail one 2X4 to anther. But who will hire a high school kid for either job?
Dairy Queen, that’s who.
Neither welding nor carpentry, but every 12-year-old who has ever been to Ryan’s and knows how to squirt ice cream into a cone can start at Dairy Queen.
Minimum wage job.
The only other unskilled job you can get is mail-carrier. And that’s hardly minimum wage. But that’s another column.
I did my duty, making Dilly Bars and other ice cream treats for a while.
With some training from an uncle I learned to drive a truck. Not just any truck, but an honest to God 18 wheeler. Learned to back it up too.
I now had a marketable skill. I marketed it. My wages went up.
When I decided to quit that traveling lifestyle I went to work for a local swimming pool contractor. No applicable skills and again at minimum wage. I got regular wage increases as my skills increased.
Later I moved to Florida and became a swimming pool contractor myself.
Florida has some pretty strict requirements on contractors of any type. Years of Mickey Mouse quality work will lead to that.
A few college courses, which included the instruction that, “concrete turns gray, get’s hard, and cracks,” and a strict exam, and I was in.
I became the pool service company to the South Florida élite. Greg Allman, Dik Brown, John D. McDonald, Lucille Ball, and others.
But that’s not the point. The point is that as my skills increased my wages increased.
I sold that company and left that job to take one with a Salt Lake City based company that manufactured materials handling equipment.
I was now a ‘field engineer.’ And I got a considerable wage increase.
I did the work of an electrical engineer in the field for years. Not only at Kenway, but in the coal industry and as a plant engineer at a wood products company here in Virginia.
The point is that as my skills increased so did my hourly wages.
A certain Yankee politician has recently said that minimum wages should have risen during that time.
They have.
But she makes no mention of skill increases or value to an employer. She avers that a local Dairy Queen should be paying a high school kid something like what I was making as a skilled truck driver.
That’s ridiculous.
