Paramedic Who Makes Minimum Wage Blows Up Arguments Against It

Some people feel a little annoyed when a minimum wage gets set up. These people get all worked up and say things like:

“Why should a guy who cleans gutters or fries burger patties earn as much as I? How stupid/lazy are these people if they can’t get a REAL job like I can, it’s their own fault that they can’t feed themselves… and we already subsidise them with food programs funded by my taxes! Besides… they’d all be unemployed if our great corporate masters could not afford to pay that minimum wage”

I would point out that the economists who claim that a minimum wage would result in layoffs are only partly correct, and mostly wrong, because they assume this thing called “perfect competition”. However, competition in the real world gets lesser over time; companies hire far fewer employees than they “have to” anyway– many of the biggest industries have consolidated into a small handful of corporations that no longer “have to” compete with each other or spend money hiring people to compete with each other- Guess what happens every time two businesses merge? Layoffs, and profit booms. Existing employees work harder, those who were fired get to fight it out over the remaining crappier jobs. And guess why small businesses can’t compete when there’s a minimum wage? Large corporations have made them redundant long ago, their size allows them to buy stuff cheaper and dominate the market and as the profits accrue into an ever smaller handful of peoples’ hands, and as people lose their jobs from mergers and acquisitions, the average person cannot afford to pay very much at all.

I would argue that anybody who spends a day doing anything that helps someone else deserves to be paid a living wage; the office worker who slogs it out in his air-conditioned environment is working as hard as (though in fact he probably could never envision doing the kind of work that he would consider “beneath his status”) the burger-flipper. Why does

But this paramedic who works harder than I do, and indeed most people currently alive, tells it better than I can.

This paramedic from Arlington who earns 15 bucks an hour had this to say about the 15-dollar minimum wage on his Facebook post:

“Fast food workers in NY just won a $15/hr wage.

I’m a paramedic. My job requires a broad set of skills: interpersonal, medical, and technical skills, as well as the crucial skill of performing under pressure. I often make decisions on my own, in seconds, under chaotic circumstances, that impact people’s health and lives. I make $15/hr.

And these burger flippers think they deserve as much as me?

Good for them.

Look, if any job is going to take up someone’s life, it deserves a living wage. If a job exists and you have to hire someone to do it, they deserve a living wage. End of story. There’s a lot of talk going around my workplace along the lines of, “These guys with no education and no skills think they deserve as much as us? Fuck those guys.” And elsewhere on FB: “I’m a licensed electrician, I make $13/hr, fuck these burger flippers.”

And that’s exactly what the bosses want! They want us fighting over who has the bigger pile of crumbs so we don’t realize they made off with almost the whole damn cake. Why are you angry about fast food workers making two bucks more an hour when your CEO makes four hundred TIMES what you do? It’s in the bosses’ interests to keep your anger directed downward, at the poor people who are just trying to get by, like you, rather than at the rich assholes who consume almost everything we produce and give next to nothing for it.

My company, as they’re so fond of telling us in boosterist emails, cleared 1.3 billion dollars last year. They expect guys supporting families on 26-27k/year to applaud that. And that’s to say nothing of the techs and janitors and cashiers and bed pushers who make even less than us, but are as absolutely crucial to making a hospital work as the fucking CEO or the neurosurgeons. Can they pay us more? Absolutely. But why would they? No one’s making them.

The workers in NY *made* them. They fought for and won a living wage. So how incredibly petty and counterproductive is it to fuss that their pile of crumbs is bigger than ours? Put that energy elsewhere. Organize. Fight. Win.”

Organize. Fight. Win.

We will brother.

Sources: Addictinginfo

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