Wendy's Washtub Exposes Both Sides As Silly on Minimum Wage
By now most readers are at least vaguely familiar with what the headline to this opinion piece references. While the video has long since been taken down from TikTok, news accounts indicate a Wendy’s employee bathed in the kitchen sink of one of the fast food chain’s stores. The tub is presumably where vegetables are washed, cooking utensils, and seemingly other things associated with the food consumed by the chain’s customers.
The video logically represented very bad PR. There’s intense competition in the fast food space, bad impressions have a tendency to linger, so for a video to be posted on TikTok (and shared thousands of times on Facebook too) that indicates lax oversight of the kitchens where food is prepared speaks to publicity of the worst kind in the food industry. News accounts also indicate that fellow employees of the bathing employee laughed as he engaged in the rather gag-inducing act.
The ongoing debate about the minimum wage came to mind while reading about the Wendy’s incident. About it, the minimum wage is arguably much less of a story than the overly emotional on either side would like to admit. As Alan Reynolds has long pointed out, each time the wage floor is raised, the number of workers exempt from wage floor minimums actually grows. Think tipped employees.
After that, it should be said up front that in a sane world the minimum wage would be less than zero. If a worker wants to pay Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk or Steven Spielberg for the right to work for one of them, or if a worker will accept no compensation for the right to learn under one of the three, then he should be free to do just that. As individuals we should be free to sell our services for whatever price we desire, including scenarios whereby we pay for the right to work.
At the same time, the debate continues about what the minimum wage should be. Here’s how it works: some dopey left-wing political type or economist makes a ludicrous claim about how the present wage minimums are too low to raise a family on, so the minimum must be increased. That the average income in a household that houses a minimum-wage earner is over $55,000 (hint: household heads are rarely the ones earning $7.25/hour) is a loud indication of how willfully ignorant some on the left are about the minimum wage, or how willing they are to grandstand on the matter despite knowing how silly their stance is.
At the same time, members of the right aren’t that much wiser. Their response to the ludicrous is to claim that wage minimums deprive young people of work experience since they make it too expensive to hire young people who aren’t worth the wage. The result, according to all too many on the right who love to feign false compsssion, is that young people are consigned to a life of poverty owing to an inability to gain work experience at an early age; work experience that is said to be a steppingstone to bigger and better things.
Don’t worry, it gets sillier. Some of these same grandstanders on the right then rush to their computers and to televisions even more zestfully every time it comes out that some fast food chain or retailer automates a function. See, they say, wage minimums force businesses to automate, thus depriving youth yet again of work experience crucial to advancement. Poverty is next. Oh dear…..
Both sides miss the essential truth that low-paid workers are extraordinarily expensive. Their low wages indicate a low level of productivity, precisely because they’re not well paid there’s a tendency within businesses that employ low wage workers toward lots of turnover, plus per the Wendy’s example, the low-wage workers don’t always take seriously what they do. Paid not so well, they don’t value their jobs.
The Wendy’s example is yet another reminder to the dopey left that businesses are in no way looking to gouge their employees, exploit them, or anything of the sort. It’s once again way too costly to underpay given the well-known truth that unruly, ineffective, lackadaisical or negative workers weigh on profitability quite a bit more than do the conscientious boost profits.
A rather anonymous former Democratic presidential candidate by the name of Tom Steyer recently called for a minimum wage of $22, and his clamor is not just silly because it would bankrupt all too many businesses if implemented. The bigger story missed by Steyer is how very much Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Walmart, and all manner of other low-wage businesses would be thrilled if their margins rated $44/hour starting wages. If so, as in if they could hire workers that productive, their workforces would be exponentially more customer focused, not to mention that videos of the kind mentioned would be non-existent. Really, which worker would throw away a $22 or $44/hour job all to bath in a restaurant's kitchen sink?
So yes, the left’s approach to the minimum wage brings new meaning to obtuse. So true, but the right once again don’t come off as terribly wise either. They grandstand their common sense about wage minimums making it difficult for businesses to hire the inexperienced, but they miss the simple business truth that the least paid are the most expensive to hire already. Even without wage minimums, it would still be extraordinarily costly for businesses to hire well below wage floors set by the left given the low quality of workers who would accept the low pay.
As for automation to allegedly avoid the left’s ridiculous wage floors, the right’s grandstanding there is, if possible, even more ridiculous. To see why, imagine if there were no regulation governing wages altogether; as in people were free to contract at whatever wage they wanted. One can dream. Ok, but if so, does anyone doubt for even a second that automation wouldn’t be continuing with even greater gusto? Simply stated, and as the Wendy’s example reminds us yet again, low-wage workers are no bargain. Very often they’re an enormous liability. Because they are, automation makes endless sense.
So will this automation consign the youth of today to opioid addiction and poverty? Let’s try to be serious. Based on this illogic, we should abolish the tractor and fertilizer too so that young people can gain work experience even earlier; as in as soon as they’re able. Nothing against work experience for young people, but the popular view that it’s essential for future advance is trite and silly.
Still, not all’s lost. As automation’s history shows, that which is roboticized won’t erase jobs as much as it will enable specialized jobs, including much more specialized entry level jobs. Robots won’t put young people out of work as much they’ll enable much better work for them, at higher wages. This is a truth both sides would understand if they weren’t so busy advertising how woke and emotional they are.
