That’s a pretty broad statement. Perhaps you have in mind large corporations? In 2014, approximately 89% of all businesses employed less than 20 people. Fact is many of those businesses can’t run on paying wages so that a 40 year old can support his family, but instead could pay for a younger person without large expenses. If you want to force the business to pay wages the business can’t support, then you get the pleasure of adding more people to the welfare roles.
Let’s clarify: there are going to be some jobs that pay what it takes to get by, but little or nothing more than that. This is one of the reasons I think that universal health care is a reasonable idea. We aren’t going to allow people to rot on the street without medical care in a country as wealthy as ours, but that doesn’t mean that every worthwhile business can afford to pay for healthcare for all of its workers. A just wage does not mean that people in low-paying jobs aren’t going to go without a lot of things that people think they need but that people got by without for most of human history.
No, I mean that if you’re working a job that requires a hard day’s work and showing up every day, you shouldn’t have to live with your parents. You might have to limit your family size. We as a society might have to help you out (while you work).
If we want to talk about adding more people to the welfare rolls, though, we can just keep talking about hard work done for a worthwhile but unglamorous purpose but that doesn’t pay a lot as a “dead end job” that is somehow beneath people of dignity to do. For most of human history, most people were in “dead end jobs.” The Church’s view of labor is that every job ought to have dignity and no one who is an honest day laborer ought to have to live on starvation wages or be talked about as if he were a second-class citizen because he isn’t in a position to be storing up wealth.
I’d like to know, by the way, how many minimum-wage jobs are offered by the large corporations rather than the people who work elbow-to-elbow with their employees. When it comes to knowing what the highest-paid make compared to the lowest-paid, I think we know where the enormous and shocking wage disparities come from. It is the people who employ huge numbers of workers whom they never meet and don’t even have to think about as persons with lives as full and as meaningful as their own, people who struggle to meet daily needs while those at the top grasp for more wealth to pile onto wealth that goes far beyond anything remotely like a “need.”
And could it possibly be justified?
www.theatlantic.com
This is the worst-case scenario: “Ron Johnson, the disgraced outgoing CEO of JC Penney, made an astonishing 1,795-times the average wage and benefits of his department store workers…”
Nobody needs to make 1800 times what their employees make. Nobody does. If he made 1800 times a good wage, OK. But if he’s making 1800 times the wages of people who are paid less than a living salary, not so much. There is something wrong with that.
