Did Minimum Wage Workers Picket Fast Food Restaurants to Eliminate their Jobs?

That sounds crazy, but can you believe that that group of people can be so misinformed as to actually march to eliminate their jobs? Well, it happened. Just recently, protesters (or what might be called union rent-a-mob people), demonstrated in front of many McDonald's restaurants, around the country, trying to get the minimum wage raised to $15 per hour. Sounds good, right? Everyone wants to get more money for their labors, but are these people actually “cutting off their noses to spite their faces” as the old saying goes?

If they can convince the federal government (or many state governments) to arbitrarily raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour, and if it goes into effect, business will drop off and many layoffs will take place, mainly affecting the very people who are demonstrating for the minimum wage increase. Little do they realize that many of the people who went on strike will lose their jobs. You can't break the “economic law of supply and demand” without there being consequences, because demand will go down for workers if costs of doing business goes up.

A readily available fact that these “low information” protesters might not realize is that the vast majority of Americans who worked for the minimum wage or less in 2013, were 24 years or younger, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and only 0.8% (that's 8/10ths of one percent) were 29 years or older, who worked for the minimum wage or less. So, for the 2% to 3% of the workers, in the United States, who earn the minimum wage, they will be the one's hurting if the protester's wishes come true and we get a $15 minimum wage.

If some company or business wants to pay more than the minimum wage, more power to them, but it should be their choice, not a dictate by the government, because most every time the government gets involved in anything they have a tendency to screw things up, and so it is with increasing the minimum wage.

A worker should not be paid by the hour per se, he/she should be paid for the value they bring to the hour they work. Most people who work for the minimum wage or below, are generally low skilled workers and workers supplementing their income or senior citizens. Many young workers starting out in life, generally have little, if any, work experience in the job market or at a job. Most people starting out at the minimum wage don't remain at that wage level forever. If they perform their job well, they will graduate to a higher wage position in 6 months at the most. There are many of our most successful business people today, who once worked at the minimum wage sometime in their youth. Isn't it better to be employed at $7.25 per hour than to be unemployed at $15 per hour?

Very few people, contrary what the unions and liberal pundits might say, who work at the minimum wage, don't raise families on that wage, so the argument that workers can't sustain their families on the minimum wage is bogus and a political ploy to garner votes of the “low information” voters by seeming to be their benefactor, when in fact, they are doing them real harm.

If anyone is stuck at a job that pays the minimum wage, the answer of how to get a better job, and to crawl out of that low paying job hole, is to educate themselves, thereby making their future time worth $15 to an employer. Why would they expect the people who hire workers to just double their pay without having to cut costs elsewhere - by either cutting jobs and/or raising prices, which in turn increases inflation, which in turn means $15 now buys you what $10 once did. What goes around comes around

So, in conclusion, my advice to these protesters, is to be careful of what you wish for, it might just come come back to bite you in the butt big time by not even having a minimum wage job to work at after you priced yourselves out of a job.

Conservative commentary by Chuck Lehmann