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It's pretty wild to me that healthcare workers would only earn $5 more per hour than McDonald's workers.
It's also wild that the $30,000,000,000.00 that the UPS drivers are splitting, would have only gone to a few incredibly wealthy people, had the workers not made a stand.
The receptionists, custodial staff, and security guards in hospitals get that $25 minimum.
The nurses union, and other specialized healthcare workers will be negotiating a high pay rate.
It is easier when the bare minimum for anyone in a hospital is $25, because if they offer too little to someone with a degree the employee can use the untrained jobs as leverage.
Only offered $30/hour? Save yourself a lot of stress, quit your job, and apply at the cafeteria in the same building.
The bosses know how appealing that is, and will offer a fair wage to keep staff that have hard-to-find skills.
Let's not get too caught up on comparisons, everyone deserves a living wage. McDonald's is a job just as much as healthcare work is, an hour of your life takes just as much of your time no matter where you work. The big question to me is why this minimum wage isn't being applied across all industries
Nobody is saying it's not a job. You're required to be there and commit your time for both industries. But the effort required to get a nursing job is magnitudes greater than the effort to get a McDonald's job, and the pay should reflect that. $5 an hour more isn't enough to justify all the hoops a nurse has to jump through to get the job, and the ridiculous shit (sometimes literally) they have to deal with. Some other commenters pointed out that the $25 is for anyone who works in a hospital, not necessarily for healthcare workers in the traditional sense, which makes more sense.
Nurses aren't being paid $25 an hour, that's the minimum wage. Do you think doctors are being paid $25 an hour too?
I feel like I've made my point clear. Perhaps I should have said phlebotomists, or EMTs.
They also would get more than $25 an hour, so perhaps you shouldn't have.
You're latching onto the examples meant to illustrate a point, instead of understanding the overall message. And no, they wouldn't necessarily be making more. EMTs are notoriously underpaid. Since it still hasn't been clear to you, I'll try to spell it out plainly: Working at a hospital in the healthcare industry is orders of magnitude harder than working at a fast food restaurant, and I don't think $5 more per hour reflects that reality.
Why is emptying bedpans and making cafeteria food (those are who will be getting paid $25 an hour) so much harder than working fast food?
You're hung up on individual positions, so let's use the two I mentioned. I looked up EMT Salary Central California: Average annual salary is $39,152. Divided by 52 weeks, divided by 40 hours in a work week is $18.82 an hour.
An average fast food worker is earning $24,473 annually in the same city, or $11.77 per hour.
Now these new laws will almost double the income for fast food workers, but give EMTs and Phlebotomists a far smaller increase for work that is more stressful, more dangerous, and requires more training. Why should their equivalent income go down proportionately?
I think you're maybe reading what I'm saying as "fast food workers are getting too much", but what I'm really saying is "healthcare workers aren't getting enough".
We're already in a healthcare worker crisis. What do you think is going to happen when they can just quit their stressful, dangerous job, and go work at McDonald's, making $2 more an hour than they were before? There's going to be an even bigger shortage. Sure, you're probably going to counter with "well then the market will demand their pay goes up!". But that's what this whole post is about. Right? The workers getting their fair value. I don't think the healthcare workers are getting their fair value, and I think it has the potential to cause an even worse shortage of healthcare workers. Sure, it'll probably be temporary, but how does that help anyone affected by it during the crisis?
Edited for a bunch of mobile phone typos and formatting.
Yes, that's before this new law. Now they will be paid a lot more. You still don't seem to understand what 'minimum wage' means.
I know what you're saying. Maybe you just have a lot more faith in hospitals and the free market than I do. You're making an assumption that the hospitals are going to voluntarily give them proportionate raises above the new minimums. I don't think that's what's going to happen. They're going to get bumped up to the new minimum until market factors force them to go higher, and the industry and employees will suffer until that all shakes down. Anyways, it's sending a message that saving someone's life in a crisis on a daily basis is only worth 25% more money than running a cash register. Perhaps you agree with that. I don't. We're both entitled to our individual perspectives on this subject.
It's harder because you have people saying "well at least you're doing what you love, caring for people" as if it justifies making their job more shitty.
How is making cafeteria food caring for people? Why do they deserve more than $25 an hour when people doing the same work in a fast food restaurant get $5 less?
This reminds me of the "heroes work here" signs as if the people washing the linens were heroes.
I have a kid who enjoys their school food because people there care. Fuck anyone actively denying that my kid actually receives a benefit from that service and from people actually caring about doing their job well.
Honestly at this point, I feel like $25 should be the minimum wage. Because let's be honest, 7:25 might as well be slavery with how much it can buy you.
I feel like we need to get inflation under control and prices back to reasonable, rather than making sweeping pay changes across all industries, while prices soar, and our currency valuation falls. Changes that are too drastic and far-reaching can cause the entire economy to collapse and our currency to falter.
What if we pegged minimum wages directly to prices? So it doesn't matter how much prices rise - the wage is pegged to them, so it rises accordingly.
I've worked food service, retail, office work, and currently I'm a janitor. Of these office work was the least demanding. The most demanding, definitely retail.
At this point a worker Bill of Rights for retail workers needs to at bare minimum not only include pay being triple, but workers absolutely need the right to self-defense from an unruly customer. Main reason don't work retail is because a drunk asshole got me fired by calling up corporate because I ask him multiple times to leave the store instead of hearing out his crazy rant about how flat the Earth was. To make matters worse it was closing time, so if I hadn't had let him out, I would have been fired for not escorting him out of the store. Making it a true damned if you do damned if you don't.
Personally all the office work was easier, I prefer being a janitor because I don't have to sit and stay in one place, I am autistic and I have attention deficit disorder, I can't sit in one place for too long it drives me crazy both physically and mentally.
I remember back when the fight for 15 first started, I had plenty of people on Facebook that were quick to point out that EMT workers only made 15 an hour, and that how Ludacris it was that fast food workers would want to be paid that much and claimed you wouldn't have EMTs anymore because they would all go flip burgers.
Missing the point that if 15 is so low it is what fast food workers would need to cover their expenses and nothing more, and maybe EMTs need a raise of Their Own.
I quickly learned a slogan that I would give these people that, just absolutely, I am a big fan of, and that slogan is. We all do better, when we all do better
I elaborated on this and even specifically included EMTs much further down in the comment chain. To summarize it, I don't think this is doing enough for healthcare workers, especially those doing actual healthcare work, like phlebotomists and EMTs.
It’s pretty wild to me that healthcare workers would only earn $5 more per hour than McDonald’s workers.
A lot of people would look at that statement and think that fast food workers are going to be overpaid here in CA, but in reality, both groups were being severely underpaid and to a degree healthcare workers still are way behind what they should be earning considering the massive windfalls that for-profit healthcare providers are raking in. Billions to the top, peanuts for the rest.
Well it refers to everyone in the hospital. So even if your job is manning the coffee or gift shop, you get $25/hr
I don't understand the math behind the UPS raises. I can't believe it is as much as my math tells me.
$30 bln / 340.000 workers ≈ $88.000 per worker per year.
Am I missing something or is this actually correct?
They unfortunately didn't fight to end the two tier system for part time workers, which is why your math is off. The part time employees aren't very engaged with the union and there was/is little attempt from the union the reach out to that section of their members to educate and involve them.
The union leadership has a vested interest in selling that they got an amazing deal, but this was a huge failure to fight over. Two teir pay is used by the owners to ensure their employees aren't a united front.
Thanks