What the Fight for $15 Campaign Means

It looks like the once seemingly quixotic campaign for fast food workers to get something close to $15 per hour will continue to pick up steam, and maybe even be successful. Since this is America, and this story is about allowing more people to live better lives, there is a whole lot of opposition to it of course.

Opponents of the "Fight for $15" movement claim that such jobs are meant to be temporary shelters for people who are trying to find their way into more respectable, gainful employment. Such conservative opponents argue that fast food jobs should not be legitimized as a decent, permanent occupation by paying living wages--they think these workers should suffer and scrape by so that they will be properly motivated to win access to better jobs.

What these conservative opponents fail to realize is that those "better jobs" don't exist anymore, and they haven't for some time now. As it becomes increasingly impossible to secure any employment at all, regardless of training and educational background, fast food jobs represent a life raft to millions who would otherwise be penniless.

Opponents of this campaign are stuck in the mindset of forty years ago, when anyone with half a brain and moderate ambition could make enough money to buy a house, a car, and send three kids to college, all on a single income too. In the past, you really did have to be somewhat lazy to be among the long-term unemployed. Now, you have to be highly trained, highly skilled, highly intelligent, superhumanly persistent and incredibly lucky just to scrape by.

The new reality is that working at a fast food joint is the best that the majority of graduates from even moderately good high schools can hope for. Even colleges too. The average age of a fast food worker today is 25. It's no longer a summer job for students or for ex-cons or recovering drug addicts trying to reintegrate into society. There's no stable society capable of absorbing these people. The support system has become the system.

What was once considered a safety net for marginal characters is now an irreplaceable resource for millions of people with families trying to be decent citizens. They have little to no hope of clawing out anything better.

Of course, giving fast food workers a decent hourly wage is a temporary Band-Aid on the festering, mortal wound of automated corporate capitalism. Machines are already nearing the market that can obviate fast food workers entirely.

Making fast food jobs into decent middle class jobs is no way to build a sustainable middle class of people with sufficient purchasing power to drive a robust market economy for generations. It is rather a way to incentivize capitalists to double down on automation as rapidly as possible, to remove labor from the equation entirely.

The solution is so obvious and sensible that it will of course meet with immense challenges before being accepted. Every citizen must be guaranteed a minimum, basic level of annual income by the government. This solution requires fostering a genuine, vivid appreciation for the human spirit and mind, reconfiguring our attitude towards fellow citizens from one of constant annoyance to something approaching fraternity and empathy. It requires finding value in human beings beyond their work output. It means divorcing the concept of an income from the concept of working. It means rediscovering what humans are really worth, beyond their productive capacity.