Work and the minimum wage

Tonight was the Jamin' 107.5 Boo Bomb, featuring some of the hip hop greats of the 90s.
I was working at it obviously, it went pretty good, two girls working at my stand with me were really into it, which amused me because I don't think either of them was much more than seven or eight by the time the 90's ended, the music was good, the crowd had fun, and I didn't fuck anything up too much, which is nice, I had a bad couple of nights in a row earlier this week with the screwing up something. Obviously nothing major as I am still employed, just irritating really.

I am near the bottom of the ranks, and sometimes that discourages me after owning a business, I see the amount of money the company rakes in (and it is a lot) and then look at my meager wages and get bitter, now this is totally a reasonable thing to be and I don't hold it against anyone for feeling that way, but it does get old fast and I try not to feel that way all the time if I can help it, one of the things that helps is reminding myself how much I made at my business compared to this. Since any money is more than zero money, my current wages don't look all that bad, so that helps. It also helps that I kind of like the work usually, which I suspect isn't something I could say about most slightly above entry level food service positions.

Not to say it couldn't be better, the fifteen dollar minimum wage would be a nice start, and I keep hearing that it might be coming though I can't find anything specific to Oregon. I work my ass off, and most of the other folks there do too, it would be nice to be able to contemplate living off the wages they pay in return for unpredictable hours, unhealthy food, and sometimes pretty grueling working conditions.

People who contest the idea that service industry workers deserve to be paid well in large part have never worked in a service industry, and if they did they either sucked hard at it, or have forgotten how much energy it takes to do it.

I've said before that if a business will fail because it has to pay its employees a fair wage, then it deserves to fail anyway, and probably will for other reasons, I know that was true for me, I had two employees, and if I had to pay them fifteen bucks an hour I wouldn't have been able to afford it an would have had to lay them off, but here's the thing: I did a terrible job running my business. Now there were pretty good reasons for that, mostly inexperience based, but I started without enough money, didn't bother with bookkeeping for the first... eight months I think? And didn't put the effort in to adapt to things that I needed to. If the minimum wage had been fifteen dollars when I started, I probably wouldn't have been able to do so! And you know what? That would have meant putting it off for a while until I could get better financing, maybe some real life business experience, and a couple years later things may have turned out quite different.

The point is, minimum wage wouldn't have been what did me in, and if a small business is running that close to the bone that paying a few more bucks an hour to the people that do the most to be the face of their business is impossible, then any unforeseen expenditure or emergency will do them in anyway.

Companies don't usually love their employees, and in no place is this better expressed than the minimum wage, remember when a company offers you minimum wage, they are literally saying "I would pay you less, but the law forbids me from doing so." This is not a mindset anyone should be defending.

I won't go into detail for other benefits, like PTO and insurance, suffice it to say I am for them all, and for similar reasons as above, if you are a business owner and actually want those who are the first point of contact for your customers to perform at anything above the minimum necessary to avoid being fired, then you should probably take care of them as if they were valuable.