American society is uniquely designed to enforce and accept the mindset that helping the lower class in any significant way is impossible, that even if we tried to help them, it would just backfire and hurt them even more. Everything about this country is designed to stifle class consciousness.
For instance, we’re one of the only countries in the world that doesn’t include sales taxes in the price of an item. A lot of Americans don’t realize this, but it’s pretty rare in most other countries for customers to have to pay more for an item than what it says on the tag. Usually, the sales tax is taken into account when setting the price so the customer doesn’t need to do the math just to make sure they can afford it. Intentionally or not, this conditions you to hate the idea of taxes even more than you already do.
This policy is designed to make you feel the pain of paying taxes in a way you simply wouldn’t if they just gave you the actual price upfront. It’s one of the many things that provokes that instinctual repulsion against an increase of any kind of taxes, even if it’s just relegated to the upper-income bracket.
We have a media that conditions us to think of billionaires and CEOs as geniuses who have our best interests at heart. Mainstream outlets often assume that a person who is good at running a business also knows what’s best for the economy as a whole. If the CEO of McDonald’s says a minimum wage increase will be bad for the economy, there’s very little question of whether there’s a conflict of interest there. We assume that what’s good for shareholders and what’s good for the economy are the same thing.
We have a society that’s been taught to hate minimum-wage employees, even while we rely on them for so many of the services that run our lives. Think of the contempt in people’s voices when they call a fast-food employee a burger flipper, the weird mocking tone in which they say the word janitor in the context of the $15 an hour debate.
We have a culture that encourages people to take pride in working unnaturally long hours. One of the most conservative people I’ve ever met was a manager at my McDonald’s who worked two jobs to support his family, totaling around 80 hours a week. He saw this as a sign of strength. He bragged about how little sleep he got and how many more hours he was working than the rest of us, never appearing to acknowledge the fact that it was insane and inhumane for him to have to do all this just to keep his family fed. In America, people take their systemic exploitation and spin it into a narrative about their personal endurance.
We also have a government that does not raise the minimum wage gradually alongside inflation. The federal minimum wage has stayed at $7.25 for over 11 years now. The best move for the economy would’ve been to increase this number gradually over the years, as many states like New York and Washington are already doing as well as countless other nations. If Congress moved it up just 50 cents a year, (which they essentially did from 2007 to 2009), we’d be at $12.50 right now without any major shocks to the system. $15 wouldn’t seem so extreme.
Instead, the federal government handles this issue in the most inefficient manner possible: by waiting until public pressure grows insurmountable. The minimum wage isn’t set to automatically rise along with inflation, let alone with the cost of living. This is by design. The goal is to make a minimum wage increase as noticeable and difficult as possible. It makes every boost feel like a major deal even though the minimum wage is still far, far below what it would be if it had kept up with the cost of living since the ’60s.
The reality is that if the minimum wage had stayed consistent with productivity and inflation since 1968, America’s lowest earners would be making around $24 an hour by now, an analysis by Jacobin found last year. Fifteen dollars is not asking for a lot. In fact, it’s asking for less than the bare minimum of what we should be providing our workers.
Because it’s been so long since there’s been a federal minimum wage increase, we’re at the point where raising it gradually is too little too late. It would help slightly, of course, but not enough to meaningfully improve the lives of the millions of workers. For too many minimum wage workers, $15 is necessary now. They can’t afford to wait another 10 years for it to slowly reach that point.
This has put activists in a tough position because, although the effects will be an overall positive, the act of doubling the minimum wage in such a short period would undoubtedly be a major change to our economy. There undoubtedly will be some unexpected side effects — good and bad — that would be easier to account for if the minimum wage had gone up gradually.
When the economy doesn’t collapse, when companies start to see the returns come in from the increased consumer spending, when millions of people are unburdened from the constant stress of working for as little as $7.25 an hour, people are going to realize that their understanding of the economy was based on lies the entire time.
They’ll see the reality that when CEOs say that something will cause them to lose money, what they mean is that it’ll cause them to maybe not make as much. They’ll see the reality that so much of our understanding of what’s good for the economy is really based around what’s good for shareholders, not what’s good for the working class. When this is made clear, it will be easier for advocates to continue pushing for minimum wage increases going forward. Because let’s face it: In reality, $15 an hour isn’t nearly enough.