The point of these jobs is to generate surplus profit for your employer
No, the point is to teach kids that working retail sucks, and they should do everything they can to never have to do that again. There’s only excess profit if you’re sticking around more than a year or two, otherwise the employer is likely not making much and you’re getting valuable life experience.
Retail is to get experience with working. You show up on-time, interact with people, learn to organize stuff, etc. You get a taste of the most unpleasant parts of almost everything society has to offer, so you get an idea of which parts to actively avoid the most. If you don’t mind dealing with stupid customers, go into sales. If you don’t mind organizing stuff, try accounting. If you don’t mind managing shifts, get an MBA. And so on.
If you cannot afford to live, how the hell are you supposed to work?
Exactly! If we try to solve that problem by increasing the minimum wage, we’re just enabling more people to stick to crappy jobs and live unfulfilling lives. If a minimum wage job isn’t enough to live on, people will be forced to look elsewhere and get decent jobs that pay better and have better working conditions.
Retail and fast food should be the domain of teenagers and college students learning valuable life lessons about never being stuck in retail or fast food.
And while I agree they’re more of a band-aid than a structural benefit
They’re worse than a bandaid, they’re a full-body cast. They bind you so you can’t get out. It’s similar to the welfare system, where the time you spend getting benefits or whatever should be spent looking for a better job.
We don’t need a labor movement, we need something like UBI. My preference is NIT (Negative Income Tax), which is basically UBI but limited to people below a certain income.
If everyone could afford to survive (basic needs like shelter and food) without having to work a crappy job, they’d be more selective about the work they take on. Here’s my proposal:
completely end the minimum wage - don’t just lower it, eliminate it entirely
institute NIT where you’re guaranteed to be at the poverty line at a minimum, even without working (poverty line is ~$15k for a single person, depending on area)
transform Social Security to fund this NIT, so it’s an actual safety net instead of a retirement program, and remove the income cap
Here are my expected results:
wages for retail and fast food would plummet, and most workers would be replaced by high school and college kids; prices for fast food would also fall
unemployment would go up, as would the number of people not looking for employment
enrollment in trades would go up, since people now have the time to try something new
unemployment would trend downward again after an initial shock, and average incomes would go up
automation of jobs would be slowed in certain jobs, and increased in others, depending on desirability of those jobs
Addressing the symptoms is just going to exacerbate the issue. I believe this proposal cuts at the root of the problems we have, which is that people don’t like working in jobs that don’t go anywhere, but they feel they have to in order to afford to live. Let’s socialize the cost of undesirable jobs so we can encourage people to create more desirable jobs instead and automate the stuff nobody wants to do.