Nothing seems to make people angrier than the idea of someone being able to live comfortably. That’s how it seems every time this country has a conversation about the minimum wage, which activists have been pushing for years to go up to $15 federally.
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The $15 minimum wage was proposed in the COVID-19 relief bill, but it had to be removed to get the bill passed. The conversation got a lot of people angry as they imagined someone working full-time at McDonald’s being able to support themselves.
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When people are angry, they turn to Fox News. On Fox Business, former Dirty Jobs TV host Mike Rowe was asked his opinion on the issue, for some reason. That conversation was reported on by The Daily Wire, which led to Rowe’s history and background being dragged all over Twitter.
First, this is what he said:
“I want everybody who works hard and plays fair to prosper,” Rowe said. “I want everybody to be able to support themselves. But if you just pull the money out of midair you’re going to create other problems, like there is a ladder of success that people climb and some of those jobs that are out there for seven, eight, nine dollars an hour, in my view, they’re simply not intended to be careers. They’re not intended to be full-time jobs. They’re rungs on a ladder.”.
“[Those jobs] are ways for people to get experience in the workforce doing a thing that might not necessarily pay you as much as you’d like, but nevertheless serves a real purpose,” he added.
Rowe goes on to suggest that if people make money doing things that are “unskilled” they’ll never try to “better themselves,” because the easiest and best time to learn a trade is when you can’t make ends meet while already working a full-time job.
“I worry that the path to a skilled trade can be compromised when you offer an artificially high wage for, I hate the expression, but an unskilled job,” he said. “So to me, the brightest line needs to be drawn between skilled and unskilled work. We need to encourage more people to learn a skill that’s actually in demand.”
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Did you know that Mike Rowe is rich and never truly had an “unskilled job,” not really? It seems like Twitter did, because they are dragging him and his opera life and his phony everyman persona to hell:
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Rowe is also talking during a time when not only are people discussing the stagnant minimum wage, they’re talking about what will happen to all of the essential workers who put themselves on the line to keep others safe, often because if they didn’t they’d lose their jobs.
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The nation runs on the work of “unskilled labor,” and that was never so apparent as in the pandemic. Mike Rowe could stay retired forever and it wouldn’t make a difference to anyone.
*First Published: April 14, 2021, 5:43 am
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