Minimum wage isn't supposed to be 'pay for your entire working life", it's supposed to be a start, originally for getting somoene up to speed so they can advance in a company (new hires don't neccesarily have ANY work exerience). But if you compare fast food work requirements with someone who's a cable TV installer as an example, the latter doesn't make much more than $20/hour to start at Spectrum and they, in theory, need to have some technical knowledge, or at least be able to learn it. In addition, some apects of cable/phone/internet installation require knowledge of the National Electrical Code because grounding is important and if they don't understand or complete the work properly, really bad things can happen. I knew someone who worked for McDonald's and after going to one of their places AND leaving because nobody wanted to take an order at the drive through when the place was empty, that was supposed to his next stop, to improve the operation. They couldn't attract people from the area, so they advertised higher wages and all that did was create a flood of workers with terrible job skills. Hard to make that job look attractive to high school kids whose 16th birthday gift might be a Mercedes, Lexus or other expensive item/trip, etc.
OTOH, paying installers more doesn't yield good results, either. This photo shows 'work' done by Spectrum and yes, it's more than one code violation. Every other installer andmanager from Spectrum said something similar to "Holy crap! Who did that?".
