There is a lot of debate these days about a “living wage”. People who work at McDonald’s and Wal-Mart want to make more money. This is true for all of retail and fast food.

There was a lady who said that she has worked for McDonald’s for ten years and she doesn’t make enough money to feed her children or buy them shoes. She showed up at a board meeting and confronted the president and demanded a raise. She got arrested.

Before we get upset about this and think that upper management is saying “let them eat cake” let’s stop for a moment.

When did working for a fast food restaurant become a career? I remember when I was growing up that it was something teenagers did to make a little spending money and to learn how to be a good employee. It was a first job. It wasn’t meant to be a full time for the rest of your life thing. As a manager, that would be different. But as a front line clerk or a cook, no. It is supposed to be a job that you have for summer, or a year at most, and then you move on.

And if McDonald’s or Wal-Mart employees start making $12 an hour at a job that requires nothing more than a high school diploma and very little skill, then does that mean that everybody else is going to get a raise too? Then everything will just cost more, and we will be right back where we were. People talk about how cheap cars were back twenty years ago. But so was everything else. And we all made less. It is all the same ratio of money in to money out.

Raising the minimum wage won’t fix anything. Let’s raise our expectations. Let’s figure out a way to help people determine what they are good at early on and encourage them to seek training in that. Vocational education is a good thing. Not everybody has to be a doctor. The world needs plumbers and electricians and auto mechanics. The world needs teachers and physical therapists. The world needs people who know how to do something well, and that something needs to be something that they enjoy. Let’s not encourage people to stay in a dead-end job by giving them more money. Let’s encourage them to set their sights higher.