No it doesn't. Growth in the economy has to increase real wages, and real wages need to keep pace with housing, food, healthcare, etc increases in order to be meaningful.
More jobs are only good if they actually provide a living wage.
More jobs are only good if they actually provide a living wage.
This is false if you spend even a few seconds thinking about it.
Not all jobs are intended to "live" off of. Most of your entry-level jobs were supposed to be for highschool and college kids working part time.
The problem is we have more and more people never graduating out of entry level positions, and today we have folks demanding those entry level positions support a comfortable lifestyle.
You're supposed to graduate out of entry level work after you acquire skills, training, and/or education. Why are people not "moving up" is the real problem...
This is some soft language hiding some bad assumptions.
"supposed to be" - what does this mean? because it's a lot more interesting...low skilled jobs, are probably what we're going to be talking about. However, it's not the 1950s anymore. eg Staffing a movie theater is not a part-time job (which you would know if you have ever worked one), even post-covid.
Targeting for graduates (or current students) is reserved for economies like college towns, historically. Those places have also experienced wages rising noticeably over, at least, the last 2 decades. Industrial and metropolitan areas don't have enough "school labor" to staff all the unskilled positions, regardless.
> Not all jobs are intended to "live" off of
If you have a fulltime job, the minimum wage is intended to allow you to survive^. The main issue is that places with fulltime positions open to unskilled labor, have living costs that outpace the minimum wage...all the way out to the most rural of US towns. The financial guidelines for employees from McDonalds, Wallmart, etc are telling.
^Claiming that jobs that pay minimum wage and only allow working 30 hours a week, aren't intended to "live" off of, is cherry picking exploitative employers. This is not compelling, nor the common case, so we can focus the discussion on the issues that the majority of the economy deal with.
This is the issue - the idea that minimum wage is supposed to be "livable" is a modern notion.
Unskilled labor probably shouldn't be livable. If someone can be trained to replace you in a few minutes (i.e. unskilled labor), then the truth is your labor is not worth a lot.
We need more people moving up into skilled labor. It's really hard to imagine someone working 30+ years at a job and not developing skills... yet that is what's happening more often today than ever before.
Highschool and College kids don't need a living wage. They need flexible hours, and schedules that fit their available time (night shift, swing shift, whatever...).
The only way for that to work is to have a slave population, because why should a living and breathing human being waste their time and their life with work that doesn't even sustain them? The concept of "unskilled labour" is a lie. Otherwise you could hire dead people from the graveyard.
> Highschool and College kids don't need a living wage.
Do you have any good arguments as to why you should be allowed to have a living wage?
A notion that dates back centuries and one specifically enshrined in law in Australia, a G20 country, since 1902 (ish).
I dare say other G20 countries also support this notion (aside from any antiquated holdouts still clinging to non SI units).
Need? No. Would it be better for society? Maybe. This is not really something that people disagree with. Dispensing with the repetition will save the distraction.
> the idea that minimum wage is supposed to be "livable" is a modern notion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_wage - back to 1604, or earlier or later; what does it matter?
> Unskilled labor probably shouldn't be livable.
Why? Arguing the economic consequences are not a reasoning.
There will always be humans who are incapable of skilled labor (of any note) beyond newly educated students. eg The Calculator profession and other forms of industrial collapse as well as immigrants (legal or otherwise) and the disabled. It's not clear what you think is the obvious way to keep these people alive. Welfare/socialism or pretending they don't exist, relegating them to a slave class, or exile?
That doesn’t sound right. To me it seems obvious the problem is these jobs used to provide more purchasing power than they do today. The increased grievance would be because of this drop in purchasing power, not because people are suddenly demanding a “comfortable” (<- loaded word) lifestyle out of the blue.
Did McDonalds used to be closed during weekdays when all their cooks and register staff were in school? I don't remember that.