New attempt at blogging / Minimum wage workers

Based on a delicate balance of desire and peer pressure, I am now a distinguished member of Blogger and the blogging community as a whole. Who knows what this little electronic avenue of personal data will lead to, but we will see. When I talk about something that I think I know a little about, I'll try to keep it as factual as possible. As for now, I think I will begin with a subject that I have been thinking about as of late.

As some of you may have heard, this past week, the Federal government raised the minimum wage[1] for the first time in almost ten years.[2] Not unlike most other people with half of a brain for economics, I was glad to see this finally happening. But what I want to focus more on here is the mysterious link between work ethic and pay rate. It seems that (at least in this little bubble of a community called SNU) a good percentage of employees working in the low, entry-level dirty jobs are more apt to dilly-dally (technical word, I know) and complain about the little things in like (which does include pay) instead of doing their job. There are people that exist on this campus that have been doing the same monotonous job for years upon years, and still come to work complaining about the job they have to do or the rate at which they are paid to do the job that they do not like.

I have experienced this my freshman and sophomore year, working closely with those in departments such as custodial, plumbing, carpentry, electrical, security, and grounds. Around the first of the month, when the timesheets were due, I would always have a line of people wanting to barter with me over anywhere from one-half to two hours of work that they "forgot" to punch on their timecards. This, of course, would be brought to their attention after they see that they need X number of hours to default to overtime.

(As a side note, I don't believe that it was even legal for a student worker to be handling full-time employees timecards. But in the world of the Physical Plant, you do what you want.)

Now, I am not stating that I believe that every request for additional time added to the monthly timesheet was false. There are a great amount of people that do much work (possibly even off the clock) just because they feel they need to. Charles Smith, a smaller custodial employee, is a great example of a person that is doing work here at SNU not because of glory or pay, but because of the love of the school and the students. He is a hard worker, a go-getter, and genuine man.

But here is my underlying question to all of this; will the recent increase of minimum wage add any more motivation to those that are obviously not happy in their low-paying job? My guess is no. My guess is that it is in their culture of work to complain, do a shoddy job, but yet still come back tomorrow.

I don't understand.

But I am glad that they have been given the opportunity to keep their pay rate up with the rest of the world. I can only hope that this means more food on the table and more gas (electricity, I wish) in the car.

References:

[1] http://www.dol.gov/esa/whd/flsa/
[2] http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/studies_stmwp