Fixed incomes across all jobs is a terrible idea; it's more the kind of idea that a centrist or right wing kid LARPing as a communist would think "communism" is like (or a baby-red who just discovered leftism exists thinking they've solved income inequality right after finishing their 8th grade ELA homework).
But to just imagine for a moment if that was a thing, I feel that work would be heavily reformatted across all of society— from a pure payment standpoint, people would be more incentivized to do "less" nice jobs like being a fry cook.
Now, to be fair, I think a lot of fast food jobs really do need to have their wages doubled. The days when being a burger flipper was pretty much all you did at McDonalds have been over for years; the "laid back" feel of a summer job at one of these places was replaced by an absurdly overdemanding and technical job that simply bestows the title of "crew member" on you, where you are all but expected to assist in the general upkeep of the entire establishment from cooking to cleaning and inventory and so on, and yet you're still considered "just" a burger flipper by society, which is why no one takes these jobs seriously. If you really want to pay a person minimum wage to do a fast food job, give them a minimum wage job... like actually just flipping burgers and nothing else. A "minimum wage job" is something so easy, a monkey could do it. Now that's just one arbitrary example; I could think of others like being a cashier or a car wash attendant. But considering automation is often seen as coming for the burger flippers and knowing how AI is currently solving a lot of visual tasks at the moment, that's been on the brain lately.
Fun fact, something between $250 and $30 ought to be the minimum wage if wages followed historical growth and inflation—
https://theintercept.com/2021/03/05/min ... -raise-15/
However, that's assuming general wage growth, not that now everyone earns that much; technically, much higher wage jobs would still exist. That would certainly be a high-capitalist ideal, where even a "low/minimum" wage job still allowed the wealth opportunity of what is currently only really possible from jobs like warehouse and medical work.THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC relief bill passed by the House of Representatives this week would raise the federal minimum wage in steps until it reached $15 an hour in 2025. But an increase in the minimum wage has been removed from the Senate’s legislation. At least for now, it is stuck at $7.25.
This is bad enough in itself, but even worse is that almost no Americans understand how low we’ve allowed our aspirations to become. Our country’s productivity gains in recent decades should have translated into a minimum wage today of $24 an hour — and by 2025, it should be almost $30.
This may sound preposterous. But in fact, U.S. society was once on a path to this destination. We simply chose to step off that path.
You'd certainly need true passion to do jobs we've decided are worth more than that if there's now flat pay for everyone. That or just pure necessity.
And on some level, I think people would adapt to it quickly. We've adapted to our current reality, which certainly isn't ideal unless you force yourself to see it that way. It's only a matter of economic illiteracy leading to an eventual breakdown that differs (wait, which situation are we talking about again?)
