I don’t think fast-food workers — who had strikes across the country last week — are right to ask for a minimum wage of $15 an hour. But just because companies can find workers willing to work at minimum wage (currently, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour) doesn’t mean they should rule out paying some of them more. From my USA Today column:

It’s understandable that fast-food employees want to be paid more. Living off minimum wage can be a grim business, particularly if you’re self-supporting or supporting a family. A budget developed and released by McDonald’s and Visa last month assumed that any McDonald’s employee would also work a second full-time (or near full-time) job in order to make ends meet.
Furthermore, it’s not just minimum-wage employees who should be frustrated: Taxpayers should also be upset because minimum-wage employees are more likely to rely on government assistance.

Now, this being a short column, I didn’t have space to get into other considerations, such as the argument that minimum-wage employees themselves tend to benefit from the low prices at places like Walmart and fast-food joints.

But while I do agree that minimum wage shouldn’t be hiked — it hurts teens and other people who need to enter the job market, and as my colleague Jillian mentions in her piece, low wages are better than none at all — I don’t think it then follows that it’s always fine and great that companies simply pay minimum wage and no more. Some fast-food workers will be able to learn additional skills and/or get an education and move on to better jobs. But not all of them will. Of course, no one’s entitled to get a certain amount of money. But if companies have workers that have been there a long time, have consistently worked hard and done well, maybe they should re-think what they’re paying them. Sure, a company needs to make a profit, but you don’t have to be a bleeding-heart liberal to also think that a company should strive to treat its employees well.

And although this is hardly a game-changer, I would support the idea of tip jars in fast-food restaraunts — when I worked at Burger King eight years ago, the policy was that employees weren’t allowed to keep tips and had to refuse them. That seems unnecessarily harsh to me.