Follow the money: SEIU just wants to harvest more union dues from increased minimum wage

What's behind the sudden push to increase the minimum wage for jobs in fast food restaurants like McDonald's and retailers like WalMart? Supporters argue that a “living wage” is needed by those who work in these jobs over the long term and for whom these jobs are the sole means of support.

The problem with this argument is that most workers who hold these positions do not remain in these jobs for long nor is this job usually the worker's sole means of support. In other words, a minimum wage job is usually not a career choice, but rather a temporary, part-time position, often filled by students on the way to higher paying jobs. Furthermore, the students who work part-time in these jobs are often merely supplementing other family income.

In reality, the effort to increase the minimum wage is only part of a larger effort to unionize the various workplaces where that wage is paid. Big labor unions, like the Service Employees Union International (SEIU), are behind this effort. And the SEIU’s motive is not to benefit workers, but rather to increase the number of dues paying members and the amount of dues they pay, so that the SEIU will have the money to run its political operations in support of bought-and-paid-for politicians like Obama.

The SEIU is not concerned with the long-term welfare of people working at McDonald's or WalMart. Rather, the SEIU's game plan can be described as follows:

1. increase the minimum wage, so that when the workplace is unionized, higher dues can be collected;
2. unionize the workplace (the prime targets are those employers with enormous labor pools, such as McDonald's and WalMart);
3. coerce the collection of the higher dues from whatever warm bodies happen to be passing through the minimum wage jobs at any given time;
4. use those harvested dues to advance their leftist political agenda.

Which is to say: the effort to raise the minimum wage is just a fundraising effort by which the Democratic Party and its allies seek to skim funds from the general public to run their political machine.

The SEIU and Obama salivate at the thought of hundreds of thousands of employees of WalMart and McDonald's funneling dues to the Democratic Party. The effort to increase the minimum wage is not a spontaneous, grass roots uprising of downtrodden workers seeking to better their condition. Rather it is an "astroturf" effort, carefully organized and orchestrated by the community organizer Obama and Big Labor with the collusion of their media lackeys like Paul Krugman.

To understand the true nature of this movement, all you have to do is follow the money. It is the SEIU and the Democratic Party who will benefit over the long run from an increase in the minimum wage and the unionization of the workplaces in which that wage is paid, not the part-time student worker passing through the minimum wage job.