Back when I was in New Orleans there was an attempt to unionize the hotel housekeepers.  Being the employment at will/right to work South, the effort failed.  I thought this was a real shame because this line of work was perfectly positioned to increase wages for people otherwise making way too little money, without negative market consequences.  You can't export the jobs.  You can't automate them.  And the hotels already charge pretty high rates in a low cost city which has bizarrely high customer demand.  This was an ideal opportunity for the working stiffs to capture a higher share of the economic benefits.

And it failed.

My dad dropped out of school in the tenth grade so he could fight in the Korean war.  (He blames John Wayne.)  Although it was probably rough in the years I couldn't tell the difference anyway, he was able to work his way into a union job and do a good job providing for his family.  

Those jobs are pretty much gone now.  Unions can't seem to stop adding very serious costs (inefficiencies) in addition to higher wages, and, well, you know the rest.  Living wage jobs for people who haven't been set up to gain elite skills are disappearing faster than Game of Thrones characters. InspectorVol is right.  We as a whole are way richer, but the allocation of our income and wealth has fallen apart.  It is unrealistic (at least for decades to come) to believe that the solution is for us all to gain high paying skills.  We have got to figure out how to accrue more of the value we produce to the bottom half (ish) participating in producing it.

And before you attribute the problem to people being lazy and government disincentivizing people to work, here's a figure for you.  (Check it out on census.gov because you are unlikely to believe me.)  According to the Census Bureau, two thirds of the food insecure households have an adult with a full time job.

Read that again.  Our biggest cause of people struggling or unable to get by isn't unemployment or assistance programs making it so people choose not to work.  It's low wage employment in an economy of unprecedented wealth.

We need to find and aggressively pursue wins for them everywhere we can.

For example, while I don't agree with Lava's claim that wages have no impact on automation, the reality is that there will be more and more of it regardless.  So the question is less whether $15 an hour will cause automation at McDonalds, but whether those people remaining at McDonalds with jobs that can't be cheaply automated will be making $15 per hour or $7.25.

Of course, most of us on this board are in a position to raise our kids in such a way that they are likely to benefit from this increasing disparity.  We have an incentive to not see how bad the problem is as meritocracy becomes more and more like aristocracy.  

Oh well, that's enough for now.

....a few counterpoints:

The "living wage" argument isn't one I can support. Entry-level jobs aren't supposed to be jobs that you can raise a family on. They're a first job that SHOULD be followed by jobs with higher pay, that demand higher skills. Now, helping people get those higher skills....there's a thing for the govt to help with.

I am also not one of those free-marketers who think that "there should be no rules". There is definitely too strong of a trend for companies to keep wages low and cash out at the top. I think, though, that what govt needs to do there is create incentives for competition to start attacking those companies. Almost all are vulnerable to quality service through employee longevity (and associated higher wages), but there are simply too many govt barriers to competition in many industries. And that's not even counting the govt-sponsored monopolies in things like health care and defense.

I am certainly a fervent anti-unionist, but that is not because I want to put down the working man. The issue is that unions are too much like government entities....FAR too concerned with their own budgets and power and growth than they are with the thing that they're purported to be helping or doing. If virtually all had a  chance to make investments to improve the development and prospects of their members but at the cost of reduced power, there's no way they'd take that deal.