Good wages, good jobs, require power....

First, if you haven't read Justin Fox's article The Case for Paying People More over at the Harvard Business Review you need to go do that.

Second, Demos' Vice President of Policy and Outreach Heather McGhee nailed the crux of the issue of low wage workers on a  Melissa Harris Perry panel the other day:

It's a question of power at the workplace. We think about the middle class jobs that helped build this country. They weren't born good jobs. They were actually terrible jobs. They were jobs that didn't require a lot of education, that were dangerous, that were hard, that were back-breaking. But they weremade into good jobs because workers had bargaining power.

How much people get paid has a whole lot to do with not their productivity, not their value added to the economy, but the power they hold.

If we as a nation choose to make McDonalds jobs middle class jobs we can do so.  This isn't rocket science.