What should we as a society do for those people who do not have the desire
or the ability to move up?

Employment is not a contract between a worker and "society", but rather between
a worker and an employer.

What society should do is prevent the unequal status of the
applicant/supplicant desperate for work and the potential employer with the job
from becoming an abusive situation. The lower the wages paid to an employee,
the greater the dependence that employee will have on the public trough.
Mini-wage sets a realistic standard that says, "you will pay at least this
pittance, to offset at least some of the living expenses and keep your people
out of the trough as much as possible." It shouldn't be the taxpayer's
responsibility to provide virtually all the basic needs for a family just so an
employer can get by with paying a predatory wage.

What should we do when an honest hard working immigrant (either legal or
illegal) wants to work picking produce or digging ditches.

See above. Asking society to provde food, shelter, and other basic services to
an employee so that you, the employer, can work that person on the double cheap
is just plain wrong. It's just a surely a raid on the public treasury for the
benefit of a private individual (the employer) as the stereotypical welfare
woman cranking out 15 kids to stay on the dole most of her life.


In construction
and farming, 2 or 3 levels promotion is middle management. If we don't
believe they can move up to middle management we just don't hire them?

You don't oridnarily hire a lot of permanent workers in farming. When you have
a crop to pick, you take all willing and capable hands. You don't worry about
30 days down the road, harvest will be over by then.

When you do hire those willing and capable hands, it should be done legally and
at a rate equal to or above the state minimum.

In your car dealership when you hired a janitor, what jobs were you planning
to promote him to?

Janitors were outside contractors. I would imagine a beginning janitor would be
able to work up to crew chief, or what not, before long- but I never direclty
hired janitors.

Menial laborers were typically "lot boys."
Good ones could work up to slightly less menial jobs in the shop, take some
technical classes and buy some tools, and eventually make a decent middle class
income as a technician. Those proving unworthy of promotion typically didn't
last long- chronic absenteeism, showing up to drunk to work, burning a phat one
out behind the detail shop, etc. "Next!"


What do we do for all these people who can not meet your requirements for
employment.

We don't do anything for them. No need. There are plenty of guys who believe
that hiring as cheaply as possible is the only way to go, and they can't be too
picky about what they get. The guys who don't want to pay anything and those
who don't want to work very hard deserve each other, and they do seem to find
one another more often than not.

All we do is be sure that the employer doesn't take such extreme advantage of
his superior economic power that his sick, starving, homeless workers create a
huge drain on everybody else.

An employer with a growing business is always in a position to provide
opportunities to bright, energetic, talented people who will grow along with
the business and make everybody in sight richer along the way. It isn't the
employers responsibilty to waste those opportunities on the dull, the
undermotivated, or the unqualified. The culls should go to the guys who run a
business so badly that a worker isn't empowered to produce enough wealth for
both himself and his employer.

Ever notice that it is usually the same guys who call for the elimination of
minimum wage laws who also call for an end to all public assistance for food,
shelter, or medical care?

You might ask some of them what should be done with the working poor.....

"better they should die, and decrease the surplus population" Ebenezer
Scrooge, "A Christmas Carol", by Charles Dickens

Anyone lacking a close up perspective might enjoy reading a book called
"Nickled and Dimed, on Not Getting By in America."