Pay poor wages and you get poor workers, regardless of the demographics/area.
How a Raise for Workers Can Be a Win for Everybody
Higher pay for employees has improved service and productivity in department stores and nursing homes. These findings have direct implications for the current pandemic, an economist says.
Ms. Ruffini’s most startling finding was that higher minimum wages reduced mortality significantly among nursing home residents. Her research suggests that if every county increased its minimum wage by 10 percent, there could be 15,000 fewer deaths in nursing homes each year, or about a 3 percent reduction.
How did pay increases translate into better patient health and longer lives? It appears that with better pay, jobs in nursing homes became more attractive, so employee turnover decreased. Patients benefited from more continuity in their care.
In addition, the better paid employees may have simply worked harder, perhaps because they cared more about holding onto their jobs. Economists say they have been paid an “efficiency wage”: Employees become more productive when their wages are higher.
The higher wage may also have attracted more skilled or industrious people to the job, but this seems to account for at most a small portion of the improvements in patient health.
If Target upped their entry level wage to $15 per hour and their average well into the $20 per hour range, I think you’d find many of these workers to be very productive. Businesses have apparently forgotten that one of the easiest ways to demoralize your workers is to pay them poorly.