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Los Angeles Raises Minimum Wage To $15 an Hour
HughPickens.com writes: Jennifer Medina reports at the NY Times that the council of the nation's second-largest city voted by a 14-1 margin to increase its minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020. Los Angeles and its almost 4 million residents represent one of the biggest victories yet for those pushing wage increases across the country. Proponents hope it will start to reverse the earning gap in the city, where the top 7% of households earn more than the bottom 67%.
Detractors point out the direct cost increase to businesses, which could total as much as a billion dollars per year. If a business can't handle the increased cost, the employees this measure was designed to help will lose their jobs when it folds. An editorial from the LA Times says it's vital for other cities nearby to increase their minimum wage, too, else businesses will gradually migrate to cheaper locations. They add, "While the minimum wage hike will certainly help the lowest-wage workers in the city, it should not be seen as the centerpiece of a meaningful jobs creation strategy. The fact is that far too many jobs in the city are low-wage jobs — some 37% of workers currently earn less than $13.25 an hour, according to the mayor's estimates — and even after the proposed increase, they would still be living on the edge of poverty."
Detractors point out the direct cost increase to businesses, which could total as much as a billion dollars per year. If a business can't handle the increased cost, the employees this measure was designed to help will lose their jobs when it folds. An editorial from the LA Times says it's vital for other cities nearby to increase their minimum wage, too, else businesses will gradually migrate to cheaper locations. They add, "While the minimum wage hike will certainly help the lowest-wage workers in the city, it should not be seen as the centerpiece of a meaningful jobs creation strategy. The fact is that far too many jobs in the city are low-wage jobs — some 37% of workers currently earn less than $13.25 an hour, according to the mayor's estimates — and even after the proposed increase, they would still be living on the edge of poverty."
Is Slashdot TRYING to lose readers? I thought this was a TECH forum.
I love seeing this crap in American articles. "Oh Noes! If we pay people more, it will cost businesses more!"
Lets look at this for a second.... Who are a businesses customers? Hint: It's the people who get paid a wage. These people get more money, more businesses get more customers. More customers mean more sales. More sales means more profits.
Is it really that hard to grasp that concept?
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
Minimum wage is a stupid answer to inequality. It raises costs for business, forces those at the margin out of business entirely, and does nothing for the unemployed except increase their number and raise the barrier to them getting a job.
The correct answer is "basic income". But that would mean lower costs to business, but higher taxes, so we can't have that.
So, they want the government to force the minimums up higher to "living wages," but they don't think everything else will just inflate along with it? Everyone's salaries go up, too! Yay! Wait, groceries and gas just went up too! BOO! Whoa, the dollar is now worth 2 pesos? QUICK, CASH IN YOUR MONIES FROM ACAPULCO! Dude, where's my retirement savings?
That's almost like saying, "If consuming water is good then drowning to death in it must be better". In short, improvements are generally on a bell curve: there's an optimum level of any given factor. Too much or too little tends to create problems.
Table-ized A.I.
Australia has a minimum wage of around $17USD/hour (around $20AUD) which increases 20% if you are a casual. Our poor people do well.
You know how everyone whines about big corporates making too much money; well this is the best way to redistribute that wealth.
Paying your poor people well, helps lift them out of poverty.
46137
...until he finds out that it cost him his job: http://redalertpolitics.com/20...
If you really believe paying slave wages will make us all wealthy, you go first, ask for that pay cut now!
$15 per hour is Galdwell's tipping point.
What would we do without California to try stupid things so the rest of us learn good reasons avoid them?
Well, so you're saying that there is an upper limit beyond which a minimum wage becomes harmful. So there must be a mechanism that kicks in that imposes that limit. So, explain what it is.
(While you're at it, also explain why businesses would pay $15/h for a worker who doesn't increase revenue by significantly more than $15 for each hour he works.)
I think it's more *likely* to turn out to be a well-meaning but ultimately meaningless gesture. We're trying to optimize something in a very complex system, and we seem to think if we just make sure all the poor people get $30,000 a year, we've solved the problem. I remain deeply, profoundly skeptical that a legislative solution as simple as "give them more money, then they won't be poor," is going to help very much.
If I'm running a business, and my payroll increases 30% while sales remain flat, I have two options:
1) slow or stop hiring, cut staff, or even go out of business;
2) raise prices to reflect the increase in wage expenses;
I don't see how either of those outcomes is very good for poor people struggling to get by on $15 an hour, even though we can console ourselves that we've "done something" to help them. Now, I am, admittedly, not an economist - perhaps it will work, or at least, it will help. But I really have sincere doubts that this is going to do much to really change the dynamic at the low end of the economic spectrum. I think it will largely end up being a feel-good measure that well-off, well-meaning people can use to congratulate themselves about, while doing nothing to change the fundamental reality of low wages and poverty.
I *hope* that I'm wrong. I honestly do. But I suspect this will be less helpful and beneficial than all of the celebrants shouting about a victory for the little man seem to think. I have no problem with trying to address wage disparities, but I think the solution is likely going to look a lot more like government- and industry-funded vocational training programs than it will a flat, across-the board, minimum wage increase.
If someone needs some comparison, France's national minimal hourly wage is 9,71 euros, that is 10.7 USD.
This is much lower, but to make a fair comparison, one would have to take expenses into account. The presence of socialized services lower expenses, especially for people at minimum wage that do not pay taxes on their income.
I get your point but there is another point people are missing.
what about those who are making 15 an hour now??? or those making 15.50??? will they get a raise??? or has their job that they worked hard for to get the pay they are getting now be considered a minimum wage job? While this *might* help the poorest of the poor (in reality those jobs will disappear) it hurts those who DID work hard to get above the bottom. That is unless they will be getting the same percentage raise as those making min wage now that is
somehow I think this is going to do nothing but devalue jobs in the 15-20$ range
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
They made a movie about that. It was pretty popular.
what about those who are making 15 an hour now??? or those making 15.50??? will they get a raise??? or has their job that they worked hard for to get the pay they are getting now be considered a minimum wage job?
you do realize that the only actual harm done here is to their poor little egos? Their wages have not been reduced at all. Do you want to get reimbursed every time someone makes you feel bad?
Some of us can perform work that is work $100 an hour or more. Some people cannot perform any task worth even $5 an hour. Life is unfair.
Real jobs don't pay minimum wage. Where I live one can survive on twelve dollars an hour. It's not fun but you can get by and even have cable tv. I'm glad to see LA jack up the minimum wage and I hope all those other cities in Cali do the same. It'll help solve the water shortage problem there as jobs migrate away from the state and the people follow. I occasionally watch some of these real estate shows that have people choosing from between different houses in places like LA and San Francisco and am blown away by the real estate prices there. For what you can buy here for less than 100 grand it often will cost half a million or more there. My electric bill here runs about $100 to $300 dollars depending on the season, a months water bill (including trash pickup) is usually around $30. The mortgage on my 3 bedroom 2000 square foot house is $590 including taxes and insurance. A dollar here is not equal to a dollar in LA.
Just wait until businesses start laying off people to cover the cost of the new $15/hr.
got any data to go with your whine?
The real minimum wage is always 0. I work in Seattle, where they recently did this. Entry level places where I live (not in Seattle), where the minimum wage is $10/hour, all have help wanted signs out. In downtown Seattle, however there was a wave of restaurant closings, and I don't see help wanted signs anywhere. Could be other causes for the difference, of course, maybe it's something else - but it's not a promising sign for teens looking for that first job.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Nah they'll just hire more illegals
Less responsibility? Maybe. But you're more likely to have asshole bosses or customers, the work is far more repetitive, it's far more likely to be physically demanding (which may cause medical problems later in life), and lower wages mean less financial stability. There's also the issue that in most part time jobs, hours are not guaranteed (so you may have some months with far fewer hours than other months), and you may be asked to come in any time and be expected to do so or be fired.
Increasing the minimum wage helps with many of these issues (a lot of the reason why conditions are so terrible for minimum-wage workers is they have no power to fight unfair and unlawful treatment, but an increase in wages would give them a better chance to do that). But I can guarantee you that if you tried a minimum wage job for a few months, you'd want to go running back to the software job.
Also, you should probably look for a better employer. Good employers know that pushing employees to work 12-hour days leads to burnout and crap productivity, as well as high turnover rates. My employer (in software) actively urges me to make sure I don't spend too much time at work.
cali is already losing jobs to texas in droves, this is not gonna make it any better
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
If you really believe that a minimum wage can increase the welfare of poor people, why not raise it to $500/hour? Then we can all be rich!
Silly lad.
That's like saying that if the minimum wage is too high, and it hurts employers, we should just not pay anyone anything at all. and we'd all be wealthy
But let's get back to reality for a second. One of th ebaxtoipnzs of right thinking, God fearing economic rightness, Walmart (genuflect) Who just happens to be the largest employer in the country http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/c...
looky who's on medicaid!
While we are at it: http://www.bloombergview.com/a...
Which is all to say, that if you support keeping th eminimum wage at present levels, you are an avbid and enthusiastic promoter of our tax dollars allowing them to pay that minimum wage.
Highly socialistic there, Tovaritsch. Are you going to the communist party meeting tonight, Comrade?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
what about those who are making 15 an hour now??? or those making 15.50??? will they get a raise???
If they're more valuable than those they could be replaced with then... yes.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
by raising the wages of those under them artificially (which is what min wage is) it does in fact harm them as costs will go up, more people will lose their jobs as its not worth paying someone 15 an hour for some jobs, and in the end this is going to hurt the middle class way more than it helps the poor
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
No jobs naturally exist, which cost more in wages than the wealth they generate for the employer.
does that mean we can fire the police and firemen? how about the dogcatcher? the trash men? none of them generate any revenue at all.
yes why bother paying people when we can be communists and socialists and give them food stamps even though they are working 40 hours a week?
So what's your answer, pay people to hire them like we apparently do now or get them up against the wall?
exactly the point I was getting out. should be made into a XKCD
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Smaller businesses trying to American Dream might struggle. Yes, plebs will be able to buy more, but it might not cut it.
Big businesses can soak it, but they're also better poised to just outsource/automate as we inch one more tick on "Human labor costs too much."
And it'll keep ticking. I won't waste emotions lamenting it, it's inevitable. We can't uninvent automation. I also accept that businesses are meant to act in their own interest, but meanwhile the money circulates less and less.
Much less. Your paycheck doesn't go to plebs, it flows upwards. You pay bills to phone companies, you pay car dealerships and bank mortages, you pay insurance/hospitals, and nothing flows down. You think the walmart portion trickles down to Joe? Nope. His job exists because it's an upward flow as well. Wealth is concentrating harder than diamonds and it's going to get worse before it gets worser.
I don't recommend trying to resculpt immutable facts (eg businesses will never hire money sinks); we'll need to adapt our world around them. But no one seems to know how, not plausibly.
I'm normally pretty libertarian when it comes to issues like this, but it doesn't surprise me especially in a state like California where the cost of most things has become overinflated. Wages are typically the last thing to rise...but something is different here...
The government's "basket of goods" used to calculate inflation is blatantly false and misleading, as are its unemployment numbers (look at U3, not the cooked statistics you hear on the news that were called out by Gallup's top guy). Particularly in a state like California where most of the population lives in a few densely-populated areas with horrible traffic and ever-rising rents and house prices, inflation has already greatly impacted individuals. The federal government has already encouraged this by making the FHA loan conforming limit different for high-priced California areas. Between this and speculators buying and sitting on houses as investments, the average slug has zero change of owning a home and struggles even to rent due to the growing techie population.
The difference is that the gap in overinflated places like California has been extended beyond any reasonable means by expansion of debt. It's all about the monthly payment for a good, not the total amount out of your pocket for that good irrespective of repairs and devaluation. Between the large bank failures and the constant pumping of the money supply, it appears that the debtors will win and the savers will lose at the expense of substantial amounts of inflation simply because compensation for productivity has to be based on something somewhat tangible, even if it's intellectual property. That underpinning simply isn't there. This is a giant souffle that will be hardened into place from the top and pull the bottom up with it.
So yes, raise the minimum wage if you will. But those prices will be passed along to consumers. Those in LA and the rest of California and like places should get used to $9-$10 McDonald's meals and $2 cans of soda and $2.50 for a basic pack of gum. Other than austerity and contraction (which may cycle multiple times between inflation before all is said and done), this was the only possible outcome whose chickens appear now to be coming home to roost. Welcome to the new normal, with effectively no consolation for the minimum wage earners.
By the fucking time they get to the 15$ min in 2020, it will need to be 25$. Why the hell are they playing chase the tail -- oh right, cause money.
nobody goes there, it's too crowded
I think you are looking at the problem at an wrong angle.
If the payroll increases 30% while sales remain flat, either someone is saving money(hard to do for minimum wagers) or you have inflation.
As inflation doesn't seem to be a problem right now in the US, the only other option is: Sales will NOT remain flat!(Sure, some areas will rise more than others...)
Wat? Do you even know what vocational training *is*?
Your argument is... what, exactly? That skilled jobs in engineering, accountancy, nursing, medicine, architecture, law, and even trades like plumbing, carpentry, HVAC, mechanics, etc are somehow being automated away and are less secure than minimum wage jobs at McDonald's? For real?
I think your hat is too tight, Babs.
The big problem with minimum wage is that it is usually set, then left alone for many years on end. This create a problem for people earning minimum wage, since their wages are not adjusted to reflect the cost of living. This is beneficial to businesses in the short term, because wages decrease in relation to other expenses. This is also detrimental to businesses in the long term, since it means that increases to the minimum wage tend to be large and create a correspondingly large jumps in expenses. It is much more sensible to link the minimum wage to the cost of living.
I read that article too, and the one that debunked it.
Yes, the most likely explanation for why CEOs are paid $5,000/hour ($10 million/year) is that they appoint their friends to the committees that decide their compensation. In very simple jobs, it's possible to assess whether someone has the necessary job qualifications (e.g. whether they sit on an assembly line for eight hours a day and attach part A to part B). So workers compete on price/salary. But for the higher level jobs, know one really knows. Maybe there's some guy working as a janitor would who make better decisions than the CEO - and be willing to be CEO for a janitor salary. No one really knows.
Except at the lowest levels, wages have no relation to economic productivity. As you note, life is unfair.
Or at least phone spell checker ware writers are overpaid...
> We're trying to optimize something in a very complex system
Yes! You're starting out well.
> If I'm running a business, and my payroll increases 30% while sales remain flat, I have two options: 1) slow or stop hiring, cut staff, or even go out of business;
Aaaaand... you crashed into the water. Raising wages increases productivity, demonstrably so: http://www.raisetheminimumwage...
Of course, as said, this only 'works' if the wage was abysmally low to begin with (which is true in this case). If you're already paying your workers $100/hr, paying them $200/hr is likely not to do much, but going from $5/hr to $10/hr is going to do a lot.
There are many reasons for this. Low-paid workers often lose productivity due to working multiple jobs or making non-optimal life decisions to save money. Employee theft and misbehavior goes down. Job satisfaction (and the resulting increase in productivity) goes up. There are a lot of other positive effects.
> I think it will largely end up being a feel-good measure that well-off, well-meaning people can use to congratulate themselves about
I actually agree with you a little bit here. But that's life.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
You weren't supposed to swallow your Wobblie Song Book whole. You were only supposed to sing or chant some of the songs.
Your two proposed options are full of assumptions and not the full set of options available. For instance, why would you assume sales remain flat as people suddenly see their spendable income rise significantly? Likewise, a third option is you could reduce your net revenue.
These are just off the top of my head.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
Wow pi$$ed off the liberals I see. GOOD! When California falls completely apart and run out of water we'll see who was right....
The Truth is a Virus!!!
so you are telling me businesses in seatle are opening in record numbers now right?? no one is leaving right???
killing the middle class on the false assumption that you are helping the poor is not the right move
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The entire council should be Latino before then...
http://council.lacity.org/Dire...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Hope they manage it as well as illegal immigrate.....err yeah. Hope they manage as well as the electrical grid....oh wait. Hope they manage it as well as the highway system....hmmmmm. Hope they manage it as well as the water supply.......well fuck.
In my experience, the biggest asshole bosses are in tech. Ditto for the customers.
High blood pressure, burn-out, and ageism in tech mean you've got to really enjoy what you do ... but ask anyone who got out of the rat hole how they feel a few years later. At a certain point, quality of life becomes more important than having more of what George Carlin accurately called "sh*t."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
what about those who are making 15 an hour now??? or those making 15.50??? will they get a raise??? or has their job that they worked hard for to get the pay they are getting now be considered a minimum wage job?
you do realize that the only actual harm done here is to their poor little egos? Their wages have not been reduced at all. Do you want to get reimbursed every time someone makes you feel bad?
That's not true. In order to pay the McDonald's worker $15.00 an hour, they will have to basically double all of their prices. Now the guy making $15.50 will have to pay twice as much for stuff that is made or prepared by minimum wage workers and so therefore, his $15.50 won't stretch as far as it used to.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The economy is nothing but money trading hands. A wage increase is _by definition_ a boost to the economy, as long as doesn't severely affect the other cash flows of the company and the company can remain alive (which in this case virtually all of them can; not so much if you increase it to $500/hr).
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
LA already has an incredible amount of illegal labor. Minimum wage is the middle class there. Otherwise... bring in the robots!
Don't worry, Bob will actually be unemployed because his work does not bring in an additional $15 per hour worth of profit.
What minimum wage forgets to take into account is those that have no job. Sort of like average salaries for IT people doesn't take into account the unemployed. If you factor in unemployed people the average wage goes down quite a bit.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Just stick with Socialism rules. The useless comment of that is redundant since that is always implied when referring to socialism. Also don't forget useless people come in all colors and creeds so don't be stingy with your criticism by picking just one group.
That's like saying that if the minimum wage is too high, and it hurts employers, we should just not pay anyone anything at all. and we'd all be wealthy
No, the amount that should be paid is the amount that an employer and an employee agree upon. Which is better, that an employer willing to pay $6 an hour not hire anybody while jobless people willing to work for $6 an hour continue to not find jobs, or that the employer actually hire those people for $6 an hour even though it is less than minimum wage?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The minimum wage in Melbourne Australia has been in the $15 range for many years, and where it 'hurts' is in the costs of the service sector. It's really tough to set the value of a Big Mac at like $5.50, and as a result I eat out much less than when I was in California. But, there is a large sector who will pay what it takes to indulge their behavioral addictions, and the service sector is nonetheless very robust. So yes there's a transfer of wealth into the lower income levels which results in them earning a living wage (minimum wage is tied to a percentage of the cost of living) and I find that far more tolerable than six people crammed into a 2-bedroom flat.
The Trash Collection service I use is called something like 'D & R Trash Service.' (name changed to preserve anonymnity.) When I call their business number, either D or R answers the phone. They are husband and wife. It's a pretty small operation, they only have the one truck.
They never answer the phone 'master' so I assume they are not my slaves. Thus, they somehow have freely chosen to run their small Trash Hauling company because it generates revenue for them.
What the hell was your point again?
under the present minimum wage, one qualifies for government assistance, which means the money is coming out of the taxpayers wallet.
As wages rise, businesses' labor costs will rise, which tends to increase the prices they have to charge to recover the cost of providing goods or services. Some of these goods and services are necessities, and the threshold for government assistance is indexed to costs of necessities. So increasing wage level increases costs, which increases the general price level, which increases the CPI, which increases how much one can make while remaining eligible for entitlements, which puts the taxpayers' situation right back where it was.
You thought you were avoiding the trap of his question, but the reality is all answers lead you to a trap, because raising the minimum wage is dumb policy. Your bell curve comment makes no sense and I think a bell curve is not what you mean. What you mean, I think, is that raising the min wage improves the lives of everyone or at least a subset of socioeconomic strata, then at some point you get diminishing returns for that subset, and then at some point you actually have negative consequences for that subset. So assuming that is what you mean, that isn't a bell curve concept, but I get why you said that. Let's assume that's what you mean.
Unfortunately, that does not make sense. You seem to have ignored the very valid point my friend made at the end of his post, which is unfortunate because that was the KEY point. Most policies like this only sound good if you assume an otherwise static economy. But that's silly. In this case, if Sally's work output is worth $13 per hour to the company, so long as her wage is less than $13 per hour, she is likely to have a job available (gross oversimplification, but true enough for the purposes of this discussion). Now suppose Sally's city imposes a $14/hr min wage. Sally is ecstatic about getting a raise until she instead gets a pink slip. This is because the company will produce less output. The company will not produce incremental output from Sally, because every hour Sally works means a loss of $1 in profit. An actual loss of $1 per hour; don't get confused and think I am referring to a loss relative to a lower wage. I am speaking about Sally being a net negative on the company's financial viability because every hour of her work costs $14 but her output is only worth $13. The company will let Sally go. Further, this is what should happen to keep the economy healthy; otherwise you are pumping $14 into a machine and getting $13 out of it, when an economy is supposed to do the opposite.
So the mistake your side makes is misunderstanding that at every incremental raise of the min wage, jobs are lost. It doesn't matter that workers have more money to spend, unless that increase in volume leads to inflation of prices, this resulting in Sally's output being worth $14+ from inflation. But your side insists min wage increases do not cause inflation and only lead to higher demand (volume). If volume demanded increases without inflation, that actually has no impact because Sally's company will not produce more units at negative margin. In fact Sally's company will produce less than before the increase in demand.
And if it does lead to inflation, Sally may not get canned, but that is a regressive cost that will hurt many lower wage workers and definitely the unemployed, whose benefits are not indexed to local inflation.
And FOX is not a well known propaganda outlet? FFS -- they are literally an extension of the Republican Party.
Dude, Conservatives and Libertarians are "Individualists" who want smaller State than socialists. The Statist Collectivists are the socialists, and National Socialists are socialists (go an look at their 25 point program, which is completely socialist).
"Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian" [32 mins]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I understand that so many of my fellow freedom-loving Slashdotters do not yet understand this (no matter where they think they are on the State Power vs Individual Liberty political spectrum), because the modern control-freak inheritors of the National Socialist and Soviet Socialist agendas do not want you to understand what is really going on. But here is the most important thing about politics, "In order for the State to gain power, Individuals must lose power". The National Socialists were Big State, and Far Left. Please don't fall for this simplest of Jedi Mind Tricks folks.
Here's the most useful diagram that shows the political spectrum in terms of State Power vs Individual Liberty:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_TI8b...
To claim that conservatives are "Hitler Youth Lite" not only fulfills Godwin's Law, it also show you have fallen from the disinformation from the Extreme Left (Communists) who call the Far Left (National Socialists) "Far Right" simply because *everyone* is to the right of communists (and the mainstream media sympathize with this false narrative). The further right you go on the political spectrum the more you wish individuals had power and the state does not, until you go through the true Far Right (Libertarianism) and go to the Extreme Right (anarchy - where the State has no power at all).
Here's the simple Rule of Thumb for y'all:
More State power means further Leftward on the political spectrum until the State has all the power and the individual has none (Communism)
Less State power means further Rightward on the political spectrum until the Individual and full liberty and the State has no power (Anarchy)
You simple choose how much State power you'd like to trade off against Individual Liberty.
so you are telling me businesses in seatle are opening in record numbers now right?? no one is leaving right???
where is this straw man you are arguing with? it sure isn't me. i never said any of those things
Then why not raise the min wage much more?
Making the min wage $15/he does not mean bob gets $15/hr. Bob will get whatever the local unemployment compensation agency determines is the right amount of money.
(While you're at it, also explain why businesses would pay $15/h for a worker who doesn't increase revenue by significantly more than $15 for each hour he works.)
Because the manager knows that if he fires that worker, he shrinks his own little empire by one worker?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
meanwhile the government keeps paying for the meals of walmart employees
food won't go up 50%
I don't see why not. Demand for staple foods is inelastic, which means the quantity demanded won't change much when the price level becomes higher.
In fact the only thing that would go up by 50% would be labor-intensive services.
Such as picking food, a cost that the farm owner has to pass on.
Sorry, but why do I give a damn about the level of consumption of anyone else? You say I am happiest when everyone consumes the same amount? It would be nice to see an explanation of that, because I don't get it.
Texas.
I'm starting to think that it's by design because every misconception is in favor of 'government' and people being ruled by force.
Watch Tom Woods dispel these myths
and one more
Liberty.
While you're at it, also explain why businesses would pay $15/h for a worker who doesn't increase revenue by significantly more than $15 for each hour he works.
Work is fungible. Perhaps you had said worker hammering roofing nails manually and after the wage increase you decide to buy a nail gun to increase their productivity. In fact historically union shops have lead the way in increases in productivity for exactly this reason. This is well documented.
The reason is because only a relative few readers are qualified to discuss the latest in astrophysics, let's say, but anyone can jump in and talk about politics.
Therein lies the problem.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
well im not sure what to make of your context lacking comment. Whats so funny, what am i funny like a clown??? do I amuse you??? what is so dang funny????
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
the problem is mcdonalds are usually franchises, not corp owned. so while that establishment gets treated as big business, it in reality is a mom and pop business.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
That's the thing that needs to happen throughout the economy.
In order to pay the McDonald's worker $15.00 an hour, they will have to basically double all of their prices.
hilarious
" In general, McDonald’s franchisees pay about 20 percent in labor costs, according to Richard Adams, a consultant out of San Diego who works with McDonald’s operators."
"Thus, doubling those salaries would push that Big Mac cost up 80 cents."
What happens to those who were making $15/hr or $16/hr? They're likely frequenting places full of minimum wage workers and their costs will now rise - inevitably - to at least some degree because of this. Further, they've all now been reduced to minimum wage (or close thereto) by the stroke of a pen.
Beyond that, how many jobs will now cost enough that automating them starts to make good financial sense? How many people with little to no skills - especially those without a good education who are most in need of steady legal employment - will find that their lack of marketable skills make them not worth hiring at this higher price point?
This is the kind of feel-good thing that bring down the middle class, raises some in the lower class (those lucky enough to ride the wave), and leaves behind large swaths of the most vulnerable people. What's going to happen is that people with little to no marketable skills in surrounding areas will get hired at the state or Federal minimum wage, gain some valuable experience, become more valuable employees, and then move or commute into LA to take jobs from poor, undereducated residents. This is an anti-poor measure masquerading as a hand-up. It will drive the middle class further down the chain (by negatively impacting their purchasing power), reduce the number of available jobs for everyone (and especially for residents), and drive many of the poor right into the ground.
Mark my words, within 5 years of this taking effect, all or nearly all indicators of poverty will worsen in LA.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
You know, when that story aired on Fox News, some people have actually went and asked the owners of those closing restaurants whether it's due to the minimum wage. And they have only found one place where that was a factor - and even that one has, ironically, not been in the original report.
At the same time, several new restaurants have opened, or are still planning to open, in the same timeframe.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ri...
One item not discussed is how this is a benefit for tax collectors and a much larger hit on employers than just the hourly wage difference. Wages account for about 70% of employers labor costs (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.nr0.htm).
Consider just payroll taxes. A person making $8/hour working costs their employer $8.61 after the 7.65% FICA taxes ($0.61 goes to the taxman). Raise that wage to $15 and the cost to the employer is $16.15 ($1.15 goes to the taxman).
Then there's additional costs pegged to wages, such as UI insurance "premiums" and workers comp. In California UI insurance has a maximum cost, but runs up to 6.2% on first $7000 of wages before maxing out. In California, employers spend $3.48 in workers comp cost per $100 in wages paid.
Benefits employers paid (vacation, sick days) account for about $2.16 per hour worked on average (about 6.9% of average hourly wage).
Raising the minimum wage entails all those additional costs too, so jumping someone from $8/hr to $15/hr changes the costs to the employer from about $10.40 to about $19.50 (assuming 30% of labor costs are non-wage). It's not a $7 additional cost, but a $9.10 additional cost (of which the majority of the difference goes into the state tax coffers *before* the wages are subjected to the income tax and sales taxes).
Because the manager knows that if he fires that worker, he shrinks his own little empire by one worker?
Spoken like who has NEVER actually had an employee. Every small business owner I know hates having employees.
Employees add stress. The only reason a business hires people is because they either can't do it all on their own or
because employees make them more money than they cost. That spread doesn't have to be much. If you have 20
employees and each employee makes you $1/hour more than you pay them then assuming you are working yourself
you are doing pretty good. Now, if minimum wage jumps by $5 per hour then that $1 per hour profit is gone and you
either charge more or you fire that employee and figure out how to do it without. I've met many a small business
owners who have talked about getting rid of their employees and turning away work just because the amount of extra
money an employee brings in is barely worth the headache of having ermployees. A massive wage hike would
make that a lot easier. One such company that did just that was Churchill Trucklines from a town near me. The
workers went on strike and demanded more money and the owner said screw it I don't need this headache and
layed off all 2000 employees.
meanwhile the government keeps paying for the meals of walmart employees
Maybe, if it stopped, Walmart would have to pay their employees enough to eat.
Just a thought.
Would a dose of common sense do?
Consider for a moment if LA were to increase the minimum wage to $1,000/hr for all workers. What do you suppose would be the impact of that on jobs and the local economy?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
While you're at it, also explain why businesses would pay $15/h for a worker who doesn't increase revenue by significantly more than $15 for each hour he works.
Work is fungible. Perhaps you had said worker hammering roofing nails manually and after the wage increase you decide to buy a nail gun to increase their productivity. In fact historically union shops have lead the way in increases in productivity for exactly this reason. This is well documented.
Or you buy that nail gun and hire 1/10 the number of people or you just do it yourself or you buy a robot and let the robot do the work.
Go to South America and you still have ditch diggers and very little heavy machinery because labor is still relatively cheap.
In the USA you still have ditch diggers but you have 1 guy with a heavy machine doing what it used to take 100 guys to do.
I'm actually surprised we haven't seen an employeeless fast food restaurant yet or at least one that only has a single cook.
Maybe the question is rotten.
Have God let me fork several versions of current Earth and I'll find the optimum min wage.
Table-ized A.I.
Such a person is *not* living in poverty, according to the official poverty designation. Of course, we give foodstamps to people earning 130% of poverty line. And the $194 in monthly foodstamps for a single person works out to about $1.21 per hour of full-time work. So we ought to be able to increase the minimum wage by $1.21/hour and eliminate foodstamps for minimum wage earners.
Of course, in California you can use your foodstamps at fast food places, so the circle is complete!
Aaaaand... you crashed into the water. Raising wages increases productivity, demonstrably so: http://www.raisetheminimumwage...
Yes, raising wages increases productivity but not for the reason that you think. When you hire a $15/hour housekeeper
you get someone better, more reliable, more stable, etc... but it's because you're not hiring the same person. If you
hire a housekeeper who is willing to work for $8/hour and then pay them $15/hour you won't see the same boost in
quality.
Sure, but still: help wanted signs up in the $10/hour suburbs, and not in the $15/hour downtown Seattle shops. Could be something else, too, of course, but I really notice the difference.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Likewise, a third option is you could reduce your net revenue.
That's assuming you CAN reduce your net revenue. Most small business owners I know pay their
employees almost as much as they themself make and many actually make less than what they
could make working for someone else. They own a small business because they enjoy it but they
will close their doors if their payroll increases by 20k because the money just isn't there.
(While you're at it, also explain why businesses would pay $15/h for a worker who doesn't increase revenue by significantly more than $15 for each hour he works.)
If your business requires paying wages that are so low that your workers can't make a living and to survive are still welfare and foodstamps (that my tax dollars pay for) despite working full time then your business plan is broken.
Or in many cases, the worker does increase the company's revenue by by more than $15 for each hour he/she works but they pay them less and pocket the difference (e.g. Walmart and other big box stores) and by paying lower wages and making other taxpayers make up the difference the owners of the company just get richer. That's why the Walton family has more wealth than 40% of Americans combined (that's 129 MILLION Americans). We're talking about a company whose executives take separate private jets to the same meeting just for fun to see who can get there faster. A company whose chairman (Sam Walton's oldest son) is only in the office a few times a month, and spends the rest of his time taking his private jet from his home in the Colorado mountains to go cycling in France, or hunting geese in Canada, or bio-safaris in South America, yet pays his workers so little that even though they work full time they can't afford rent and food. Are you still going to tell me that company can't afford to pay its workers a wage they can live off of?
Debunked what? There's a minimum wage below zero?
Yes, it's called a "Dude Ranch". Get some city slickers to pay the ranch to be allowed to drive the cattle. Most brilliant hiring strategy in all human history.
"Thus, doubling those salaries would push that Big Mac cost up 80 cents."
Well, then by all means, let's double the minimum wage. If it will push the Big Mac (currently $3.99) up to 80 cents. Of course, that $3.39 is local. It is a lot more expensive in L.A., but as your article plainly proves, it is absolutely not at all related to the fact that the minimum wage there is 50% higher than it is here.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
When minimum labor costs get too high for valuable or popular work, we end up with a lot of "volunteers." This happens all the time in science and medicine. In general, minimum wage hasn't had an impact on this (yet). Young scientists understand that working on a high profile project or in a "real world" clinic is good for your career. There's already enough downward pressure on scientific wages to prevent even the most jaded PI from offering a minimum wage position to paid technical staff. That all said, the average (non-graduate, but paid) student lab worker at UCLA makes $14/hr, with a $9/hr minimum. $15/hr is above the minimum salary for graduate researchers on campus. (Not picking on UCLA, their salary info is public and easy to search.)
So, we're getting into territory where minimum wage laws are putting cost pressure on scientific work. Interesting and a bit sad.
Will this even apply to schools? The federal and state governments usually don't apply all labor laws to universities.
I suppose University of Washington has the same issues. It would be nice to think that some of the more bloated administrative budgets would take a haircut to pay the student workers a bit more. It would be very sad if it simply became normal for young scientists to "work" for free their first few years.
Surely can't be worse service than we get now.
raising the minimum wage increases the amount of money flowing in the economy. everyone will have more money to spend. businesses will expand because people will have money to spend. there will be fewer jobless.
No, it doesn't raise the amount of money in the system unless more money is printed, and then that money will be worth less. The only way to increase the amount of money is by the economy expanding, not by artificially declaring the worth of a commodity. I minimum wage is raised, then stuff will cost more. Some slight benefit might be had for some of the poor, and a decreased standard of living will be incurred for the middle class.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Yeah, but some people want indoor plumbing. Go figure.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Reality often is, but it's what we have.
Thanks for posting propaganda as "news".
Yes, it's propaganda, but it doesn't mean there isn't a grain of truth somewhere in there.
As a young French person who had the option to work in either France, or the United States, I can tell you that it's damn difficult for young people to find jobs in France (precisely because it's so expensive to hire workers, or even fire them). I can't tell you how humiliating it can be to look for a job in France for a young person. It's like they're doing you a favor (the risk is so high to them, so they might as well make you grovel for the opportunity).
So then, since there are so many jobless because of the high minimum wages (and other government programs), the government invents government internship programs to get around the minimum wage. So you end up getting paid less than the minimum wage, you still end up working for a private company, but this way the pay check comes from the government and the money you receive is called a stipend which is technically not a wage since you're in an internship (never mind that 40 years olds and 50 years olds can still be stuck in rotating internships all their lives of course).
or fire those employees...and then we still end up paying for them.....
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
hmmm, I was working for batch scheduling operations support for 15$ an hour for like a year and a half. It was 12 hours shift 3 or 4 day weeks. It paid the bills and I road my bike back and forth to work. Before that I was doing the receptionist work you were speaking of joining call with devs and trying to get them to work incidents, paging, doing sysadmin work like cleaning logs file or running scripts. For less than 15$ an hour. Then the offshore people took over everything, and moved it over seas. I am not sure how much they are being paid, but i bet it is less. It sure stung though when they fired everyone, I was no longer there but my friend talks volumes of the feels he got from it..
NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER GIVE UP! "No limitations, no boundaries, there is no reason for them."
Seattle is not only the fastest-growing city in the United States, but employment is growing there faster than the national average. Anywhere you go in Seattle, you see new commercial buildings going up. You think that's because businesses are leaving?
http://blogs.seattletimes.com/...
http://jobs.seattletimes.com/c...
You are welcome on my lawn.
I still don't think it can compare to the state in a great many minimum wage and near minimum wage jobs.
Tech may, in some situations, be worse than other similarly-paying jobs, but I don't think it's possible to really compare to low-wage jobs in terms of stress due to the people you have to deal with.
It is blatantly obvious yet a lot of people don't seem to get it...
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
You cannot outrun inflation.
No. But you can keep pace with it, rather than LAGGING IT BY A FULL 50%
That canard has been debunked long ago.
We have seen big jumps in the minimum wage many times (many of them in my lifetime) and they have never resulted in equal jumps in prices. Because if those companies could increase those prices, they would have already, minimum wage increase or no.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, the amount that should be paid is the amount that an employer and an employee agree upon. Which is better, that an employer willing to pay $6 an hour not hire anybody while jobless people willing to work for $6 an hour continue to not find jobs, or that the employer actually hire those people for $6 an hour even though it is less than minimum wage?
So you are in favor of The government and industry conspiring to take your tax money.
The world doesn't work that way any more Tovaritsch. It's not going to happen at all when the largest employer in the country is sucking up my tax dollars so it can pay its employees less.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Even if the surrounding cities don't raise their minimum wage levels, businesses in those cities will have to start paying their hourly employees more because of increased hourly wages in nearby Los Angeles. Why would I work at McDonald's for $8/hr in a suburb when I could drive an extra 10 minutes and make $15/hr at a McDonald's in L.A.? Answer: I wouldn't. Ergo the McDonald's in the burbs will have to offer a wage that at least approaches the current L.A. wage or it will struggle to hire staff.
I'm saying it's crazy to pay someone 15 dollars an hour to ask someone if they want fries with their Big Mac. Kids hold most minimum wage jobs. People start at the bottom. If you're 50 years old and you're still slinging fries and soda pop then you're just not trying. The fucking deboners at the local chicken processing plant down the road where I live make 4 dollars over minimum wage. The guy changing tires at walmart does too. Minimum wage jobs are not meant for kids or people that have zero motivation. Hell, my lawn guy makes more fucking money than I do and most of it's tax free. My daughter straight out of high school got a job at Lowes making 50 cents over minimum wage. After two months they gave here a 2 dollar raise. She left there after 6 months more and got a job at Frito Lay putting chips in a box. Stuffing boxes with chips now for nearly 15 dollars an hour and that was back in 2002. I made almost twice that but I was in my 40's then and she had much better benefits. I don't really care if they jack the minimum wage up though as I've seen it done so many times over the years. Neither side's predictions come true. The people that say it'll make things better are wrong and the people screaming it'll destroy the economy are wrong. It always balances out after a little while.
Since apparently there is no downside to raising the minimum wage some, why not raise it a bunch?
If some is good, more is better, and much more is much more better, right?
Why not a minimum wage of $500/hr, and make almost everyone rich? (Except for the people who are already pulling in a megabuck per year.)
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Don't be an idiot. The entire country isn't as fucked up as LA.
Yes because 100% of McDonald's costs is the price of labor... idiot.
This is 100% accurate. If I had mod points you'd get them all.
A lot of people have strong opinions on raising the minimum wage, but that's all they are: opinions. Yes, there may be logic behind the arguments, but there is only one way to find out the effect of raising the minimum wage, and that's to try it and see what happens. Analysis may be difficult, but some data is better than blowing hot air.
In short: hooray for experiments! Let's see what happens!
Try to be a rational human being: make a prediction based on logic, wait for the data and analysis, and then update your beliefs! (I know, easier said than done.)
My prediction: it'll more-or-less be wash. Some good from increased wages, some people fired, somewhat higher prices to pay for labor. At the end of the day, low-wage workers will get displaced by automation anyway. In short, raising the minimum wage is nothing to get your undies in a bunch about.
Is where they indicated that neighboring cities must do the same or businesses will migrate away.
That, in a nutshell, just described democratic federal policy. It only works if there's no escape.
Bullshit article...
The minimum wage for Seattle isn't $15, it's $10 or $11.
It won't be $15 for several more years (between 2017 to 2021 depending on various thing like size of the company, type of compensation, medical benefits, etc.).
Source: http://murray.seattle.gov/minimumwage/
To believe this meme you see lately that somehow ebil corporations are forcing us to pick up part of the tab for their employees, you'd have to believe nobody would work there if Medicaid and other social services didn't exist. Which is idiotic. No, the problem is there are lots of people who don't produce enough value for their labor to live the minimum lifestyle we consider acceptable.
So apparently the solution is to force them out of their jobs entirely. What do you think the response is going to be from businesses? "Oh well. I guess we just won't make as much money"? Were you born yesterday?
I've been cutting my own hair for 47 years.
That sentence is incoherent.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
No, he's not saying that there is an upper limit beyond which a minimum wage becomes harmful, he's saying that the entire rationale behind a minimum wage is bogus.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The economy is goods changing hands, and services being performed, for considerations, usually with money as an intermediary. That you think money motion is the economy disqualifies you from economic discussions.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
While you are pulling accusations out from where the Sun don't shine, tovarisch, why not accuse him of being in favor of raping puppies? Sounds a lot more impressive and is just as well-substantiated...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
All government laws are ultimately enforced by violence or threat of violence, often referred to as "at gunpoint".
No voluntary, honest, harmless transaction between mentally competent adults should be prohibited by law.
No single person has the right to point a gun at me and say "you must pay him at least $15.00 an hour." A group does not gain new rights by adding members, so no group, howsoever formed, even if it calls itself a government, has the right to point a gun at me and say "you must pay him at least $15.00 an hour."
Minimum wages laws are a moral obscenity, and have no place in a civil society.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Public sector unions are trying this all over. They don't give a damn how many minimum wage workers lose their jobs. All they want is an increase in the minimum wage because their wages are tied to it and they get an automatic pay increase. Which they want because their automatic inflation adjustments are not as much fun since the administration decided that there isn't any inflation. And the voters won't approve regular raises based on their performance. And when the worker bees get a raise, management always gets a bigger one for themselves. 'Cause the taxpayers never run out of money...
Fox NEWS (as in the channel) is. The local Fox stations tend not to be.
if you are very, very lucky. If _anything_ goes wrong your whole life collapses like a house of cards.
Oh, and Jobs won't migrate away. This is the first thing everyone who perpetuates the race to the bottom (tm) likes to quote. It doesn't happen because California is a _nice_ place to live and the rich like having services. But don't take my word for it, go look at Kansas' unemployment. It's twice the national average after all their "free market" reforms.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
it's the rate businesses close after 5 years. There's no wave, just more of the same with something new to blame it on.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
then your fiends and family are probably making less. Odds are you couldn't give two shits about this "devaluing" your salary. OTOH it INCREASES the value of your salary because now instead of being trapped in a shitty job because if you left you'd have to start all over you now have the option to jumping ship and a credible threat to your boss to demand raises with.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
No jobs naturally exist, which cost more in wages than the wealth they generate for the employer.
True, but what is the minimum natural wage a job can have? Suppose for a particular set of fields, there is a greater supply of workers than needed, why wouldn't the wage for any job in that field approach zero, regardless of the profit made by the employer?
no kids either (I'm on /. after all). I don't get a mortgage credit. It doesn't come close to my standard deduction. And there's more and more of me. Birth rates are dropping (after all, they don't pay me enough to start a family...)
I bought a house because I could, and when the economy crashed and the 1% started stealing homes from under folks apartment rent shot through the roof.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Hmm sounds like Hostess. They kept paying the demanding wages of the union workers but never raised prices (God bless them for that) but eventually the workers demanded too much and so Hostess decided to close up shop instead (the assets were eventually purchased). That's one of 2 scenarios that happens when workers demand raises. The other is prices go up. Now, on a single company scale that isn't much of an issue but if businesses across the board raise prices due to hikes like a federal, state or city minimum wage increase then we're talking about adversely affecting a lot more people when those prices go up because now more people have to pay more than they did before for goods and services. How many of those people are minimum wage workers? Probably most of them. So now those people are back in the same boat they were in before.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
So the mistake your side makes is misunderstanding that at every incremental raise of the min wage, jobs are lost. It doesn't matter that workers have more money to spend, unless that increase in volume leads to inflation of prices, this resulting in Sally's output being worth $14+ from inflation. But your side insists min wage increases do not cause inflation and only lead to higher demand (volume). If volume demanded increases without inflation, that actually has no impact because Sally's company will not produce more units at negative margin. In fact Sally's company will produce less than before the increase in demand.
And if it does lead to inflation, Sally may not get canned, but that is a regressive cost that will hurt many lower wage workers and definitely the unemployed, whose benefits are not indexed to local inflation.
http://www.seattletimes.com/se...
http://www.cepr.net/blogs/cepr...
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I'll let yah whitewash this part of the fence if you give me a nickle.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
...and not being able to learn from THE REALITY OF WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS isn't ignorance.... it's fucking stupidity.
http://www.cepr.net/blogs/cepr...
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
ganjadude didn't claim that the people earning just above minimum wage will have a reduced wage.But he is claiming that reduced incentive to do good work occurs when people get a raise for no good reason. What's worse is that with a mandated minimum wage increase there is bound to be people who don't deserve it get a raise anyway all the while someone working their ass off who were earning just above that wage don't get a proportional wage increase. Do they not work hard to earn a living? The same excuses for raising minimum wage can apply to those earning just above minimum wage but those people are left out in the cold. Anyone who believes raising minimum wage helps the min. wage workers is a socialist who relies on the gov't to even the playing field. Since when was the job or the job's wage ever the problem? I had a minimum wage job when I was in high school. Pretty much everyone did. Did I like getting that amount of money? It was fine at the time but everyone always wants more. But the mechanism for getting more is to do more work, accept more responsibility, gain to new skills, etc. to *JUSTIFY* the wage increase. It's typical immaturity that motivates people to demand a higher wage w/o providing their employer a requisite tradeoff in more output for that wage increase. The real world doesn't give raises just because you have a child to feed or have a car payment. The real world gives raises when you do something to earn it. And if your skills, experience, etc. outpace what the employer can pay you accordingly then YOU move on to fix the problem because the problem isn't the job in that case, and it never is. If someone wants more money they find the job that pays more but employees have to realize that they have to do a proportional amount of work to earn that money. Too many people nowadays except so much for free and expect it now. To use your logic, do they want to get reimbursed everytime they have another child to raise? Minimum wage is just that. It was never intended to be a livable wage. Livable wages are those above minimum wage that people move up to, at least those people who have the initiative and intelligence to do so.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
IF they really worked hard to get $15.50 and the business paid them that much because of hard work, then they have a very powerful tool to ask for an increase "are you going to pay me minimum wage for all the hard work ?".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
In a sense, minimum wage is just a best effort to re-balance the market distortion introduced by the social safety net. Were there no net, people being paid less than it costs to live would be forced to quit either because their health would decline from the privation or because they would be too busy dealing drugs and robbing people to show up for work. Then wages would go up to bring people in who won't quit, go to jail, or die or the business would fold up and go away.
Since we find high crime, shanty towns, and riots undesirable, we introduced the social safety net. A side effect is that it becomes possible to capture people in a situation where they are paid less than it costs to live and the taxpayers get stuck for the rest. The minimum wage seeks to patch that up to the extent possible.
The sad reality is that people were forced to accept minimum wage jobs in the big crash and many are still stuck there because Wall Street recovered a hell of a lot faster than Main Street.
the government collects 30 times as much in taxes in CONSTANT DOLLARS as they did in 1940
Bullshit the inflation from 1940 is already ~15 times. In fact looking at your next sentences:
Now, they ran a deficit in 1940 as well, but let's think about this for a minute. If $135 Billion in 1940 would have been enough to make ends meet, then how come with three times the population now, it takes $3.2 trillion?
Because 135 billion alone in 1940 is 2.2 trillion to 2.3 trillion of today in constant dollar. Any CPI calculator will confirm that baring a few % +/-. The delta of 900 million is from federal programs which did NOT exists in 1940. From environmental protection, drug enforcement, NASA, EPA, etc...etc...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
You misunderstood him. He says "there's an optimum level of any given factor"; that means that below that optimum, you improve things by increasing the minimum wage, and above it, you make things worse.
The only way this could be a more blatant "Conservative" Propaganda site is if they named it Hitler Youth Life
Funny that Nazi Germany had declared that they too wanted to abolish class struggle, played games with a minimum wage, and had the full financial support of the labor unions.
Look up "Labour Front" and you will find the Nazi's, with a high minimum wage, job security, etc..
Still want to call the conservatives Nazis?
"His name was James Damore."
Just pay their executives a little less.
Run the numbers, dumbfuck.
"His name was James Damore."
> The economy is goods changing hands, and services being performed, for considerations, usually with money as an intermediary.
"money as an intermediary"... so... basically exactly what I said.
Yeah sure, not all transactions in the economy involve money (gee whiz, I never knew that!) but it's kind of cute what you economic nincompoops say and think it makes you sound smart.
Here, let me help you by giving you the dictionary definition: "the management of the resources of a community, country, etc., especially with a view to its productivity. "
"Ohhh, right, I'm sorry, I was wrong!"
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Feeling good and doing good are 2 different things.
Never had a public sector employee.
Government employee the headcount==empire statement is true.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
When California falls completely apart and run out of water we'll see who was right....
Their water situation is going to turn out the same way their energy situation did... with someone outside the State in partnership with someone inside the State exploiting the fact that Californias water isnt priced correctly... Enron 2.0
"His name was James Damore."
The ignorance of this one is strong.
Sorry bud, but the Unions had literally zero to do with Hostess problems.
1) Hostess had been on the verge of bankruptcy multiple times prior to them going under.
2) More importantly, the Unions had already taken multiple paycuts to keep the company afloat.
It wasn't till the management asked for another paycut and got it only to vote themselves a 300% pay RAISE that the Unions refused another paycut as the management had shown their hand and their intentions of just bleeding the company dry instead of working to keep it going.
Hostess Unions actually helped that company, it was systemic failure of management over the course of years over years that killed Hostess.
No, but if I've already worked one cheek off my ass to get my $16 an hour, and I'm working the other cheek off to stay where I'm at, I'd be tempted to say fsck it and go flip burgers for $15.
-Troll, Flamebait, and Offtopic are NOT equivalent to disagreement.
Quite true. And once a business invests in that productivity-increasing device, they lay off most of their minimum wage workers because they don't need them anymore.
Historically, unions have lead the way on minimum wages because white unionized workers wanted to keep cheaper minority workers from competing with them. This is well documented.
http://nypost.com/2013/09/17/w...
That's ok. You're just a pathetic idiot. Not all jobs are in production of goods. A store clerk isn't going to magically generate more sales just because she's paid more.
Business plans don't "require" that. The alternative business plan is to invest more in automation and technology and then fire most of the low-skill workers since they aren't needed anymore. And if, for some reason, a business can't do that, they simply close and do something different.
The Walton family has tons of wealth because their stores are convenient, cheap, and well stocked. And even if you guillotined the entire Walton family, as you seem itching to do, it wouldn't change the economics of the minimum wage one iota.
If your store is easier for someone to get to than is Wal-Mart or the like, or they like the service better than waiting half an hour for an "associate" to happen by, maybe with that extra per hour in their pockets some of these people will decide it's worth it to go to your place instead and spend the time saved with the family they see so little of because of working all the time.
People on the low end of the pay scales who get extra money spend it, which boosts the local economy, which means more jobs as more staff are hired to handle the increased business, which means even more spending which boosts the local economy which means more jobs....
It's why massive borrowing at near zero interest rates to spend on massive amounts of infrastructure repair and creation would actually be a good idea, because more people would have paychecks to spend locally.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Raising wages increases productivity, demonstrably so: http://www.raisetheminimumwage...
The main reason why raising the minimum wage increases productivity: When the labor cost increases, it becomes more important to use it efficiently - optimizing routines, buying tools and equipment and automating. This has worked very well in Northern Europe - if your business plan demands a salary too low to live on, go think up something else. Also, all your competitors have to pay the same wage - a crucial factor.
If you want to see the other side of the coin, look at third world countries - available capital and know-how is low. You will have large groups of people manually digging, carrying materials to the top of buildings etc.
There's a comic book store up there, or maybe it's in San Francisco, that's complaining, but another way of looking at it is that there are actually too many comic book stores in the area for the demand and that the workers have been subsidizing the customers before now.
I'm not saying the store owner might not have an actual problem, but apparently he's not anticipating any increase in demand for his merchandise despite more people in the community having more money available to spend.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
When all those robots, replacing people at burger places start getting my order right.
Why not be next month! $15/hr is a perfectly acceptable and reasonable wage, how can anyone appose it? It does not take 5 years to give people a wage they can live on, this is a joke, sign it into law to be started by next month.
Just the name "Red Alert Politics" says something about their strategy, and the strategy of many other similar outlets. They have to whip people into an emotional frenzy where reason is discarded, which is how they turn members of the working class against their own interests. Sometimes they trigger such a state using religion, or race, or an emotional appeal to the instinct to protect children. As some of these things have come to mean less to people, "invisible hand"/money-worshipping nonsense preached with an air of authority have taken a big place in the arsenal. Regardless of the specific methods used to invoke a state of blind "red alert"... the goal is always to obscure the vulnerable reader's chance of thinking about the issues critically. Bonus points if your material reinforces what the reader thinks he already knows. A consistent voice of garbage from many sources is highly effective.
they lay off most of their minimum wage workers because they don't need them anymore.
You are quite right. The savings in labor are then passed right along to the consumer who uses it to hire the worker doing some other task which cannot be robot automated as easily, such as, to give a trivial example, baby sitting.
That's the history of capitalism. You don't seem to believe on it, so I take it you are a Marxist.
wanted to keep cheaper minority workers from competing with them.
Perhaps so in the US, but the world just happen to be a smidgen larger than that. So your point is rather irrelevant.
You're right, let's get ahead of the game now and make the minimum wage in LA $1,000/hr. Better yet, do it at the Federal level
You see often cited as conservative/republican mouth point. But this is an utter stupid viewpoint - why it is modded as insightful is beyond me. Interesting maybe at most.
The reason why this is stupid is as follow : when you rise minimum wage you rise slightly the living of people but you also partially rise inflation. Rise too much and the inflation will eat most of it. So the economic of it is to rise only slightly and try to minimize inflation. Rise it to 1000$ or 100000000$ and you got hyper inflation and your $ is worth as much as zimbabwe dollar. That type of stupid argument (1000$ hourly wage) by the way is the same slippery slope argument republican make for gay mariage "but then after that they will want to marry horse or multiple people or children"
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
it doesn't raise the amount of money in the system unless more money is printed
That's not what he said.
increases the amount of money flowing in the economy
Don't confuse the stock of money, which might be sitting idle, with the flow of money. It's the difference between measuring distance or velocity.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
The only way this could be a more blatant "Conservative" Propaganda site is if they named it Hitler Youth Life
The irony is that you seem to not know what the actual name of the Nazi party really was:
We called them the Nazi Party in English, but their actual abbreviation was "NSDAP"
What does that stand for in German?
National Socialist German Workers' Party
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
Read up, you might learn something...
You are quite right. The savings in labor are then passed right along to the consumer who uses it to hire the worker doing some other task which cannot be robot automated as easily, such as, to give a trivial example, baby sitting.
The U6 unemployment rate would seem to indicate that there is a limit to this.
Not all workers are suited to all possible jobs.
Exactly. ...
Raise min wage --> raise price of goods/services --> raise min wage -->
You can end this cycle by keeping basic needs at a reasonable cost so that you need to raise minimum wage constantly. Basic needs include housing, electricity, food, clothing, travel, medical services, etc. That is, have a low tier of above services and products anyone min. wage person can afford.
If your business requires paying wages that are so low that your workers can't make a living and to survive are still welfare and foodstamps (that my tax dollars pay for) despite working full time then your business plan is broken.
You assume those are the only two options...
Lets say the min wage was raised to $30/hr tomorrow...
Does this mean McDonald's is screwed? Does this mean that all current McDonald's workers get a GREAT PAY RAISE?
No, of course not... It suddenly would make sense to completely automate a McDonald's restaurant, you'd have one or two $30/hr managers and the rest would be robots.
Yes, yes, you say that people would be needed to service and maintain the robots. Yes, but most of the people losing their jobs aren't remotely qualified for that job and you won't need a million of them.
---
I challenge you to look up the number of people who work in fast food in this country, imagine if half of them lost their jobs to robots tomorrow.
What would they all do?
How about I give you a third option? Stop being so greedy and expecting more than 20% profit. You can do that, right?
If you're happy with 10% profit, by all means, start a business and run that existing business out of business by undercutting them.
Or are you all talk?
No wonder they are small business owners:
1) they hate employees!
2) The key to growing your two bit operation is hiring people smarter than you and let them do their thing.
3) Given that they are not willing to pay a decent wage, is it any wonder that the only thing they manage t hire are headaches?
Complaining, but still up and running? I'll bet there's probably people in the area complaining about the last time his prices went up too, but I'll bet he still did it.
Even if the editors had endless queue of high quality submissions about bits, bytes, and physical and biological sciences, they would throw some political stories in the mix. The reason is because only a relative few readers are qualified to discuss the latest in astrophysics, let's say, but anyone can jump in and talk about politics.
I think the typical Slashdot reader can discuss politics better than the typical pundit I see on TV news. I can usually find comments that are more insightful and focused on the issues than I get from, say, Hillary Clinton. Or GWB.
As Socrates said, the artisans and tradesmen were the only ones who actually knew anything.
If you really believe that a minimum wage can increase the welfare of poor people, why not raise it to $500/hour? Then we can all be rich!
That's how corporate executives became rich.
Yes, indeed. Unfair.
Also, I could spend all day making a better hunting spear, only for others to come steal it from me by force.
It is because life is unfair, that we are all having to try to find better systems that work better for everyone.
Like the guys who go round killing rhinos to sell the horns, they just say, "life is unfair, I have nothing, why shouldn't I get something for myself?"
Minimum wage may or may not be a good idea (my guess is it isn't), but "life is unfair" is a moot point, because every human is every other human's problem, one way or another.
Funny thing, if you actually do the math, it's not really helping us that much. If you have ever actually ordered something direct from a Chinese company, you know the savings are not being passed on to the consumer at all.
Consider, there's what, about an hour of human labor in assembling an iPhone (a mostly automated process)?
(While you're at it, also explain why businesses would pay $15/h for a worker who doesn't increase revenue by significantly more than $15 for each hour he works.)
They wouldn't, but a well-managed business should be profitable enough to pay its workers $15/h. If American businesses can't afford to pay their workers at least $15/h, then the American economic system is a failure. If we had a free international market in employment, workers would be leaving for higher-wage European countries.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/fr...
Frederick E. Allen
12/21/2011
How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much
In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germany’s big three car companies—BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen—are very profitable.
How can that be? The question is explored in a new article from Remapping Debate, a public policy e-journal. Its author, Kevin C. Brown, writes that “the salient difference is that, in Germany, the automakers operate within an environment that precludes a race to the bottom; in the U.S., they operate within an environment that encourages such a race.”
There are “two overlapping sets of institutions” in Germany that guarantee high wages and good working conditions for autoworkers. The first is IG Metall, the country’s equivalent of the United Automobile Workers. Virtually all Germany’s car workers are members, and though they have the right to strike, they “hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties,” according to Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive. The second institution is the German constitution, which allows for “works councils” in every factory, where management and employees work together on matters like shop floor conditions and work life. Mund says this guarantees cooperation, “where you don’t always wear your management pin or your union pin.”
Mund points out that this goes against all mainstream wisdom of the neo-liberals. We have strong unions, we have strong social security systems, we have high wages. So, if I believed what the neo-liberals are arguing, we would have to be bankrupt, but apparently this is not the case. Despite high wages . . . despite our possibility to influence companies, the economy is working well in Germany.
At Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant, the nonunionized new employees get $14.50 an hour, which rises to $19.50 after three years.
http://www.remappingdebate.org...
A tale of two systems
By Kevin C. Brown
Remapping Debate
Dec. 21, 2011
American autoworkers are constantly told that high-wage work is an unsustainable relic in the face of a hyper-competitive, globalized marketplace. Apostles of neo-liberal economic theory — both in the public and private sectors — have stressed the message that worker adaptation is necessary to survive....
But the case of German automakers — BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen — tells a different story. Each company produces vehicles not only in Germany, but also in “transplant” factories in the U.S. The former are characterized by high wages and high union membership; the U.S. plants pay lower wages and are located in so-called “right-to-work” (anti-union) states. ... the UAW has made significant concessions on wages, especially through the creation of a permanent “Tier
Yeah that Volkswagen is a dead duck.
No, but if most of your customers are getting paid more, they can buy more.
If you pay restaurant staff enough so that they too can afford to eat in restaurants, is this bad for the restaurant industry?
Quite true. And once a business invests in that productivity-increasing device, they lay off most of their minimum wage workers because they don't need them anymore.
Historically, unions have lead the way on minimum wages because white unionized workers wanted to keep cheaper minority workers from competing with them. This is well documented.
http://nypost.com/2013/09/17/w...
Cherry-picking quotations over the last 100 years of labor relations by black conservative Thomas Sowell in the New York Post is not "well documented".
One of the main reasons for the black middle class is union wages. Unions reflect American society, and there are a few racist, exclusionary unions, but the big unions, like the UAW, SEIU, teachers' unions, garment workers, etc., were some of the institutions with the greatest racial equality in America. They argued that they didn't want their white workers to compete with low-paid black workers; they wanted to bring low-paid black workers into the unions and bring their wages up.
You can walk into the housing projects in New York City built by unions and see people of all races living side by side.
I am an employer and I actually like my employees a lot. They are smart, they work hard, coming to the office every day is basically a joy. I try to make their life as easy and as productive as possible, and I pay them as much as I can. They know this, and this works pretty well.
I believe that if every employer actually saw their employees as human beings who are doing the best they can, and treat them accordingly, the world would be a much better place.
$1/hour more than you pay them
Because an employee is worth less than $3000 in increased profit to a business? Hell no. There's no way someone would go through the hassle of employing someone for such a thin margin.
I do agree this adds stress to the idea of keeping employees, but realistically stress is all there is. If a business goes under because someone has to pay an employee a few dollars more then the business was very poorly managed and likely to go under anyway.
Yep there is a really clear difference, I would much rather work downtown too where they pay a decent wage. Why would I work in the $10/hour area?
Your argument is... what, exactly? That skilled jobs in engineering, accountancy, nursing, medicine, architecture, law, and even trades like plumbing, carpentry, HVAC, mechanics, etc are somehow being automated away and are less secure than minimum wage jobs at McDonald's?
As an example, take printing. Printing used to be a skilled job. In New York City, we had a High School of Printing, and everyone who graduated could get a well-paid job with lots of opportunities for anyone who was skilled, resourceful and willing to work hard. Then in the 1970s and 1980s there were changes to the economic structure of the industry. Big, high-volume presses on the west coast had huge efficiencies of scale. Small print shops disappeared. Computer printers replaced smaller jobs. The newspaper and magazine business collapsed. Direct mail collapsed. Printers couldn't get work any more. They retired early. New York City closed the High School of Printing. Yes, the jobs were automated away.
New York had lots of industries like that. (And that's the entire New York region, including New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, etc.)
Medicine is not a great source of employment on the lower level. Medical assistants are low-paid clerks (often minimum wage). Medical billing is low-paid work. Home care attendants, the fastest-growing segment, is a minimum wage job.
Medical secretaries are disappearing. Legal secretaries are disappearing. Those used to be well-paid skilled jobs.
There are structural changes in the economy since the 1980s. A big part of that is international competition. American workers can't compete with Chinese workers making $20 a day. US unemployment is higher, it's harder to get work, and the work pays less. Middle-class Americans are making about as much now as they were making in 1980. All of the increases in productivity and wealth have gone to the upper-income levels. Vocational school used to guarantee you a good job. It doesn't any more.
Likewise, a third option is you could reduce your net revenue.
That's assuming you CAN reduce your net revenue. Most small business owners I know pay their
employees almost as much as they themself make and many actually make less than what they
could make working for someone else. They own a small business because they enjoy it but they
will close their doors if their payroll increases by 20k because the money just isn't there.
If your business isn't profitable enough that it can deal with an unexpected increase of $20K, then it won't last through all the other unexpected expenses that businesses have to ride through. What if you sell coffee and a fungus drives the price of coffee up? What if your town shuts down for a week because of a tornado? What if your truck gets wrecked?
What if you sell coffee and a fungus drives the price of coffee up? What if your town shuts down for a week because of a tornado? What if your truck gets wrecked?
All these events, if occasional, can be mitigated by saving / investment. If regular, most businesses will shut down.
Are you saying this is about raising the wages for some month only when certain astrological patterns are seen, on an average one month a year?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
These theoretical economic arguments are very interesting.
However, they don't predict the actual empirical facts. There are European countries with minimum and average wages much higher than ours, and they don't have those problems. If a business is profitable and efficient, it can afford to pay $15 or even $30 an hour. If it's not profitable and efficient, we don't need them. Let them go out of business and be replaced by a more efficient operator who can make better use of that capital.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/fr...
How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much
Frederick E. Allen
12/21/2011
In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germany’s big three car companies—BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen—are very profitable.
http://www.remappingdebate.org...
A tale of two systems
By Kevin C. Brown
Remapping Debate
Dec. 21, 2011
American autoworkers are constantly told that high-wage work is an unsustainable relic in the face of a hyper-competitive, globalized marketplace. Apostles of neo-liberal economic theory — both in the public and private sectors — have stressed the message that worker adaptation is necessary to survive....
But the case of German automakers — BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen — tells a different story. Each company produces vehicles not only in Germany, but also in “transplant” factories in the U.S. The former are characterized by high wages and high union membership; the U.S. plants pay lower wages and are located in so-called “right-to-work” (anti-union) states.
You might consider a third option. Reducing executive compensation.
That's the thing that needs to happen throughout the economy.
Then executives would be unmotivated. Instead of making things, they would just sit around the house watching TV and sniffing cocaine.
Remember Ernest Rutherford, the arrogant physicist who was saying that all of science is either physics or stamp collecting?. Here on Slashdot, because many of us are self or well-employed developers and computer scientists, we think that we can easily figure out even the most vexing problems relating to the economy. In particular minimum wages are of course for slackers, never mind that first summer job we got ages ago.
How about some interesting myth busters?.
http://federal-budget.insidego...
"The U.S. government collected $80.9B in tax revenues and spent a total of $117B in its 1940 budget" So it was not 135 but 117, which is near enough but nowhere near the inflation adjusted number. I call BS on that because an inflation adjusted number for 135 would be around 10 billion 1940 dollar.
By the way the number is confirmed by government spend in % of GDP : it was 10% in 1940 a year which was *specially* suspiciously used, and it was between 16% and 22% ever since after WW2. The fact that in percentage GDP it stayed stable or had barely growth completely destroy the original argument.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
As an economist, I could not agree more. If the minimumwage is higher than the equilibrium price, that will cause unemployment. However, have you considered the possibility that the equilibrium price rises if wages rise? If I have a shop in LA, yes I will have to pay a higher wage to the guy helping me stock the shelves. But if at the same time, the people who frequent my shop buy more stuff, I may still need him to prevent my customers from seeing empty shelves and moving to a competitor down the street. So in effect, raising the minimum wage has increased the equilibrium price of having a guy help me stock shelves as I stand to lose more if customers go elsewhere in that circumstance. Now that still doesn't tell me whether THIS increase in the minimum wage increases unemployment or not. For example because what we also don't know is what the current equilibrium price is. You seem to assume that is lies somewhere near the current minimumwage. Why? If I look at profits for corporations, I might assume that the equilibrium wage is considerably higher than the current minimumwage. What if the equilibrium price for most labor in LA is already 14 dollars an hour or more? And the fact that millions are paid less than 14 dollars an hour just means more money in the pocket for a few business owners 2000 miles away? In that case I would expect the increase of the minimumwage to have a beneficial effect on employment. After all, it would mean a huge increase in wages for many people who live and spend locally, at the detriment of some business-owners who may live thousands of miles away, and even if they live in the area certainly will not consume every bit of their earnings locally. The increase in wages could even very well push the equilibrium price to a level higher than 15$ an hour.
We need more of this around the world. It can't be that people work 3 jobs and barely get by why others buy a new car every year or a new cellphone or whatnot and do no more important stuff than the cleaning lady or the cook. ... And no, shoving around papers or hacking up the next bazillionth Twitter or IRC clone or setting up the next Wordpress installation that's going to be totally abandoned 15 months in is not more imporant than cleaning. Emphasis mine!
If it's not worth paying 15$ it's probably not worth being done by a human in the first place and should be left or automated. And if you're not ready to spend 15$ but insist you have cleaning personell you're an asocial *sshole and ought to clean up your own dirt.
My 3 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
There aren't that many high paying wage or wage that pay above 15$ an hour and there is already a fierce competition for them.
Companies cannot find enough people with even modest intellectual skills to hire (and retain) for even modestly skilled jobs with much better than minimum wages paid. Hell, there are landscaping companies around here who will pay $20/hour for anyone that will consistently show up to shovel. Costco hires even the most basic, unskilled shelf-stackers for well above minimum wage (closer to $19).
Are you one of those which think the poor are lazy ?
Actually, in many cases that's exactly the problem. But kids born in to families where doing the work needed to become a decent high school graduate is considered unimportant or too much trouble have lazy parents to thank for that - the kids themselves usually don't know better until it's already too late to form decent habits.
You need money for a proper education
No, no you don't. The taxpayers around you will pay for your education through high school. And if you've don't anything even close to working hard, you'll have the academic background needed to get anything from substantial subsidies to full scholarships in higher education. I worked while in college, to have money. Did you?
Frankly your kind of thought are so short sighted , you should get glasses for your brain.
You have no idea where prosperity comes from, apparently.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
You might consider a third option. Reducing executive compensation. That's the thing that needs to happen throughout the economy.
Why don't we just annoint you wage czar, and you can set everyone's pay. Since you seem to think you've got what everyone is worth all figured out, and market forces need not apply.
Minimum wage is the base rate for for most workers. If the minimum is 16K a year, entry level for skilled labor is 20-22K, 2 year 25K, 4 year, under 30K. My employer has been starting Bachelor Degree'd fresh outa college at 27K. If the minimum was 20-25K, they would have to pay college graduates better. The money is certainly there, we are making record sales & record profits.
Why have wages been flat for so long now? Holding the min wage down is part of the reason. The money is certainly there. Everyone deserves a cut.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
Increasing the minimum wage will lead to employers looking to ways to minimize the high cost of labor. Automation such as voice recognition for order taking is one such example. Robots, even as simple as Siri, will take the low end jobs and then more people will be out of jobs and competing for the lowest paid jobs. Look at what happened in Detroit and other areas like that which now have very high unemployment rates. Government price fixing produces problems.
I'm curious to see whether we will see a flood of immigration to cities with the high minimum wage, and a corresponding increase in cost of living that effectively negates the effects of the higher wage through reduced purchasing power.
You're paying $5 for a burger because the burger costs $3, the labor $1, and $1 is extracted as profit (arbitrarily).
In this scenario, how is the $3 for a burger broken out into labor and non-labor costs?
I am an employer and I actually like my employees a lot. They are smart, they work hard, coming to the office every day is basically a joy. I try to make their life as easy and as productive as possible, and I pay them as much as I can. They know this, and this works pretty well.
I believe that if every employer actually saw their employees as human beings who are doing the best they can, and treat them accordingly, the world would be a much better place.
I watch a show called Bar Rescue. The bar is failing for a number of reasons, mostly because ownership or management doesn't get it done. A consultant comes in and tries to fix the place and set it on a path to success.
In many episodes, the owner blames the employees for his failures. In most of the bars, the employees are just kinda there, doing what they are told with no ambition. Some bars have some real star workers in them--but no bar is full of these kind of people. They are rare among the staff. A slew of others are not smart, hard working, or come to the office on time every day.
That's the issue with these minimum wage jobs: a chunk of the workers are there because they have no drive or ambition to do anything better. Treating them as people who are doing "the best they can" is like saying everyone should be treated like a king. A percentage of workers are *NOT* doing the best they can. The boss basically has to order them around to get anything out of them.
Really, the world would be a better place if everyone worked hard all the time. But not everyone does.
In fairness, the point is made that the price is printed on the cover so he can't exceed that.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Everybody posting comments on this article is required to add either the words "... in the long term", or "... in the short term".
If either of these phrases is omitted, the comment will be modded down.
You have been warned.
Wasn't it an economist who said something like "In the long term, we're all dead."?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
$15 really isn't that much, especially in LA. Why not make it, say, $25?
Spoken like who has NEVER worked in a large corp (10,000+) where number of employees is a status symbol. Who will gladly pickup that extra work small companies won't, because that large corp has figured out how to scale their business.
Great. So all the small businesses go out of business and everyone works for a handful of big megacorporations. I know this is where we are heading but I'm not sure it's the best place to go
as then the individual loses all that remains of any negotiating power.
2) The key to growing your two bit operation is hiring people smarter than you and let them do their thing.
Not every business or business model works that way. Mcdonalds would go out of business
tomorrow if they hired people "smarter than them". As this article is about minimum wage
then most of the people we are talking about are NOT smarter than the business owner or
they wouldn't be on minimum wage. Most businesses require some form of "cheap" labor
and most if not all of that cheap labor is less smart than the business owner or it wouldn't
be cheap anymore.
It's very rarely enforced - there's no trick and it won't change. Both the corporate republicans and socialist democrat branches block needed reforms.
If you really believe that a minimum wage can increase the welfare of poor people, why not raise it to $500/hour? Then we can all be rich!
And if you really believe that a long-overdue increase in minimum wage is going to bankrupt American corporations, then I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. Only driven on by a little old lady on her way to church, a real bargain!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
and he posted at 11:42PM he probably typed that in the nude, so no.
Imagine: you want to sell your car for $4000, and I want to buy it for $4000. Now imagine the government tells you can't sell the car for that price, so the deal is off.
What is the difference between that, and mandatory minimum wage?
Stop the flood of illegals, and stop the flood of visa workers, and wages would rise naturally from the laws of supply and demand.
Yes, it was Keynes, the declared darling of Democrats, and the secret darling of Republicans.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
So you stopped reading at the name, and trusted the Nazis to not lie to you?
And they were socialist in name only, essentially. Their blend of nationalism, military-industrial complex governing the country, etc. aren't at all socialist, and those were the driving forces behind their position. Hitler didn't instigate a single welfare program under his leadership, and in fact closed many, opting to send people to work camps or have them killed, or simply let them starve. Vanity and Nazi-favouring programs were instigated, but they were small in reach and designed to be propaganda from the very beginning. The genuine welfare systems which were in place during his rule were there before he gained power. They even privatised great swathes of the country's infrastructure & defense, including privatising 13 of the country's arsenals.
You might want to learn a thing or two yourself!
So, if it costs too much they'll automate and you'll pay to support them anyway. Here's the thing - you can either find jobs for people and let them work (or force them to work, Kim Jong Il), you can support them (either in their homes or poorhouses or prisons), or you can let them die of starvation. You can manage the process or let it go on chaotically - that's about it. Which of these options are you going to choose?
That is all.
That's your argument? If you blow the numbers out to orders of magnitudes greater, it stops making sense? What a surprise! What are you going to do next? Refuse to fill your car's tank because if you tried to put 10,000 gallons in it it wouldn't fit? Not buy a single coffee because you can't drink 50 at a go? Amazing.
If they do, that is. And then only until they get new jobs at the newly-appearing competition. Without changing anything, you will be paying for Walmart's employees' food indefinitely.
(While you're at it, also explain why businesses would pay $15/h for a worker who doesn't increase revenue by significantly more than $15 for each hour he works.)
Like anyone is making that calculation. If you don't bill your hours no one can say whether you have increased the company's revenue by your salary. I kept the email servers running all year last year. Tell me how much I increased the company's revenue by doing that. Please show your work.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
While you are pulling accusations out from where the Sun don't shine, tovarisch, why not accuse him of being in favor of raping puppies? Sounds a lot more impressive and is just as well-substantiated...
Highly possible, there comrade.
Reality checks for the cognitively disconnected tend to produce your raping puppies comment.
But beyond that, we differ. I do not want my tax dollars to be used to provide a babysitter for someone working at Walmart or McDonalds (substitute business of your choice) - do you?
But at the same time, I do not want WalMart to be subsidized by the government either. Do you?
Over time, the costs of living have gone up, and at the present minimum wage, it just isn't enough to sustain a family, (remember families are the bedrock of society) So should they all remain single and childless?
We hear from some that these minimum wage jobs should not be considered real jobs, thought of like jobs for teenagers saving up for the prom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
But given that the USA's largest employer is using the government subsidized process, I'm not certain that one stands the reality test. Our local one sports many adults.
Because not everyone is going to be an engineer, or scientist, or MBA. There are simply going to be people on the bottom rung of the ladder, and given that the largest employer in the country keeps them there, (where are they gonna go?) it seems like a pseudo conservative version of the liberal's "you can be anything you want to be, honey!" - while "Let it Go" plays in the background.
So what do you do? Embrace the concept of people living in shantytowns, almost like America 2? I keep coming back to America's largest employer, not because of any special dislike, but because of that immense size. Because I don't want the government paying for these people's living - I can't imagine anyone, conservative, pseudo-conservative or liberal thinking that is at all the right path to go down.
But reality is these places employ a lot of people, they don't pay them a living wage, and I am paying for it - you too.
All of my shock talk is just attempts to get people to think about things when they have been inculcated with party line so deeply that just like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland - “Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Somehow that doesn't jibe with "The Government that governs least, governs best".
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Randall lives in Boston, and what little politics has been in his comics, he is likely to believe that LA is doing the right thing despite the 100 years or so of proof that minimum wage increases cause more problems than they solve.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Read the comment again. You are responding to someone who believes that everyone should be paid the average of all production. This is a socialist comment, if the minimum wage was 25$ per hour, EVERYONE would make 25$ per hour. There wouldn't be any more money for anyone making more than that.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I think you have this backward. If you believe that taking a job that pays minimum wage is suppose to pay a living wage then your already in trouble. There are too many people that can do those jobs to justify a higher wage, and the service that they provide is not invaluable enough. A person will only pay so much for a burger before they just decide to buy a loaf a bread and cold cuts at the grocery store and make their own sandwich. Flipping burgers was never meant to be a life long career choice.
If you're so stuck in a rut then seek help! There are many programs both provided by the government, non-profits, communities, and churches that can help you qualify for better employment.
Isn't called "Ecomomics" when money is involved?
If I'm running a business, and my payroll increases 30% while sales remain flat, I have two options: 1) slow or stop hiring, cut staff, or even go out of business; 2) raise prices to reflect the increase in wage expenses;
I don't see how either of those outcomes is very good for poor people struggling to get by on $15 an hour, even though we can console ourselves that we've "done something" to help them. Now, I am, admittedly, not an economist - perhaps it will work, or at least, it will help. But I really have sincere doubts that this is going to do much to really change the dynamic at the low end of the economic spectrum. I think it will largely end up being a feel-good measure that well-off, well-meaning people can use to congratulate themselves about, while doing nothing to change the fundamental reality of low wages and poverty.
The example you give only applies to a subset of businesses. Most will not have to go out of business because they have to pay people at least $15 an hour. A few little mom and pop's maybe. But Walmart is not making that calculation, nor is Target or Costco. They can easily absorb the increase in labor costs, and their profit will go from ridiculous to merely astounding. Besides, people's wages are companies revenue. Studies have shown that increasing the minimum wage can stimulate the economy by enabling people to spend more. This is most effective at the bottom of the income range because those people will spend the increase rather than saving it. So increasing labor costs is not the only dynamic at play.
I agree that this will not solve poverty or income inequality. But it's a step in the right direction. Our economy is supposedly 70% consumer-driven. It makes sense then that increasing the buying power among those most likely to use it would have an overall positive effect.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Right, and spenders will not suddenly become lousy at seeking bargains. Which means my "little local shop" is going to get skull-fucked by the only type of company that can survive in this brave new world: mega-chains that can leverage their massive scales of economy to save a few cents on every bottle of shampoo they sell, and thus undersell my prices, and put me out of business.
I'm sure we'll all be very happy working at minimum wage for super-mega-giant-corp, but do you see that "more spending power" is simply going to result in the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a handful of large corporate CEOs? Nobody else will be able to afford the employees, and the employees will take their hard-earned minimum wage dollars where those dollars will stretch the furthest.
Great for efficiency. Lousy for people.
Well, that's happening anyway regardless of the minimum wage. It seems your problem is more with modern American Capitalism, where the strong eat the weak and low prices are all that matters, than with a hike in the minimum wage.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Correction, I meant to say "bell-shaped" curve, not "bell curve". The second is a specific family of curves. (No Kardashian puns intended.)
Table-ized A.I.
Easy. Because his products are not priced for minimum wage makers. The poor guy who makes the Ferrari likely doesn't get paid an income which would allow him to buy one. Even by doubling his pay.
The profit margin on such goods is high. As such they will take option two from above an reduce their net revenue.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I'm not "cherry picking quotations from Sowell", this is a clear statement he has made over and over again, and he has documented it very well. Read his publications to find a lot of support.
Really? Unlike Sowell's well-documented charge of racism, I have seen no evidence for that at all. Why don't you provide some citations to academic sources? In fact, economically, since unions represent such a small percentage of the workforce, that statement is implausible.
Question: *when* and *where* was this?
I mean, my very first junior sysadmin job paid around $15/hr - but that was in Arkansas, during the early 1990's. The former was legendary for low cost-of-living/low-wages, and the latter accounts for inflation betwixt then and now.
Pretty sure that nowadays, in any decently tech-savvy city, you're not going to find a job in tech that pays less than $15/hr... well, unless you're an intern who got a shit assignment.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You might consider a third option. Reducing executive compensation.
That's the thing that needs to happen throughout the economy.
It's funny how top executive compensation doesn't seem to be subject to the same downward pressure that lower wages are subject to. I wonder why that is. Surely you could find someone to take those jobs for less money. Yet we somehow don't hear that argument.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
A big problem with MW jobs isn't just the shitty per-hour rate, but the shitty number of hours. $15/h is nice but not so helpful if you only get 10h/week.
I wonder if anywhere has address a "minimum weekly pay" or something of the like, which would put pressure on businesses to actually provide regular staff with useful hours rather than just bringing in a ton of people all at unlivable hours. The latter tends to put people in situations where they're working multiple jobs to get enough pay-hours for bills, but go through hell trying to get their hours to line up (because generally they're also not consistent) and have no time for any personal life.
Even though research shows that raising the minimum wage helps the workforce, I'm sure you're entirely correct! Muppet.
You need raw materials, equipment, tools
How much of the cost of producing raw materials is labor? How much of the cost of producing equipment is labor?
LOL! Wipes tear from eye. Wow. Just wow.
That is so wrong. This has been tried for the last number of decades. It absolutely does not work. This was justification for tax breaks for the rich. As it turns out the rich manage to pretty much stay rich by not spending their money. We see today more than ever before a disparity between the rich and poor. That whole 1% thing remember? They fact that you mention "Trickle Down Economics" and in the same breath call someone else "economic illiterate" is just marvelous. I bet you think that the invisible hand of the market solves all issues as well?
While you are right, in one sense, governments are pretty limited in what they can really achieve, they do have an important part to play in regulation, if only to try to prevent groups of people from gaming the system to further enriching themselves at the unfair cost of others. One can argue how successful they are in that, particularly in the USA, where the regulators are in bed with the industries they are supposed to be regulating, receiving monetary donations for favorable considerations.
As to the minimum wage increase. It has little to do with economics. It has more to do with the protection of the most vulnerable citizens. One might argue about the what the ultimate role of government really is, but generally speaking taking care of those people who make up the nation certainly qualifies. In a secondary way, it is also a cost saving measure if said government ends up having to pay for it one way or another, through welfare, or other programs. The whole story about the minimum wage workers at Walmart being the biggest food stamp users, where essentially Walmart is gaming the system for more profit at the expense of the general tax payer.
In summery: Trickle Down economics is complete BS, and you are either A) an idiot or, B) wealthy and it is in your best interests, and who cares about anyone else, the nation you belong to included.
You forgot the option where the poor become a large and dissatisfied enough class that they force a change in the system, violently or not.
Why not implement a negative tax rate instead of a higher minimum wage? We could have the same benefits as a minimum wage with these additional benefits:
* Tie the bonus to having a job
* Burden is on government instead of business
* Don't overpay high school kiddies who aren't heads of households
Republicans are against that because they don't want to help poor people. But why are Democrats against it? just because they specifically want to burden businesses?
The company is worth a lot of money because they pay their workers minimum wage, while using its disproportionate size advantage to force suppliers to very cheap prices, while selling said goods cheaper than their competition. That is pretty much their business model. What is being said is that the workers of said company deserve some fair compensation for the accumulation of that wealth, which in the form of shares, is owned by a very few.
It is a pretty basic argument that has been around for a long time. It is pretty much how unions got started, and why Walmart fights unionization so fervently.
I bet you're the type of person that thinks the CEO that pays themselves a 1$ salary but gets 60$ Million in stocks doesn't make any income either.
The reason is because only a relative few readers are qualified to discuss the latest in astrophysics, let's say, but anyone can jump in and talk about politics.
Therein lies the problem.
Not really, think back to all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth from those convinced that the LHC was going to vomit out world eating quantum black holes, around here anybody can jump in about anything.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
My roommate mentioned this morning that LA is raising the minimum wage, and that California should do the same thing so he could make more money. I pointed out that he already made more than minimum wage in Silicon Valley (~$10 per hour), not including the commissions he gets from selling cellphones. If he spent more time learning how to sell than bitch about his boss, he would make more money.
There are two problems with this that I can think of right off the bat.
A. Full employment is a fairytale dream. Today we already have an abundance of people with 4 year degrees that are flipping burgers to scrape by because there simply are not enough jobs requiring their services. Being qualified for better work does not matter if those jobs simply do not exist. As society advances technologically we are going to have more and more unemployed and under employed people as a percentage because we need less people working to provide the goods and services that we as a society need. This is not actually a problem depending on how those people are dealt with.
B. Minimum wage was established with the intent of it being a living wage. Over time that has been eroded but there is no good reason for us not to try and fix it. The minimum wage being less than a living wage is essentially subsidizing all businesses that rely on paying their employees below a living wage. I thought we wanted a free market wherein businesses rose or fell based on their own merits, not government bailouts?
Yes, raising the minimum wage will raise the cost of all products and services that rely on minimum wage workers. That means fast food burgers will go up in price, but so will those cold cuts and bread from the grocery store. Pretty much every consumable and service you purchase will be affected in some way. The pertinent question though is how much will those costs go up, and how long will it take for the rising tide of minimum wage to also raise your own salary. The more gradual the minimum wage increase is the smother this will all happen, California's five year schedule sounds pretty reasonable to me.
So, rather than trying to actually dispute what is being said, you go off on the source of the information. I see you never learned how to think critically, perhaps that is why you make minimum wage?
So you are saying that because Fox reported this, and Red Alert Politics repeated it, that the pizza joint isn't going out of business as it can't afford to pay the payroll anymore.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Instead of trying to alleviate this travesty with a new one — minimum wage — why not undo such subsidies? If somebody does not pay "enough" for your goods or services (including labor), people look for another buyer. And if they don't, then the pay is enough — by definition.
The government inserting itself between private parties willingly engaging in a lawful transaction is an abomination. That it is done under the pretext of fixing, what it broke in the first place, makes it worse.
This is a destruction of liberty and path to totalitarianism:
All under the excuse, that we — the Collective — pay you, so you must do as we say. And, no, you can not opt-out either — our compassionate bleeding hearts would not allow you to make that stupid thing either.
As the definition of "poor" expands, the government's control of us all solidifies. Mandatory minimum wage is no different from NSA-spying and other manifestations of Collective (Glorious) trampling the rights of the Individual (cantankerous and unreasonable) — both are imposed on us "for our own good" by the people, who consider themselves our betters.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Like it or not, every business is the subject of politicians' experiments. For example, the minimum wage exists in the first place, and CA has a higher minimum wage than the federal minimum wage. Every law is an experiment because its unintended consequences are unknown. (Hell, even the intended consequences are sometimes unknown.) This experiment is getting more press than others, but the amount of press and the effect of the experiment are two very different things.
No matter how much you pay the bottom 10%, it will always be the bottom 10%. When someone does a job that can be done better by a machine, what kind of pay do they deserve?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
There are good arguments that wages, especially at the lower bound, are sticky and don't reflect a "true" market rate. The theoretical models are complex, but the evidence is simple: almost everywhere the minimum wages are imposed or increased, the predicted negative consequences invariably fail to materialise.
[FUCK BETA]
The real minimum wage is always 0. I work in Seattle, where they recently did this. Entry level places where I live (not in Seattle), where the minimum wage is $10/hour, all have help wanted signs out. In downtown Seattle, however there was a wave of restaurant closings, and I don't see help wanted signs anywhere. Could be other causes for the difference, of course, maybe it's something else - but it's not a promising sign for teens looking for that first job.
You must be talking about a different Seattle than the one I live in. I'm seeing new restaurants opening weekly where I am, Capitol Hill, and haven't heard of any large closings in downtown. Von's closed, but that was way before the minimum wage move.
Could be something else, too, of course
Here are some possibilities
1. Living so close to a place where there are $15/hr jobs, nobody wants to apply for a $10/hr job.
2. Being downtown, many people probably drop off resumes even those locations aren't hiring, so they likely don't need to advertise to get a pool of applicants.
That's almost like saying, "If consuming water is good then drowning to death in it must be better". In short, improvements are generally on a bell curve: there's an optimum level of any given factor. Too much or too little tends to create problems.
Oh no now he's talking that "voodoo Regan era economics", if this keeps up then puppies and kittens will start dying; think of the baby Harp seals!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Noticing a difference is good. Drawing a causal relationship without actual data, not so much.
Ooooh... Yeeeaaah.
Indeed. Let's strawman the minimum strawman to a billion strawmen per strawman. Then we can all be strawmen!
It could be, just guessing, that the labor is getting the $15/hr job instead of the $10/hr job, or at least there is competition for the higher paying wage and the lower offering is not getting any applicants.
You mentioned 'in the suburb', so I figure its from somewhere close by Seattle?
No wonder they are small business owners:
1) they hate employees!
2) The key to growing your two bit operation is hiring people smarter than you and let them do their thing.
3) Given that they are not willing to pay a decent wage, is it any wonder that the only thing they manage t hire are headaches?
I'm going to put this in a different perspective for you, because this is what life is like as a business owner.
Take your paycheck. Now take the equivalent of $15 / hr for a month and remove that from it. What's left is what you get paid. If you get paid less one month, you still have to pay that paycheck. If that person screws up and costs you business, you feel it, not them. If it turns out that person can't actually do the job that they were hired to do, then you can fire them but at that point you have to start paying into employment while you then hire a replacement. Also keep in mind that said employee will probably constantly complain that they aren't paid enough even though statistically, the first 5 years you are in business you the business owner will actually make nothing while working at least 12 hour days and investing / risking just about everything you have if it doesn't work out.
That, in a nutshell, is life as a business owner.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
Perhaps they would be happier being employees, then. I await their conversion to the wage earner world. I will be waiting a long, long time, won't I?
True, esp. when they expect most of their calls to be from clueless PC users, and anything more than "have you rebooted your computer" is haaard, man (as Barbie said).
Just in the last month: idiot nixspam, which is a blacklist of alleged spammers, and uses a method that's 20 years out of date (almost nobody uses an ISP that has 1000 users, total; my hosting provider has literally millions of domains), blocked my hosting provider's mail gateway. After nixidtiot's page asserted there were "too many spams", I contact my tech support by email, and forwarded them the bounce message.. In the blazing speed of a week, the tier I support managed to check *MY* HOME IP, and tell me it wasn't blocked.
After I came down, by email, like a ton of bricks on them, and the same in the "how did we do survey", a couple days later I got a response from Tier II, and a permanent tier II contact for things like this....
mark "this coffee mug holder not compatible with any other...."
You forgot the option where the poor become a large and dissatisfied enough class that they force a change in the system, violently or not.
That works, right up until the government figures out how to build battle droids...
Laugh all you want, if they actually had millions of them, your "poor violent uprising" wouldn't get 10 feet.
And to be clear, we love our employees and do actually pay them everything we can. The bottom line is that the expense and government involvement AROUND employees creates a huge risk for the business and for us financially (and personally). For every 10 good employees, you never know when there will be one problem who can ruin everybody's day unfortunately.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
Seems this entire story is full of people who think that this is capitalism. For the average american, working harder doesn't get you more money. For the "above average" american, working isn't necessary to make money....at all - it just happens. That is only going exaggerate itself over time because we can't (and, by definition, wouldn't) legislate away GREED.
In an ideal world, companies who what 100% of a person's time and dedication should pay for it. That's complicated by rising efficiency, automation, shareholders who want "their cut", and god-knows-what-else piled-on to devalue the time of an individual who just wants to provide for a family. Every job needs to be done, be it pulling teeth or cleaning floors. Reducing that need to a dollar value based on the going rate for a job lacks empathy - and it's out of control - someday it will be a revolt. Just because there are 2 or 2 million others willing to take less money doesn't mean that it's right/ethical. Every head is deserving of a living wage.
To address problem A/B more succinctly: If a company can't afford to provide a living wage to everyone who works there, IT's DONE GROWING. Those who are unemployed can start another company and go after the part of the market that you cannot (or, for sake of maintaining profits, will not) serve. The focus on short-term profits is just like cancer: unrestrained growth, for growth's sake. (At that point, you can boost productivity w/automation, but that's a considerable investment, also.)
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
So, if it costs too much they'll automate and you'll pay to support them anyway. Here's the thing - you can either find jobs for people and let them work (or force them to work, Kim Jong Il), you can support them (either in their homes or poorhouses or prisons), or you can let them die of starvation. You can manage the process or let it go on chaotically - that's about it. Which of these options are you going to choose?
I actually wouldn't object to paying to support them, if it came with the condition that they not reproduce.
The problem is the poor have more kids than the wealthy and they keep replicating themselves.
It won't end well.
No He's saying that flipping burgers at McDonalds should be a career path not a career destination. If you cleaning rooms at the Holiday Inn and don't see an opportunity for management, move to where there is an upward path.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Worth, to whom? People who work 7 buck an hour burn a hell more calories than you do, probably. Your version of their worth has a lot with your perception of yourself. Who gets what is a rigged game.
Corporations are beholden to their shareholders. When asked if I could do A for the company and it will likely be the dominate player in the market in 20 years or do B right now and pay the shareholders a 10% increase in what they were getting and it does not appear to put the company out of business in the next 5 years. The CEO running the company is pretty much required to take option B. He is working for maximum shareholder value in the near to mid term.
If my goal was to build a company from 1 person to 10 and then to hire managers to do the work and grow the company to 100 people then to 500 and to offer an IPO. then yes, I am short sited in not loving employees.
But if I like what I do and can make a bit more money by having a few employees and know I am helping some folks out by giving them a job then why not? I only have to do it if I want to. But if government regulation is to much, or dealing with employee problems is to much or if I can't turn a profit at it, why not go back to doing it by myself?
To be successful, not every business must go from starting in a garage to being Apple or HP.
For those that like it small, a minimum wage increase like this may very well mean firing everyone and going back to being your only employee.
Back in 1992 I worked for a lawyer who had about $15,000 a month in expenses but had about $95,000 a month in receivables from passive income streams. That is right he was pocketing $80,000 a month even if he did not lift a finger, or never won a case. That includes employing 5 people full time. The state was looking at instituting mandatory employer paid insurance. He could afford to pay us all 3 times minimum wage and pick up the health care costs. In reality he would have fired all 5 of us and stopped practicing law or move to another state.
If every business that employed only 5 people shut down in LA, it would put a lot of people out of work. And every business big or small will be looking for a way to dodge this. It would be much cheaper to bake bread in Bakersfield and drive it over the grapevine. Hell, you don't even have to pay the driver LA wages.
vi +
I am all for fair compensation, but am I truly frightened when U.S. workers make more in one hour than Mexican workers make in a day.
If jobs are to remain, our workforce must be far more productive than our global competition. We should be demanding more worker education, which would likely impact wages far more than legislative mandate. Simply making the workforce more expensive with no realistic improvements will only enlarge the class of the permanent unemployed.
Regardless of where minimum wage goes or does not go. Labour needs to be valued higher. Over the last few decades we have increased in efficiencies so that we need less labour to produce more, though we have not increased what we value labour at. So we have been able to produce more, from less (both labour and materials), but that trade off has not helped increase labour costs.
A re-balancing needs to happen where we value labour more than we do other costs of business, then maybe everything might slowly shift back into focus where Walmart employes can afford to shop at Walmart for the goods that cost very little to make in the first place.
It would be interesting to see the ratio of labour costs vs material costs it took to produce various types of objects in the past vs now... I realize its hard to compare on a quality perspective as many items we use day to day are much more productive than those in the past due to invention/inovation, but I'm sure there are some examples and I would think the ratio has moved towards more cost on the materials and less on labour than they did in the past.
I kept the email servers running all year last year. Tell me how much I increased the company's revenue by doing that. Please show your work.
I suspect the revenue savings/increase is the difference between keeping you employed there and, say, renting Office 360 (and yes, they'll happily provide enterprise-scale mail for a corporation, for a price.) No real work required to come to that conclusion.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I do sympathize, but that is between him and the publisher. Of course, that only applies to new issues. He can do what he wants (within reason) with old issues and with other related merchandise.
But my point is that everyone complains when the price goes up but that doesn't mean it wasn't necessary and it doesn't make it go back down. I asked for an example of a business 'going broke' in Seattle and all I've got is one that's complaining.
That's pretty much the story of the cheap labor conservative in a nutshell.
The root of the problem is that low wage employees are often poor negotiators, and are not in a position of strength to begin with. They are easily taken advantage of by explotative employers, and landlords. Some checks and balances need to be in place to protect this class of workers, but there also needs to be incentives for the minimum wage worker to improve thier own marketability in the job market.
The biggest expense for a minimum wage worker is housing.
Just rasing the minimum wage will cause rents to rise as landlords will be in a position of strength. Some areas have rent control which would mitigate this,
but I would expect landlords would increase rents in the low end of the market to capture some of this money.
Minimum wage coupled with rent control might be workable if food and transportation costs are kept marginal.
All of this artifical control will mess with the markets, but markets can't be left to 100% capitalist control. There have to be limits.
People were paid 18/hour in 1966 to work like a dog at McDonald's (you've never worked a restaurant chain job, I see). And the corporation grew into fantastically profitable giant. Seemed to work.
And people who get paid minimum wage don't get forty hour work weeks. They usually are capped at 18-29 hours, to avoid full-time employee status. And the work hours are jangled weekly so they can't get second jobs. Fun!
You're not everyone. And you've no imagination when it comes to life's little snafus. I take it life has treated you well. You've never really been too ill, or blacklisted, or locked into a bad situation because of family issues, or been unable to find employment because of past accusations or convictions, or had a nervous breakdown, or been hit by a car and been unable to function, or been employed in an industry that was gutted for profits.
And no, you've not seen the minimum wage jacked over the years. It was down to 40% of its original value even after all the "jacks", until finally someone performed arithmetic and found it started life at $18 an hour.
And that is only if they weren't forced to take it out of the their net profits, instead of the customers' pockets. They've made a KILLING in profits.
I 100% agree with you.
I worked for a company that was purchased by a larger company that did not want a competent Dilbert as an employee. A smart person who understood what they were doing, why they were doing it and why it was important. They wanted a minimum wage Wally. Someone who clocked in at 8:00 and out at 5:00, and did the bare minimum. They knew what to do to do the task at hand but did not ask questions. If they were told wrong, they would spend all day building parts that would not work, because they did not know how to tell if a part would work or not. All they knew for minimum wage is how to build the part like they were told to build it.
After that job, I swore I would never work for another company like that. I watch for it when interviewing for a job with a company, I will leave during the interview if I think they will be an employer who will pay bottom dollar for the minimum skilled employee to work for them. Every job I have ever had I have received promotions and raises because I was able to understand why things were going on and was able to make improvements that added enough value the employer recognized I was a good employee and paid me more.
I want to work for a company that will let me help them do better. That will treat me good and I will do good work for them. Not a company who wants to pay as little as possible and thinks, "who cares if they quit, we can find someone else who will do the lob for less".
vi +
My view is that raising the minimum wage will decrease the M.W jobs available, but what's happening in Seattle is being spun in so many ways by third parties with vested interests you can't believe anything. Restaurateurs tend to be whiny sucks, dismal businessman all to ready to blame anyone but themselves for running their businesses into the ground. Resteraunts often run for years on the verge of bankruptcy, putting a few of these out of their misery isn't the end of the world.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
It was tried for a while, the 0 dollar wage. It was called slavery, and it DID work. The plantation owners were the wealthiest humans to ever walk the planet. Still might have been, adjusted for inflation. A great success. Those owners would have bought the world up with their wealth, bit by bit, had slavery not been sort-of stopped. Of course, normal non-slave humans were competing against free labor, and so barely got by, with lousy schools and dirt roads and abysmal ignorance that lasts to this day. We paid a lot for that free labor, didn't we? A truly "free" market - once side got their goods for free.
That is a flawed question parroted by listeners to conservative talk radio.
Low wage workers aren't asking for that kind of increase, only enough to live in dignity. $15.00 an hour is workable and can be supported by business. $100.00 an hour is not supportable.
If the payroll increases 30% while sales remain flat, either someone is saving money(hard to do for minimum wagers) or you have inflation.
This is of course assuming that debt isn't being paid off at a slightly faster rate, savings aren't being accumulated in a rainy-day fund, college savings account or 401k, etc. Oh, and the businesses that raise costs in order to compensate for higher wages will probably hoover up the rest.
End state? little-to-no improvement, and everything remains more or less status quo... just with a bit of inflation kicked-in.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
He said they weren't real jobs. I guess that means they don't need doing.
Sure minimum wage jobs are not desirable. Do you REALLY think the people trying and failing to make ends meet on one PLANNED to be in a minimum wage job? Do you REALLY believe that was their aspiration in high school?
Fact is, the economy tanked and decent paying skilled manufacturing jobs got sent overseas. Sometimes all that's left are minimum wage or welfare. And then people here have the nerve to call them lazy after they choose minimum wage over welfare. Those people really should be ashamed of themselves.
Maybe fucktards who can't get an order of two big macs, fries and a happy meal don't deserve a living wage? That's just my guess.
Your compassion and empathy for your fellow man knows no bounds. Since they don't deserve enough to live on, why are we even tolerating their existence?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
So if I have a friend, lets call him "Bob", Bob and I are both the same age and from the same family. Bob can be my brother.
I finish high school, Bob sits at home playing video games. I stay with one job that starts at $8/hr and get promoted while Bob just moves job to job every 6 months after they realize he's a slacker.
Eventually after suffering through working extra hard to get promoted rather than fired in 6 months, I'm now starting to realize that Bob's way was wrong... after all he keeps moving from job to job all making $8/hr, but I've now been promoted up from $11/hr to lets say $15/hr.
Then this law passes and suddenly Bob and I make the same money..... Is this really "right" to you? Shouldn't my harder-than-bob's-work actually get me something tangible? Is it really fair to now watch Bob just get bumped to $15/hr like me despite the large difference in work ethics and education?
According to everything schooling and society has taught me, I should be doing much better than Bob yet he's right at my level! How is that possibly fair to me?
You have shown that hypothetical scenarios can be tailored to illustrate any point. The answer to your question is that your industriousness will continue to benefit you as you continue to climb up in your career, while Bob will still be stuck at minimum wage. So five years from now, when you are making $25 an hour, Bob will still be making $15. Does that seem fairer now?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Your argument is... what, exactly? That skilled jobs in engineering, accountancy, nursing, medicine, architecture, law, and even trades like plumbing, carpentry, HVAC, mechanics, etc are somehow being automated away and are less secure than minimum wage jobs at McDonald's?
Two things: 1. Vocation training, in my experience, is used to refer to low skill jobs. 2. We do use automation to reduce the demand of many of those jobs. We have software to reduce the need for enigeers and accountants, there is that new computer based on Watson that searches case law reducing the need fro assisstantns, and we are starting to self diagnostic devices that lowers the demand for medical professionals.
As wages exceed the cost of living, people start saving, paying for conveniences, and paying for services. If your income doubles, you are less likely to shop at Wal-Mart because now you can afford better products.
That's like saying that if the minimum wage is too high, and it hurts employers, we should just not pay anyone anything at all. and we'd all be wealthy
No, the amount that should be paid is the amount that an employer and an employee agree upon. Which is better, that an employer willing to pay $6 an hour not hire anybody while jobless people willing to work for $6 an hour continue to not find jobs, or that the employer actually hire those people for $6 an hour even though it is less than minimum wage?
That might be true if the power dynamic were the same on both sides of the table. But it's not. Generally speaking the employee needs a job more than an employer needs the employee. The business probably has 50 applicants for the job, while the applicant isn't entertaining 50 job offers.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
by raising the wages of those under them artificially it does in fact harm them as costs will go up
hilarious
Well,
seems what you think is hilarious is the way the world works; if you double the minimum wage, 80% of the benefits will go to the top 20th percentile of income earners.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Everyone. Deserves. A. Living. Wage. There is no reasonable alternative.
I'd imagine $15 is just to be conservative. Raising the minimum wage always seem to be difficult to do politically.
the problem is mcdonalds are usually franchises, not corp owned. so while that establishment gets treated as big business, it in reality is a mom and pop business.
Then wouldn't franchise fees get reduced? It strikes me as a short term problem. Even if prices doubled, it ultimately becomes a minor increase in a person expenditure.
Not even that I'd imagine. Many of the hidden costs of labor(workman's comp, insurance, training, uniforms) are fairly flat.
The commute would be long by bus - it's possible, I guess, but when I worked min-wage jobs almost everyone was working very close to home in each of those jobs.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Although I have become convinced that the income gap in this country has probably grown too large, these " top 7% of households earn more than the bottom 67%"-type comparisons really fundamentally bother me. I never, ever want to live in a country where the top X% earn exactly X% of the income.
I don't know about completely striping reproductive rights, but I wouldn't object to everyone, rich or poor, having to procure a procreation license. Say each person is allowed up to one license provided they can be proved by some objective measure to be a competent future parent. Your right to a license may be bought and sold so that people who want more children and are capable of supporting them may do so provided they can find others willing to not have more children. Although honestly it sounds like a lot of central planning and I think that's been proved to be sufficiently complex enough that we're unlikely to ever accomplish it in a satisfactory manner.
Are you certain of that? Glancing at unemployment rates CA has been lowering their rate much faster than TX over the last 5 years. The gap is less than half what it was in 2010
If anything can be deduced from unemployment rates, CA is doing better than TX lately. I bet energy prices are going to cause some drag in the next couple years, too.
Man, you really need that seminar!
That's because somebody doing a good job an the executive level vs a bad job is significantly different in the impact it has on the entire company. It's not chopping wood.
Yet the ones that do a bad job still get huge severance packages. Sign me up for the job where I get $Texas even if I don't do a good job.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I don't know about completely striping reproductive rights
I'm not suggesting that we "stripe" the rights from anyone, rather I'm suggesting that if someone is unable or unwilling to work... or simply doesn't WANT TO...
That's fine, they can have $3,000 a month for free from the government, the condition being that they may not have children.
If you have kids, then you can support them and don't need my money. If you don't have money, don't have kids.
There are way too many parents of 5+ kids who are broke.
I think the typical Slashdot reader can discuss politics better than the typical pundit I see on TV news
You gotta admit, that's not a very high bar.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
double the prices? thats absolute bullshit.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I am an employer and I actually like my employees a lot.
I never said that I hated my employees but rather that I hated having employees.
It doesn't matter how good the employees are at the end of the day they are still
something else you have to deal with.
Perhaps they would be happier being employees, then. I await their conversion to the wage earner world. I will be waiting a long, long time, won't I?
Not really. A large percentage of small business owners go back to being employees
every year. The success rate of small business is rather low. A lot of people start
a business, find out it's harder than they think, lose a lot of money and go back to
being an employee of someone else.
It's been done.
In order for mcdonalds to need to double their prices if hte minimum wage goes from 7.25/hour to 15/hr, wages would need to be nearly 100% of operatings costs.
they aren't. they are about 20%. and not all employees make minimum wage.
the final analysis was that a Big Mac goes up by about 68 cents.
hardly "double".
and yes, the cost is neatly paid for by reducing executive bonuses. roughly 15% does the job.
hell, economy and country wide, paying for a raise for -EVERY SINGLE PERSON making less than 15/hour- to 15/hour would cost less than the banking industry -ALONE- paid out in bonuses to executives last year.
Dumbfuck.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
bonus stat: walmart, the single largest employer, and the single largest employer of low income workers, could raise every employee to a miminum of 15/hr, and it would cost the average walmart shopping family a whopping 46$ extra per year. added plus: those employees (and their low wages) would no longer need to be subsidized by the public safety net (food stamps, etc)
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
It was tried for a while, the 0 dollar wage. It was called slavery, and it DID work. The plantation owners were the wealthiest humans to ever walk the planet. Still might have been, adjusted for inflation. A great success. Those owners would have bought the world up with their wealth, bit by bit, had slavery not been sort-of stopped. Of course, normal non-slave humans were competing against free labor, and so barely got by, with lousy schools and dirt roads and abysmal ignorance that lasts to this day. We paid a lot for that free labor, didn't we? A truly "free" market - once side got their goods for free.
Do not for a minute, forget that the second place team in the great war of Northern aggression between the north and south, were indeed those who you referred to.
And check out who the reddest of red states are. Yup, mark me troll or whatever, the people who used to look it up in th ebible to justify owning other people are in that neck of the woods. A slashdot mod matters not to that truth
I suspect since any wage paid to those at the bottom of the economic ladder removes money from the rightful owners of that thar money, that there is a fair segment of the US population that still thinks that people should own other people.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I've seen a lot over the 40 years I've been in the workforce. I've never seen anyone who had a skill take a minimum wage job. I've seen people have to take pay cuts and sometimes work a shitty job for a while but not a minimum wage job. I got out of the Air Force back in the 80's and worked for a few months in a warehouse. It was hot, sweaty work with crazy hours but it paid the bills. I remember we had kids come to work there and they would clock out for lunch the first day and we'd never see them again. Even though it paid twice what McDonald's paid they didn't want to work that hard.
Slashdot follows Sturgeon's law, which is, "90% of everything is crap." But there are some insightful comments.
One guy said that asking whether Rand Paul leaned more towards libertarianism on the left or the right is like asking whether the square root of -1 is closer to -1 or +1.
Negative consequences of minimum wage can manifest in a huge number of ways, from decreased labor participation rates in narrow demographics to increased college enrollment and time to graduation. And governments that impose minimum wages screw up the economy and employment in lots of other ways too, drowning out the effect. Studies that fail to find effects therefore really don't show anything.
Sure, plenty of people believe that and argue that it's a source of unemployment and contributed to the Great Depression. Trouble is that a minimum wage increases exactly the kind of stickiness that they believe is harmful. Therefore, if you believe in wage stickiness, you should oppose, not support, minimum wage laws.
If that were true then why would you need a law for it? What sane business owner wouldn't want an increase in productivity?
As for stickiness, your argument seems to be that residual stickiness is worse than the harm inflicted by widespread low pay, which seems to be overdoing it somewhat.
[FUCK BETA]
Really? Ask the UAW folks who all lost their jobs when Detroit basically shut down. The Unions are greedy! I know what those UAW folks were making and getting for benefits. It was WAY out of line. Their greed helped in the $$$ losses of the auto makers.
Yes unions helped with decent working hours and such - but all that is GONE! When Obama, the Democrats and Republicans pass TPP - kiss ALL the jobs in the U.S. BYE BYE! Foreigners will move in and take them all.No union will be able to stop it.
Get a clue.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
The reason is because only a relative few readers are qualified to discuss the latest in astrophysics, let's say, but anyone can jump in and talk about politics.
Therein lies the problem.
Look up the bike-shed problem.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Your argument is... what, exactly? That skilled jobs in engineering, accountancy, nursing, medicine, architecture, law, and even trades like plumbing, carpentry, HVAC, mechanics, etc are somehow being automated away and are less secure than minimum wage jobs at McDonald's? For real?
Just look at accounting. One accounting department for one decently-sized company once involved dozens or more employees, all maintaining spreadsheets and doing calculations. Then came Excel (and similar such programs). One accounting department is now perhaps 3-4 people, doing what used to take dozens of numerate professionals.
Automation of jobs is not restricted to blue-collar or low-skill work.
Ah, another idiot deceived by Nazi propaganda. Hint: any relationship between Nazi public announcements and reality was purely tactical, to make the propaganda more believable. The Nazis were tightly involved with private companies, which is the opposite of Socialism.
I can find many cases of Conservative totalitarianism, using Conservative as having something to do with conservation of current institutions. Ever heard of absolute monarchies? Was it the conservatives plotting to overthrow them or the left-wingers? Was Louis XVI a flaming leftist and were the revolutionaries conservatives?
If your answer is "yes" than you're using the word wildly differently from how most people use it, to the point of uselessness. If your answer is "no", you're directly contradicting your rules of thumb.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Yes, and that massive literature has found negative effects. There are also many papers that have failed to find negative effects, but for each of those, there are simple explanations for why they failed to find negative effects.
In fact, a basic problem with many studies is that they don't even look at the identity of the workers, only at categories. Employment may stay the same within a category of workers, but the workers that made $8/h are simply replaced by different, more skilled workers when the minimum wage rises to $15/h. In fact, that's the most rational and likely outcome.
No, I'm saying that if you advocate intervening in the economy in a big way by raising the minimum wage, you need to demonstrate conclusively that, at a minimum, doing so doesn't cause more harm than good (that's only necessary, not sufficient). Negative effects on employment are actually the least of those problems, they are simply the most poignant ones because they illustrate that the policy may actually hurt the people it purports to help. But even if you could dismiss those, there is a long list of other things you need to show.
I'm not making an argument there, I'm pointing out a basic inconsistency in the arguments about wage stickiness. The fundamental argument is that downward stickiness leads to unemployment, yet a minimum wage law is nothing other than downward stickiness. Furthermore, since unemployment is high right now, you can't even say that minimum wage is addressing temporary upward stickiness.
(Of course, given the high turnover rates in low wage jobs, it's doubtful that there is a lot of stickiness in either direction anyway. Wages not going up because there is a surplus of low skill workers for those jobs isn't "stickiness".)
It appears you're reaching the end of your patience. So I'll try to sum up the rest of my questions in one final question: How would I go about finding costs for a particular good that can provably not be connected to labor?
Unlike Capitalism, Globalization is Zero-sum WITHOUT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Casteism
(While you're at it, also explain why businesses would pay $15/h for a worker who doesn't increase revenue by significantly more than $15 for each hour he works.)
The actual situation may be the opposite of this. Businesses are paying less that $15/h for a worker whose job is worth significantly more than $15 for each hour he works. Why? Because the price (wage of the job) is based on market equilibrium, not the actual value of the end product. Take for example the job of washing dishes in a restaurant. Anybody can do the job but the job is vital to the business. The supply of labor is so high that it is a minimum wage job even though the value to the restaurant of having clean dishes is very high.
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
Costco hires even the most basic, unskilled shelf-stackers for well above minimum wage (closer to $19).
Disingenuous statistic is disingenuous. Costco is legendary for paying more than minimum wage and irritating stockholders in consequence. The famous quote from Deutsche Bank was "it's better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder." Naming an extraordinarily unusual retailer does not bolster your point.
Naming an extraordinarily unusual retailer does not bolster your point.
Of course it does. It's AN example of what I'm talking about. There are plenty of retailers who pay entry-level employees more than minimum wage. Why? Because they want to keep them around - churn is expensive, even at the stock/clerk level. Flipping burgers isn't supposed to be a career. You're not supposed to do things like have babies while you're on your first, menial job.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Old enough to have discussed the substance of the matter, instead of tossing out vapid ad hominem - something about which you're confused, it seems.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Ah, so because water is necessary for survival, we should price it at $1000 / gallon, instead of at $0.02 / gallon? I don't think so. Goods and services do not have an intrinsic value; their value is determined by scarcity and demand. If dish washers are not scarce, their wages are low and they should be low. The idea that labor or products have some intrinsic, absolute value independent of scarcity or demand is common in fascist and Marxist economics, and it simply doesn't work in practice.
The restaurant only transforms various inputs into an output that customers buy; the price is determined by the cost of the inputs plus the value the restaurant adds. If one of the inputs (e.g., clean dishes) becomes more expensive, then the customer will just pay for it. The restaurant doesn't really care per se how much the dish washing costs, except that if they raise prices, they may sell less because customers find substitutes for their products. To forestall that, the restaurant can substitute too: if manual dish washing becomes to expensive, they buy a big commercial dishwasher or start using disposable dishes.
What about the mega-giant-corp that employs people specifically to help their low paid works to claim food stamps/vouchers. Now the low paid are ineligible for those vouchers these people will be laid off, thus increasing the unemployment.
One benefit to these higher wages is the local/national government can use the money allocated for these vouchers to reduces taxes, improve infrastructure (repairing/replacing bridges before they collapse etc.) , There is also the benefit that these higher paid people will also contribute to an increased tax intake, through income and sales taxes.
Goods and services do not have an intrinsic value; their value is determined by scarcity and demand. If dish washers are not scarce, their wages are low and they should be low. The idea that labor or products have some intrinsic, absolute value independent of scarcity or demand is common in fascist and Marxist economics, and it simply doesn't work in practice.
I agree with everything here (when I said "actual value" I meant that colloquially as value to the consumer", sorry about the ambiguity) except "...is common is fascist and Marxist economics..." It always seems to be the pro-capitalists that talk about value as independent from demand. In fact, you do it immediately in the next sentence:
the price is determined by the cost of the inputs plus the value the restaurant adds" [emphasis added]
No, the price is determined as the equilibrium between what the customers are willing to pay and what the vendor is willing to accept. The cost puts a floor on what is profitable to the vendor, but that's it.
If one of the inputs (e.g., clean dishes) becomes more expensive, then the customer will just pay for it.
This presumes that the customer is willing to pay more. The value to the customer of the end product hasn't changed so why would this be true? But, yes, if the amount that the vendor is willing to accept changes then a new equilibrium price will be found and that new price may be higher. It could also be lower (especially if the new minimum wage puts more people on the border line of willingness to pay, in this case price discrimination is the key).
Anyway, all I was pointing out is that there are situations at the minimum wage level where the value to the business of getting the job done is higher than the current cost to the business of getting that job done. While businesses may complain about it, they'll pay the higher wage for those jobs.
(Regarding substitution: I assume that most restaurants already have industrial dishwashers, but those dishwashers don't load themselves.)
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
I agree it's irrelevant, but it's the argument you are making.
No, I don't do it at all. "Value" is like "speed" in physics: relative to a reference frame (buyer). Furthermore, when people talk about "the value" in economics, it is "the average value", understanding that it actually represents an average over a wide spread, as opposed to a single value for all customers. It is perfectly reasonable to continue using the term "the value" as long as one remembers that there is always a reference frame involved and that it is an average representing what actually is a wide distribution.
What I was getting at with that sentence isn't about an absolute "value" of the product, but the fact that even as a relative quantity, you're looking at the wrong "value". A buyer assigns a value to the entire end product (restaurant dish). But that value to the buyer is composed of the required inputs (ingredients, etc.) plus a small difference that the restaurant actually adds and that the business owner gets paid for. What I'm pointing out to you is that dish washing is an input, and as such what businesses pay for it is a cost. If an input becomes more expensive, the restaurant has to raise prices because there is no other place for the money to come from. There is no gigantic magical pot of profits that can be used to pay these workers higher wages; if there were, everybody would be investing in fast food restaurants.
Demand is elastic, so if the vendor is forced to raise prices in order to pay for higher wages, fewer people will find the product to be worth buying. Those who still buy at the higher prices will be paying for the higher wages (profits will also decrease slightly, but that only pays for a small fraction of the increases). For the people who choose not to buy at the higher prices, a corresponding number of businesses will cease to operate.
You gave the example of (manual) dish washers, not me. I agree it's a stupid example, but since it's your example, I illustrated how substitution works with it. There are plenty of ways to substitute for loading dish washers too.
And one easy way of replacing low skill labor is to replace it with high skill labor doing the same job; I might hire a high school dropout to load dishes at $8/h, but at $15/h, I might as well require a high school diploma. The people intended to be helped by the law still weren't helped.
But even if the employees don't change, some businesses just become unprofitable at the higher wage rates and go out of business; that may even show up as a positive effect, as it is likely followed by an exodus of low skill residents, who now have trouble finding jobs or affording the higher prices. Or employers simply may tacitly agree to ignore the law altogether, find loopholes, or move into a neighboring community.
And because there is such a variety of consequences, all of which occur simultaneously, any attempts to quantify the negative effects of higher minimum wages fail: the effects are distributed across many different coping strategies.
Get out of the Loony Bin, did you?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I love when people who have no understanding of econ101 tell me I don't understand Econ101 and then spend the rest of their comment proving that they don't understand econ101.
Companies don't care about making revenue. They care about making profit. A company absolutely will choose to earn less revenue when it means more profit. Because every hour of Sally's work is a net $1 loss in profit, earning $13 in revenue through Sally's work means $14 loss in costs. The company will always be better off not having Sally work.
> There are European countries with minimum and average wages much higher than ours, and they don't have those problems.
I'm sorry but I'm not sure how you would know that. You would need to compare their output currently to their output in an alternative history / parallel universe where the min wage were lower. Barring that, it's interesting that you say this but don't address why almost every EU country has a lower GDP per capita that the U.S. Granted, GDP is a flawed measurement, but feel free to look at other similar measures. The EU also has a higher unemployment rate. About double in fact.
So if I am saying that a higher min wage reduces output and causes unemployment, and you're telling me I am wrong based on what actually happens in the real world, I would have expected some addressing of these numbers. While I am not using them as proof of anything, it does seem to run counter to your claim that the "theoretical arguments" don't have predictive power in the real world.
Let's assume per capita GDP is a meaningful measure of the country's economy. Another measure of the country's economy is the equality or distribution of income.
I'd rather live in a country with more equality of income, even if it had a lower per capita GDP. (And some economists argue that more equality would produce a higher per capita GDP.)
Since we can't compare alternative Americas, empirical examination of the data is the best evidence we have.
I'm saying that other industrial countries have higher minimum wages, greater equality, and still have high production and a pretty good quality of life.
The difference between a per capita GDP of $55,000 a year and $45,000 a year is not that dramatic. The difference between a country in which people are left to die of treatable diseases because they can't afford health care http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... and a country where everyone gets needed health care is dramatic.
I don't care about high unemployment, if you also have a German- or Scandinavian-style social safety net, so that unemployed people can still maintain a comfortable life. In Germany, unemployed workers are paid almost as much as they are when employed. Some of them take additional training during their down time. Some of them were go on vacation. That's fine with me. The economy doesn't collapse just because you have 10% of the workforce on the dole.
I had friends in California when Reagan was governor. They were able to go on welfare, get enough to live on, go to the California state university system free, and get a college degree. California got a lot more scientists and engineers just as Silicon Valley was developing. I think that's good.
The US does have a per capita GDP of about $10,000 more than Germany ($45,000 vs. $55,000). OK.
Suppose you had 2 countries:
Country A has a per capital GDP of $55,000, but the distribution is unequal.
If you divide the country into quintiles, people in each category are:
Bottom 1/5 $13,750 a year
Next 1/5 $27,500
Next 1/5 $55,000
Next 1/5 $110,000
Top 1/5 $220,000
(which is roughly the actual income distribution in the US.)
Country B has a GDP of $45,000. But there is more equality. The distribution is:
Bottom 1/3 $22,500
Middle 1/3 $45,000
Top 1/3 $90,000
Which would you prefer? In country A, you have 1 chance in 5 of being in third-world poverty. ($13,750 is the per capita GDP of China.)
I'd prefer country B. In country B, I'm guaranteed a comfortable life.
Of course other countries have higher GDP per capita http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... All of the modern industrial countries are clustered in about the same range.
Besides, most of that $55,000 per year per capita GDP in the US doesn't go to me. It goes to people at the top of the income distribution, and since 1980 it's been going disproportionately to the people at the very top of the income distribution.
It's like the economist's joke: Bill Gates walks into a bar. The average income in that bar goes up to $100 million a year.
You seem to have wandered off somewhere that has nothing to do with this conversation. I am not interested in your opinions about the best country to live in. In support freedom to choose where you live and reduction of all barriers, to the extent possible, in the way of you choosing where you live. The safety net provided by Germany has nothing to do with this. I claimed that the min wage reduced output and increases unemployment. You said the opposite. I asked how you would explain per capita GDP, a measure of output, being higher when min wage is lower. I asked how you would explain unemployment rate being lower when min wage is lower. These are two results directly in conflict with your assertion. You ignored both points in your response and instead essentially said these things are okay because of a better safety net. That is a non sequitur and I am not really interested.
I don't believe that unemployment is lower when the minimum wage is lower. What's the evidence for that?