Why We Need a Social Wealth Fund
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/social-wealth-fund-alaska-peo...
Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees
261–270 of 1001 posts
Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason that, back in the progressive era, all the eugenicists were on board with the idea of the minimum wage was that they thought that at a high enough wage "undesirables" wouldn't be able to a job and so couldn't compete away jobs from "desirable" workers. Thankfully these days we have a social safety net that generally prevents people from starving whether they could get a job or not but making people starve…
[citation needed]
During the second half of the Progressive Era, beginning roughly in 1908,
progressive economists and their reform allies achieved many statutory victories,
including state laws that regulated working conditions, banned child labor, instituted
“mothers’ pensions,” capped working hours and, the sine qua non, fixed
minimum wages. In using eugenics to justify exclusionary immigration legislation,
the race-suicide theorists offered a model to economists advocating labor reforms,
notably those affiliated with the American Association for Labor Legislation, the
organization of academic economists that Orloff and Skocpol (1984, p. 726) call
the “leading association of U.S. social reform advocates in the Progressive Era.”
Progressive economists, like their neoclassical critics, believed that binding
minimum wages would cause job losses. However, the progressive economists also
believed that the job loss induced by minimum wages was a social benefit, as it
212 Journal of Economic Perspectives
performed the eugenic service ridding the labor force of the “unemployable.”
Sidney and Beatrice Webb (1897 [1920], p. 785) put it plainly: “With regard to
certain sections of the population [the “unemployable”], this unemployment is not
a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.” “[O]f all ways of dealing with
these unfortunate parasites,” Sidney Webb (1912, p. 992) opined in the Journal of
Political Economy, “the most ruinous to the community is to allow them to unrestrainedly
compete as wage earners.” A minimum wage was seen to operate eugenically
through two channels: by deterring prospective immigrants (Henderson,
1900) and also by removing from employment the “unemployable,” who, thus
identified, could be, for example, segregated in rural communities or sterilized.
https://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/retrospectives.pd...
Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees
#263$15/hour is still not much in the international market where Amazon sells its goods. In large parts of Europe it's less than what a warehouse worker makes. It's still barely enough for an adult to be able to pay his/her half of family expenses in the US. A lot of employees will still need a second job. And it only comes now, 20 years after the company's founding, after it has huge profits (and can deduct expenses lik…
>$15/hour is still not much in the international market where Amazon sells its goods. In large parts of Europe it's less than what a warehouse worker makes. i don't understand this comment. while i'm all for warehouse workers getting a fair wage i don't understand the point of comparing a us wage, being paid in the us, to us workers, to foreign workers in foreign economies? yes USD 15 is not enough to survive in Oslo…
It’s not 30k/year for many of these employees. They are temporary workers that never know when they have work and when they don’t. It’s 15/hour.
Also, 30k is a decent wage for a young person with no dependants. It’s not enough if you have kids, not even in the midwest or deep south.
Comparing wages to the markets where Amazon sells its goods is interesting when talking competition.
Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees
#264The blog post says "employees". No reporter I've seen has bothered to ask if it applies to contractors.
Wouldn't contractors set their own rates?
No. The majority of "contractors" in America are really just employees of subcontracting firms who have way fewer rights, don't get benefits, and have to pay applicable employment taxes themselves instead of the company taking care of it.
Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you pay your employees $7.25 you deserve to be made fun off at least. Jeff Bezos recently also said Amazon deserved being scrutinised. I'm not saying this is what triggered them, but sometimes you have to take a strong position in order to be listened to.
> If you pay your employees $7.25... ...then you're paying the wage your employees are willing to work for. Basic economics in action. If you're making fun of this you need to take an econ 101 class.
Do you really want to test the limits of Econ 101?
People are willing to work for pennies. Just look at India. If you want to turn USA into a third word country with high levels of income inequality that’s how you do it.
Have some empathy. Otherwise the peasants will revolt, and they have guns.
Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
$15 an hour will push a lot of people out of being employable. There is a greater tolerance for whom you will accept at current wage points. The other effect of a much higher starting wage is you will have people enter the market who did not think the wage was worth their time. The people who cannot be relied on to show up on schedule, quit and want to come back, have some issues in their credit or criminal backgroun…
> $15 an hour will push a lot of people out of being employable. On the other hand, isn't it illogical in a free market economy that wages do not increase at a rate at least equal to the inflation? How do you keep the economy running if people have less and less purchase power as time goes by? (These are genuine questions, I'm not an economist at all.)
I think the answer is that full employment is increasingly not necessary to keep the economy running in this increasingly automated economy.
Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees
#267I make more as a waiter with absolutely 0 experience. Being a waiter is better, more stable pay than many office and warehouse jobs.
Something is severely wrong when food service is more profitable than manufacturing and distribution and tertiary-degree stuff.
Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees
#268>In addition, the company also pledges its public policy team will lobby for an increase to the federal minimum wage from $7.25 — it doesn’t identify a specific wage that it’s targeting, but instead says, “We believe $7.25 is too low. We would look to Congress to decide the parameters of a new, higher federal minimum wage.” I'm going to take a wild guess and assume it will be $15/hour. That way they'll get to look pr…
This is disastrous for low skilled workers. It removes the bottom rung of the economic ladder -- if you have no skills or little skills, the best way to develop skills is to be employed. If you don't provide more than 15$ per hour of value then you won't be able to get a job.
This also helps create a moat around amazon - if they can get the costs of everyone to go up, when they unleash better picking/warehouse automation no one will be able to compete with them.
Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
> $15 an hour will push a lot of people out of being employable. Or maybe it will just force employers to pay better wages to those they employ already. $7.50 / hour is what they pay kids here to stock grocery chains.
I think the point is that many people aren’t worth $15/hour. Having a well-stocked grocery store is worth $15/hour if the person doing the job is fast. But slower stockers may lose their jobs altogether. Most companies I’ve worked at have had mailrooms. Very few have had people actually working in them. Which tells me that when the buildings were designed, the mailroom was considered valuable enough to include in the…
I can think of tons of jobs that are worth less than $1/hr. That doesn't mean I think people should actually do those jobs. Over time we tend to get more-valuable jobs.
Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees
#270Opponents of the minimum wage argue that it reduces employment by creating an artificial floor on wages, that jobs are lost because employers can't afford to pay the minimum. But if you can't pay the minimum, then you didn't really have a job to offer in the first place! By extension of this logic, employers could argue that they are losing jobs because they can only afford to pay someone who will work 12 hours a day…
> If you can't pay a basic living wage Stop right there. What about people who don't need a basic living wage, like students who still live with their parents? Why should they be pushed out of the market? I worked in high school, starting when I was 16. It was minimum wage. Without that job I wouldn't have been able to afford a car (necessary where I lived), travel to Greece and Italy, and have my own spending money.…
> What about people who don't need a basic living wage, like students who still live with their parents? Why should they be pushed out of the market?
Part time work. You can work 15-25 hours a week at the higher minimum wage while having time to study or deal with other things. A proper minimum wage should be the amount for a worker to live on after working 40 hours a week. If an employee can not make enough to live in that area (after working for 40 hours), the employer should not be there and is taking advantage of the employees.