Real minimum wage was already $12-$14 pretty much anywhere. It basically just removed the 7.25 training wage for the first 3 months.
Job loss predictions over rising minimum wages haven't come true
151–160 of 381 posts
Re: Job loss predictions over rising minimum wages haven't come true
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The CEO of Walmart even advised the feds that they should raise the minimum wage. High minimum wages favor larger entities than can leverage economies of scale. Amazon has expressed similar support. I don't think this is entirely altruistic.
Yep, larger companies are probably way better equipped to deal with raising the minimum wage. This will just hurt small/medium business.
It will hurt small/medium businesses that can't afford to not exploit their workers.
If your business plan is reliant on having an artificially high staff due to exploiting an artificially low wage, then you don't have much of a business plan at all. "But what of all the poor businesses engaged in a race to the bottom to maximize personal profit?" Let's not think of the parasites here.
Re: Job loss predictions over rising minimum wages haven't come true
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some businesses cannot be profitable and therefore will not exist at certain minimum wages, though. It's also worth noting that some businesses probably can't be profitable without chattel slavery, though it's hard to find examples since the practice has been illegal for so long. > The US minimum wage is a big part of why manufacturing jobs have moved out of the US, for instance. No. I'd say the bigger part of the…
> Americans would starve and die of exposure on those wages. No, they wouldn’t. Americans survived on wages lower than that in the past. They would simply have to adjust their lifestyle to look more like the one of Bangladeshi —- unless you assume that Americans are somehow extremely inept compared to Bangladeshi.
Are you implying that the people currently starving and dieing of exposure living in bangladeshi-style slums right on the streets of San Fransisco is an acceptable outcome? We should be paying more people a wage that forces them to live like that?
Or do we look at the growing inequality in this country and realize we can definitely afford to add a couple bucks to a poor guys hourly rate so he doesn't have to give 60% of his income to the parasite landlord every month.
Re: Job loss predictions over rising minimum wages haven't come true
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm old enough to remember this conversation happening three times, and wise enough to know that this conversation happens every ten years or so probably since the first wage was paid in currency instead of goods. A certain pay rate creates supply. Conditions make it hard to switch jobs. And every year you ever so slowly reduce the effective pay to those employees and they slowly give up little luxuries to make ends…
I'm cynical. I think it's frankly worse than that. When we talk about economic and market forces, we don't talk about "greed" as a major economic force. We know it's the creation of capitalism, but economists seem to do everything in their power to ignore it. Standard economic models breaks down when people are powerful enough to create their own supply/demand curves. We've had the term "working poor" for a while. I…
> I suspect that we'll have "working homeless" in the decades to come.
"A 2010 longitudinal study of homeless men conducted in Birmingham, Alabama, found that most earned an average of ninety dollars per week while working an average of thirty hours per week[192]"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_S...
"Employees at Amazon's base in Dunfermline, Fife, were apparently so worried they’d lose their jobs if they were late they decided to sleep rough in the woods nearby."
https://metro.co.uk/2016/12/10/desperate-amazon-workers-forc...
Re: Job loss predictions over rising minimum wages haven't come true
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm old enough to remember this conversation happening three times, and wise enough to know that this conversation happens every ten years or so probably since the first wage was paid in currency instead of goods. A certain pay rate creates supply. Conditions make it hard to switch jobs. And every year you ever so slowly reduce the effective pay to those employees and they slowly give up little luxuries to make ends…
I'm cynical. I think it's frankly worse than that. When we talk about economic and market forces, we don't talk about "greed" as a major economic force. We know it's the creation of capitalism, but economists seem to do everything in their power to ignore it. Standard economic models breaks down when people are powerful enough to create their own supply/demand curves. We've had the term "working poor" for a while. I…
The working homeless already exist Los Angeles/California. There are more than a few employed people, with kids, living in their cars.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11690325/thousands-of-californians... https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-economicall...
Re: Job loss predictions over rising minimum wages haven't come true
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
The markup on most products is such that US businesses could easily manufacture their products in the US at current minimum wages and still handily profit. They simply choose not to, because that means they have to pay their executives and owners less money and no executive wants to forego their country club membership, each of which is equal to the salary and benefits of 3 or more line workers, or their annual bonus…
> The markup on most products is such that US businesses could easily manufacture their products in the US at current minimum wages and still handily profit. What data are you basing this on? You're also ignoring the most important part - consumer choice. People buy cheap shit because it's cheaper. It's the foundation of Walmart. So let's say the companies here did manufacture here, but then a foreign competitor offe…
If you were a small business you should be spending your time lobbying for tariffs against exploitative international manufacturers or even local subsidies instead of lobbying to pay your employees less out of your bucket of gold every year.
Re: Job loss predictions over rising minimum wages haven't come true
#157You might not lose your job, but you may see your hours reduced or you might not get the opportunity in the first place. Technically the employment numbers don't change, but you shouldn't think of of minimum wage employees like salaried employees. Minimum wage earners can lose fractional percentages of their jobs unlike salaried employees. Most proponents of raising the minimum wage cite the Card & Krueger paper whic…
Your fundamental assumption is that labor economics works like an economics 101 course. It doesn’t, that’s why it has it‘s own field of study. As an example, free markets depend on equal information and workers don’t have the same information as employers, so their ability to negotiate isn’t nearly as robust as you imply. Also, many companies enjoy a monopsony on local labor which distorts the traditional relationshi…
While no system works exactly like models do, there is nothing magical about the economics of labor.
Free markets do not depend on equal information. Almost every single market has some level of asymmetric information, and yet markets function. Plus it's not like a lot of information is hidden by minimum wage employers, almost every single job description will include expected wages in the description. It's fairly easy to map a skill set to wage earning potential. The ability to negotiate is mostly affected by the ability of a company to find substitute labor.
Almost no companies in the first world are monopsonies, this is just flat wrong. Almost all real world monopsonies are based on government procurement. The classic example being government purchasing of military equipment due to civilian bans on ownership. (the government is the only one who can buy a fighter jet)
My economic freedom is dependent on the decisions I can make, not the amount of money in my pocket. By raising the minimum wage you are removing the ability to sell my labor at a rate lower than the minimum wage. This limits my economic freedom.
The real affects of a minimum wage increase are not uniform. As stated above, more experienced minimum wage workers benefit to the detriment of less experienced minimum wage workers. Some people will benefit, but the data shows that most people will be worse off in terms of take home pay.
This article is garbage. The conclusion it comes to is not based on any relevant data contained within the article and has not made any persuasive argument to back up their claims. There is no analysis in the article, just stating a bunch of facts and hoping that people don't understand correlation and causation.
The reason why I point to Card & Kruger is due to the fact that every single justification for the raising of the minimum wage is hinged on the validity of that paper. The paper is wrong and it's causing our most vulnerable populations to live in poverty.
Re: Job loss predictions over rising minimum wages haven't come true
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's rare for a company to offer health insurance to employees who are pegged to minimum wage. If salaries are going down due to inflation, then you may have a point but it's a perverse one; medical costs are going up way faster than anything else. Both are reasons to support socialized medical coverage, but they don't really enter into this particular line of discussion.
If medical costs increase more than the amount of general inflation's effect on both medical costs and the rest of wages, than covering those increasing costs while holding the rest of wages constant is a wage increase. If you don't like that, it's a social issue and a policy question, but it's not evidence what wage (how much employer is paying for employee benefits) is stagnant or droppiing.
If the workers aren't getting it in their paycheck it is not a wage increase. It is simply another tax, neither the employer nor the employee benefit from it so who exactly is this benefit for?
Re: Job loss predictions over rising minimum wages haven't come true
#159One reason could be because almost nobody makes minimum wage. In 2017 just over 2% of workers made the minimum wage. When you only look at full time employees, it's less than 1%. When you include only people over 25 it's even less. https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2017/home.htm It's interesting how few people know this. When you ask people to guess what percent of people make the minimum wage, you'll lik…
When I had a burger flipping job, the automatic yearly raise was like a dime an hour. So unless you were a new hire, hardly anyone at burger flipping jobs right now are making minimum wage.
Re: Job loss predictions over rising minimum wages haven't come true
#160We should peg minimum wage to some multiple of the 5 year rolling average of per-capita GDP.
Peg it so full time hours is 3x the local 1br apartment rent, then it would make a difference for so many people currently working 60-80 weeks to live paycheck to paycheck, unable to save enough to even afford the proportionally massive upfront cost of moving to a cheaper area.