If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
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Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
#2Average annual wages in the United States for was $63,000 for the most recent year available.[1] Average annual hours worked was 1,779 per year.[2] That implies an average wage of $35/hour.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w... [2]https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm
Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
#3Average annual wages in the United States for was $63,000 for the most recent year available.[1] Average annual hours worked was 1,779 per year.[2] That implies an average wage of $35/hour. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w... [2] https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm
That doesn't contradict the actual article, whose full title is:
> If Worker Pay Had Kept Pace With Productivity Gains Since 1968, Today's Minimum Wage Would Be $24 an Hour
It looks like when it was shortened one of its most important words were dropped.
Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
#4Average annual wages in the United States for was $63,000 for the most recent year available.[1] Average annual hours worked was 1,779 per year.[2] That implies an average wage of $35/hour. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w... [2] https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm
As noted in your first link, average wage is misleading because the high end is incomprehensibly large (and is where most growth has taken place) and that skews the result.
>The wage distribution is right-skewed; the majority of people earn less than the average wage. For an alternative measure, the median household income uses median instead of average.
Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
#5How much would a cheeseburger and a shake cost?
Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
#6Is there any evidence that whole-workforce productivity applies equally to minimum wage jobs? If not, the claim seems unsustainable.
Completely anecdotally, improvements in labor productivity due to automation (etc) are less likely to be impactful in jobs like waiting tables, delivering newspapers or flipping hamburgers.
That anecdotal evidence is backed by research that shows that service sector productivity tends to lag other sectors significantly.
Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
#7Average annual wages in the United States for was $63,000 for the most recent year available.[1] Average annual hours worked was 1,779 per year.[2] That implies an average wage of $35/hour. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w... [2] https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm
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Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
#8Is there any evidence that whole-workforce productivity applies equally to minimum wage jobs? If not, the claim seems unsustainable. Completely anecdotally, improvements in labor productivity due to automation (etc) are less likely to be impactful in jobs like waiting tables, delivering newspapers or flipping hamburgers. That anecdotal evidence is backed by research that shows that service sector productivity tends t…
It absolutely does not. Productivity gains over the past 50 years have been disproportionately concentrated in higher skilled positions (who earn salaries, not wages). If you feel like reading a 66 page extremely dry analysis of the relationship between compensation and productivity then here you go. https://www.nber.org/papers/w24165.pdf
Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
#9How much would a cheeseburger and a shake cost?
Labour is anywhere from 25% to 34% of the food cost. So, anywhere from 1/3 to 1/4. It's not the lion's share as envisioned.
Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
#10Smart-but-lazy employees are interested in efficiency, and will work uncharacteristically hard in order to achieve it.
Bosses and owners are only interested if there's something in it for them. As in does it increase our output without a proportional increase in costs. The bigger the gap the more social capital I will burn on making that change (including, but not limited to, fucking over my loyal employees by replacing half of them with a machine, or imports).
We would have barely any of those productivity gains if they didn't also lower the cost of labor per item. So this number is a largely hypothetical. And perhaps a little unhealthy to dwell on.
Conversely, though, if minimum wage had kept pace with inflation, we might see higher productivity today because process people would have had the ammunition to push for more and bigger improvements to production and overhead costs. New equipment would be rolled out sooner while prices were still high, making a steeper adoption curve and accelerating R&D expenditure.
Still, it would be better if management did not try to keep 99% of every dollar saved. We could easily see a world where, instead of the $12/hr we should have simply to maintain the spirit of the minimum wage as it was conceived, everybody had Seattle's $15/hr minimum wage and big cities were trying to legislate for $20.