21–30 of 451 posts
How much would a cheeseburger and a shake cost?
It seems awfully dangerous to think that we should pay people less because otherwise things would be expensive.
This is exactly why/how wealth is moving up and up to a smaller proportion of people at the top
Productivity is a ceiling on wages; once wages raise beyond a certain point, the company will take a loss, even after passing down the cost of labor to customers.
Wages not keeping up with productivity gains isn't just on the low end. Seeing how well they tracked before 1970, there was an overall labor shortage. Around 1970, that changed, and there was more labor than the market needed, so wages were kept low enough that it's cheaper to pay someone minimum wage to take your order than to install an order kiosk.
How 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. https://totalfood.com/busting-restaurant-labor-cost-myth/
I always thought that cost of living dictated wages and the so-called wage stagnation was due to relative lack of inflation for basic living expenses over the past 20 years.
Also the past 20 years have seen a relative large influx of immigration compared to the previous 20 years. Increasing the competition between workers and would in turn lowering wages, at least according to supply/demand forces. This effect would be especially pronounced for minimum wage workers but with the expansion of the H1B program it will soon be observed for high income tech workers as well.
This is this same sort of group that would say "trickle down economics doesn't work." It's funny they'd expect productivity gains to trickle down to wages. Productivity is a ceiling on wages; once wages raise beyond a certain point, the company will take a loss, even after passing down the cost of labor to customers. Wages not keeping up with productivity gains isn't just on the low end. Seeing how well they tracked…
Average 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.
This is this same sort of group that would say "trickle down economics doesn't work." It's funny they'd expect productivity gains to trickle down to wages. Productivity is a ceiling on wages; once wages raise beyond a certain point, the company will take a loss, even after passing down the cost of labor to customers. Wages not keeping up with productivity gains isn't just on the low end. Seeing how well they tracked…
I think this a a demonstration that trickle-down economics doesn't work, because additional capital injected into a capitalist system tends to be captured by the capital at the top. Rationally, you would expect productivity gains to be captured disproportionately at the point where the gain occurs, on the assembly line, not back up through the hierarchy. But because of the rich-get-richer mathematics of capital, thos…
That's not to say we shouldn't work to improve the average worker's wealth and quality of life, of course! I'm all in favor. But it's not a matter of gains getting "sucked up" from where they naturally would have gone; recent gains in manufacturing productivity just aren't at the individual level in the first place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
A good follow-on question might be, do we expect more from low-wage employees now than we did then? When I was a teenager, food service proved to be a much more complicated job than I anticipated it to be. My first tech jobs paid better (even though an internship would have paid more), and felt simpler. If only because I'd spread out the effort of learning the skills over 8 years instead of 3 months.
That will mean they get paid less than an entry level but skilled tech job.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A good follow-on question might be, do we expect more from low-wage employees now than we did then? When I was a teenager, food service proved to be a much more complicated job than I anticipated it to be. My first tech jobs paid better (even though an internship would have paid more), and felt simpler. If only because I'd spread out the effort of learning the skills over 8 years instead of 3 months.
> do we expect more from low-wage employees now than we did then? Given an example of warehouse workers, and how companies are enacting more and more automated "anti-slacking" restrictions, yeah, I think we are.
The on-campus tech job paid about 10% more, day 1, than any of my friends were making. So I used the higher pay and all the tricks my roommates taught be for frugal living and cut back my hours about 25%.
I tried not to brag about it. I even felt a little guilty about how hard they were busting their asses, while I had a job where I could automate the tedious bits myself, and once I was not low man on the totempole I could delegate other parts.
PSA: Be nice to your food service staff. And your janitors. Instead of thanking god it's them instead of you, be grateful someone else took that shit job so you don't have to cook and clean up after yourself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. https://totalfood.com/busting-restaurant-labor-cost-myth/
Isn't this only first-order labor? If the butcher needs to pay more for labor as well, you're still experiencing an increase in price that's labor-related, just hidden.
1) economies of scale, factory farming employs very few people per pound of meat produced, having been subject to a lot of automation. Likewise, supply chain areas like storage and shipping move a lot of product per employee.
2) 'butchers' and similar jobs are relatively high skill and likely pay above minimum wage anyways. They also have better economies of scale. But at any rate, it's unlikely professional butchers are particularly involved in producing meat for fast food burgers and likely 1 or 2 low wage employees in a factory are doing all the manual labour involved in producing meat for hundreds of burgers.
At any rate, I don't think the null hypothesis can really be that every level of the supply chain has the same level of labour costs.