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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

#151

Post by burntoutfire »

martin_bech wrote: post #140
rmason wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these comparisons miss one thing: after WWII America had a monopoly. We had destroyed our competitors factories in Asia as well as in Europe. It took a while for them to build back and be truly competitive outside their home countries. Here in Michigan we had a front row seat to this happening with manufacturing. Everything peaked in 1973 and has been on a slow decline ever since. Sure there have been booms but t…

Hi from Scandinavia, we dont have a monopoly on anything, and no actual minimum wage, yet people make about $20+ at the lowest paying jobs, enjoy 5 weeks paid vacation, free healthcare and cheap childcare..

Don't you have industry-wide agreements, negotiated with unions, on minimum wages in these industries though?

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#152

Post by rayiner »

pydry wrote: post #121
codekansas wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess this speaks more to political mismanagement than an intentional goal. No politician is going to get elected on a platform of higher rents and lower wages. Increased rents, at least, are usually caused more by good intentions gone bad than by intentional malice

>No politician is going to get elected on a platform of higher rents and lower wages Have you noticed how little the media focuses on the actual platforms of most politicians and focuses on the spectacle and drama of politics instead? That distraction serve a purpose (for the owners of said media). Also, a platform of higher rents and lower wages will usually be called "lower taxes" and "freedom from onerous regulati…

If you can find an NYT article in the last two years using AEI as the source of a story I’ll buy you a nice bottle of whiskey. The media will systematically ignore sources like AEI, that use actual numbers, in favor of soundbites like the one in this Common Dreams article.

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#153

Post by leetcrew »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #108
leetcrew wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too was surprised at how complicated my first food service job was. there are so many opportunities to mess up in every minute of peak hours. at the same time, I almost miss it. if food service paid the same as software dev, I might seriously consider switching back. as stressful as it was, there was a sense of closure at the end of every shift. if I messed something up, I would either hear about it by the end of t…

I worked at Subway for 6 years while earning my CS degree. I sometimes miss the mindless simplicity of the work. I miss knowing exactly what I need to be doing every day. But I certainly don't miss with dealing with the general public, where a very vocal minority has decided that it is socially acceptable to yell at service workers. It's even worse when it's their own mistake, like they ask for mustard when they mean…

> But I certainly don't miss with dealing with the general public, where a very vocal minority has decided that it is socially acceptable to yell at service workers. It's even worse when it's their own mistake, like they ask for mustard when they meant honey mustard, and somehow I'M the idiot for not knowing which one they meant.

yeah I don't really miss stuff like that. although as I've gotten older, I've started to appreciate people who are overtly hostile. at least you know where they stand. I find it much harder to gauge people's intentions in white-collar land.

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#155

Post by vannevar »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #107
vannevar wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's inevitable only if we decline to regulate capital. Just as it's also inevitable that a speeding truck will crash, unless the driver puts on the brakes at some point. There is nothing in the laws of physics that dictates that our financial system must be as it is. It is the result of our collective choices, and we can change it when it becomes in our best collective interest to do so.

The fundamental problem is, if you need a factory with 100 workers in order to effectively manufacture anything, then the ability to innovate in manufacturing is limited to groups who have sufficient capital to direct the efforts of 100 people. There are of course different ways to organize that capital. Capital can be owned by rich people, by corporate firms, by the government, by worker collectives. But it's still…

Sure. But there's a wide range between the concentration of capital we have now, and the notion of it all being somehow distributed equally. It's not so much about giving capital to workers, it's more about retarding the natural flow of capital to itself. If the economy were only made up of 100-person factories, then there might be enough competition and experimentation that more capital would find its way to innovation and labor, rather than being drawn to large concentrations of wealth. I'm not saying we need to go to that extreme, but there is much room for progress in that direction.

Looking farther into the future, with AI and robotic labor, it's quite possible that everyone would have the capital to direct a large factory. As it stands now, it appears likely that any such robotic future would be owned almost exclusively by a tiny fraction of humanity.

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#156

Post by TT3351 »

sneak wrote: post #144
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that "pushing a broom" is a straw-man of a job that doesn't actually exist anymore, if it ever did.

There are many millions of busses to drive, bags to load, passengers to drive around, trash bins to empty, and floors to be swept, vacuumed, and mopped. I think perhaps you underestimate the massive size of the unskilled job market.

0 of those jobs consist of solely "pushing a broom," which as a phrase dehumanizes and strips "unskilled" workers of their dignity.

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#157

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

sneak wrote: post #144
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that "pushing a broom" is a straw-man of a job that doesn't actually exist anymore, if it ever did.

There are many millions of busses to drive, bags to load, passengers to drive around, trash bins to empty, and floors to be swept, vacuumed, and mopped. I think perhaps you underestimate the massive size of the unskilled job market.

Busses are definitely a specific skill requiring specific certification. I don't know if dedicated bag loaders exist these days but everyone has other job requirements. While yes, the market for low skill jobs is large, I think you're still diminishing these roles.

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#158

Post by fallingfrog »

norseboar wrote: post #95

I think there's a bad assumption in here, which is that pay should keep pace with productivity gains in the first place. I'd argue the whole point of productivity gains is that they do outpace pay. The idea is the same work generates more value. Some of that extra value can be passed back to the employee, but if all of it is passed back to the employee, then the goods produced don't actually get cheaper. If nothing g…

If productivity doubles, and worker pay doubles, then the cut going to capital also doubles. Don’t see the problem with that. Your math is wrong.

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#159

Post by monocasa »

sixstrings wrote: post #73
bhupy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, you're right. The real median personal income in the US, today is $35,977 -> https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N Unfortunately I'm having a hard time finding the median number of annual hours worked. But using the average hours worked, that puts the median worker at $20/hr. Obviously not perfect unless we can get the median hours worked. Also, like other commenters have said, I don't think anyone ha…

Is that net or gross? And assuming 30 days of vacation at 7,5 hours each, are those 225 hours part of the equation? Interesting to see how those numbers aren’t as drastically different from my country as I’d assumed.

Someone making $35k isn't getting 30 days of vacation in the US. Maybe 10 days of combined sick days and vacation.

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#160

Post by credit_guy »

chrisseaton wrote: post #125
credit_guy wrote: post #122

In a very simplistic way, shouldn't the average wage keep pace with the average productivity gains and the minimum wage keep pace with the minimum productivity gains? I can see the average farmer making huge productivity strides, since they use much more complex combines, and irrigation systems and such, but did the productivity of a burger flipper go up similarly?

> In a very simplistic way, shouldn't the average wage keep pace with the average productivity gains and the minimum wage keep pace with the minimum productivity gains? Wages are set by the market, not by productivity.

That's for sure. This is an article that makes an appeal to fairness though. The underlying message is "the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer". So, if you want to follow the argument of fairness, should the wage of the minimum wage workers grow at the same rate as the average productivity for the nation, or as the rate of the productivity gains for the minimum wage workers? If it's the latter, then it's quite likely that the productivity of the lower end jobs did not see a whole lot of gains.
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