181–190 of 451 posts
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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?
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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.
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The question is why these services exist? I don't think it has to do with wages, I think it has to do with the difficulty of firing employees.
Aren't the usual reasons we buy a service rather than doing something ourselves chosen from a list that goes something like: * X is available more cheaply from a third party supplier (who presumably has achieved some kinds of economies of scale) than our fully-loaded cost to deliver the same * X is a commodity product where we do not feel we can differentiate ourselves by doing it in-house * X is ancillary, but impor…
* Purchasing X through a third party allows us to circumvent laws and regulations meant to protect workers and/or consumers
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Well, while it's important that the minimum wage is $24/hr (or $15/hr), none of these results tell us whether the better way to do that is to mandate that employers pay that full wage, or for the government to fill in the blanks with a UBI/NIT funded by progressive taxation.
If productivity is going up, why would we subsidizing their employers by paying part of their wage?
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It's not difficult to fire employees in the US. You can't just fire the minorities and the women, but other than that you can fire for any reason at any time. It's sometimes difficult to fire employees as a way of lowering wages. The people left behind who are expected to make up for that through raised workloads and losing the experienced for green new hires might complain.
It's also not difficult to sue a company for unfair hiring/firing practices. But if the employee is via third party, there is no hiring or firing involved, limiting the liability of the first company.
And if they had kept up since 1949, minimum wage would be $4.22 an hour. Two can play the game of cherrypicking troughs and peaks. Additionally, average productivity is not minimum wage productivity. They are separate statistics, and the bulk of the efficiency gains have not been made at the burger flipper level, but at higher levels, where there have been huge gains in pay. The productivity gains in engineering and…
And if they had kept up since 1949, minimum wage would be $4.22 an hour. Two can play the game of cherrypicking troughs and peaks. Additionally, average productivity is not minimum wage productivity. They are separate statistics, and the bulk of the efficiency gains have not been made at the burger flipper level, but at higher levels, where there have been huge gains in pay. The productivity gains in engineering and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.