If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by DuskStar » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

claudeganon wrote: post #189

burntoutfire wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes they do, which is why the US made that in impossible in the 30s. Making it so that unions can only form on the basis of company level votes, along with myriad other restrictions, made it so that the labor movement could never have as much power as it does in Europe.

Don't multi-company unions exist, though? The UAW is a pretty famous example.

Unless you're saying that the problem is that the US doesn't make every new auto manufacturer a UAW shop with no opt-out?

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

#222

Post by chordalkeyboard » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

ahoy wrote: post #53

qeternity wrote: post #49

This is so horribly flawed. Productivity improvements have been concentrated at the high end, and those that have occurred in low skilled jobs have been almost entirely due to technology, not to labor efficiency. Technology gains have always disproportionately been captured by the providers of capital over the providers of labor (given they are the ones who invest in said technology).

I don't think "this is fine because capitalism privileges capitalists by design" is the rebuttal you think it is.

It's not "by design" but rather an emergent property of an economy.

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

#223

Post by cafed00d » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

slg wrote: post #215

missedthecue wrote: post #179

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…

>Someone stocking shelves in 2020 is about productive as someone stocking shelves in 1968. This is not completely fair. There are countless innovations that have allowed these low skill jobs to have an increase in efficiency and productivity. One example, when I was a teen and worked retail I remember we would all have to spend hours going around the store counting every product on the shelves in order to do our rout…

> Now many stores have intelligent inventory tracking that requires little to no work from employees. > Why isn't the benefit of that efficiency passed on to those employees who are now more efficient?

It is, though, right? It is passed on to the employees who were responsible for the efficiency gains. Those employees who built those innovations — could be employees of retailer, or employees of the companies, say tech companies, for whom the retailer is a customer.

I think the parent commenter’s point is still valid that:

>>Someone stocking shelves in 2020 is about productive as someone stocking shelves in 1968.

I would phrase it slightly differently: “the skill of stocking shelves in 2020 has been as efficient as it has been in 1968”. It’s the skill of creating innovations in inventory tracking , better statistical modeling and predictions/estimates, and probably the advent of tracking all this in digital systems that has multiplied the efficiency at the macro level.

Employees who are stocking shelves have not been able to participate in those contributions.

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

#224

Post by specialist » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

missedthecue wrote: post #201

cryptoz wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wages have stagnated. Your graphs aren't really relevant to this question; so what if per capita disposable income has increased? That doesn't say anything at all about wages of people in America. Here is a more complete picture, with words and discussion and multiple graphs too: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...

My graph also shows median income, and it clearly shows it has not stagnated, but risen, and not by any small amount.

Median (average) measures are the refuge of the scoundrel.

Refuting the (willful) abuse of statistics is like trying to refute numerology with reason.

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

#225

Post by chordalkeyboard » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

ptmcc wrote: post #65

rayiner wrote: post #57

These sorts of comparisons are extremely difficult to make. They depend very strongly on what exactly you’re looking at, how you’re measuring inflation, etc. You can easily make charts that show total worker compensation is closely tracking productivity growth: https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/does-compensati... (Unlike Common Dreams, this article shows their work and discloses their exact methodology and…

Many (most) minimum wage jobs do not provide any meaningful benefits, so it's tangential to the minimum wage in most cases. There's no doubt some fuzzy math involved to extrapolate inflation over the course of 50+ years, but I don't think that invalidates the fact that minimum wage has objectively not kept up with inflation even remotely. The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, and a handful of s…

> Worse yet is that labor data shows that more and more adults are working in minimum wage jobs, so the talking point of "it's just summer jobs for teenagers" and "it's entry level work to move on from" is very out of touch with reality these days. There are millions of people trying to survive on these wage levels and without benefits and it is not working.

Then is it really true that productivity has increased? Millionaires and billionaires are not eating the food of millions of people or occupying hundreds of thousands of apartments and vehicles.

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

#226

Post by pydry » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

bhupy wrote: post #129

pydry wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If efficiency has gone up why hasnt rent gone down? Since rent has been pushed up by political means why not wages? Also, why are we assuming that technology brought down wages when offshoring has skyrocketed. What makes you think it wasn't competition from the third world labor rather than robots? There is a political position embedded in the assumption that robots are responsible for the missing jobs.

> Also, why are we assuming that technology brought down wages when offshoring has skyrocketed. What makes you think it wasn't competition from the third world labor rather than robots? Do we think that increasing minimum wage will hasten or slow down this trend?

If the United States government wanted to speed up or slow down this trend or even halt it altogether it could do so tomorrow no matter what the minimum wage did. Currently it views offshoring as a geopolitical threat and is opting to slowly repatriate supply chains. No matter what happens to the minimum wage that opinion is unlikely to change.

I don't think it makes sense to treat an explicit political choice as a fait accompli.

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

#227

Post by bhupy » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 9:25 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #193

jfengel wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progressive taxation would mean that the subsidy comes from the people making the most money. The goal of a UBI is to decouple basic living from employment, giving employees more leverage to negotiate pay.

But why aren't they paying a living wage in the first place, a wage that they were paying in the past if not for inflation? And wouldn't the cost of the subsidy mainly be spread across the upper end of the middle class and not the employers, making it be a net benefit for the employers? Walmart for instance already has a huge emphasis on setting their employees up with welfare and using that to pay them a below livin…

> But why aren't they paying a living wage in the first place, a wage that they were paying in the past if not for inflation?

Because the market rate for labor doesn't always work out to equal a "living wage". Markets are remarkably good at bringing down the price of goods & services, but that necessarily means that they also bring down the price of labor, which is an input. While this is good for most people, it's obviously less good for those workers that are engaged in low leverage work where net-productivity hasn't changed. As a society, we should help those workers via welfare.

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

#228

Post by bhupy » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 9:25 PM UTC

bleepblorp wrote: post #59

vsareto wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is. This is mostly political in that businesses ought to be keeping up wages because that's the right thing to do. If the supply of labor is such that they always have access to lower-paid workers though, there's no real obligation to increase pay. This is when minimum wage should come in, and this would be an argument for increasing minimum wage to that end, but businesses themselves can just ign…

There's a little more to preventing real wage erosion than it simply being the right thing to do from a humanitarian perspective. The interests of individual firms are not aligned with the interests of the broader economy. It's in the interest of every firm to pay its workers as little as possible, but it's in the interest of the broader economy that most people can afford to buy goods and services. Every employee's…

> In a society with a social safety net, under-paid workers are also a cost to government as they will not pay taxes and will be due social assistance payments/transfers to help cover their costs for food and shelter.

Social safety nets are typically paid for via progressive taxation, the burden for which falls on the rich. In the alternative, the employer covers that cost and passes it on to buyers in the form of higher prices. Higher prices affect rich and poor equally. There's arguably social value in having the government pay for that safety net: and it's lower prices for lower and middle class consumers.

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

#229

Post by mgolawala » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

slg wrote: post #215

missedthecue wrote: post #179

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…

>Someone stocking shelves in 2020 is about productive as someone stocking shelves in 1968. This is not completely fair. There are countless innovations that have allowed these low skill jobs to have an increase in efficiency and productivity. One example, when I was a teen and worked retail I remember we would all have to spend hours going around the store counting every product on the shelves in order to do our rout…

I think the point the OP is making is that the benefit of this efficiency gain is passed on to the technology teams that implement and maintain those intelligent inventory tracking systems. They are the ones getting paid the higher salaries. They are the ones making the the store workers more efficient.

What makes you feel that Software developer salary is linked to computing power? In fact, even if we were to consider it a fair comparison, computing power, if measured by Moore's law has doubled every 2 years. Software Engineer salaries have lagged far far behind.

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

#230

Post by monadic2 » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

missedthecue wrote: post #179

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…

That leads to the natural conclusion that only people valued by those in power will see society's benefits. That's not a society I want to live in.