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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

#251

Post by xyzzyz »

pydry wrote: post #212
SamReidHughes wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What. Lowering taxes doesn't lower wages. Higher rents are caused by regulations, not freedom from regulations. You have to ask permission for something as simple as building places to live.

No, it raises rents. California rents can be traced back to prop 13, for instance. Prop 13 wasn't run on a platform of raising rents, was it?

As bad as Prop 13 is for California, it's silly to put the whole blame on high rents on it. It's enough to note that rents are high in NYC, Boston, DC, and Seattle, and none of these places have Prop 13. If you can have skyrocketing rents without Prop 13, why would you think that it's Proposition 13 that's bearing the whole blame in California?

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

#253

Post by lukewrites »

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…

Help me to understand how you're reading this graph. I understand it to mean that in 1949 minimum wage was $4.22 an hour in 2018 dollars. Does that graph show worker productivity as well?

Similarly I do not understand your assertion that the author is "cherrypicking troughs and peaks". from tfa:

> Until 1968, the minimum wage not only kept pace with inflation, it rose in step with productivity growth. The logic is straightforward; we expect that wages in general will rise in step with productivity growth. For workers at the bottom to share in the overall improvement in society’s living standards, the minimum wage should also rise with productivity.

Is their assertion regarding 1968 and minimum wage factually incorrect?

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

#254

Post by slumpt_ »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #157
sneak wrote: post #144

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.

I see a lot of this on HN and it’s disappointing. Place can be a bit too steeped in privilege and survivorship bias at times.

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

#255

Post by tasty_freeze »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #198
tasty_freeze wrote: post #110

Many comments are focused on "But why should minimum wage jobs pay scale rise with productivity? The jobs haven't gotten any more demanding." But isn't this logic applied to average CEO pay, which has gone up many times faster than productivity? CEOs work isn't any more demanding than it used to be, either.

> CEOs work isn't any more demanding than it used to be, either. I think it has, actually. The CEO's job became more complicated as a result of the increased complexity in the world. There used to be only brick-and-mortar and mail order, now there is internet. They used to advertise on tv, radio, and newspaper. Now they can advertise tv, radio, newspaper, online ads, and social media influencers. They didn't have to…

Has it gotten 10x harder? Was running the vast agglomeration of companies that was ITT really less difficult than running today's sprawling companies? Do you think the CEOs of today's companies get into the nitty gritty of all of those issues you talk about, or do they, as always, delegate the real work of understanding those issues to their subordinates?

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

#256

Post by jgilias »

The graph in the article really looks like as if value generation simply got decoupled from minimum age earners' labour at some point. Intuitively this makes sense. Sure, the invention of steam engine driven factories or something like the assembly line did drive productivity. However, you still needed human labour to actually produce the widgets. Now total productivity growth is largely driven by highly paid specialists producing textual descriptions of widgets and setting up automated systems that keep churning out the widgets themselves. Figuratively speaking, you don't actually need to pay anyone to push the button to make a widget every time you need one. So you don't.

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

#257

Post by pmiller2 »

gwright wrote: post #246
pmiller2 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not cherry picking when wages have been stagnant for the last 40+ years.

I'm not sure exactly what the data shows but total compensation would seem to be the more reasonable thing to look at. In particular the value associated with health insurance and other non-cash compensation has gone up.

No, "total compensation" includes things like health insurance benefits that simultaneously have gotten more expensive in real terms over time, and don't put money in my pocket.

If I could go to my landlord and trade them a months' worth of health insurance benefits for rent, then you'd be on to something. If you could find a way to separate out the part of "total compensation" that actually contributes to income, such as stock grants & such, then we could talk. But, just "total compensation" doesn't cut it.

If you really want to get a true picture of how screwed the American worker is, take a look at housing and education costs over time, as well. Both have increased faster than inflation, and vastly outpaced wage growth; yet everyone needs a home, and a college degree is practically a requirement for any vaguely middle-class career.

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

#258

Post by martin_bech »

DuskStar wrote: post #221
claudeganon wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

yes unions are mostly big and exists across companies. However you are also free to join any union you like or none at all. For jobs a restaurants, factories etc. salary is mostly the product of Employer - Union negotiation. As a software dev, you negotiate yourself (unless you work a gov job).

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

#259

Post by gwright »

pmiller2 wrote: post #257
gwright wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure exactly what the data shows but total compensation would seem to be the more reasonable thing to look at. In particular the value associated with health insurance and other non-cash compensation has gone up.

No, "total compensation" includes things like health insurance benefits that simultaneously have gotten more expensive in real terms over time, and don't put money in my pocket. If I could go to my landlord and trade them a months' worth of health insurance benefits for rent, then you'd be on to something. If you could find a way to separate out the part of "total compensation" that actually contributes to income, su…

Those benefits are income to you. Not taxable income, but they have a non-zero value. They certainly appear on the balance sheet of your employer and represent an increase in their total payroll costs.

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

#260

Post by Junk_Collector »

Ductapemaster wrote: post #131
mortenjorck wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s an excellent and frankly damning ProPublica report that serves as a case study in the movement to rely on staffing companies for low-wage labor: https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service... The degree to which both costs and risk are shifted onto workers is at times astonishing: “After paying about $1,500 for home office equipment: a computer, two headsets and a phone line dedicated to Aris…

The really awful thing from that story (Planet Money did a great recent episode on the ProPublica coverage) is that they are able to get away with this through Arbitration clauses. By way of their contracts, they strongarm their contractors into dealing with any "misclassification" issues (eg. exerting too much control over a contractor) individually, silently, and outside of court. Contractors have no ability to sue…

Arbitration is actually very expensive for the company but generally they can rely on the fact that most people will not utilize it for a variety of reasons. If people large scale started taking companies like this to claims it could quickly become more expensive than class action lawsuits trying to arbitrate each individual claim.

If you feel strongly against arbitration clauses, activism to get people to use them is the fastest way to kill them as the cost benefit will quickly become a negative.

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