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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

#281

Post by pldr1234 »

tylerhou wrote: post #247
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…

> 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. This is just wrong: the article is not talking about inflation; it is talking about indexing the minimum wage to productivity. Eyeballing the graph from the original article (and projecting productivity back to 1949), if indexed to productivity, then minimum wage would be at ~$15. Your…

Trickle down economics has created one of the greatest rifts in wealth equality in history. Yet people like the GP still champion the concept and its variants.

I earn fantastically at work, but any vote I make will always be against the political party that spouts the same nonsense.

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

#282

Post by gridlockd »

jjeaff wrote: post #97
dantheman wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it has to do with wages. And also with the ability to abuse those employees without exposing the "brand" to public scrutiny and litigation. It also allows you to offer better benefits to your core employees without offering the same to employees that work for contractors (there are fringe benefits like childcare or use of company facilities like private gyms that generally must be offered to all employees in…

> I think it has to do with wages.

It doesn't, you're literally paying a middleman to take away the risk and hassle of hiring an employee. That's the added value here.

Otherwise, you could just hire the worker directly for what that middleman is paying them. Working as a contractor, you get a pretty good idea of what your "rights" are worth in pure dollar terms.

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

#283

Post by gridlockd »

enragedcacti wrote: post #184
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would argue for a fourth point in this case * Purchasing X through a third party allows us to circumvent laws and regulations meant to protect workers and/or consumers

These "laws and regulations" still apply to the agency that hires those workers. You're simply paying for them to carry the risk.

You can argue that such agencies are more likely to disregard laws and regulations, but how would you fix that? With laws and regulations?

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

#284

Post by punnerud »

With higher minimum wages the incentive is higher for automation. Pushing companies to produce at “home” could then raise the prices in combination with giving more to the higher earners.

How can we incentivize taking jobs back and increasing wage for the low earners? Stop to automate..?

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

#285

Post by monocasa »

bhupy wrote: post #265
monocasa wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they actually brought down the cost of goods & services overall, we'd see the consumer price index dropping. That's not what's happened. Most of the structures of UBI I've seen seem like a massive redistribution scheme to the wealthy.

> we'd see the consumer price index dropping. That's not what's happened. Not for all goods & services. The consumer price index has been falling for most goods & services with the notable exception of healthcare, housing, education, and (to a lesser degree) food. https://howmuch.net/articles/price-changes-in-usa-in-past-20... The only way to prove that “market forces do not reduce prices” is if all goods & services…

> Not for all goods & services...

Yes, some sub indices have gone up, others have gone down. That doesn't change the fact that _overall_ the CPI has gone up over time. Wages have been having an inverse relationship with prices overall. This is not a case of "prices are cheaper so the wages are less too".

> The only way to prove that “market forces do not reduce prices”

I'm not sure why you're putting in quotes something I didn't say.

> Only true for landlords, but that's because the supply of housing is artificially constrained by zoning regulations. If we fix that, then this becomes less true.

No it's true for all employers that would have had to pay a living wage and now don't because the middle class will subsidize their labor costs.

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

#286

Post by m0zg »

bsanr2 wrote: post #264
mgolawala wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consid…

SWE's don't have a union, so of course they're getting relatively hosed, too. Though the disparity is somewhat justified in that the efficiency of software (neither in its running nor production) haw kept up with Moore's Law. In any case, owners and executives are funneling up the excess value created. It's there, you're just not getting it.

> they're getting relatively hosed

If by "hosed" you mean getting $120K salary right out of school, then I guess that's true. I'm just not sure I'd call that "getting hosed" though.

If you want to see what "getting hosed" means, go work as an SWE in Europe.

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

#287

Post by smaryjerry »

bsanr2 wrote: post #262
slg wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

It's not fair at all. The responsibilities of retail employees have grown vastly in the last 50 years. There's more product, with a greater diversity of handling requirements, which need to be stocked across larger stores later in the day (as closing times slowly approach midnight or later). That's for supermarkets (which are increasingly part of larger big box stores). If you work checkout at a place that sells anyt…

Your are comparing one industry and one job in that industry and it is still a bad comparison. The idea that working a cash register now takes more skill than before is false. The idea that you have to now have more knowledge is false. People were not stupid back then and supermarkets still existed, and neither then nor now does a minimum wage employee need vast amounts of knowledge. The best retail employee has a positive attitude, not knowledge of how to get to the bread aisle. It is outrageous to make such a comparison and assume current jobs are more difficult or harder when advances in nearly all technology has only improved. Remember when cashiers had to do math?

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

#288

Post by smaryjerry »

pmiller2 wrote: post #211
missedthecue wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Now, overlay that with a graph of productivity over time. Observe that productivity growth has greatly exceeded wage growth. Speculate on where the gains due to productivity have gone, if they’re not being shared with workers. There’s a story to tell here, but you’re not showing it.

Productivity has nothing to do with wages. If you worked 4 hours writing a book by hand or 4 hours writing a book on a computer with spell check, you were more productive but it has nothing to do with skill of the user but the technology of the time. Another example is in the 90s only rich has cell phones, now everyone Does, does that mean everyone is now rich? Quality of life is vastly better for the world now.

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

#289

Post by BingoAhoy »

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..

Wealth availability and spreading is a multidimensional problem. More wealth can be made available to the average person (median) in a variety of manners. Having more wealth producing centers like intact factories not destroyed by world war 2 bombing is one way to give a locality more average wealth and higher minimum wages. This increases the mean and total wealth. Another manner of increasing the median wealth is through managing income distribution and inequality. Socialist policies, labor unions, etc etc, will raise the median amount of wealth even if the mean stays the same.

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

#290

Post by dantheman »

jahaja wrote: post #219
dantheman wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those displaced (50% in the example above) can go and provide services in another area... Why should only the pin producers get 4 hour weeks. What about those have to toil in the field for 8 hours a day to produce food? What happens is that those 4 can go do something else; now in reality that something else is often not as good as what they were doing before or else they would have already been doing it. But people…

> Those displaced (50% in the example above) can go and provide services in another area... Why should only the pin producers get 4 hour weeks. What about those have to toil in the field for 8 hours a day to produce food? So for the sake of fairness, no one should get to work less hours? It's pretty clear that Russell's sentiment is that this should be expanded to society as a whole.

Sure people can work less hours, but right now people choose to want more things - better healthcare, larger houses, more entertainment and choose to work more hours.

Certain areas are clearly broken - education, medicine, and housing -- but that's largely due to government interference.

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