There’s no reason a minimum wage should track mean productivity, unless you want to price significant portions of workers out of jobs.
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
#332As an Australian looking in, much that manifests in the USA is simply inexplicable.
It feels like the sensation is shared in most other western democracies.
(Actually, it's probably even worse for people in Europe, as in Australia we seem to have a stronger pull recently towards 'the American way of doing things', though perhaps I'm just more sensitive to it the last several years.)
I suspect the problem with explaining the lack of social justice is in part because, if you're living within that system, and have had no experience living outside it, then alternatives just sound infeasible and fanciful. It's a challenge to just find a bit of ground to start any such conversation.
An excellent article by David Bentley Hart published earlier this year included this quote, which did the social media rounds at the time, and conveys the exasperation any informed onlooker experiences.
"Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. "
From: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/three-cheers-socialism
Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Give America back the monopoly it had in the fifties and sixties and minimum wage would be $24 an hour. It would take a lot more than that. Remember that the gains labor made after world war II were built upon decades of struggle by labor, including frequently being targets of violence by armed militia hired by corporations [1]. Despite that, America desperately needed labor for world war II (where the alternative…
> The minimum wage does not naturally rise The minimum amount of money you have to pay for someone to show up for any job rises (and falls) alongside demand for labor in the broader economy. > Under our current system that heavily favors returning productivity gains to capital instead of labor... If you look at the profit margins of those companies that employ a lot of low-end labor, you will find that they're genera…
> The minimum amount of money you have to pay for someone to show up for any job rises (and falls) alongside demand for labor in the broader economy.
Oh, what that it were so simple. There are far more factors governing "market wages", which you are describing, including labor supply at a given skill level, automation, political representation of laborers vs employers, and how that representation manifests as power in the local and global economic contexts.
The "minimum wage" specifically is a policy designed to put a floor under the standard of living of people whose market wages in the economy would provide a standard of living below what the society considers humane. Some societies have no such humanity based floor.
Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scandinavia isn't a country
Perhaps they mean Denmark+Norway+Sweden collectively? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavia#Use_of_Nordic_coun...
I kinda agree with GP: when someone isn't specific about where they're from, then nobody can really respond to them. It's like when people say they're from Europe or how great things are from them there. Even if you wanted to look up how your argument applies to their country or how their country addresses your point, you cannot.
Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
That graph is not very well laid out; in order to see the effect it purports to show, you'd want to scale the SWE salary to all salaries to compare them; otherwise, you're just looking at "SWE is paid more than most occupations" → "SWE is still paid more than most occupations". Both clearly experienced growth, but did SWE experience more growth, or did it grow proportionally? The SWE line in that graph grows by ~74%,…
Housing, Healthcare and Education. Those three have eaten up a larger and larger chunk of people's paychecks over the years. In regards to the cost of housing, I came across an adage a while back that has stuck with me, "Housing can either be affordable, or a great investment, not both". I think the real solution is a change in policy for housing to no longer be treated as a great investment. Not that I have high hop…
What would that look like? Would you disallow non-occupant ownership?
Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
#336[deleted]
Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
#337There's a lot of reasons for this but one of the largest is the near invisible (to me) structural shift from direct hire to contractors for jobs at the lower end of the wage/salary spectrum. There is a fantastic long form article that articulates this better than I can at: https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenn... The portion relevant to this discussion: "Thirty years ago, she says, you could wa…
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…
Why were American firms not able to use their advantage to compete against the upstarts? This comment reads to me as implying American companies are uncompetitive compared foreign firms and are doomed to lose simply by being subject to competitive forces.
What are these other companies doing that we are not? What can we do to make ourselves more competitive such that each employee has enough productive capacity to easily receive $24/hr or equivalent? The peak of 1973 is gone and not coming back, we have to look to the future now.
Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
"Trickle down economics" did not cause that, a massive regulatory complex that protects incumbent monopolies did. An extensive rollback of regulatory complexity or a small business safe harbor exemption from everything but the critical health & safety pieces along with a Henry George land tax would solve our impasse. These are, sadly, not very popular policies.
The most durable way to build middle class wealth is entrepreneurship. And not the SV kind. Family-owned business have something very few publicly traded ones do... long time horizons. We've destroyed the ability for the middle class to do that outside a select coterie of sectors.
Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
#339Earlier 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…
Why were American firms not able to use their advantage to compete against the upstarts? This comment reads to me as implying American companies are uncompetitive compared foreign firms and are doomed to lose simply by being subject to competitive forces. What are these other companies doing that we are not? What can we do to make ourselves more competitive such that each employee has enough productive capacity to ea…
From the macroeconomic perspective, since the US dollar had reserve status and unlimited foreign demand, it just becomes more efficient to print and export dollar bills and import real goods than to actually exert physical labor to produce goods to export and balance trade. Once this realization sets in, the optimal game theory outcome is to reorganize the economy around this structure of print-and-export-dollars debt-based system. Debt only becomes a problem when other people don’t want to hold it anymore.
Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
Or just amend the Federal Arbitration Act to deny the use of arbitration as a tool to suppress legitimate use of the courts to address remedies.
In the meantime create a tool to allow for mass arbitration actions.