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

#351

Post by DeonPenny » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 4:41 AM 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…

Those innovations have 0 to do with labor of the workers. The cost of the investment in the innovation is where the wage went. How does it make sense to pay for that twice. The worker sans the innovation is no more productive.

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

#352

Post by zaroth » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 4:42 AM 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…

> Many (most) minimum wage jobs do not provide any meaningful benefits, so it's tangential to the minimum wage in most cases.

I think you might be forgetting that most benefits at that wage level come from the government not the employer.

When you count how those benefits have increased since 1968 then minimum wage has never been higher.

This is most particularly true for Medicaid Expandion states since the ACA, but even non-expansion states with the health care tax credits and cost sharing reductions which are worth $10k-$20k per year to a low-income family of four.

This adds about $4/hour to the effective wage of a dual-income family which TFA is just ignoring.

The increasing value and accessibility of SNAP benefits is probably another $1/hour.

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

#353

Post by confidantlake » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 4:43 AM UTC

marcusverus wrote: post #309

confidantlake wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels very arbitrary to claim the employees responsible got the gains. Like take Walmart, the biggest beneficiaries by far are the relatives of Sam Walton. Yet they did nothing to build the automated inventory tracking, the statistical modeling, or the digital systems. Or take the programmers who worked on Walmart.com. They didn't invent the transistor, Linux, or Java. They just used them to build a crud app.

> Or take the programmers who worked on Walmart.com. They didn't invent the transistor, Linux, or Java. They just used them to build a crud app. Likewise, the shelf stockers who work at Walmart didn't invent pasteurization, the tin can, or the grocery cart. They just move the cans around. What does that have to do with the fact that programmers contribute (on an ongoing basis) to improved productivity, while shelf st…

My point is that it is somewhat arbitrary who captures the value, and it is not always clear who produces the value. Say a grocery store is stocking at twice the rate they did 40 years ago because they have an app. Is the guy who wrote the app responsible for all the increased productivity? Not really, writing the app was fairly trivial compared to inventing the transistor, the operating system, and the programming language. Is the guy who invented the transistor responsible? Well it would not have mattered at all if there wasn't a store to make use of his invention. Is the store owner responsible? Well he isn't technical at all, he didn't invent the transistor, write the app or stock the shelf. Besides he would have no one to sell to if there wasn't a town to sell to. Is the town responsible? Well they provided road the stocker drove on to work, the university that the programmer and transistor developer went to, the police force that protects the store, and the customers that buy the cans.

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

#354

Post by confidantlake » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 4:57 AM UTC

cafed00d wrote: post #312

confidantlake wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels very arbitrary to claim the employees responsible got the gains. Like take Walmart, the biggest beneficiaries by far are the relatives of Sam Walton. Yet they did nothing to build the automated inventory tracking, the statistical modeling, or the digital systems. Or take the programmers who worked on Walmart.com. They didn't invent the transistor, Linux, or Java. They just used them to build a crud app.

Yes fair enough. This is why every employee should get paid _stock/rsu/whatever_. The rewards of efficiency gains that Walmart, the enterprise makes, should be shared by the people who made it happen. But then again, not many people would prefer to take that risk and instead prefer to get paid a set hourly wage. Of course, it’s a matter of balance — how much guaranteed income vs. risky income does a person want? I do…

It is much more efficient these days. They use apps to determine when to stock, how much to stock ect. They need many fewer people, and they run much leaner.

Like I mentioned in a comment above, who we consider made it happen is arbitrary. Walmart cannot exist without a functioning society. The daughter of Sam Walton never worked at Walmart, yet she gets more of that gain than any other individual.

For other products, it is even more arbitrary who gets the benefits. If facebook disappeared, another company would quickly take the role of social media leader. Likely not much would change from a productivity standpoint. Yet whoever happens to get the role of dominant social media ceo makes billions.

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

#355

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 5:03 AM 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…

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

Note there was an article on the HN front page just in the past week or so about how Amazon warehouse workers were getting more repetitive stress injuries because partial warehouse automation allowed them to fulfill 3x the number of items per hour than before these systems were put in place.

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

#356

Post by chordalkeyboard » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 5:12 AM UTC

pmiller2 wrote: post #301

rightbyte wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Refuting numerology with reason works quite well for most people.

Reason doesn't work great for convincing a numerologist that they are wrong.

It does a number on the audience though.

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

#357

Post by refurb » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 5:31 AM UTC

randyrand wrote: post #308

Productivity goes into reducing prices, not increasing pay. When a whole market can make 10x more solar panels for the same cost, solar prices go down by you guessed it - about 90%. You don't suddenly have 10x more profit to pay your employees. Maybe a monopoly would, but not a competitive market like most businesses are in. These people have absolutely no clue what they are talking about.

This is an interesting comment and your example is a good one, however, the productivity gains are measured in dollars, so I would assume they account for lower prices already. Unless there is some independent measure of the value of product that doesn't reflect lower prices.

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

#358

Post by refurb » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 5:33 AM UTC

ardy42 wrote: post #3

dcolkitt wrote: post #2

Average annual wages in the United States for was $63,000 for the most recent year available.[1] Average annual hours worked was 1,779 per year.[2] That implies an average wage of $35/hour. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w... [2] https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm

That doesn't contradict the actual article, whose full title is: > If Worker Pay Had Kept Pace With Productivity Gains Since 1968, Today's Minimum Wage Would Be $24 an Hour It looks like when it was shortened one of its most important words were dropped.

That makes sense, but why would productivity gains be equally applied across all wage levels? You'd naturally expect it to be unequal based on the productivity gains in specific job functions.

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

#359

Post by rbg246 » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 5:35 AM UTC

gridlockd wrote: post #271

danans wrote: post #176

Earlier 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…

If everyone has to raise the minimum wage all, everyone has to raise prices accordingly and ROI remains the same.

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

#360

Post by lasagnaphil » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 5:36 AM UTC

decker wrote: post #302

H8crilA wrote: post #50

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ 1971, 1968, doesn't really matter. But - many such "negative" effects only really show up after 1981, that is after the peak of the interest rates. RIP Volcker, the last Fed president with vision. If you're into slightly crazy sounding theories about the cyclical nature of human progress I recommend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio... . Ray Dalio is also wri…

Shipping containers were standardized between 1968-1970. A device that enables efficient outsourcing to cheaper labor is a likely reason for labor wages stagnating while overall productivity rises. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container#History

Or if you reverse the cause and effect, the demand for global free trade (which is more about neoliberal politics than technology) might has created the need for standardized shipping containers.