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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

#361

Post by momokoko »

mortenjorck wrote: post #106
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #40

There'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…

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…

I think we need to stop saying a company and instead use the name of the person or persons actually setting Tami up for this.

AT&T and Arise are not people. People made these decisions and put Tami in this position. We should use their names.

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

#362

Post by andrewjl »

ashtonkem wrote: post #348
andrewjl wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Arguably American firms have been incredibly competitive since the 1970s; its American labor that hasn’t been. And/or the fruits of globalism have not been fairly shared. Depending on whom you ask.

The fruits of globalism aren't shared equitably amongst labor, post-1970's labor earnings have done exceptionally well for the upper tranches of the labor pyramid. Why are those more competitive than the rest? There are factors like differential productivity gains due to globalization, technology, etc but I'm not convinced. Especially when one takes Baumol's cost disease into account. There was a change in during the 1970s, but I don't believe globalism was it.

The surprising thing about the current era is just how little wealth is inherited and how much has been largely generated during the owner's lifetime, in many cases due to labor and receiving compensation in the form of stock. The vast inheritances we read about from the 19th century aren't there this time, barring a few exceptions. Thomas Piketty wrote about this in Capital.

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

#364

Post by murderfs »

tboyd47 wrote: post #249
murderfs wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not try this with other commodities? Silver was used as currency for longer than gold, and was still legal tender in the time of Henry Ford. Let's see what happens if you do the same analysis with silver instead. Silver was 1/20 the price of gold back then and 1/80 of the price of gold today, so your $120,000 turns into $30,000. Whoops. Aluminum? $433. It turns out that comparing wages over time with an arbitrary…

Gold is obviously not just an "arbitrary natural resource." There's a reason why we say "gold standard" and not "silver standard," "aluminum standard," or even "dollar standard." Nevertheless, it was only a fun thought experiment (which is what most economic arguments boil down to).

The "gold standard" just happened to be the last one to be abolished: it was only really predominant around the 1800s. Silver was by far the most prevalent metal used in currency for millenia, to the point where almost every single modern currency is named after a silver coin.

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

#365

Post by dehrmann »

vannevar wrote: post #25
dehrmann wrote: post #22

This is this same sort of group that would say "trickle down economics doesn't work." It's funny they'd expect productivity gains to trickle down to wages. Productivity is a ceiling on wages; once wages raise beyond a certain point, the company will take a loss, even after passing down the cost of labor to customers. Wages not keeping up with productivity gains isn't just on the low end. Seeing how well they tracked…

I think this a a demonstration that trickle-down economics doesn't work, because additional capital injected into a capitalist system tends to be captured by the capital at the top. Rationally, you would expect productivity gains to be captured disproportionately at the point where the gain occurs, on the assembly line, not back up through the hierarchy. But because of the rich-get-richer mathematics of capital, thos…

I never said trickle-down economics work. I just found it ironic that the sort of group would would normally claim it doesn't work completely ignored that with. Basically, if trick-down economics doesn't work, why would you expect productivity gains to trickle down?

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

#366

Post by m12k »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #40

There'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…

It was recently pointed out to me that health insurance costs roughly the same to purchase for each employee, so with wildly different wages, the percentage that health insurance makes up of the total cost associated with an employee also differs wildly. So while health insurance might make up e.g. 5% of what is paid for a software engineer, it could make up 80% of what is paid for a janitor. This puts a big incentive on companies to get rid of their lowest paid employees (or wiggle their way out of providing benefits), since there is essentially a fixed price income tax that always needs to be paid on any salary regardless of it's size otherwise.

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

#367

Post by linspace »

rbg246 wrote: post #359
gridlockd wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If that were true there would be no resistance to raising the minimum wage. The truth is that it redistributes wealth.

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

#368

Post by geodel »

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..

Wouldn't it be great if you let in a million people from countries where people make lot less than $20. It would be fastest way to raise standard for those people

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

#369

Post by inglor_cz »

yoz-y wrote: post #200
thatguy0900 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this an issue in other countries where it is even more difficult to fire employees?

I haven't looked into whether it's specifically an issue but in France it's notoriously hard to fire employees and indeed a lot of work is done by workers hired from agencies. This is also because it is very hard to make temporary contracts here.

Czech Republic here. We are somewhere between France and the US when it comes to hardness of firing people.

Agency work is extremely common here, especially on the lower level of the job ladder. Gig economy and contractors are common even in higher settings, such as software development.

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