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

#381

Post by slykar » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 7:14 AM UTC

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…

> let’s be honest, its actual purpose—is that workers get a lot less out of their jobs than they used to.

Do you really belive there is a collective of business owners who thought "yeah, let's outsource everything, because f..k employees"?

Obviously it's about specialization. Why a software house should hire a cleaning lady? They are not in the business of cleaning, they know nothing about it and they don't want to even think about how you go about hiring someone for cleaning.

Or the other way around. Should a cleaning company hire software developers? They would fail so hard at it. Not to mention the frustration.

World got more complex, business got too.

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

#382

Post by nickff » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 7:21 AM UTC

nimish wrote: post #340

Junk_Collector wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would you "amend the Federal Arbitration Act to deny the use of arbitration as a tool to suppress legitimate use of the courts to address remedies"? Do you just want to get rid of mandatory arbitration? That sounds like repealing the FAA and replacing it with its mirror image.

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

#383

Post by nickff » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 7:25 AM UTC

momokoko wrote: post #361

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…

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.

Well, I think AT&T and Arise actually are people, they're just not individuals.

But getting to the core of your point, how would you allocate blame? Is the CEO responsible for every mistake? Do you part it out to various levels of management, based on their involvement with this specific case? Do you think it's better if more corporations copy Google's approach, and outsource all the low-wage work to avoid bring blamed for problems?

To be clear, I am not sure who is to blame for what, but I think the real problem is a shortage of opportunities for people at the bottom of the corporate ladder (as well as for those struggling to get on it). The average HNer isn't protected from exploitation by laws, they are protected by their BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement).

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

#384

Post by m0zg » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 7:28 AM UTC

matthewdgreen wrote: post #319

m0zg wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

High US tech salaries are an ephemeral business problem that owners have not yet eliminated. Eventually they will.

If they haven't been able to do so in 20 years, I don't think this is a problem they particularly care about "solving".

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

#385

Post by OscarCunningham » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 7:33 AM UTC

bhupy wrote: post #32

ruined wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As noted in your first link, average wage is misleading because the high end is incomprehensibly large (and is where most growth has taken place) and that skews the result. >The wage distribution is right-skewed; the majority of people earn less than the average wage. For an alternative measure, the median household income uses median instead of average.

Yup, you're right. The real median personal income in the US, today is $35,977 -> https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N Unfortunately I'm having a hard time finding the median number of annual hours worked. But using the average hours worked, that puts the median worker at $20/hr. Obviously not perfect unless we can get the median hours worked. Also, like other commenters have said, I don't think anyone ha…

> Obviously not perfect unless we can get the median hours worked.

Even then, the median annual wage divided by the median annual number of hours worked won't necessarily be equal to the median hourly wage.

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

#386

Post by fastball » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 7:33 AM UTC

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…

> The productivity of any individual worker is determined not just by their skills and technology, but also by the institutional structure we put in place.

Could you expand on this a bit?

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

#387

Post by tylorr » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 7:36 AM UTC

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…

Here's the link to the planet money episode https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/918195277/call-center-call-ou...

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

#388

Post by tobyhinloopen » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 7:52 AM UTC

Yes, and a big mac also would be $24

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

#389

Post by jacobush » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 7:58 AM UTC

hombre_fatal wrote: post #334

curtis3389 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It works when where they are from is used as a counter-example. I may be jaded, but I often find people from the US say, "this would be impossible".

Then it's often interesting to point to various places in the world where in fact, the thing is possible.

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

#390

Post by jacobush » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 8:04 AM UTC

andrewjl wrote: post #377

danielscrubs wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90550015/we-were-shocked-rand-st... What do you think about that? Did they make any errors?

Labor in the top 1% is still labor was my point. I never argued that inequality doesn't exist or didn't get worse. I just think the capital vs labor rhetoric is a distraction. Edit: Also, from the link, this is very fishy to me. You could argue the medical benefits they exclude aren't meaningful because of healthcare inflation not being linked to better health outcomes. You can't make that argument for capital gains.…

"Labor in the top 1% is still labor"

I have an issue with this. By some definition, of course. But there is still something very different about the kind of labor which goes on there. Class, opportunity, connections, access to capital, and access to political influence further entrenching their position. It's almost like the nobility of yore.

I find pointing to the 1% labor as some kind of redeeming quality of the system, is instead a distraction from capital vs labor. For the regular labor to have a chance to enter the top 1% of labor, is just as much of a pipe dream as them falling into Big Capital.