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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

#441

Post by danans »

andrewjl wrote: post #440
danans wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what a minimum wage actually does is remove the possibility for anyone to work below an arbitrary number of dollars. It should be paired with a federal jobs guarantee and universal healthcare then.

I think to work right the jobs guarantee needs to be a temporary guarantee with the aim of upskilling and not purely a "make work" program. Something more like college, though not academic, with built-in accountability mechanisms. It shouldn't be normalized to be a "lifelong" thing, in the same way we think it's unusual for someone to be a lifelong college student. At least one without milestones such as degrees, etc…

I agree. The goal shouldn't be ditch digging. There is a huge amount of work that needs to be done in areas that will require plenty of upskilling that can take place while working.

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

#442

Post by hannasanarion »

andrewjl wrote: post #438
hannasanarion wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantity of regulations is not the same as regulatory burden, and it's not like every single businness in the whole country needs to keep track of every single one. In the food service industry, the most common type of small business, there are only 2400 federal regulations, and most of them concern common sense things, like "wipe tables after customers use them" and "cook chicken to 180°" and "don't let rats live un…

> it's not like every single businness [sic] in the whole country needs to keep track of every single one. That's an incorrect understanding of how laws and regulations work. Ignorantia juris non excusat . > 2400 seems like a laughably small number of regulations. I'd love to hear a food service operator's perspective. It may differ from yours.

Please explain to me why a restaraunteur needs to know about the proper temperature for casting steam locomotive crank arms, or how many people need to be in a coal plant's fire response station. Under what circumstances will a food truck operator need to know those?

I worked in the restaurant business, I know how thoelse regulations work. Not every one applies to every business. We didn't serve eggs, so we didn't need to Cara about all of the special rules for cooking eggs to temperature, maintaining separate tools and workstations, refrigerator temperatures, etc just for eggs. 5he same is true of all the other thousands of ingredients and food items we did not serve.

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

#443

Post by andrewjl »

hannasanarion wrote: post #442
andrewjl wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not like every single businness [sic] in the whole country needs to keep track of every single one. That's an incorrect understanding of how laws and regulations work. Ignorantia juris non excusat . > 2400 seems like a laughably small number of regulations. I'd love to hear a food service operator's perspective. It may differ from yours.

Please explain to me why a restaraunteur needs to know about the proper temperature for casting steam locomotive crank arms, or how many people need to be in a coal plant's fire response station. Under what circumstances will a food truck operator need to know those? I worked in the restaurant business, I know how thoelse regulations work. Not every one applies to every business. We didn't serve eggs, so we didn't ne…

The regulatory corpus is not provided in a single indexed volume neatly arranged by category, it's haphazardly organized, subject to the whims of bureaucrats when interpreted, endlessly cross-referenced, and even inconsistent in places.

One might have one agency in charge of one thing and another one in charge of another, with no rhyme or reason to it. There is no way to find out all the regulations that apply to your specific business unless you 1) consult a very expensive lawyer or 2) read an authoritative, current reference specific to your field of endeavor. 2) is usually not an option if you're doing something uncommon or brand new.

In the end one's best bet as a business owner is consulting an experienced lawyer for everything that you do. They're usually pricy and charge down to the minute. Everything you don't check, is a potential compliance risk. Today some classes of severe violations, for example improperly withholding employee taxes, can even result in the corporate veil being pierced where you as the business owner now become personally liable for your business. And I'm not even getting into things like tech that have no legal certainty whatsoever.

All these legal and compliance costs are deadweight on the economy, they could have been used to invest in better equipment or to pay employees more, instead they are spent on lawyers. Some laws & regs are no doubt necessary, but anything beyond that is a net loss for everyone. The balance always seems to only land one way these days.

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

#444

Post by dennisgorelik »

Minimum wage is a threshold for _not_ paying salary (if a candidate is not skillful enough to earn at least a minimum wage -- that worker cannot get a job).

Minimum wage is bad for workers. Increasing minimum wage hurts low-skilled workers even more. Which is a cruel thing to do, especially for a programmer who earns significantly more and is not affected by minimum wage.

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

#445

Post by reducesuffering »

cwhiz wrote: post #407

National minimum wage is stupid. Even state minimum wage is a bit silly. There is way too much variance from one location to another. MIT created a “living wage” calculator that tries to estimate what the minimum livable wage should be in a given city.[0] Some extreme variance from state to state and city to city. There is no reason to do this federally. States and cities should handle minimum wage. [0]: https://livi…

Why shouldn't the federal government implement the min. wage as min(cities & states) so that any bad actors of states & cities that don't follow the "living wage" calculator are accounted for? Isn't this what the federal government currently tries to do?

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

#446

Post by cwhiz »

reducesuffering wrote: post #445
cwhiz wrote: post #407

National minimum wage is stupid. Even state minimum wage is a bit silly. There is way too much variance from one location to another. MIT created a “living wage” calculator that tries to estimate what the minimum livable wage should be in a given city.[0] Some extreme variance from state to state and city to city. There is no reason to do this federally. States and cities should handle minimum wage. [0]: https://livi…

Why shouldn't the federal government implement the min. wage as min(cities & states) so that any bad actors of states & cities that don't follow the "living wage" calculator are accounted for? Isn't this what the federal government currently tries to do?

It’s not the business of the federal government to dictate to each state what their minimum wage should be. States are free to make their own decisions on minimum wage. Citizens within those states can vote to change it, and if they don’t like it, they can leave to another state.

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

#447

Post by reducesuffering »

cwhiz wrote: post #446
reducesuffering wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn't the federal government implement the min. wage as min(cities & states) so that any bad actors of states & cities that don't follow the "living wage" calculator are accounted for? Isn't this what the federal government currently tries to do?

It’s not the business of the federal government to dictate to each state what their minimum wage should be. States are free to make their own decisions on minimum wage. Citizens within those states can vote to change it, and if they don’t like it, they can leave to another state.

Do you agree with free markets and globalization dictating unskilled labor's wages in the same way? Your suggestion is a miniature version of that. If one state sets no min. wage, most factories will be based in this state, and much of unskilled labor will be forced to move to this state as the other states won't be competitive because of the higher cost of labor. Isn't this similar to the US' predicament with regards to global labor (like Chinese and Indian factories) being much cheaper, thus many US made products aren't competitive on price?

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

#448

Post by austinjp »

WalterBright wrote: post #431
austinjp wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What separates the haves from the have-nots? It's not blogs.

In America it's largely the choices people make. After all, school doesn't teach how to create a startup. But there are plenty of books and blogs on how to do it. All one needs is the get-up-and-go to take advantage of all the freely available information.

It's not a lack of "get-up-and-go" that perpetuates lack of opportunity. "All one needs"? You could gain some insights here by having a few conversations with people doing the sort of precarious contractor work that was mentioned previously. I doubt they're lacking elbow grease.

There's also an implication that it's simply okay to let job security rot away, that people in precarious work should simply read a few blogs and retrain. I'm not convinced that it's a good plan to ignore creepingly pervasive employment insecurity.

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

#449

Post by bsanr2 »

m0zg wrote: post #286
bsanr2 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Relatively. It's not based on what you can buy with it, it's based on what your company pulls in with your turning your cog.

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

#450

Post by bsanr2 »

smaryjerry wrote: post #287
bsanr2 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

Every sentence you've written is the opposite of true.

And cashiers still have to do math. Most places don't have automatic change dispensers, nor can a machinr account for a customer suddenly switching which bills they're going to give you. I understand that never having had to work one of those jobs is a source of pride in a lot of places, but in this thread, it just outs you as ignorant.

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