Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, this is where this sort of blanket extrapolation breaks down. Has the average productivity grown that much? Sure, I can believe that. Has the productivity at the lower margin grown that much? I seriously doubt that. The value created by stocking shelves at wal-mart just doesn't really change over time. There's a lot of labor on the lower end that is a solved problem with all the productivity wrung out of it de…
Won’t the productivity of stocking shelves go up if, for example, technology makes grocery stores more profitable? Perhaps technology helps stores order locally customized inventory that will sell better (and waste less), or perhaps delivery or curbside pickup systems help stores compete better against online stores. Even packaging improvements could increase productivity. The fact that the stores themselves are phys…
Minimum wage would be $26 an hour if it had grown in line with productivity
111–120 of 199 posts
Re: Minimum wage would be $26 an hour if it had grown in line with productivity
#112I'm struggling to understand how productivity has anything to do with salary. Productivity increases are inevitable for everything as automation keeps improving. Salaries go up with demand for skills. If its more difficult to hire for a critical role (a skilled job or competitive), or the role generates a lot of value for a company, salaries go up. Simple economics. Low skill jobs and physical labor jobs actually req…
In the 1930s, a store clerk in a large city could afford to support a family in a home they would eventually own on their single income. Today, a couple with that same job would likely be in public housing and would be scraping by.
In Chicago in 1933 a 4 bdrm apartment was listed for $35/month. [2]
So basically, rent was eating half your salary even then. But then again, you had a 4 bdrm apartment and not a closet.
Probably would've been tough to buy a house on that though.
And of course, there is this:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/place/article/Problems-H...
“the two great problems it ignored before — housing and traffic.”, Herb Caen, 1948
Some things never change.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41815102 [2] https://blog.rentconfident.com/2635/classified-history-housi...
Re: Minimum wage would be $26 an hour if it had grown in line with productivity
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Owning any single family home (presumably with a yard) seems clearly more attractive than living in a public housing apartment complex.
I'd rather have an apartment with Internet access than a house without.
Re: Minimum wage would be $26 an hour if it had grown in line with productivity
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or you could do either of: 3. massive bonuses for execs and wage increases for white-collar workers 4. stock buybacks and dividends to directly distribute profits to shareholders Let’s not pretend that both of these don’t happen at the cost of regular employees.
Even if this were true, it provides little in the way of an explanation. Why do 10s of thousands of companies across hundreds of industries pay their regular employees a small fraction of their worth? What is stopping someone else from coming along and paying them a larger fraction of their worth?
A dead German economist might have an answer for you ;)
Re: Minimum wage would be $26 an hour if it had grown in line with productivity
#115This might be the case but many jobs I feel like would no longer be worth paying anyone to do at that rate. That would suggest to me that the productivity of minimum/low wage workers has not increased at the same rate as productivity generally. Which would make sense given most of that increase is attributable to technology which isn’t distributed evenly through different sectors of the economy etc.
The value of unskilled labor is probably much lower than everyone wants to think it is in a global economy. There is no incentive to pay workers in developed countries "fair" wages when that labor can be done at a fraction of the cost in the developing world. Service sector jobs are probably hit by this because while they cant be outsourced, all the other employment going elsewhere just means they have leverage. Some…
Re: Minimum wage would be $26 an hour if it had grown in line with productivity
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is stopping companies is competition. If you own a supermarket and want to pay a decent wage, bad news for you. Over long time you are likely to loose against your competitor who doesn't share your sentiment. You may start with 100 companies of which 2 don't have any scruples and over time you will find out that these companies will take over the market along with other ones that will use this experience as lear…
>If you own a supermarket and want to pay a decent wage, bad news for you. Over long time you are likely to loose against your competitor who doesn't share your sentiment. If you can market this "decent wage" to your customers successfully enough that they buy in, then you can continue along this trajectory. (As a side note, most people here probably wouldn't take you up on that "decent wage" retail job, in part beca…
As it is, it seems most people do not give a fuck about it and will still choose a store that is cheaper.
Actually, everybody knows Walmart or Amazon employees are paid shit and they still choose cheap.
Re: Minimum wage would be $26 an hour if it had grown in line with productivity
#117If minimum wage workers aren't responsible for the growth in productivity, why should they be paid as if they were? Would productivity actually be increased, if business owners not only had to invest in, say, machinery to improve productivity, but also needed to pay employees more now that they were using machines that improved their productivity? For example, I build fences for a living. Usually I pay a guy $100/day…
In your scenario you didn't say how much you charge the customer, but I'll assume that it's more than you pay the laborer so that you can turn a profit. You are paying the laborer $5 per post hole. Let's say you have a healthy profit margin so you charge the customer $10 per post hole. The laborer makes you $200 each day of which you pay the laborer $100 and pocket the other $100 as profit.
Now you have a post hole digging machine, they guy can dig 200 post holes and that generates $2000 dollars in value for you of which you pay out $100 to the laborer and pocket the other $1900. Now you used to make $100 profits, so let's subtract that out and say you make an additional $1800 per day from that laborer. If the capital costs $20,000 you will pay for the capital in $20,000 / $1800 = 11.11 days, we can round up and say 2 weeks.
So in 2 weeks you will have paid for the capital expenditure with the increase in productivity, and then there will be upkeep and maintenance on the post hole machine, but every day after the first 12 days you go from labor making 50% of the value they generated digging holes to labor making 5% of the value they generate digging holes.
Now we tell ourselves, this is the system working, you took the risk in buying the post hole digging machine. The laborer could save up his earnings for 200 days (assuming he had no other expenses, which is not realistic) and also have $20k to buy a post hole digging machine and then could just go capture the full value of his labor himself, or could pay someone $100 to operate it and make $1900 a day.
If you are the guy digging the holes though, 6 months after the machine is paid off you are still only capturing 5% of the value you generate, does that seem like a good deal anymore. At what point does your taking 95% of the value someone else generate become predatory. We make ourselves feel better by saying, it's a free market, if he doesn't like it he can go get a different job. But at the end of the day, someone making $1900 has a lot more economic power and the options that come with it than someone making $100. After a year of hard work that laborer has $36,500 and the capitalist has $693,500.
It's not surprising that as the economy has done this day after day, year after year, we are faced with massive income inequality, and it was really only a matter of time before the guy actually digging all the post holes your selling might ask how this arrangement is fair.
Re: Minimum wage would be $26 an hour if it had grown in line with productivity
#118I agree that minimum wages are too low but the argument that wages should track productivity is false from economical point of view, in my opinion. The argument would be true if how people contribute to economy did not change. But over time disparity in contribution to economy changed. Hundred years ago people had very similar jobs, mostly physical, manual, where each would contribute rather similarly. Nowadays compa…
Economically, all jobs that have a productivity lower than the minimum wage's total cost to employers disappear.
So there is a balance to achieve and that's why low productivity is always seen as problematic (and why food delivery guys are never going to be paid a lot).
Re: Minimum wage would be $26 an hour if it had grown in line with productivity
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Won’t the productivity of stocking shelves go up if, for example, technology makes grocery stores more profitable? Perhaps technology helps stores order locally customized inventory that will sell better (and waste less), or perhaps delivery or curbside pickup systems help stores compete better against online stores. Even packaging improvements could increase productivity. The fact that the stores themselves are phys…
Up to a point this would work but there is a point where stocking shelves at all is no longer worth it when the labor reaches a certain price, and they would probably just start tossing pallets of goods directly onto the sales floor and only support self checkout. And then probably invest in robotics to automate moving the pallets around. You could have an entire Walmart ran by fewer than 10 employees
Re: Minimum wage would be $26 an hour if it had grown in line with productivity
#120That was an outlier year with the highest historical value.
First Google graph: https://www.today.com/money/good-graph-friday-minimum-wage-w...