Topic: Minimum wage. - page 6. (Read 4816 times)

the concept that all jobs should provide a "living wage" again becomes subjective. Who gets to define what is a "living wage"

One can try and say the poverty level but someone needs to put meat on the bone. Does a living wage mean a car less than 5 years old for each driver?
Does it mean a separate bedroom for each family member?

Must all TVs be at least 42 inches?

should they have air conditioning?

If they have children, should their salary be increased for every child they choose to have?

In other words, the person selling you tickets at the theater who has 3 children should be paid a lot more than the 16 year old teenager. Would that not be "fair" and provide the "living wage" ?

was it a global economy when he was around? The times change and either you compete, or lose. The same goes for workers. It is up to the individual to make themselves as valuable as possible. The good looking girl gets more guys coming to her as opposed to the 300 pound girl.

Minimum wage is just that - a minimum.  I'm sick of people complaining that they can't live off it.  It was never designed to be a living wage, it's a lower threshold to make sure people aren't getting screwed by stingy employers.  Mostly the debate today is propagated by a bunch of under educated folk who feel entitled and believe they have the right (a definition they fail to grasp properly) to have everything they want without having to put in any effort to obtain it.

We need communizm back, no wage, no salery, everybody do their share to contribute the world.
I also like that model in StarTrek where everybody work to educate them self.

it's just common sense

Regardless of the mandated minimum wage, business has moved on. The federal minimum wage is mostly meaningless, these days. Only 1.6% of our hourly workforce is actually making minimum wage. The free market has already mandated businesses to pay higher wages, without coercive government meddling. This whole hot-button topic is just a politically divisive ploy, to divide The People and drive low-information, single-issue voters to the polls.

There are those who would have you believe that if the MW were abolished, evil businesses would begin paying their workers 3rd world wages. This is demonstrably untrue. If that were the case, then a large percentage of hourly workers would already be at the minimum, right now. Instead, it's 1.6%.... Imagine that.

There are those who would have you believe that there are millions of hurting Americans who are desperately trying to support a family on a MW job. Also demonstrably untrue, just by looking at the BLS numbers. There are only about 1.3 million workers making the minimum, out of some 77 million total hourly workers. Of those, 705,000 are 16-24 years old, almost all of whom (697,000) are single. There are only 88,000 MW workers who are married and living with their spouse.
http://www.data360.org/temp/dsg773_500_350.jpg

Economic rules state that if the price of a commodity, in this case labor, goes UP, then demand for that commodity goes DOWN. So, increasing the MW, will theoretically mean fewer available MW jobs. Higher labor costs will necessarily drive up COGS (cost of goods and services), which means inflation. Both of these hurt the 93 million unemployed and fixed-income Americans. However, as I stated above, MW workers are such a tiny piece of the big picture, none of this really matters, nor would its effect be really measurable, unless the increase was really large.

higher minimum wages produces more jobs


so why there are fools like this is beyond all reason:

I tend to think about worker pay the same way I would about anything.

Everyone pays as little as possible for basic needs, if I can buy groceries cheaper at store A than store B I will go to store A. The quality of the steak might make me willing to pay a higher price at store B, but the quality of rice, eggs, sugar and so on doesn't really matter that much to me. Because those products vary little in quality, not because they are less needed, I will buy them as cheaply as possible. I also need less of the things I desire to have higher quality, and most likely spend less of my total budget on them. Furthermore if store A starts to provide high quality steaks at a lower price I will buy that product at store A also.

My goal is to spend as little as possible so I can keep as much money as I can.

It really seems like a no brainer that businesses will pay as little as possible for any work that can be provided by most people. Work that takes special skill will merit more pay, but if that work becomes more readily available and the wage becomes more competitive I will lower my wages for it. As technology makes various jobs easier and education becomes more prevalent, skill level becomes less important and skilled labor becomes less scarce.

Eradication of minimum wage would be a race to the bottom.

I'd have a bigger problem with the term competitive. In the UK there is this idea of a living wage, which is essentially enough to live comfortable on. In most of the country its around 7.20 pounds and hour and in London its just over 9. When I say decent wages I mean the living wage. What is competitive is harder to explain. Wages in companies can be held back by "stickiness" which can lead to a situation in which workers are overpaid relative to their productivity which means that what workers are paid isn't always determined by supply or demand.

the term "decent" is also subjective. You could use the term "competitive" but that would be associated with a market driven wage as opposed to govt mandated.

To most conservatives that would be a very valid response, but I am an anarchist, so I buy your bluff.

Retaliatory force is positive, that's not what I mean when I say coercion - by coercion I mean initiatory force. The minimum wage doesn't correct some transgression of a contract the employer has neglected - it asserts a price floor and outlaws all free association below that price. Therefore, it falls into the latter category.

It was a bad choice of words, I should have said decent instead of fair. The minimum wage doesn't have much to do with fairness and it wouldn't be a fair wages for certain industries. Things such as supply, demand, job description and skills determine what is a fair wage.

Since the UK first introduced the minimum wage there has been no significant rise in inflation as a result of it but a dramatic hike might raise inflation. My solution wouldn't be a dramatic hike to 15 dollars an hour as has been proposed in some areas of the US, I would propose a steady rise in the minimum wage which is above inflation year on year.

One reason I support the minimum wage is due to benefits. Here in the UK we had something called tax credits where those considered in need of in work benefits could have the government top up their pay packets. This had three bad effects, the first was that the system was badly managed and prone to overpaying, those in the lowest income quartiles who received tax credits would then receive a letter demanding that the amount by which they were overpaid be paid back. This was often in the thousands. The second problem was that people were so afraid of being overpaid that they stopped claiming meaning that billions were wasted. The third was that if the government subsidised pay then companies could get away with keeping wages low. Tax credits were ended in the last budget and were replaced with a promise of a minimum wage of 9 pounds an hour by 2020. This solved all three issues.

That might be true of small-medium sized businesses who suffer most from a hike in the minimum wage but not for large corporations. While profits have soared since the recession growth in wages has been much slower.

We’ve had innumerable people who have never run a business in their lives trying to tell us that the effects of a minimum wage rise can only be glorious. So it’s refreshing to hear the views of someone who will actually have to deal with the effects of a minimum wage rise: the CEO of Wendy’s. Amazingly, they’re not predicting that their newly better paid employees are going to spend so much more at their stores that their profit increases. Nor are they predicting that the rise in aggregate demand is going to do the same. Finally, they’ve not broken down in tears, agreed that the shareholders are just too greedy, and insisted that the capitalist pigs will just have to do without so that the workers get their fair share.

No, instead they predict that that their restaurants will have to increase prices and reduce the amount of labor that they use.

That is, make all consumers worse off and also make some people unemployed. This isn’t the bright new dawn we were promised about a rise in the minimum wage, is it? It is what people like me have been predicting but remarkably few people seemed willing to listen to us.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/08/11/wendys-explains-what-really-happens-with-a-minimum-wage-rise-job-losses/

If raising the minimum wage doesn't lead to an increase in productivity then the only other choice is to either raise prices, which can often be difficult due to competition or reduce the workforce. Those whose productivity doesn't justify a rise in the minimum wage will find themselves unemployed.

Incentives obviously play a role but raising the minimum wage isn't a guarantee the productivity will rise.

you conflated "minimum wage" with "fair wages", why?

The term "fair" is subjective (except county fairs). To a 16 year old who greets you at the restaurant, earning $8 per hour is fair to them because they know that it's an entry-level job. Perhaps to another person with rent and a car payment they might think $20 per hour is fair. They might see no difference in why they should be paid less per hour than the nurse at the hospital.

Most of government's functions in a modern society are coercive, the role of the police is coercive, prisons are coercive, the system of law and order is coercive-and I suppose you have no problem with prisoners being punished? Taxation is coercive, but without that we wouldn't have roads, a functioning state education system or the police. Coercion itself is bad, but in some spheres it can be used for good. Either way the extent to which the minimum wage is coercive might be exaggerated, a majority of Americans earn above the minimum wage.

It is the typical leftist form over substance solution to poverty that rather than alleviating poverty spreads it.