In what country and era?
I’ve worked minimum wage jobs. Then spent eight years managing minimum wage employees(It’s called career advancement in case 42fish was unaware of how it works).
I have a couple years’ experience employing minimum wage workers back in the early '90s. I’m going to suggest there are two broad groups of those folks.
One is kids in temporary jobs. Fast food being the archetypical example. The other is adults in long term jobs. Janitors, gardeners, or very low end dirty factory work being the archetypical examples. Maybe telemarketers too.
The dynamics of the two are very, very different.
In the former the employees are interchangeable, expected to work just a couple hours a day only a couple of days a week, and are expected to quit within a few months at most. There is lots of room for scheduling flexibility on both sides. And kids being kids, lots of examples of silly kid behavior like sex in the bathrooms. The kids don’t really *need *the money and can quit, take a month or two off, then find a similar McJob down the street at any time. Nor do they much fear being fired. Smart management understands all aspects of this and plans accordingly. It *can *be a humane, if low-rent, kind of work life. Though it doesn’t *have *to be.
The latter group is very, very different. They are much more like abuse victims.
They’re expected to work long hours, stay on the job until fired, and to be fired instantly for letting any personal stuff interfere with the job. Like getting sick or having their car break down. And they understand this is the deal. Since they live hand to mouth, a 2 week interruption in income while looking for another equally shitty job is an economic disaster. So they put up with this treatment. Management also understands this dynamic and plays their whip hand for all it’s worth. Almost all of the payroll theft and wage-and-hour fraud committed by employers happens at the minimum wage level. This is the reality of the modern US sweatshop no matter what the industry. It *can *be a living hell though it doesn’t *have *to be.
Based on adaher’s comments I suspect his experience is mostly with the former group. IOW, all true as far as it goes. But not the complete picture.
Late add: FTR - my group was more the later; permanent minimum wage adult workers. We treated them well with reasonable workloads and with understanding for life’s inevitable crises. No shouting and belittling. We were rewarded in turn with massive loyalty and extra effort.
You don’t have to be an asshole boss to get economic efficiency out of your troops. You just need to be a bit smarter (and more humane) about how you do it.
I’ve known adults in minimum wage jobs. Of course you can get time off, so long as you don’t want to go back to work. Yes, MW workers are considered interchangeable, which is why they get fired and replaced if they don’t come in.
Think twice before ordering anything with Special Sauce on it.
Speaking as someone who held a management job before the company in question went bankrupt: Have you ever considered not acting smuggly superior?
I’ve been unemployed for six months too. Even homeless, when I was 18. I’ve lived in a roach filled apartment and thought it normal. My “achievement” has been to get to the median income, and that’s pretty tenuous because I’m overpaid and now 42, so when this job goes away I’m not sure what happens after that.
The only smug superiority I claim is better observational skills. The people i work with now are simply a better class of worker than minimum wage workers. Now when I first started at 18, it was the 1991 recession, so I actually was exposed to a lot of professionals working minimum wage becuase they got laid off. It was good, because it taught me how real workers conduct themselves even when making almost nothing. It also taught me why many people will never better themselves.
I’ll take that as a ‘no.’
IME there are many fine and decent people working minimum wage. In many ways they are better people than I am, able to keep going in the face of much more adversity and much less reward. Ref Gunga Din.
But …
At the same time we had lots of problem people as well. People with chaotic lives. People with undiagnosed DSM diagnoses. People with very little impulse control. Petty criminals. etc.
We increased wages to about 1.5x minimum wage. And replaced the flakes with folks one notch up the food chain. The results were dramatic.
Some of the gain was simply the extra money added stability to people’s lives. Suddenly they could afford to deal with needing $20 to pay a parking ticket. But much of it was the difference between the people who could only command MW and those who could command 1.5*MW.
adaher’s tone is sometimes a bit offputting. But IMO/IME he’s right about this. Not for absolutely everybody everywhere every time, but certainly for lots of folks in lots of places lots of times.
I still am in touch with lots of people from that time of my life. They’ve all moved on to better things. The ones that haven’t weren’t much worth keeping around, because they were negative and toxic people.
Where I worked, minimum wage increases caused us to reduce labor, which also allowed us a better class of worker. The combination of higher wages and more responsibility priced out many of the people we’d used to employ. People who aren’t big fans of working don’t like being responsible for making every damn pizza. But before, when we’d have two or three people doing it, you ended up with one guy doing 75% of the work and the other two doing 25%. It wasn’t rocket science to figure out that we’d do almost as well with just one person. Assembly line practices at pizza places are almost unheard of nowadays unless it’s someplace doing HUGE business, like 1000 orders a day. Used to be that one guy sauced your pizza, another topped it, and another guy cheesed it and put it in the oven. Nowadays your pizza is made by one person 95% of the time. Sometimes by the same person who took your order, which also used to be unheard of except in very low volume units.
Now I work at a place where the minimum anyone makes is around $10/hr and average income is about what the average income in America is. The kinds of behaviors that were tolerated when I worked in fast food would just never be tolerated where I work now. In fast food, if someone wasn’t working you basically cracked the proverbial whip. “Hey, you need to be making these pizzas!” And you might have to do that ten times in one shift because the guy would keep on wanting to not do his ONE job! Where I work now, if you don’t do your job, you don’t get reminded that you have a job to do. YOu go away.
Okay, so how far do we go down this rabbit hole? I mean, we’ve been hearing for years that the reason people in poor neighborhoods cannot get prenatal care is because of the cost. Now, for better or worse, people have absolutely, 100% free prenatal care.
So, what’s the problem now? Oh, she cannot get time off of work to go to the doctor.
I’ll bet if we passed a law mandating paid time off of work for doctor visits, your side would say that all of the doctors are across town and these workers have no transportation. I’m not trying to put words in your mouth but I’ve heard similar arguments.
It seems that any solution short of having a government worker come to their home and provide prenatal care, at a convenient time around the clock tailored around the woman’s schedule, will be insufficient to the left.
And it would be crass to point out that this single mother working a minimum wage job who does not have a father to help raise it, cannot afford a child, cannot even afford to take time off work to go to the doctor, failed to take the basic step of getting free Obamacare contraception which would have solved her dilemma in the first place. Let’s not even get into the idea that she should be married before having a child because that’s just lunacy right there.
We have more social programs and more handouts than at any time in history, yet poverty and unplanned pregnancies continue to increase. As conservatives have been saying for years, the issue is not a lack of money, but a lack of community, family, and values.
So what is the end game of social spending? Pretend you have a blank check for inner cities and for my area, Appalachia. Flood the area with money, food, doctors, counselors, free housing, etc. It still does not solve the basic problem.
Perhaps you should look up poverty and unplanned pregnancy rates before making this kind of statement. Here, let me help:
The unintended pregnancy rate among teens has been declining since the late 1980s.[6] Between 2008 and 2011, the unintended pregnancy rate among women aged 18–19 declined 20%, and the unintended birth rate declined 21%
Poverty rates also declined, from about 23% in 1960 to 14.8% in 2014.
Anyway, continue with your rant.
Hispanics in general out-‘family values’ WASPs. How has that done comparatively for their average socioeconomic position? It’s a straw man, and a rallying cry for entrenched Republicans unhappy that they don’t have every control possible. Just the same old ‘returning to better times’ argument.
I don’t want a blank check. I want efficiency, intelligence, and planning in applying funds, which ends up costing a lot less. I think I smell a whiff of the anti-welfare sentiment there.
Let me follow-up my prior response with some additional comments:
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Unsurprisingly, there seems to be a direct and strong relationship between anti-poverty spending and poverty rates. See for example figure 1 in the linked paper. Notice how the US has the lowest anti-poverty spending of the tested countries and the highest poverty rates?
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See the following table showing recent poverty rates in the US. Notice how the share of population in poverty is strongly affected by economic conditions in the US? During the economic boom of early 2000, the poverty rate dropped dramatically to just over 11%. During the recession it increased sharply to over 15%, and then started to fall with the economic recovery? It seems unlikely that “a lack of community, family, and values” caused those enormous swings in poverty rates, unless your claim is that “community, family, and values” dramatically changed during the recession and then abruptly started changing back once the recession ended. The data would instead seem to support the rather sensible idea that poverty rates are related to economic conditions rather than “culture”.
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According to the US Census Bureau, “during the 4-year period from 2009 to 2012, 34.5 percent of the population had at least one spell of poverty lasting 2 or more months”. If “culture” causes poverty then over 30% of the US population has a culture problem.
A hookup, as you probably know, can take less than 2 minutes. Prenatal care, as you clearly have no experience with, can take between 2 and 4 hours per appointment.
And my experience with prenatal care is with obstetricians that serve middle and upper middle class patients. I can’t imagine how long it must take to even get in the door at a facility for poorer people or people getting treatment through public assistance of some kind.
Jeez, even I don’t think people are rabbits, who just look at each other and start screwing. Hookups, like doctor’s appointments, take some time to organize. Person A likes Person B, they talk, they dance around the subject of hanging out, usually without either admitting they plan to have sex that night. Unless it’s a regular booty call, the process can take quite some time. Sure, the actual hookup can take a lot less time than a doctor’s appointment, but setting it up takes MUCH longer.
The fact is, most people delay care for the same reason they spend less time holding their child, less time helping their child with homework, and do less activities with their child to further their development.
At least part of the reason that Britain and Canada may lag other countries in that article is that the death rates are not necessarily comparable across all countries:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Note that due to differences in reporting, these numbers may not be comparable across countries; while the WHO recommendation is that all children who show signs of life should be recorded as live births, in many countries this standard is not followed, artificially lowering their infant mortality rates relative to countries which follow those standards
[/quote]
Are you an actual economist? Because if so, you must be aware that correlation is not causation.
Nor is this particularly convincing. If culture/habits/behaviour etc are important, they can push people to the left side of the income/consumption curve, and economic conditions can play their part in pushing them over or under the poverty line. Culture would thus still be important for how well or not people do economically relative to others, even if not for narrowly measured poverty rates.