Now, that would be one hell of a Death Tax!
It depends. I would suggest that there are innumerable factors at play. If minimum wage jobs are are larger share of the job market, then more people having them isn’t a fault of labor. If there are many out of work and businesses can force the most desperate to work for minimum that isn’t the fault of labor.
You would, I think, assume that everyone seeks to improve their wealth. If only one small demographic is doing so, that suggests that something is wrong with the overall system.
Wait, is this the Bricker debate thread? Shit!
Oh baloney. If all the Walmart employees had PhDs in physics everybody would be making good money.
I think its kinda funny how many of the really smart and “whatever” folks like to bitch and moan about those “beneath” them. Have they considered what their lifes would be like if most people were as smart/whatever as they were?
All those folks would be making a shitload more and they would be making a shitload less. They ought to be thanking their lucky stars that they are so much smarter, more clever, hard working, better looking, healthier, raised better, had better genes, went to a better school blah blah blah, because otherwise a buttload of people would be able to compete for their jobs, thereby lowering their earnings, if not outright taking der jobs.
OK, thanking my lucky star.
I guess I wish I knew what is holding you back so I could help.
How’s that work, exactly?
Thats a joke son.
Would you think it possible that greater numbers of skilled people would raise everyones standard of living? I don’t make less but others make more? Could that happen?
Of course it’s possible. But if education is out of reach, those skills may simply not be accessible to some wedge of the population.
Again, if we have terrible social mobility and only one segment of the population is increasing its wages, then, the obvious takeaway is a systemic problem.
If the population at the whole saw prosperity increase no one would have an issue. But when the richest of us are the only ones reaping the benefit of the increases in the economy, it’s absurd to say, “Well, I guess the working classes are lazy now.”
Have your stocks not yet recovered the value lost during the Great Recession?
Many people who are far from rich are reaping the benefits. If you are not, you need to rethink your choices.
Again, that isn’t a rational way to look at things.
If our system worked for generations to allow all segments of the population to increase in wealth, the fact that only one segment does now, is an indicator of a break down in that system.
But if you can look at this:
And take away from it that the 60% are lazy, maybe that says more about you, than about them.
How is the 60% gaining 40% fit in with your suggestion that only one segment now shares the gain?
The 60% in the middle gained a 40% increase in income over 37 years.
The 1% at the top gained a 275% increase in income over 37 years.
This reflects the middle getting less of the increased wages in the country and the top gaining more than it did in the past.
I agree.
And do you agree that this trend cannot continue indefinitely, or eventually the 1% at the top will control 99.999% of the wealth? The final end game is 1 person owning all the wealth in the country.
At some point, it has to stop.
In Neal Stephensons’ last book he wrote of the frictions that occur when a system is shooting off into a vertical climb, as is CEO compensation. We will see changes.
I just hope we see a moderating trend, and not heads on pikes.
Lets wave a magic wand. All of a sudden every garbage man, fast food worker, and other menial wage job workers becomes quite smart and have those magic pieces of paper called degrees. These folks are now quite capable of being doctors, particle physicists, or lawyers.
If they KEEP doing the jobs they are doing, do you think society is going to become that much better? Maybe a tiny bit IMO. But you know what would most very likely happen? Those crappy jobs would suddenly have to pay much more to be kept filled and those previous doctors, lawyers, and particle physicists would make less and/or have to fight much harder to keep the jobs they have.
On a whole societies wealth can go up if folks overall got “smarter”. But that doesn’t neccesarily mean the top dogs compensation would.
Do you still beat your wife?
Hey, I can play the game of asking leading questions too. Let’s do some more of that.
There’s so much wrong with your point, so allow me to deconstruct it for you.
To begin- gaining a skill that is valued does not guarantee employment. I went to college. That doesn’t mean I am guaranteed a job other than the one I was able to get. There are any number of thousands of others out there, college grads, who put in the investment and skills necessary to gain higher employment.
“The Market”, meaning the invisible amoral deity worshiped by believers in the always-correctness of His Holy invisible hand, does not necessarily reward those who enter its pearly gates armed with the correct educational requirements or job histories. When the economy tanks, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people who were competent and qualified lose their careers and can’t get them back.
They have to feed their family. They go to work where the work is available.
They get a job at a pizza place, who pays them minimum wage and no health benefits.
That isn’t what they’re worth. In truth, that isn’t what an uneducated person fresh out of dropping out of school is worth either.
The reason the price is set at minimum wage as it stands is only because the government has intervened to put that minimum standard there. Because if that standard wasn’t there, the wage would be even lower.
Doesn’t matter if you can’t pay even the most minimal of bills with such a job; because, after all, someone desperate enough will work 2 or three jobs to pay their bills. To eat and have shelter, and get rid of the luxuries like electricity and a working telephone.
If it was up to the “market”, then they’d be getting paid even less than they do now. Remember, when pizza chains found that loophole where they could pay their drivers half what minimum wage was, that’s exactly what they did.
People went from minimum wage to half that wage.
That isn’t because the MARKET decided that that’s what that person’s life was worth. That’s because rich fuckbag CEO decided that’s how much he could get away with paying.
And because the market does not have much in the way of rules, and what rules there are are written to benefit big corporations to a large extent, and companies engage in coercive practices such as union-busting and lowering hours and firing people who attempt to unionize, an actually “fair” market does not emerge.
If a multi-million dollar business with shops set up across the globe decides unilaterally to pay its workers less money, and fires or reduces hours of everyone who protests, that is a mass-action that is hostile to the worker.
The worker, in turn, should unionize, so he can present his case that he needs a certain minimum income back to the employer. An employer can fire one worker, they can’t fire their entire staff without suffering serious repercussions.
The ACTUAL VALUE of the workers is not being reflected in pay, because the workers are not allowed to present themselves as “The Staff”.
The company can present itself as the one conglomerate which can fire you and prevent you from being hired there again. It uses its power as a vast entity to bully and cow the worker into accepting half a wage. To prevent them from exercising their full market value by presenting themselves as one voice, which would leverage them additional pay.
The worker cannot argue to get his full market value. The worker is pitted against his fellow worker when one agrees to work for a lesser wage, simply to keep their job. They can’t act as a cohesive unit because any attempt at such is responded to with backlash, loss of wages, loss of job.
That’s not a free market. That is a monopoly controlling the entire board, and the worker is the thimble that keeps landing on hotels. It’s as free as Somalia. Do what the warlord says or die.
In some sense, yes, it’s freedom. But you know how a civilized society works, is it puts in place rules that prevent that kind of abuse of power.
Companies like Wal-Mart or these Pizza chains often abuse their power and lower a worker’s wage well below their actual market value.
So in summary, because I know large posts have a way of making people with ADD run for the hills, as reading a book is unheard of, and a few paragraphs is too hard:
[ul]
[li]The market doesn’t guarantee employment.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]The market doesn’t guarantee employment at the level of education and experience that is appropriate for each candidate.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]The market doesn’t guarantee protection for the worker against unfair and unsafe and exploitative labor practices.[/li][/ul]
So when you go to the conservative well of ideas, which has been bone-dry for thousands of years, and come up with “it’s the worker’s fault he isn’t paid more” I get to point out that you have no effing clue what you’re discussing.
The reason the worker isn’t paid enough to cover their minimum expenses isn’t because he’s uneducated, not experienced, not worth the value he’s asking for, the reason is because an employment monopoly exists and is not countered with a labor monopoly. So due to the unequal forces, the playing field is tilted completely sideways, favoring the employer.
That’s not “The free market”. That’s exploitation. And they would get away with far worse if the government allowed it.
That’s why workers have to turn to the government to solve their problems. Only the government is powerful enough to mandate that the worker deserves to see a doctor, paid for by the same mechanism that allows the worker to pay his rent. Essentially, a tax on the consumer. Since the employer won’t cover it, the cost is passed along.
I mean this is really fucking simple shit. How can you not get this?
Yes, it is. Your labor is worth whatever you can convince someone else to pay for it.
Not really. If that were the case, you would see most workers making minimum wage, instead of only about 3% of the work force.
So, 97% of the time people get more than minimum wage, because they have convinced their employers that their labor is worth that much.
No, it is because the market decided that that was what their labor was worth.
Well, if he was wrong, then he would have lost pizza drivers and would then have to raise wages back to whatever would attract the number and caliber of drivers that he needed.
And the history of the UAW and GM shows that if a company doesn’t do union-busting, they are uniformly successful. 
Really? How does it do that? I am not a member of any union, and I make considerably more than half mimimum wage.
I have resigned from several jobs, and the companies were never able to stop me from being hired somewhere else.
Since there is more than one company hiring, it is not a monopoly. And I am not aware of the local pizza chain killing people who refuse to work for them as drivers.
You don’t seem to know what “market value” means. It does not mean “as much money as you want”. It means “as much money as you can get given the perceived demand for your labor, compared to everyone else in the hiring pool”.
I am afraid you have not shown anything like an employment monopoly.
If you are saying there is only one pizza place that will hire you, well, fine, but that is hardly an employment monopoly.
We have heard this kind of thing before. It may or may not be simple, but it certainly is shit.
Regards,
Shodan
No it is not. When companies engage in practices that are designed to prevent the workers from gaining leverage, that reduces the bargaining power of the worker.
That doesn’t mean that the worker is less valuable to the company. It simply means their anti-bargaining tactic has suceeded.
If the worker was able to collectively bargain and increase their wage, then they would get a higher wage that the company is willing to pay.
Why is that? is that because, by the mere act of collective bargaining itself, the worker is that much more valuable to the company?
Don’t be daft. The worker is being paid far less than his value to the company. We actually have a number assigned to our labor, called “yield”, which tells us exactly how much the worker averages the company each hour.
In any given day, the worker making 8 dollars per hour earns the company between 30 and 40 dollars. Given our overall profit margins, that means we could afford to pay each of them at least two dollars more per hour without drastically hurting the profit margin, but we don’t, because we can.
If we make 40 dollars for every 10 we spend on labor, we’re still ahead of the game.
The reason we don’t do that is because if the worker asks for 10, they don’t get ten. They’d get ten if all the workers asked for ten. But any attempt to collectively bargain immediately gets met with reduced hours and any excuse to create a paper trail and fire them.
Way to compare apples to rockets. You do not begin to debate the issue properly when you toss out statements such as these.
Two things-
Firstly, they did lose pizza drivers. A lot of employees quit to go look for better jobs. You don’t suddenly pay half your workers half their wage and expect them to stay on the job.
But the other factor here is hunger. If you pay a worker a bowl of rice, and that’s the only job available, a worker will take it, because they have to eat. It’s not because the worker is WORTH a bowl of rice, it’s because, absent any regulation protecting the worker, that’s how much certain employers will pay and get away with paying.
You seem to equate the value of a worker with how much they get paid, as if that is axiomatic truth. You’re completely wrong. The free market does not determine the value of a worker. Worker productivity is actually the highest its been in decades, but their wages drop or stagnate.
The worker is actually much more valuable now than s/he has been for a long time, and the worker is getting paid less. That’s not based on value, that’s based on leverage.
Leverage is what the worker would need in order to restore their pay levels to an actually fair market value. Since the worker has no leverage in the face of exploitative and abusive labor practices, they cannot do as you suggest and simply get equitable pay upon request or find other employment.
Your situation does not mean the market is working for millions of other people.
Being able to say “I am paid well and I am nonunion” does not mean that everyone else can follow your example. So when you present yourself as a counter-example, that does not invalidate a single one of my points.
I know in your mind you think it does, but that’s because you’re deluding yourself.
Not everyone can be a neuroscientist, not everyone can be a congressman. Some people have to wash dishes for a living or the dishes will never get washed and the trash will never get taken out.
Just because some people in our society are in a well-leveraged position does not mean all of them are, or that it is axiomatic truth that a person is worth what they’re paid.
Your argument boils down to “I’ve got mine, Jack. Therefore there is no problem, no unfair treatment, no exploitation. You are paid what you’re worth.”
And you’re wrong. And it was very easy to point out why you were wrong.
Regards, Shodan.