Did I click on GD by accident? I’ve been avoiding that place like the plague for almost a year now.
Thanks for completely missing my point. But, if Wal-Mart was such a dear example to you, you should have stated why. Then we might have mentioned that its annual profit of $16 billion would have been a smarter number for you to choose than its … CEO’s salary. :smack:
Or claiming, with slight justification, that its rapid growth to $470 billion in annual sales was built on the backs of its low-paid employees.
Oh, I apologize for muddying the waters with a $122 billion 180-year old health industry giant you’ve never heard of.
Agricultural laborers are exempt from federal minimum wage requirements.
Anybody can Google the fraction of minimum-wage workers that are actually teenagers, and what their share of the entire labor pool is. But the bolded part raised a major question for me that I’m moving to another thread since this one has gone far afield enough as it is.
In a nutshell, I’m questioning your assumption that the work experience gained by teenagers in low-wage jobs is actually valuable at all, at least in light of the opportunity costs: On the benefits of McEmployment
Look, it’s a myth that migrant farm workers get paid less than minimum wage. In fact they are almost never paid an hourly wage, instead they are paid for piecework. So for every bushel of cucumbers you pick, with no damaged fruit, you get paid a dollar. Pick 50 bushels in an hour and you get paid $50/hour. Pick 5 bushels and you get paid $5/hour.
Corporations don’t like to pay workers under the table, because they have to account for their money. Unless the business has off-the-books income, there’s no incentive for them to pay off the books, is there? Money you pay workers under the table can’t be used as an expense. You pay taxes on profits, which is income minus expenses, if you can’t document your expenses you show a much higher profit and are taxed on that.
Thing is, it is true that minimum wage is a price control. But minimum wage is also really really low. If we abolished minimum wage laws you wouldn’t see many jobs that paid less than current minimum wage because it’s practically at the minimum amount where it’s worth while to work. Who honestly thinks there are lots of people who can’t find work because they’re only worth $5 an hour? If you’re that unskilled you probably aren’t worth hiring even if you worked for free.
I talked about management salaries because I was responding to a post talking about…management salaries. :smack:
And if you would bother to look just two posts below the one you are complaining about, you would see me talking about…their annual profit of $16 billion. :smack:
I’m sorry, I’m too dense to understand the point you’re making. Sales are mostly irrelevant, what matters is profits, and the value of the company as a whole (i.e. market capitalization). Wal-Mart’s market capitalization is approximately $250 billion. That corresponds to approximately $110,000 per current employee. The total value today of the entire company, which encapsulates all the work done over the past 50 years to grow the business and all the profits that it will likely generate over the next 50 years, is just $110,000 per current employee. Not $110,000 per year - $110,000, total. If you instead divided by the cumulative number of employees Wal-Mart has ever had, the number is much lower.
This point is directly related the OP. The problem mentioned in the OP - companies not paying a “living wage” - is not due to the evil corporations or evil managers making too much “profit” off the work of their lowest-paid employees, and paying wages too low relative to the value produced. It’s that unskilled labor does not produce much value in the modern, global economy, and that we are rapidly approaching the point (if not there already) where the value of unskilled labor is below the cost of living.
We are not talking about executive compensation in general. Sure, plenty of CEOs are overpaid. But my point is that overpayment of CEOs is not the reason why certain companies aren’t paying a living wage to their lowest-paid workers, and mentioning random companies with overpaid CEOs doesn’t defeat that argument.
Thanks for this, just the kind of answer I was looking for. I knew that the situation couldn’t possibly be as simple as I made it out to be, and this is the other side of the issue that I needed to hear.
I apologize, I did hesitate to put it in GQ since I knew it might take a sudden turn for GD, but I am mainly after knowledge, so it seemed like it should at least start in GQ.
Thanks to everyone for your answers!
One part of the issue to is which country you are talking about. Minimum wage workers here are fabulously wealthy in other countries. Many of my Filipino coworkers use their low wages here to pay for 2-3 houses in the Philippines. Coca cola was famously criticized for paying their employees like 25 cents an hour or something, until they pointed out it was double the average workers salary in that country.
The working poor in the us are only poor because they are working in the us.
You misunderstand. What I meant was that a job is not supposed to be something that happens or not from day to day, like the English miners. It is not like a commodity, today we’ll buy 10, tomorrow 50, the day after maybe 20.
In the civilized world, as opposed to the USA, getting rid of hired workers is not a trivial task. The iron ricebowl has to some extent faded in places like Europe, but very few countries practice the at-will hiring practices like the States. In Canada, for example, depending on assorted circumstances, you can pay up to a month per year of service to lay off workers. Penalties for unjust termination can reach up to 2 years’ pay.
I’m well aware of the laws of economics. However, the point is our modern society would not work if nobody could rely on the stability of most modern employment. If your employer could simply say, “I got no work, stay home today, but call me and I might have 3 or 4 days next week” - that would destroy our current consumer and credit society. (How much of your credit score is attributable to steady employment?)
Employers pay people already to show up whether the employer is making a profit this month or this quarter, or not. If they were allowed to treat them like those migrant workers on the street corner, I’m sure some employers would. The laws that the government puts in place tell you what sort of things some people in the extreme will do. Each line of the labour standards acts are related to some clever business owner’s attempt to rip off his workers.
(Consider “Sixteen Tons” to drag in another coal miner data point. Why does he “owe his soul to the company store”? Because the owners paid in script not cash, redeemable only at the company store. They overpriced the goods since the script was useless anywhere else and the workers had no cash to buy elsewhere, nor any cash to leave the company town and move elsewhere.)
Sixteen Tons is a good song but bad economic history. According to the latest research (pdf) prices at company stores were in line with the cost of goods at other stores, and scrip was mostly used for pay advances.
Sounds like someone has a case of the "supposed to"s. How many jobs are “day to day” where people line up like day laborers on the street corner? Not many. Anyone who has hired people knows that it’s tough to find good employees and the ones who do their job well, you want to keep.
It’s not a trivial task in the US either, even in at-will states. The flip side of your European utopia is that companies are also slower to hire people if they think they may have to pay them months of severance.
I’m not sure that you are aware of the laws of economics. One of the things that makes the US economy so strong is that it is so flexible. Companies have the flexibility to hire full time, part time, temps, contractors, and consultants depending on their business needs. And they need that flexibility to take advantage of new technologies and business practices.
Stability is nice, but it also leads to stagnation. I’ve seen plenty of employees and even entire companies and industries that got fat and lethargic from hiding behind legislation or bureaucratic apathy. And when are finally forced to adapt, they are unable to.
You are not guaranteed to be able to perform the same job for 30 years. Shit, most of the work I do didn’t even exist 30 years ago.
Yes, I’m aware of the laws of economics. I took Economics 101 (Actually ECO100). There’s a balance between too easy to hire/fire, and too difficult to fire. Easy to fire may help the company’s bottom line, may encourage investment, etc. - but if the jobs are not reliable, what good are they for the long term? As I said, modern society pretty much demands steady income, since so many functions of modern life - mortgage (or lease), auto purchase, even credit cards - depend on the person having a steady income.
So we are creating two classes of people - full employees, difficult to dismiss, and term or contract workers, liable to disappear in hours at the CEO’s whim. (Seen that - company announces, cutbacks, one of which is all contract employees dismissed with the shortest allowed notice from the contract terms)
I have several acquaintances who have or are working as contract workers. Some are good, do this out of choice, and have no problem remaining fully employed. Others find that term work is the only work available. Despite that there is plenty of work in the foreseeable future to justify hiring full-time, places as diverse as companies, governments, and universities prefer to hire term contract workers.
Think, for example about maternity leave. Your job is protected (at least, in Canada - as I understand, some US states feel maternity leave is a socialist concept). If you announce to your contract employer you are pregnant, may have to take several weeks off in a few months, will they bother to renew your contract? They are not obliged to.
We do have a lot of day-to-day workers. My experience with restaurant and retail was that many are part-time, the schedule is configured from week to week so many don’t have fixed schedules. This is great if you are a student and the schedule can accommodate classes. However, many of the workers were in fact working 2 or 3 of these jobs to pay the bills because that is all they could find. Employers love this. People who need the money avoid making trouble. They can schedule as much or little as they want. If the employee can barely make rent in a slow month, well, not the employer’s problem. I’ve heard that this has even affected nurses, some of whom often work multiple part time jobs because also for economical reasons, it’s simpler to have flexible part-time staff. One person I knew worked at a higher-paying retail store. They were not guaranteed work on Saturday, but they could not be unavailable if they were called if the store got busy.
I suppose the only benefit for the workers is that they don’t have to stand on a street corner every day.
Certainly the management people who pulled in north of $100,000 a year did not have to worry if there was a paycheque next week.
One of the challenges is that change happens much more rapidly these days. New technology is great, but it is also disruptive to the status quo. Not only does it allow companies to replace workers with automation. It also lets companies make decisions much more rapidly on things like restructuring or relocating.
This can create issues as people do tend to want some sort of structure and consistency in terms of home, communities, schools their children attend, proximity to family and friends and other aspects of life that get disrupted.
But the fact is, there are very few jobs where you can just sit down at a desk (or whatever) and say “I’m going to do this for the next 40 years”.
That’s a pretty big benefit. One of the advantages of temp and contract jobs is that you can take a 6-12 month contract to make ends meet.
It’s not like management jobs are that secure either. They tend to be high-paying, provide few tangible outputs and are often rife with politics.
One thing that you are missing is that if people want good dependable living wages, they should not go to work at McDonald’s, or any place that offers minimum wage. They should go to work at international banks as VPs in charge of marketing, or else as arms dealers, with billion dollar contracts. Perhaps as plastic surgeons? Maybe as engineers or Presidents of the US.
Can you see what is missing? Value. People who work at McDonald’s are getting what they are worth, not what they want. You are missing everything in the world that has to do with supply and demand.
Also, let’s force you to share your wealth with people in Africa. I’d say 70% would be fair. Sound pretty good?
Income of the rich isn’t subject to payroll tax, and, since most of it is capital gains, pays a low rate of income tax. Thus, there are obvious ways to change tax policy to benefit low-wage earners.
Many intelligent and good-spirited rich people agree with this. The noted Marxist, Bill Gross of PIMCO, advocates this in a recent Bloomberg interview.