You do understand that not everyone’s life goes well, regardless of how much they want it to be so, right? When every penny goes to surviving, and every waking hour is devoted to putting a meal on the table, keeping a roof over one’s head, and trying to stay ahead of the rent and the bills, there’s no time or money left to expand one’s horizons. Telling someone who is poor to just do better and work harder is like telling a starving person to move to where the food is, or telling a depressed person to ‘just cheer up’. Many people who make minimum wage are working more than one job just to keep their heads above water, and often can’t.
Here’s the real problem. Assume I own a small business employing 25 people. 18 of them are minimum wage types, putting screws in circuit boards, repeat, etc. 1 answers the phone and routes the calls. 2 are in sales and 2 are in accounting. My wife and I are the other 2. The MW goes up to 15 bucks an hour. That’s 15 bucks coming out of my pocket. Can I raise my prices to compensate for it? Who knows?
So.
The one who answers the phone just got replaced by an automated system.
The 18 who put screws in the circuit boards just got laid off because I’ve outsourced that to another country willing to work for <5 bucks an hour.
The sales staff is safe, but they are on salary.
The accountants were making 25 bucks an hour anyway.
My wife and I pocket the savings, because, that’s how trickle down economics works, it trickles down to the owners pockets, and stays there.
It’s real life economics. MW just put 19 people back on unemployment.
Whenever I hear of this topic, I remember being in Brazil in the early 1990s, where inflation was … excessive. Prices would increase from morning to afternoon of the same day.
It surprised me that many transactions were not specified in terms of X number of cruzeiros, but in X number of minimum wages.
In other words, the federally mandated minimum wage had become the basis of everyone else’s pay. “How much does the job pay? Five minimum wages.”
And no matter what happened, the minimum wage seemed to retain a dollar value of somewhere between $100 and $200 per month.
It seems like a grand idea to increase the US minimum wage to $15, but I’m afraid that it would just cascade to everything else until that $15 had the same purchasing power of the original lower wage and we would be back where we started.
Is there some hidden button you could press that might cause an innocuous red light to flash on the dashboard? You could give a nod at the light and then announce “Sir, we need to give our attention to this situation…regulations require that we not have passengers in the cockpit at this time. I’m going to have to ask you to return to your seat.”
Uhhhh… Get a job in SF? The unemployment rate in SF County (which is essentially the same as the city) is 3.3%. But most of the cities around SF are raising their MW, too. For Example, The People’s Republic of Berkeley is just 3 months behind SF in getting to $15/hr.
It’s the reason our government uses to let Starbucks, for example, get away with paying less tax than I do: ‘But they’re JOB CREATORS!!! You can’t make them pay any taxes or all the jobs will DISAPPEAR!!!’
No, they are fucking well not job creators. People who buy coffee are the job creators. If Starbucks closed down tomorrow, but all the overpriced-frappuccino-buyers still wanted to buy the same number of overpriced frappuccinos, not a single job would be lost, because all the other overpriced-frappuccino-sellers would take on extra people to deal with the rush of new customers. If all the overpriced-frappuccino-buyers suddenly quit buying, on the other hand, all those jobs would be lost.
Employers are not job creators. They’re not keeping the economy going. *Customers *are doing that.
And if you give the Walmart greeter or the assembly line worker an extra hundred bucks a week, it will do *much *more to keep the economy going and keep people employed than it will in the hands of the billionaire. The minimum-wage worker will put it straight back into the economy, buying food or cinema tickets or contact lenses or doctor’s appointments, keeping all the people in those chains employed. The billionaire will stick it in his offshore account, where it will help to keep no one employed except maybe his accountant.
What does the incoming potus think of the $15.00 min wage…
Trump Labor pick, Andy Puzder, opposes $15 minimum wage, Obamacare.
*Donald Trump’s likely pick to head the U.S. Labor Department doesn’t like Obamacare, higher overtime pay rules or a $15 minimum wage. He’s made that quite clear.
Andrew Puzder, the 66-year-old chief executive of the Carl’s Jr and Hardee’s restaurant chains,
*
Instead of creating a living wage, the fight for dramatic minimum-wage increases could leave millions with no wage at all,” Puzder wrote in a column in The Wall Street Journal in 2015.
Sorry, but the guy who puts up the money and risks failure is the “job creator”. Customers can want as much as their heart’s desire, but someone has to take the initiative to create the job. That is not to say I agree with HeXen and his/her seemingly adoration of billionaires. But it’s the company owners who take the risk in creating a job, not the customers. They risk nothing.
Just to be clear, I wouldn’t have said that if the unemployment rate was high. But it’s essentially zero.
He may be working in Oakland, where rents and such are high, but not like SF. And would it be the end of the world to have to live in Oakland instead of SF? I’m not getting the whole thing about: I grew up in SF, so I should be able to live there. You have no more right to live there than anyone else who is legally in the country.
And employers can put up as much money as they want and risk as much failure as they want, but if no one buys what they’re selling, there won’t be any jobs.
I agree that the employers take the risk. I don’t agree that they create the jobs.
I’m confused. The $15 minimum wage, where it exists, is implemented at the local or occasionally state level. Why would it matter what the Secretary of Labor and Women in Bikinis Eating Cheeseburgers thinks?
Unless you’re pointing out that the Trump Administration is going to tank the economy so hard that no one will be able to pay their employees a living wage?
That’s not how economics works. You think a few captive jobs that have to be done by legal and domestic labor is the entirety of jobs? No. Why does Detroit look like Detroit? Because of failed economic policy. Why are the ports so busy unloading imported manufactured goods that used to be made in the rust belt? Failed economic policy.
Yep, your burgers will now be made in China, you can send your lawn to China to be mowed, and someone in China will carry drywall up to the third floor for a construction company.
Your economic knowledge is that of a small child, or someone at the end of the bar, who’s “gonna tell you what it’s really like” before he slumps down off his stool.
Yes, they both can be valid. People who now make $15 an hour will want an increase, and that will be part of the cascade reducing purchasing power. That’s called inflation.
The child care industry, for instance, is one of the most affected by labor costs. Many child care workers make less than $15 an hour. So you raise the MW to $15 an hour, all the child care workers get a raise, the child care center has to raise its rates to pay salaries, and all the people who put their kids in child care see some of the increase go to higher child care costs.
(I have no dog in this fight and no deep knowledge of minimum-wage issues)
I suspect neither is correct because there would be as many different responses to an increased minimum wage as there are employers and employees.
The situation I described in Brazil involved employers who pinned all wages to the minimum wage, thereby making a perfect system where everything would ratchet up as the minimum wage increased. The reality was likely different: there must have been many employers who were late in increasing wages for their higher-paid employees, or simply neglected to do so, until the market forced them to (i.e. their skilled workers left for greener pastures). But year to year, the purchasing power of one minimum wage was pretty darned stable at around $100-200.
