The Op would like us to raise the minimum wage because they prefer contacts to glasses, want to go the movie theatre, and would like to have a feast.
OH MY F#%€ING GOD!!!
You poor poor creature!
You are so poor that you have to wear glasses, wait for pay per view, and have no discretionary income available for occasional gluttony? Next thing you are going to tell me is you only have an iPhone 4.
My heart bursts.
Are these really the BEST reasons you could come up with for raising the minimum wage?
There are working poor who struggle to provide the very basic necessities of life for themselves and their families. Your examples of why you want the minimum wage raised are kind of insulting to them.
I am no way engaging on the issue as to whether the minimum wage should be raised or not, only pointing out the horrible argument that has been made.
If I was a shopkeeper and you came to me and told me you wanted a raise because you prefer contacts to glasses, want to go to the movies, and want to prepare a feast, I think I might consider that those things are luxuries, weigh them against luxuries that I might desire, and decide that I’m paying you enough.
So was the minimum wage ever truly meant to be a real living wage? I have never had the impression that has ever been the case.
I always understood it to be a sort of floor wage intended to prevent the very worst of the low-wage issues that could happen from entirely unfettered labor markets, not necessarily a wage intended to be something that someone could live a relatively comfortable single life, or a cash-strapped, but adequate family life on.
Beyond that, who actually earns minimum for any appreciable length of time?
I’d argue that a bigger threat to the labor markets is the predilection for employers to hire everyone as part-time/contractors in an attempt to limit both hours and benefits. This is up and down the job scale- it’s not just low-wage unskilled workers. Many companies try to do the same with IT workers and other skilled knowledge careers.
Right on brother! These poor people deserve what they get. I mean, I’m OK, so that means that they must be lazy, amIright? Everyone has the exact same opportunities I had. So these poor people are inferior to me.
Wow! I feel better about myself now. Thanks!
I mean, he deserves to eat beans and stale bread everyday, because I’m better than him. Fucking feast! He deserves NOTHING!
Can’t see the article without turning off my ad blocker. But I suspect that an article in a magazine that targets the rich may be biased. I’d suggest you read the book “Evicted”, by Matthew Desmond for a gritty and real look at what it’s like to be poor.
No No No No No. Don’t color me that way. That’s not how I am. that’s not what I’m saying.
What I’m saying is this:
A good argument to raise the minimum wage might be “A person putting in a full day’s work deserves to earn enough to provide for themselves a reasonable and dignified existence. The current minimum wage is too low, and people often have to work multiple jobs simply to make enough to supply the bare minimum necessary to support themselves. Many people working under minimum wage are forced to take on debt, compromise their health care, nutrition, or other essentials.”
A bad argument would be: “Raise the minimum wage because I would like to go to the movies more often.”
Which kind of argument has the OP made?
I think the minimum wage is too low. That’s my personal opinion. I think the OP has compromised that stance, and is actually providing eveidence to the contrary.
Hamburger-making machine churns out custom burgers at industrial speeds
Automated lawn mowers.
Elevators.
A higher MW makes automation a reasonable option. A higher MW will save a few, screw more, and in the end, if it has any effect on the owners bottom line, you know who will lose.
The last time I worked for minimum wage (late 70s or early 80s) I always worked as many hours a week as I could. I never worked just one 40 hour a week job, it was always 1 1/2 to 2 full-time jobs.
I was continuously exhausted, but that was what it took to make enough to live the life I wanted to live.
The precipitating factor is usually the risk taker. The supersaturated solution is created by the consumer. You can take all the risk you want in some countries, you will only succeed in beggaring yourself. In America, we have 300 million people who whine about making in an hour what people in other countries make in a day, that consumer base is so fucking rich and supersaturated that most of the millionaires in America would be scratching the dirt in other countries.
Open a business, bilk the consumer (who in the aggregate works for you) make payroll, keep profits. Rinse and repeat. Now we are cutting out the part where we make payroll in America and refill the pockets of the American consumer.
You are correct - AUTOMATION is responsible for much job loss. However, that is not what the idjit I was responding to said. He seems to think (Much like Trump supporters) that China (and immigrants) are somehow taking all these jobs away.
I have long thought that what really matters isn’t whether a person could live reasonably on minimum wage, but the availability of jobs on which a person could live reasonably.
Raising the minimum wage might (or might not) be a step toward achieving that end. But if there were enough decent, well-paying jobs available for everyone who needed them, it wouldn’t matter all that much what the minimum wage is.
Because “how hard you work” has nothing to do with how much you are paid. If you don’t have skills that are worth more than minimum wage, why should you be paid more?
Stop wearing contacts and wear glasses. Quit buying things you cannot afford. Get some skills worth paying for. And above all, quit expecting that people who actually worked for their wages should support you.
Poor people and MW earners (or near-MW earners) are two distinct groups, albeit with some overlap. If your intent is to help the poor, I recommend primarily targeting the poor. I was not poor when I was making seven and change an hour. But I was able to get enough work. Most people living in poverty can’t (or won’t, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.)
Poverty is a real problem. It actually makes people stupid*, which makes it harder to jump out of the trap and which I think hurts the country. I believe we have options here, many of which involve taxing me. But I think MW is the wrong target.
*Have we all read that paper? If not I can dig it up.
Or if they can get work, life problems often take over, causing them to miss work and get fired. Evictions among the poor are epidemic. It’s difficult to hold down a job when your first priority is shelter for your family. Even worse is when your new abode is miles away from your job.
Minimum wage is all tangled up in a chicken-egg situation. Higher wages help pay the rent and other bills. But they also may end up curtailing benefits because of too much income. Also, some subsidized housing rent money prohibits you from having over $2,000 in the bank, which discourages any savings. Many working poor simply don’t report income from a second cash job, just so their benefits will continue and allow them to get by. There are presently some 64,000 homeless families, which pencils out to about 123,000 children.
I hate those asset cliffs, which are even worse than some of the income cliffs associated with some programs. Which I probably don’t need to tell you can amount to a greater-than-100% income tax.
Btw I have that book from the library. Haven’t read it yet.
Looks like you bungled the quote tags there. Not sure if that’s something the mods will fixed. I don’t think anyone is confused though.
I haven’t worked a MW job since the mid-80’s, but from what I’ve been hearing in the last five or so years, MW employers these days expect the workers to be on-call at all times for schedule gaps. To come in to cover sick or no-show coworkers, that kind of thing. This makes it close to impossible for them to work more than one job.
Uh, the entire issue is that too often, the former starts including food, shelter, electricity , and medication. It would definitely include training required for the latter.
I’m sure if you talked to a poor person sometime, you’d probably learn that they’re much more conscious of their finances than you think. Which makes sense, since it’s literally a matter of life and death.
I also think they’d react badly to any implication that they somehow deserve to die, but that’s just an assumption of mine.
No, Scylla, they’re not. They were never meant to be. What I’m trying to say is that it’s not just the basics and obvious things that poor people have to struggle for, or do without. I’m not expecting to have big fancy things. I don’t drive a car, I don’t get to shop at Victoria’s Secret or even The Gap. I don’t have cable TV. And I certainly don’t have an iPhone. I have a cheap-ass Kyocera phone, and my service is through Metro; it costs $30 a month. I’m cool with that.
But there are some amenities that are not extravagant, excessive or a reflection of spoiled expectations. They’re not life-and-death, but I don’t think they’re too much to ask. I think that anyone who is willing to trade labor for money is not unreasonable to believe that money should sustain them. That’s all.
I am honestly shocked that people think you can raise the minimum wage that much without causing unemployment.
I work as in engineer in manufacturing. Part of my responsibilities is to quote new business to potential customers. I try to strike the most economic balance between manual operations and automation. I know our labor rates down to the second.
Our competitors are elsewhere in the US, but also India, China, Korea, Mexico, etc. Of course, cost is not the only factor in a business decision, but it can be a big part of it. And we have often lost business to companies overseas because of cost. Sometimes its ‘losing’ business to my own employing company, but in a plant overseas, again, because of labor costs (including my own).
Honestly the more our guys can do with automation, the more we can keep jobs here in the USA, including entry level assembly positions, because labor costs too much already. [yet automation is often viewed as the evil job taker, ha!].
We struggle to find people with even the most basic maintenance/technical skills and we pay well above industry average. Yet we get people knocking down our doors to earn less than $15 for jobs that require someone to basically to show up on time and work a full day with no further responsibility and a very small skillset.
This is to say, the market is already saturated with un-skilled workers already. Why pay more when the supply is already outstripping the demand by a large margin? At the current pay levels it seems people are already not motivated to learn anything of value to the market. Why would we want to reward that with increased pay? How are we gonna keep jobs in the US like that?
Besides the unemployment argument, what business are my wages to anyone other than me and my employer? If I agree to work for $3/hour and my employer is happy to pay it, then who the hell cares?