According to this line of reasoning, if the goverment cut off assistance to all Walmart workers, then Walmart Co. will automatically step up to the plate and makes up the difference? Clearly it is the goverment at fault here, for providing all those market distorting subsidies, right?
You seem to be making an unfounded connection here. What Walmart decides to pay its workers is what the market will bear. It has nothing to do with what level of goverment assistance they are receiving.
Note to John - the purpose of education is not to create better workers, it is to create better citizens.
Just a cite with regard to disabled and impoverished: http://archives.cnn.com/2000/US/07/19/disabled.low.pay/
It’s getting better, but it’s definitely a problem.
You honestly think someone would be willing to take BELOW the minimum wage?
Sadly, yes.
If they weren’t, why is the law neccesary?
I’d say that this goes without saying. I’m surprised you don’t know that there are plenty of people in the US that DON’T make minimum wage…and still do the jobs. Certainly there are people out there that would rather work for less than minimum wage…than work at all.
-XT
And if that’s the case, then isn’t that illegal?
False dichotomy. Besides, people were fine citizens 100 years ago when HS graduates were rare. The demands of citizenship haven’t changed so much since then as the demands of the labor market. If you wish, we can make the businesses pay only for HS, and we’ll throw in k-8 education gratis. No? Well, it’s the same thing with eliminating desperate poverty-- it’s a comon good, not a duty of business.
Well, the benefits of automation in your example were only made real by hiking up wages. Now what are you going to do with all the unemployed McDonalds workers? You think they’re going to be hirded by the electronics companies making the new equipment? Maybe. But how much you wanna bet that new equipment is made in China? Companies (**especially **comapanies like McD) are always looking to eliminate inefficiencies, and are quite capable of finding them without “help” from the government.
What makes you think companies choose that business strategy? Do you think a company like Intel or IBM could just “choose” to pay it’s employees WalMart wages? No one forces people to work at WalMart-- they choose to work there for a variety of reasons. There may be some people who literally have no choice, but you’ll have to prove to me that those people represent a significant fraction of the workforce. And lets keep in mind that WalMart generally pays employees above the MW.
Please tell me why you think every job in American should be one that provides income capable of supporting a family? Do you **want **to drive more jobs overseas?
No, I am not assuming this is a zero sum game. It isn’t. But a $1 increase isn’t going to get you a living wage. That is what we’re debating in this thread. Only you and a few others keep going back to the MW stuff.
Well, that’s why I said spread the tax over the work life of an average worker. If that’s 40 years and your company only lasts for 12, then you only pay for 3/10 of that worker’s education. But I hope you’re not taking this as a serious argument. We don’t make companies pay for education because we recognize that an educated populace is a common good, and we all share in the cost. In the same sense, a society w/o desperately poor people is also a common good, and we should pay for it out of the common funds.
What makes you so sure another company will replace it? Why not just relocate as much of the work as possible overseas? Why do you need a real live cachier anyway-- we’ll just hire someone in India and hook up a video connection. And we already have a level playing field wrt what you are talking about. Any company that wants to can “benefit from welfare”. Why do you suppose that most don’t?
Thats not the question you asked or the topic at hand. Certainly it would be illegal to pay people less than minimum wage today. So what? The fact that people are STILL willing to work for that wage sort of says something in light of the fact that it IS illegal…no? Perhaps we could even say that it says something about what would happen if there was no minimum wage, ehe?
-XT
I’m going to assume you meant to put a ‘not’ in that last part.
This is where I start to have a problem. If you have a system where workers are so desperate for jobs that they are willing to work full time and still not meet the poverty line (as per my last post on page1), that is a problem with the system, not the workers. Yes I believe in a worker’s prerogative in terms of earning more money as a general rule, but the absolute, bottom of the barrel crappiest job in America should still provide a modicum standard of living (ie just above the poverty line) for that person.
Well, I disagree, but its moot as far as THIS discussion is concerned. We aren’t talking about tweeking the MW a buck here or a buck there…but a radical, fundamental change to the system in order to not only have everyone in the US who has a job (note, I didn’t say WANTS a job) paid enough so that they can have a house (or housing I suppose) personal transport, insurance, a family, and money saved as well as education bucks for the pups. I know a lot of middle class families that don’t CURRENTLY have all this…so we are talking about quite a bit of a change here, something that continues to be lost on our good pal Voyager.
If we want to broaden the debate to include a small adjustment in the MW (say good ole Voyagers ‘buck’) vs no MW, or something in between…then we should all start a new thread to discuss that topic (again). THIS OP was about something different.
-XT
500,000 non-Enlgish speaking, dirt poor peasants from Mexico and Central America find their way into the US and get jobs every year. I think most Americans can mamage a move if they put their minds to it. If all you see ahead for you in your backwater American town is a life of poverty, then you can find some way to pick and move. You join forces with someone else or borrow money from relatives, or save every freakin’ penny for 2 years if you have to.
I’m not quite getting the difference betwen LW and MW here. If you establish a LW, isn’t that a de facto new MW? AFAICT, the only difference is one of scale.
I can’t show you an example of a state, and I never said I could. I was trying to point out that there may be some benefits, that were not being considered, to offset the higher prices. The lower taxes was an “if” statement to illustrate the point.
Of course this is true, and my wording was very bad. I didn’t mean to say that the raise cost Wal-Mart nothing, I don’t know why I did. I meant it did not cost them the full amount of the raise.
I was not trying to say that either of these situations would completely offset the inevitable rise in prices that would accompany an increase in MW. I was pointing out that there were mitigating side benefits that had not been considered yet in this thread, and throwing them into the mix to be discussed.
The bucks an hour was a metaphor, not a proposal.
Notice the OP said a two earner family. I’m not sure the living wage proposals say this or not, but under his requirement your $30K a year becomes $60K a year for the family - way over what is needed.
Plenty of companies paying under $30K a year provide healthcare. If it becomes a tremendous hardship for most companies to provide a decent health care plan - not 100% paid of course - maybe they’ll start backing a single payer system, so we won’t be at a competitive disadvantage with the rest of the world.
Education - I don’t think they’re talking Harvard. Higher education in California, in the community college system, is dirt cheap. Seems very affordable for a dual income family well under $30K each.
Here is a table of median household income by state, 2001 - 2003. (Hasn’t changed much since then.) For the US as a whole it is $43,527, and by state it ranges from $55K in New Jersey to $31K in West Virginia. Do you really think a living wage need be greater than the median income in the highest income state, and 50% greater than the US as a whole? Even a $20K individual living wage would put it at median, and I doubt very much that much is even necessary.
You’ve been throwing numbers around - let’s see what you think the components of a $30K living wage are. Maybe you’ve got richer tastes than I did when I was in grad school.
You may be underestimating the economical barriers in front of some people (or overestimating their ability to save or borrow money). After Katrina, I had to deal with a lot of people who were stuck at a relative’s home (or a shelter) because they didn’t have the money for a bus ticket. This is people who had work until the disaster but didn’t have a single penny saved.
Some (many) people just live at the very limit of their financial capacity. They spend every last penny they make to cover basic necessities or worse, they go deeper in debt every passing month.
For these people, it is simply impossible to pick up and move. A month without income is a slide down the chute of bankruptcy. Their relatives and loved ones are either in the same hole or don’t care enough to help (you would be surprised)
Inmigrants have a huge advantage. They come here leaving their families behind. They have very powerful support groups that save them a lot of money on lodging and transportation and providing valuable networking for job search. The money they make buys a lot more in their home countries than it does here, allowing them to take lesser paying jobs.
And take lesser paying jobs zome of them must since they are illegal and can’t really demand MW or any other right. That, in turn, creates a pressure on the job market making employers less willing to pay top dollar for a position they can fill for less with an illegal.
Anecdotal success stories to the contrary, a sizeable group of people is not in a position to improve their lot in life. They live to survive and make do with whatever they can get.
But let’s look at it a different way. If everybody could live the american dream (and it doesn’t seem to include mopping restrooms at McDonald’s), who would mop the restrooms at McDonald’s? If we all like to eat ripe tomatoes but nobody likes to pick tomatoes, how do those tomatoes get to the supermarket?
Every person living the american dream requires a host of people living outside of it to make it work (and remember we are talking about worldwide LW conditions, exporting the problem is not an option)
Way to set the bar real high there, John; if it’s good enough for the third world, it’s good enough for America. Nevermind that most of those immigrants leave their families for sometimes years at a time. No, if they can do it, all the whining poor in America can too. Real pro-family attitude you got going there.
You know, John, for all your moderate lip service, every once in a while you slip up, and your true heart peeks out. Not a pretty sight.
Are you claiming that you can have all that stuff (healthcare, personal transport, housing, good food, saving AND send kids to college) on $20k a year with two earners (i.e. a total family income of $40k)? Realizing that the healthcare is going to be part of that salary? Not to mention all that other stuff? Seriously?
Ok…fair enough then. Lets work with the $20k figure for individual income then. According to Google, the current minimum wage in the US (average) is $5.15/hr. That works out to roughly, what? $824/month? $9888.00 per year? So, you basically are saying that for a ‘living wage’ we would essentially double that salary…right?
Lets just use McDonalds as an example since its always kicked around in these threads. According to this site, McDonalds has 447,000 employees world wide. Lets make some assumptions…lets assume that 200k of those currently make around minimum wage…about $10k a year appearently. You are proposing to essentially double their salaries to around $20k a year to provide them all with cars, houses, health care, savings and educations for their little ones (and all on a mere $20k! Isn’t America great? 
). That would be (roughly) 200,000 employees getting a $10,000 anual salary raise (and we won’t even get into what we do with all the OTHER folks who ARE making $20k atm and who would probably want a bit of a bump as well so they were making more than checkout clerks, fry cooks and such)…that works out to roughly $2,000,000,000…around 2 billion dollars IOW. Who absorbs that cost? Is McDonalds expected to just right off a 2 billion dollar loss? Would that loss come out of our taxes? Would the magic money fairy simply give them the money because they are helping folks out? Or would, most likely, McDonalds simply pass that on to us, the consumers, in the form of higher costs for our happy meals?
And this is only one company (albiet a big one)…the same thing would play out to a greater or lesser degree across the board. If they have to pay their employees more than their labor is currently worth, then they need to make that labor worth more…but raising the prices for goods and services to their customers. And none of this gets into who pays for the health care (would probably be split between employee and employer as usual in the US…so thats MORE money from both sides), or what we do with all the folks who are making more than minimum wage now…do they all get a bump? I mean, if I’m making $21k at McDonalds as a shift manager or something, I’m going to want a bump about the same so that my salary isn’t the same as the fry cooks and such who work for me…right? Wouldn’t that be reasonable?
What you guys are proposing would have a ripple effect in the economy…and the irony is, if you got your wish and everyone in the US made $20k or better as a minimum, the prices of goods would rise such that those folks would essentially be in the same (or worse) boat as they are now.
-XT
Well, a LV is a subset of a MW, but a MW isn’t necessarily a LV. We set the MW somewhat arbitrarily-- where it somehow “feels” right. A LV would be calculated to assure a mimimum living standard, usually for a family. Additionally, a LW would have to be tied to the inflation rate, otherwise it would no longer be a LW after a few years. And I don’t even want to think about what would happen if we **mandated **that wages be tied to the inflation rate-- Holy Feedback Loop Batman!! :eek:
The other think is that, right now, relatively few people make MW. That gives businesses a certain amount of flexibility to not lay people off during difficutl times. But if we institute a LW, then many more people will be making that wage, and businesses will have less flexibility to reduce wages during tough times and they’ll have to lay people off.
Of course you can always find extreme examples of people who simply cannot move, but that shouldn’t be what we use to drive our economic policies. We have government programs for people hit by national disasters-- they may not always work the way they’re suppoosed to, but that’s a different debate.
Exactly how many people who are at or below the poverty level fall into that category? Of course there are some people who just have no choice. But is that the majority of those at or below the poverty level, or only some fraction? If the latter, which I suspect is true, then let’s not use that as our standard for setting policy across the board.
Come on! They have many, many disadvantages, but they’re willing to put up with more because they have more to gain. But don’t get so carried away with the analogy to illegal immigrants-- I only pointed to that as a way of showing that people do have options, no matter how bad it might seem. If you’re really living in a dead end town, what’s better-- having Dad or Mom move away for a year until they can send for the family or just sitting in that dead end town waiting for a government handout? And what do you do 5 years from now when the town is in even worse shape? And what do you children do when they grow up?
You seem to have an endless supply of straw. I didn’t set that as a bar.
Eh, get off your high horse. If you want to adress my argument, instead of taking one snipet out of context, go ahead and do so. If you have something to say about me, open a Pit thread. I’ll be happy to go at with your there.