The ideal would be that most people would have a mop the bathrooms at McDonalds type job for a while and then move on. There are office jobs that are basically the equivalent. It doesn’t mean that any given group of people have to make a career out of it to get the work done. I did my share of those types of jobs that should be enough credit for a lifetime when I was younger and it seemed to work out just fine and I have an honest respect for that type of work.
I’m guessing though, that if these people had a choice, they would NOT work for below minimum wage. The scenario originally described sounded to me, at least, like someone would be sitting and negotiating contract terms and saying, “No, I don’t want MW-you can pay me less.”
In real life, most of these people are illegal immigrants, who have no recourse. And that’s WRONG.
Well of course…if given a choice between making sub-MW and $40k a year, folks are going to take the $40k a year. Thats a given. However, the folks who ARE taking less than MW DO have a choice…as you noted a lot of them are illegal immigrants. Their choice of course is to not come here to work. Obviously, sub-MW or not the salary is better than their other options. I know it was for my folks when they came here.
If there were no MW laws on the books, then folks would STILL have choices…if a company attempted to offer $.10 an hour they could always choose not to work for that company…to take their labor elsewhere. In all but a very few cases, people can always pack up and go somewhere else if the job they want doesn’t pay what they need to live.
At any rate however, we aren’t talking about MW…but a living wage that gets all those goodies the OP mentioned. THAT would be something that would seriously skew the economy, would rather radically alter the prices companies charge for goods and services. If you didn’t manage to cram such a thing down the throats of the entire world, the US would essentially price itself out of just about every market out there. I wonder how the stary eyed crowd would feel with the flood of outsourcing sure to follow such a move…if you didn’t enforce it world wide.
-XT
A fine ideal. But are there enough top jobs for all these people to move up to? Are there enough new workers to fill up all the crappy jobs when the current crop graduates to those top jobs (yes, I know they don’t move up in batches, you know what I mean)?
I am not even sure what are the stats we are looking for to answer those questions?
Why?
I’m not saying it has to be $40,000 a year. Just enough to enable a person to LIVE a decent life.
Thinking on a larger scale (and please excuse my absolute ignorance on the matter that is just about to be revealed), isn’t this a problem that can be “solved” by dividing the global GDP (or something of the sort) by the total population of earth? The idea is to see if the world is making enough money to go around and give everyone a LW. Of course that LW means something different in every country but let’s go for a really rough estimate here to see if are even in the same order of magnitude.
But then we are into the realm of the subjective. What exactly IS ‘a decent life’? By who’s standards? Your’s? Mine? Someone born in a 3rd world nation? Someone living in an inner city ghetto? How do we quantify that term in real world figures? What will buy ‘a decent life’? $30k a year? $20k a year? Less? More?
-XT
I really recommend that you read Nickel and Dimed. I know there are valid criticisms of Ehrenreich’s investigation, but she demonstrated quite persuasively that simply “picking up” is not often an achievable goal for individuals, let alone entire families. The steepness of the average rental deposit, and the unwillingness of landlords to lease to unemployed people, make it quite difficult to start fresh. Which means people are “stuck” living in unpleasant circumstances, making less-than-optimal decisions, thereby perpetuating their lowly status.
I don’t think we want “dirt poor” to be our standard, anyway. I don’t think “dirt poor” communities are attractive places to drive through, and people produced by “dirt poor” communities tend to be under-educated and low-achievers. The immigrants you’re pointing out as role models are cramped 20, 30-people deep in single-family housing units. They grab work when they can get it, which is not every day, and they have to solicit at the Home Depot, scaring the little old ladies. They suffer from work-related injuries and don’t receive workman’s comp, pushing the costs onto the taxpayer when they finally seek treatment. They don’t buy car insurance so they are often involved in hit-and-runs. They are often involved in petty and not-so-petty crime. They send money back to Mexico, but they cannot afford to house and care for a family here. Yes, they have jobs, but what kinds of lives are they living? Is it laziness for someone to want a job that allows them to have a dignified existence?
I think it makes sense to raise the MW with inflation, at least. That this hasn’t happened is shameful, and why it’s so controversial I’ll never understand. All this talk about “what the market will bear” goes over my head, but I wish someone would explain something to me. The average salary of a CEO has increased dramatically over the past twenty years, while the wages of the MW earner have been pretty much stagnant over that time. How is it that CEOs can justify enormous pay hikes while those workers who are often on the front-lines of productivity see little of the windfall of the booming economy? Why is the market able to shower one end of the spectrum with riches (don’t forget those stock options!) while proposals for doing the same for the other end are met doom-and-gloom forecasts? If minimum-wage earners are such a small percentage of the workforce, how could it possibly hurt the economy to bump up their wage by a dollar or two?
I scratch my head whenever people talk about employers and workers “contracting” for a job, as if employers and workers have equal power and footing. I can only assume that people who think this actually happens are very sheltered individuals. If I’m unemployed and have no marketable skills, my labor is completely disposible. I can’t negotiate from this position. An employer would step right over me and pick the slob who won’t complain. Eventually, if I want to eat, I will become that slob.
This argument also assumes that laborers at Company A knows what their counterparts in Company B are paid. Office workers often don’t know what their coworkers in the next cubicle are paid, let alone what a person down the street is making. Being a savvy job seeker requires extensive knowledge of the market and also having the ability to take the “best” job at any given moment. Yeah, the Circuit City in your town is hiring and paying $9/hour, but it’s thirty miles away and you don’t have a car. Oh, yeah, and the job requires you to work nights but you want to take night classes at the local community college. These sound like whiny excuses, but when they are your reality, it’s hard to say that you have a “choice” in the same way that a consumer does.
The labor market doesn’t work the way people think it works. People have to work; most of us do not have a choice. Yes, if every business is paying $7/hour and you’re paying $3/hour, no one will work for you. The market decides you lose out. But if all businesses decide that $3/hour is groovy, allowing them to keep their prices low for the greedy consumer while still keeping their CEOs and stockholders fat and happy, then the market is shitting on the worker. And guess what? No one cares! That worker has no power, no ability to change anything, because they have to eat. A minimum wage at least ensures some degree of protection for the worker under this inherently exploitative system.
My question: Under what circumstances would the market ever favor the bottom-rung laborer? The consumer can make its voice heard through its purchasing habits, because the market is consumer-driven. But the laborer doesn’t have a voice in the market. No one really cares about the lowly laborer, who’s services are deemed disposable. If a minimum-wage earner unionizes, they are fired. If they strike, they starve. Their only recourse is to try as hard as they can to escape that bottom-rung. But there are limits to how many can escape at any particular time. Someone has to be there to work the register and drop the fries.
So let’s get real. Our economy is inherently exploitative. We have always depended on a pool of people–whether they be slave, sharecropper, sweat-shop, or undocumented laborers–who willingly or not-so-willingly serve as the bottom-rung dwellers. We try to buoy their spirits by filling their heads with talk about the American Dream, and sometimes they actually make it happen. We take away the minimum wage and we won’t see these people suddenly becoming free agents, negotiating for salaries and benefit packages (stock options!) on the golf green. That’s not what they were doing before the minimum wage was enacted, so why would they do it if we suddenly took it away? Without the minimum wage, we will see shantytowns and crowded tenements, the kind we’re accostomed to seeing on grainy BBC footage of third-world countries, where the people make not $6/hour but $2 an hour. Two dollars a day. Meanwhile, you’ll be able to buy a Happy Value Meal for fifty cents. Forget about the toothless woman who’s pouring your drink for you. You get a burger, fries, AND a coke for FIFTY cents, man! Only in America! The land that’s paved in gold!
:regaining composure:
There are plenty of people who work at below-minimum wage salaries. They are called illegal aliens. Or, they are tax cheats trying to find a way to avoid payroll taxes. Funny, the same people who whine about illegal aliens “taking all the jobs” are often the ones who whine about labor laws and protections. They also whine about welfare, homelessness, and poor-performing schools. Well, people, something has to give. If you don’t want poor people fucking up everything, you have to ensure that when they work a full day, they have enough to live. If you don’t want this, then be prepared to pay for their food stamps and their Medicaids and their lazy asses begging in the streets. And if you don’t want to do these things, then be prepared to fend them off when they break into your homes and rape your wives. Wishing they would educate themselves and stop being so irresponsible is not going to solve their problems or that of their children.
I don’t dispute that. But I think we’re getting bogged down in negatives here. People can’t move. People can’t start their own businesses (even cleaning services) or people can’t go back to school or whatever. Yes, it’s true that some people can’t do some of those things, but how many people can’t do any of those things (or a long list of other options)? Moving was introduced as one option for people who can’t seem to find work. There are many other options, and if we find ourselves with jobs at one end of the country, and people at the end who “can’t move”, maybe the thing for the government to do is to help those people move, not pay them inflated salaries to encourage them to stay in areas where economies are stagnating. If all we had to do to end poverty (and not create high unemployment) was to mandate a higher wage, I think one of the 50 states would’ve figured out how to do that by now.
Posters keep talking about people who just can’t, not matter what, raise themselves out of poverty. Fine, I’m sure such people do exist. But just how many people like that are there, and if it is (as I suspect) only a fraction of the people living in poverty, then let’s not use those people as the standard of measure as to whether a certain program is going to work or not.
I really just offered as an example of the other end of the spectrum. If someone “can’t move” or “can’t start his own small business” or "can’t do any of the other recommendations, them maybe, just maybe some of those people are simply not so desperately poor afterall.
Pegging the MW to inflation might not be too bad for the economy, but the more people you have making the MW, the more difficult it’s going to be for businesses to weather hard economic times w/o firing some people. I don’t know what the trip point is, but right now only about 3% of hourly workers make the federal MW. Raising that by 50 cents or a dollar is probably going to have a neglible effect on the economy. But remember, this thread is about the Living Wage, not the MW.
What I’d be concerned about is creating a LW and pegging it to inflation, since it seems like that would set up a feedback loop for a never ending cycle of wage/price inflation. Producers have to raise prices in anticipation of future wage increases, which raises the cost of living and triggers higher wages, which… But without pegging the LW to inflation, it really can’t be a LW except temporarily.
Well, back in 1968 the U.S minimum wage ($1.60 and hour) was $9.12 an hour in today’s dollars. According to my calculations, that would be an $18,969 annual wage for a full time worker. This is very close to the 20k hypothetical you are floating. So it’s obviously quite feasible to set a MW like this. I’m not sure what data I’d need to look up to compare the lifestyle of a 1968 minimum wage worker with a 2006 MW worker, but I thought I’d throw that info in as food for thought. Your predictions seems to me to be exessively dire.
By all means then…back it up. I don’t believe that a rough doubling of an entire bracket of workers (and the ripple effect this would have on those who already make higher than MW income) is going to be anything other than dire in the short term…nor do I see how comparing it to the income in 1968 is useful, as in order to get to that point NOW (in todays dollars) would require a fairly abrupt change…not a gradual change over time.
Out of curiosity, what exactly DO you think would happen if we roughly doubled MW to $20k per year? No effect at all? Some small but hardly noticable effect? Another question would be…is $20k per year REALLY a living wage as the OP intended? Can you really have a home, good food, transortation, health care, savings AND money for college for the kiddies on $20k per year in the US?
-XT
Well, I don’t see why it all needs to be done NOW instead of gradually phasing in it in.
Well, if you have BOTH parents working, I think so.
Don’t you think that businesses would have already decided 3 dollars an hour is groovy? Why isn’t everybody making the minimum wage now, then? After all, if there is a mandated minimum, and by your logic every company would conclude it is in their best interests to pay everybody the least they can, then we should all be making minimum wage. Obviously, you’re missing something here.
What you are missing (or failing to acknowledge) is that workers are contracting their services. They have market power, and that power is in direct proportion to their marketable abilities. If your abilities are very few or extremely common, then you don’t have very much market power. This is basic economics, and it’s why we don’t pay for air, which may have a great amount of utility but has very little value in economic terms. Every potential worker has something to offer though, that is why nobody works for free. Services, no matter how lowly or seemingly dispensable, are valuable. And ideally, people will get paid exactly the same as the value of their services. Obviously this doesn’t happen perfectly, but it seems to be working fairly well to me. But that isn’t the argument.
The argument in this thread is not whether people should be getting what they “deserve” based on the value they bring to the business and the economy, but what they “deserve” as lovable, cuddly human beings. And that my friends is communism. Not creeping communism, not a step in that direction, but blatant unabashed communism. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” I’m not going to debate the merits and shortcomings of communism here, but let’s at least call a spade a spade.
By the way, I meant to address this. You’re right, most of us don’t have a choice of whether or not to work. But most of us certainly do have a choice of where to work. And that choice is what gives workers power.
Since I’m up and at it, I’ll also address this:
Minimum wage is such a small percentage of the workforce that it wouldn’t hurt the economy too much to bump their wage up a bit. The reason it isn’t tied to inflation (in my cynical point of view at least) is twofold: First, some people (myself included) are against the minimum wage period, and so tying it to inflation is two steps in the wrong direction. Second, and this is the real reason, politicians like something meaningless to talk about come election year. Tying minimum wage to inflation would get rid of a nice diversion and force them to address issues that may not be so easy to grapple with.
I hope it’s not out of place, but it might be germane to the topic at hand: I’m against the minimum wage philosophically. If someone wants to work for the hell of it, to make a few extra bucks or just to get out of the house, they shouldn’t be forced to work a job that can support an entire family. If you have a family get out and get a job that pays better. This is in addition to the sentiments in my above post re: you should get paid according to the value of your services and not according to some subjective yardstick of what you deserve as a person. I think these differing concepts of what people “deserve” is at the heart of this discussion. If you think people deserve to get paid for the value they bring to the employer, then that is that. If you think people should get paid some minimum amount because they deserve to live a certain way, then you can debate what that minimum should be and what standard to base it on. But if you lean that way you have to look reality in the face and see that their just isn’t enough wealth to spread around so that everybody can be in the middle class. And by my definition, having a place to live, a reliable car, a growing savings account and enough money to not only afford kids, but to send them to college is deep into middle class territory.
Yeah, because thinking of human beings as anything other than a disposable commodity is communism. Caring about whether human beings can lead lives with something approaching dignity is communism. Yeah, right. Sorry, buddy, no sale here.
You must think there are a LOT of Communists out there …
Everybody isn’t making minimum wage because everybody isn’t a non-skilled worker. But looking at base-level, no-skilled labor–minimum wage or damn-near-minimum wage is the starting salary. Except for a few special places (Wyoming, last time I heard, was paying Mickie Dickie employees a whopping $10/hour), minimum wage is where a person with no skills starts off. These are the people who are exploited because they are not deemed valuable enough to negotiate with.
I don’t understand, though. There is no objective value to anything. Doctors twenty years ago got paid more than they are paid today. Were they more valuable in the 80s than they are now? The average teacher salary is more than the salary was fifty years ago. Are they more valuable now?
The market gets to decide everything. It decides that today, a Big Mac is worth 99 cents and next week, it will be worth $1.99. Has its worth really increased, though? Did the market determine this change, or was it only the idea of some corporate bigwig who wants to squeeze money out of people? If that same guy decides that his frontline staff is worth $4.00/hour and he’s trusting that his people are too desperate (or stupid) to complain or quit, does that mean $4.00/hour is how much his employees are worth? If people can function rationally and intelligently in the free market, explain to me why we saw such abject poverty during the late-19th and early 20th century? Without the minimum wage, were they not even “freer” than they are today? Do you want to return the slums to Manhattan?
The market is driven by greed. The market is run by greedy people. The whole goal of the market is to generate profits for the bigwigs supervising the machine, not the people running it. When a company makes record profits, does the windfall cascade down the food chain? No. You see the salaries of the bigwigs and the dividends of the stockholders increasing while the salaries of the fry cooks stay the same. Has the market determined that the bigwigs are more valuable than the fry cooks? Or is it that since the bigwigs are at the control switch of the market, they get to determine how much they’re worth versus how much the little guy is worth? If the latter is more like it, how can you say the market is really “free”?
You know what’s scarier than communism? Rampant capitalism. I don’t want to live in a communist state and I don’t want to live in a state with no basic protections for vunerable classes. And I’ll say it again: if you want the comforts of a First World country, you have to provide basic services and protections in some shape or form. I don’t want to live in a society where people are reduced to living on the side of the road because they’re picking tomatoes for Farmer Bill for $2 dollars a day. I’m against it even if these people are fine with this existence, because I don’t want to see their horrible slums and look at their sunken-face kids begging in the streets. I like living in a wealthy country. The minimum wage at least ensures that the wealth generated by a company is not totally kept from its laborers. I think the market, if left to its own devices, will milk the bottom rung for all that the money-makers–not some invisible, objective entity–deem that they are worth. That’s how capitalism has always worked.
I don’t know if the living wage is the answer, but surely its opponents can agree that some protections are needed in this glorious “free market” of ours.
DrCube is right…gauranteeing a living wage IS communism. My point earlier is that even if a living wage law was created, prices would most likely be driven up until the living wage is no longer a living wage. Then the living wage would have to go up again…it would create horrible inflation. The only way to prevent the inflation would to also fix prices, and probably upper-ends of salaries as well (for everyone, not just CEOs/“the rich”). Once wages and prices are fixed, what do we have? Certainly not a free market. Sounds like communism to me.
DrCube is right…gauranteeing a living wage IS communism. My point earlier is that even if a living wage law was created, prices would most likely be driven up until the living wage is no longer a living wage. Then the living wage would have to go up again…it would create horrible inflation. The only way to prevent the inflation would to also fix prices, and probably upper-ends of salaries as well (for everyone, not just CEOs/“the rich”). Once wages and prices are fixed, what do we have? Certainly not a free market. Sounds like communism to me.
Sorry about the double-post…if a mod could delete one, that would be great.