Well, OK, but the point of the cite was that hardly anybody is working two jobs at any wage level, federal or state.
0.2% of the workforce is working two jobs. X = the percentage of the US workforce working for the MW in their state. Y = the percentage of the US workforce working for the federal MW.
0.2 > X > Y. Unless every single person in Y works in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana or South Carolina.
This suggestion that people are slaving away for 80 hours a week at starvation wages is wrong at least 99.8% of the time.
Not sure how you get this number, but according to BLS, there are 6.5 million people working 2 jobs. Unless there are 32 billion Americans working 1 job, I doubt the percentage is that low.
I agree, but we also need to recognize that some things can not be fixed - to use your analogy, it’s not a gash, it’s an amputation. Some people really are going to need help long-term and forcing them to jump repeatedly through the same hoops over and over hoping for a change that will never come helps no one. In some instances we really would be better off (both the person in question and society at large) providing modest accommodations (a studio apartment, say) and a food budget for people that are not capable of supporting themselves.
The 0.2% statistic is for people working 2 or more full time jobs.
The percentage of people working one full time and one or more part time jobs, or all of the jobs are part time is is between 4 and 6 percent. Which is, indeed, a signficant percentage. And this statistic does not include “side gig” jobs like uber driver, or on-the-side cash jobs, which raises the percentage even higher
To avoid continuing this hijack, please strike the word “multiple” and change “jobs” to “job” in my previous post. I don’t believe it changes in any way the intent or meaning, but perhaps will allow us to re-focus on UBI and the effects of the lack of financial security on the mental and physical well-being of those in poverty.
Speaking as a person who was unemployed, and on benefits, for a number of years:
If there had been one person, in a job, that was willing to exchange my benefits for their job, I would have willingly paid the value of the benefits to that person in exchange for that job.I never met such a person.
I take it from what I read here, nobody is claiming that they themselves would give up their jobs for benefits: it is only those ‘other’ people who would give up their jobs for benefits.
In my gig I work with a lot of people who sit around the house, playing video games and smoking weed. Some receive benefits. Some don’t. But each and every one of them would like to be able to work. But crippling anxiety, or depression, or panic attacks, or simply shitty social skills tend to get in the way of regular employment. And that’s just the ones who have the resources–emotional, mental, transportation, financial–to come to see me.
There is much more stability and financial security for the poor now than there was for the vast majority of individuals 200 years ago. Nevertheless, vast increases in human well-being occurred and >95% of people contributed to their well-being and society’s in some way or another.
Do you have evidence that human physiology or psychology has changed such that the same percentage of people cannot make similar contributions?
It’s much easier now to contribute. You don’t even really need to lift heavy things or do arithmetic. These things are aided by machinery and automation. Back in the day, you had severely handicapped people working strenuous jobs and still sustaining. Today, it’s possible to sustain a standard of living 10 times greater with 1/10 the physical and mental output.
It is a market with severe power imbalance. Historically, it has not worked out too well for the worker to have no power in the relationship.
Not sure where you are going with your talk about minimum wage hikes here, as I didn’t mention them.
I was actually specifically, in that post, talking about how a UBI would level the playing field between employee and employer.
Now, as an employer, I don’t know that I actually like this.
But, as a fellow human being, I think I do.
As far as MW goes, well, I do consider it to be a necessary evil unless there is a robust safety net.
There will always be someone in more desperate situation, and willing to do the job for less. Without a floor on wages, the value of your labor is based on what the lowest bidder can accept.
The problem is, is that you have price inflation with or without a MW increase. I’d like to see proof that MW always produces price inflation before I’m on board with not keeping MW up with inflation.
Please cite this, as the BLS claims that 4.9% of people report working two or more jobs.
Should I believe your uncited assertion here, or the BLS?
If you are talking about people who make the fed MW, and there are states that pay a higher than fed MW, then the people that are making their state MW are not counted in your statistic, but are still MW.
And yet, sometimes, the method of “pointing out facts” is to obscure the actual truth, and in the process, actually contributes to ignorance.
Once again, please cite where you got this statistic, as it is not in agreement with any other official published statistic.
I think the real takeaway from that experiment is that UBI didn’t lower employment rates, which is what certain posters claimed would happen. In fact, I’m not sure what you mean by “didn’t work”, since there seem to have been a lot of positives and no real negatives (other than the cost, of course).
First, you never did provide support for your claim that “the plan to replace all air travel with high speed rail”, and you seem to have disappeared when you were called on it.
Second, I now see that you’ve plagiarized Donald Trump: “It sounds like a high school term paper that got a low mark.” I hope I never reach the point in my life when I think something Donald Trump said was so witty that I have take it for myself.
You don’t get markets then; that’s ALWAYS the case, no matter what the market. If you have a dozen guys selling identical widgets, the buyers for the identical widgets are going to buy from the one selling them for the least until he runs out, and then from the next cheapest, and so on.
Over time this reaches an equlibrium- some combination of the other eleven guys lowering prices to capture some of those sales and/or the twelfth guy raising his prices to make more money (realizing that the next guy behind him made more per widget) happens, and the market price stabilizes.
The same thing happens with wages- haven’t you ever been in the position where you wouldn’t take a job because the pay’s too low? That’s you participating in the labor market and effectively raising the lower end of the market price for your particular combination of skills and experience.
One variable left out of this equation is that it’s become a LOT harder to get through the job interviewing gatekeepers to get a job. Speaking as someone who recently changed jobs, I can attest to this. Employers act like they’re still holding out for the “best and brightest” or that it’s impossible to fire a bad hire. (Yeah, yeah, documentation and blah blah. Those excuses are in direct contradiction with “at will” labor laws that exist in most states.) I still read the jobs subreddit and other internet forums for job seekers and it’s brutal out there even for highly skilled people. Today’s normal is to send out something like 200 resumes/applications, resulting in 8 phone interviews, followed by face to face interviews with only 3 companies, landing you one job offer. And this generally takes place over 6 months to 1.5 years depending on where you are. Many more companies are also requiring their candidates to do projects to “prove” they have the needed skills - all unpaid of course.
I’d say that tons of people WANT to contribute but can’t because of this. Many just give up after a year or so.
I’m not an employer yet but working hard to increase my shop revenue to support a small staff, so I’ve been thinking forward to that. In the current world without UBI, I’d have the pressure of needing to pay for a very small full time staff and pay them a living wage. I’m not Walmart who will happily pay rock bottom and show my staff where the welfare line is to make up the difference.
However, I think in the world** with** UBI, I could hire more people for lower wages without feeling like a cheapass. The workers would join my crew because they enjoyed the work and wanted extra money, not because they only had bills to pay.
Think of it this way: when job interviewers ask candidates why they are interested in working there, candidates are coached not to say “I need the paycheck”. But in fact, that’s exactly the only reason a lot of people apply to work at a lot of companies. Combine what I said above about the job market, it’s often not possible for people to work at the company they want to work for, so they have to settle for somewhere else. In such cases, they don’t care that much about the company, they’re literally there only for the money.
I do understand markets just fine, thank you very much.
And you are right that that is always the case when you are dealing with commodity objects, which is the exact problem that I am specifically pointing out. People are not commodity objects, but that is how the market treats them.
Given that you consider low wage workers to be as fungilbe as identical widgets, then it is only the widget that is offered at the lowest price that you will take.
That seller may be selling that widget at lower than the cost of the widget, for any number of reasons, which ends up putting all the other widget makers out of business.
To translate to the labor market, that means that there will be people who are taking the job for less than a living wage, because less than a living wage is better than no wage.
There are times, like right now, that there is more demand for widgets/labor, and as such, the price of it is going up, though rather slowly.
Then there are times, like 2008 or so, and quite likely within the next decade or less, that there is more of a supply for labor than there is demand, which means that the price of it goes down, often times very rapidly.
In 2008, I know many people who left jobs that paid $18 or so an hour, and ended up finding jobs that paid MW.
The free market doesn’t care about the widgets that are not sold.
Not always. The twelfth guy may have lower costs than the others, and be able to maintain a lower selling price than the others, while still maintaining a profit. He may make more profit if he matches their price, but if there is more supply of widgets than demand, then he will force the others to lower their prices as well.
In the end, whoever demands the lowest price for their widget wins.
I have been in a position where I could turn down jobs because it didn’t pay enough to compensate for the work.
However, I also have been in positions where I have accepted MW, and would have taken lower, as it was more than what I was making at the time.
Not everyone has the luxury of holding their labor out for the highest bidder. The don’t have time to wait for it to reach “equilibrium.” They have bills to pay now, they are hungry now.
Even in an “at will” state, if you do not fire with cause, they can collect unemployment, which raises your payroll tax. Documentation is important.
Or, they take the first job offer that they receive, having been at it for months or a year, and get a salary that’s less than they would have were the labor market actually efficient at valuing human resources.
Depends on why they want to help.
When I was first opening, I had friends offer to volunteer their time, to which I had to turn them down, as I didn’t want to break labor laws before even opening my doors.
With a UBI and no MW, they could have come and helped me for whatever we settled on was fair compensation.
I prefer people who are here for the money. I can motivate them with money, I can threaten them with money.
If someone says that they are looking for something to “fulfill” them, then I have no idea how to fit that into my metrics.