Full time? How many McDonalds workers are getting full time?
Not to add too much complexity to the thread, but with Washington State specifically there’s the issue that $10/hr or even $15/hr may be a competitive living wage in the Puget Sound region, but there’s that whole other part of the state east of the Cascades. With that handy-dandy living wage calculator shimmery posted, it looks like a living wage in most of the cities I plugged in in eastern Washington are in the $7-8/hr range. People in eastern Washington living comfortably on an overly generous minimum wage (while undoubtedly grumbling about those damn liberals across the Cascade Curtain) certainly wouldn’t be the end of the world, but I could see that actually hurting the local economies in places there, especially outside of the “big” cities.
One other issue along those lines is the “migrant” farmworkers in eastern Washington. There is what is supposed to be a very limited exception to the minimum wage law in Washington for migrant or seasonal farm workers, but there are quite a lot of people who have lived in the region for generations who are nevertheless classified as migrant workers even though in any meaningful way they are employees who should be subject to the minimum wage law. My concern there is that ratcheting up the minimum wage even more would create even more of those quasai-legal arrangements or outright under-the-table working.
His response was so far off that I just assumed he responded to the wrong post.
I just don’t think I can agree with you, yellowjacketcoder. You think some people are not worth paying enough money to live. These lower-class people aren’t all horrible rapists and murderers or something, so I can’t fathom how you could believe that they’re not worth it. I’m not saying we give them free money - we’re talking about people with jobs, who are working for pay.
I don’t see how certain jobs are so “worthless” as to be paid less than a living wage. Without food service workers nobody could go out to eat, so they uphold a pretty important part of people’s daily lives. They run around on their feet all day and deal with nasty (and nice) customers under strenuous time constraints. I don’t see what’s so “easy” about these jobs. My desk job is easier AND pays more, frankly. Seems a bit mixed up.
Why do we treat them only as transient jobs? They are pretty sucky, but people work them many years, maybe their whole lives. Not everybody can move up the ladder simply because there’s not enough positions to move up to. There aren’t as many managers in the world as there are floor workers - every floor worker cannot eventually become a manager because there are not enough spots. Inevitably there will be people stuck on the bottom their whole lives because of this fact. Someone has to be these workers on the bottom or the whole system falls apart. Why are we letting them be treated to a substandard quality of life when we can do better? What exactly have they done to deserve it?
The proper answer is to avoid the need for minimum wage hikes by providing government support: negative income tax, subsidized housing (Friedmanists support these two IIRC), food stamps and public-financed health care.
Minimum wage hikes are a poor choice forced by necessity: the political climate doesn’t allow expensive government spending on health or housing.
Which amounts to a subsidy to corporations who employ low wage workers, incentivizing others to drop wages in the knowledge that the federal government will support their employees who are unable to support themselves on the wages they are paid.
Wait, why would that incent other companies to drop their wages?
I’m guessing you support minimum wage laws (and unemployment insurance) for another reason. If the demand for a car model falls so much that the manufacturer cannot make a profit, they can either cut costs or stop making it. In either case there are some bad side effects, but the economy as a whole is stronger because resources get directed into products that people want.
If people were robots, they could just be turned off when there was a lack of demand. Being people they need to eat, and, as we’ve seen, support a family. When there is no demand we have the government do it. But if there is enough demand for their services to be employed, it is not too much to ask the employer to have a floor on pay. If the employer is so inefficient that they can’t make money after paying their salaries, then they cut staff - but I’d suspect that without an investment in automation their output would decrease and the inefficient employer would be in trouble. What we don’t want is for the government to subsidize inefficient employers by paying salary or benefits the employer should be paying.
In the current case, with productivity and profits increasing (at least until just now) the argument that employers can’t afford the floor salary is weaker.
After that, the market does take over, which is why pay above minimum wage won’t increase in lockstep with it. The CEO is not going to demand another $5 an hour after all.
Because the pool of workers able to take those jobs will be bigger, and because why pay yourself when you can get the government pay? That’s for negative income tax, not UHC which would level the playing field because all companies and people would be taxed to support it.
If a company can make a profit paying minimum wage but makes a bigger profit with government subsidies, why should you and I support their higher profit with our taxes?
If the company can’t support minimum wage without government subsidies, why should our taxes prop up an inefficient company? Let it fail and let someone who can do a better job take over.
Because that’s what the market will support? The whole argument in favor of minimum wage (which I’m not opposed to) is that people aren’t being paid enough to support themselves. In other words, companies don’t care if they pay a living wage. So, why are you under the impression that what the governemnt does or doesn’t do has any bearing on companies’ salary decisions?
Most people pay more than minimum wage becasue they want a higher caliber of employee.
Unclear. Some low-wage workers make very little after transportation costs, loss of leisure, etc. are subtracted out, but are forced to work by dire necessity. With basic needs met elsewhere, they could afford to be more selective in their employment. What I propose should be endorsed by left and right alike! Wages determined by free market. Minimum human needs met by society.
My comment is hypothetical, of course, since present U.S. politics are directed at weakening rather than strengthening the social safety net. Given present political reality, I support increasing minimum wage.
I believe something like 5% of fast food workers earn the minimum wage, and half of those are teenagers.
Because the results have actually be mostly inconclusive. The studies I’ve read on minimum wage have not shown much negatives but also not shown much positive outcomes either. Essentially previous hikes actually had a minimal effect, undermining the argument of both those who warn of gloom and doom due to a wage hike and those who think it will somehow fix any real problems experienced by the lowest wage earners. A raise to $15 from $7.50 would, I believe, be a much larger % increase than ever seen before though–so whatever effects minimum wage hikes have we’d see a much more robust example from such a hike than previous hikes that would go from like $5.15–>$7.50 or whatever.
Things change, and maybe that’s what is happening here. I remember when I was a young teen in the early eighties and my mother telling me to stay in school and get an education because “You don’t want to spend your life digging ditches”. She was referring to having a job working with our town. What was once a low paying job, digging ditches or working on a garbage truck, is now a pretty safe career choice with wages starting in the low twenty dollar an hour range with a pension plan, health benefits and three weeks vacation. The skills required to do these jobs has not changed in the last thirty years but the security and benefits certainly have.
One of the downsides to a high minimum wage, which I have not seen mentioned yet, is to the small mom and pop operations. A good friend of mine recently had to close his music store. This was not because of a higher minimum wage but because of other overhead expenses increasing exponentially ie; rent, power, etc. There is no way he would be able to absorb a 100% increase in minimum wage. You are only going to sell so many guitars per year and I think this would hold true for many of these types of operations.
On the other hand I now, at a later stage in my life, understand how hard it is to raise a family on a minimal amount of money. I can’t speak for Americans here on the board, but here in Canada, the cost of living is rising way faster than the increase in wages. In my neck of the woods we have some of the highest power rates in the country despite the fact that I am a five minute ride from one power plant and forty minutes away from another. We pay, with the conversion from litres to gallons, about $5.20 a gallon for gas, a little over $7.00 a gallon for milk, $3.90 for a gallon of heating oil. Our housing costs are generally lower that the rest of the country, but you get what you pay for. A new three bedroom single story home, 60 X 100 foot lot is in the $200,000.00, but you can get older, thirty to forty years, decent two story homes around the $100,000.00 range. The problem is that this is out of range for our minimum wage, which was increased to $10.30 an hour this year. To top it off we have no real industry anymore, most of the work around here are minimum wage jobs, so with that I understand the desire to want a livable wage.
My view is if you’re not running the business then the wages are between the employer and employee. If employees weren’t willing to work for that wage then the businesses would be empty.
You mentioned studies. Seems like a natural reaction to ask for them. I mean you did say studies. You should have done the work.
It is trivially true that the government has an effect on salary - see minimum wage.
Do you doubt that government subsidies of salaries wouldn’t cause employers to lower their pay, at least somewhat?
Caliber of employees, and thus pay, depend on the business model of the company - see WalMart versus Costco for example. And if companies need skilled and rare employees, they pay more than minimum wage, a lot more, because they can’t get anyone. No one in demand need worry about this.
And I certainly agree that companies for the most part don’t care about a living wage. If you can give your employees less while everyone else gives theirs more, so that you still have customers, you win. When everyone cuts and your customers go away because they can no longer afford you, you and everyone else loses. It is just another example of the tragedy of the commons.
I guess it depends on how well minimum needs are met. Very well, and I agree there would be people inclined to not work except for a good job. If it amounts to a subsidy, wouldn’t the market quickly determine which combination of government and private pay is enough to get employees? I suspect the private pay component would be less than no government at all.
And there would have to be jobs to be selective about.
But it is moot, because I agree with your assessment of the political situation.
This is exactly why we can’t say with any degree of confidence what raising the minimum wage to $15 would do. We’ve never had that kind of increase before, so any studies we have are of questionable validity.
I hope it is generally agreed that if we raised the minimum wage to $100/hour, it would have some kind of serious impact. Probably some serious inflation and/or unemployment and market failure. Either $100 becomes worth not much pretty quickly, or McDonalds goes out of business.
I think it’s also pretty obvious that raising the minimum wage by 1% wouldn’t really have much of a measurable effect at all.
Somewhere between those two, there’s an increase that’s large enough to have serious effects. How large that increase is is an open question, but it’s completely incorrect to claim that we could double the minimum wage and it would have no effect on employment or inflation. We simply don’t know, since no one has ever tried it before.
Cite?