Complete fail on the reading comprehension there, but you tried. At least, you readied yourself and jumped when you read something you didn’t understand and thought you could make a brilliant point. We’ll put a Potato on your report card with the other ones.
Consultant and a Project Leader are generally higher level positions. And in those other jobs, the ones where I wasn’t in IT, I made $10-12/hour.
No, you’re wrong Colonel Sanders.
More power? Probably. But you said “one side (the employer) has no need (or willingness, usually, IME) to negotiate”
Of course there is a need. I negotiated the salary in my job. Other people negotiate theirs. It happens. I can’t believe you think it doesn’t.
And of course, people near minimum wage negotiate living wages out of their employers on a regular basis? :dubious:
I didn’t bring the mystical “living wage” into the conversation. Employers negotiate salaries, that’s a given. Even close to minimum wage people negotiate their salaries. Do you think that doesn’t happen?
I’m sure it does. I’m also quite certain it isn’t common.
How’s a Congressional Budget Office report of their modeling two specific proposals in 2014 based on the then current studies. Their modeling is based on a review of the economic literature at the time. They looked at a raise from $7.25 to $9 without COLA and a raise from 7.25 to $10 with COLA. Their summary:
The $9 proposal showed a central estimate of 100k jobs lost but with a likely range that includes a “slight increase” in employment. By $10.10 the likely range is a “slight decrease” to -1 million jobs with a central estimate of -500k jobs.
The range for $9 seems to indicate some of the stimulus proposed in the research the living wage side likes to cite. Going higher seems to show there’s a competing job loss effect their opponents tout. Both sides can be partially right with different effects at different wages. CBO’s analysis tends to confirm that. Ignoring all the effects, both positive and negative makes it hard to craft the best policy, though.
You might also want to check out the link for “Answers to Questions for the Record Following a Hearing on the Minimum Wage Conducted by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions” at the bottom of the page. It’s got some good representations of and background to the findings in the responses. If your interest is in actually targeting poverty regardless of the tool used, check out the answer to the question Sen Lamar Alexander asked comparing using minimum wage versus the EITC.
So you worked a call center in the 70s and made $10-12/hour. Color me impressed.
Living wage is a nonsense term.
Furthermore if the job pays minimum wage and that’s the only job one can get the reason there is little to no negotiating is that the person is most likely already being paid above market value. That’s that person’s fault for having poor economic value.
Loved the OP. There’s more than one reason people take minimum wage jobs. What do you do when your elderly parent gets sick on the long term? Will you spend their final days with them? Maybe a simplier job for ease of stress or flexibility would be better. Your kid gets sick and it takes countless tests with different doctors to get a diagnosis. Do you just send your kid off in a taxi? It’s ignorant to not consider that it may be fucking necessary to take a minimum wage job. Not because you’re useless and uneducated, but because you unashamedly took a shitty job because the comfort of your family members means more. It is not always a level playing field for everyone at all times.
Thank you, DinoR. Always appreciate cites. I’ll look it over.
Still, on first look, hardly seems the negative counter-productive nonsense that octopus is claiming.
look, the Republicans keep screaming about the size of government, the ‘waste’ and cutting ‘those people’ off welfare they don’t deserve. Well, if we were sincere in wanting to get fraud off the welfare rolls, we would increase funding for enforcement and investigations, not these nonsensical across the board cuts that only hurt everyone. It isn’t like the government is suddenly going to say “You know what? This is starting to hurt. We need to get those fraudulent 20 million people off the rolls!” That isn’t reality.
At the same time, our not very Christian “Conservatives” have this bad habit of those simplistic solutions and vilifying the poor. Like it’s all their fault and they deserve it, and if they just tried harder they’d be brain surgeons. In pure defiance of many of them being the very people they rail against.
And then we have the corporatists and the cronyists convincing these tards that if we just give them more tax cuts, slash regulations (that help workers) and look the other way, we’ll suddenly have more jobs than we can possibly use and we’ll all live in this magical Unicorn Land where everyone can negotiate with power for whatever job they want and are qualified for.
Cut welfare and support for the poor and middle class
Increase welfare for the rich and corporations
= Magic happens
Meanwhile, we have near full employment after a long recession, our oil imports (a big drain of cash) have been cut in half, and minimum wage pushes are increasing wages after a ludicrously long period of stagnant wages that moved many people backwards into poverty. This is precisely the time to raise wages, when unemployment is lower and any losses will be small and likely very brief.
So really, what are we gaining by refusing to raise the minimum wage, cutting welfare programs even further, and giving away more corporate welfare?
That and I like throwing hard capitalist crap back in their faces. Low wages requiring government support programs are a form of corporate welfare. We’re telling them that they can go ahead and pay poverty wages and no benefits, we’ll just create these big social programs so everyone else pays for it. (Certainly not the corporation, because we also gave them huge tax breaks!)
If it is wrong to support people forever with welfare and take away their incentives to achieve via hard work, why isn’t it wrong to support corporations forever with welfare and take away their incentives to innovate?
I look forward to this new America where the average worker is paid the pittance they hardly deserve, while their betters live the “Gilded Age” lives they so clearly deserve!
Meanwhile, Henry Ford spins in his grave.
(Not that the bastard doesn’t deserve it . . . but he did understand the realities of being a producer of goods that really requires a workforce with money in their pockets to buy them.)
CMC fnord!
Don’t forget Milton Hershey. He understood that happy and healthy workers worked harder and that loyalty is a two-way street.
What do you get out of being such a trolling piece of shit? Seriously, does that sort of thing make you happy? Does it make you feel better about yourself?
Ah, another person who can only argue against a strawman. Please quote where I said negotiations never happen? You can’t because I never said it but I doubt you’ll ever acknowledge your mistake (or outright lie’ we can quibble over those semantics some other time, perhaps).
What’s amazing is that you even quoted what I said just 4 short sentences before you constructed that strawman. Did you think no one would notice? :dubious:
Also, you seem to be deliberately ignoring the power imbalance and the resulting implications. Tell me: how many concessions did the Allies make to the Axis powers when WW2 came to an end? :dubious:
When you display some inkling of knowledge on the subject of employment & employment negotiations, maybe you’ll have something worth saying (and listening to). But right now, you don’t. You don’t seem to know anything about the subjects at hand other than your firsthand anecdotes.
You are wrong if you think employers need to negotiate. They don’t. The fact that you found one who was willing to doesn’t negate my argument and it’s ludicrous for you to think it does.
I only, and only, mention Ford because the whole glorious success, and mess it currently has become, is known by the word “Fordism”.
Hersheyism might, or might not, have worked better . . . certainly would’ve tasted better :p!
CMC fnord!
My, my. It has a potty mouth. I can’t help if you are too retarded to understand economic value.
Pointing out to the feeble minded and uneducated that economic worth is what someone is willing to pay for something is not trolling. I hope you haven’t bred. We don’t need Idiocracy to be a prophecy.
People don’t deserve anything for labor. They earn what someone is willing to pay them in exchange for that labor. If it’s too low find another buyer or learn a skill more in demand. It’s that simple. The politicians on the left just like to create dependancy in order to have a captive voting block.
Unless there is collusion which is illegal iirc Burger King, McDonalds, and Wendy’s can’t fix prices or wages. So pickle placing, hitting the hamburger icon, and pulling the fries out of the frier are paid a competitive wage. It may be lower than one wants. But it’s not lower than the value of the labor. It might actually be higher due to government mandate.
I’m surprised at that, as I’ve worked in high tech manufacturing in the U.S. for the last 35 years. The majority of those jobs did go to China in the last couple of decades, but thorium had fuck-all to do with it. The suits at the top had to maximize shareholder value by minimizing labor costs, and here comes China abandoning their anti-capitalism, joining the WTO and saying “look, here is all this cheap labor” and manipulating their currency to ensure the trade deficit remained high.
I could get behind either a basic income or a raise in the minimum wage.
How would the basic income be paid for? If it came from a rise in the top level tax rates, taxes on excessive C level pay, a transaction tax on stock trades, closing the carried interest loophole and other measures designed to reverse the upward transfer of wealth that’s been going on for the last three decades that might do some good. Perhaps let it be managed by the Social Security administration or the state employment offices.
How do you establish this claim? How, exactly, do you figure out the objective value of labor? The “invisible hand”? Yeah, they’d pay their workers less if they could. Ideally, they’d pay the absolute minimum they could still draw workers to. Yeah, workers will go for it despite the absolute shit wages. Mostly desperate workers who don’t have much in terms of options, and who will take “shit pay” over “no job”. But how the fuck do you get from that scenario to the “value of labor”? Just by assuming that because this is what corporations will pay them and that’s what they’ll work for, this is the true “value” of labor? Well shit, in that case, the value of work for Britain’s unemployed is $0!
What’s missing from your analysis is that, fundamentally, there’s a power difference here. People living on minimum wage need to work. They’re typically working those jobs because they can’t find anything better, and because they need to get a paycheck right fucking now. In that context, talking about the “true value of labor” as dictated by the market is completely nonsensical - it’s like treating the real value of a dose of an epi pen as $10,000 because the unscrupulous sales associate noticed that you didn’t really have a choice but to pay what he asked or you were going to die. The market is consensual, but it’s a rhino’s bargain - when your options are “do shit work for shit pay” or “starve and lose your home”, there’s not really a choice.
I earn 650€ a month at a job I hate. If I had any choice, I would quit. Unfortunately, I don’t. I can’t find replacement employment, and I can’t afford to miss a paycheck or I’ll end up homeless. Go ahead, you tell me - is my work (full time) worth that much?