I much prefer this as well. I totally agree with people who say that people shouldn’t be exploited for their labour - but IMO the way to fix this is not to make the minimum wage a living wage, but rather to make it so that you don’t need to earn a wage to survive. Then you know jobs will be paying a wage that is mutually beneficial for both parties and that someone isn’t forced to work a minimum wage job or else they become homeless. Having a higher minimum wage makes sure people working minimum wage jobs live a little better, but it does nothing to make them less dependent on that job.
I only support higher minimum wages for pragmatic purposes because I don’t think support for UBI in Canada/the US is high enough yet to make it politically feasible in the near future.
I actually have no problem with people getting minimum wage being on welfare. To me, that’s the purpose of welfare - ensure that everyone in the country can survive, regardless of what they do for work. I can understand politically why people get upset at the idea of taxpayers “subsidizing businesses” but I see it as taxpayers supporting less well off people. I don’t think it should be businesses’ responsibility to ensure the welfare of their employees, IMO that’s society’s responsibility. Making businesses responsible for the welfare of their employees makes the employee dependent on their company - it’s for the same reason that I think the dependency on workers for employer health benefits in the US is a bad thing, while universal health care would be so much better.
More generally for the thread - on a macroeconomic level, I’m not sure if raising minimum wages will cause higher unemployment or inflation, but on a microeconomic level, it’s pretty clear that businesses have to either 1) raise prices, 2) reduce the size/hours of their workforce, or 3) live with lower profits. I’ve thought that larger corporations are usually in a better position to do 2) than small businesses because they have a larger pool of resources to invest in automation, find opportunities for reducing redundancy, etc. while small businesses often have no choice but to do 1) or 3). Seems like minimum wage increases definitely advantage large businesses over small. The only advantage to small business would be if the increased spending power of minimum wage workers disproportionately flows towards small businesses, but I don’t see why that would be the case (but if anyone has any citations showing that, it would be helpful).
Waiters making that much in tips are probably doing a damn fine job, and probably upselling like crazy. That sounds like people he’d want to keep even in slower times. He doesn’t have to, but it would seem to make business sense.
Reminds me of waiters in Antoines, where top customers had their special waiters. I think they made more than MW.
I’m definitely not saying this is a good thing. In fact it’s a terrible thing. But it happens.
It is pretty much what the “bring manufacturing back to increase the number of manufacturing jobs” people want. What they’ll get, as we see, is automating the low skill jobs and having the rest of the jobs be highly paid.
Supply and demand and pricing for commodities or any good and service for that matter has no regard for your concept of humaneness. We live in a global world and we turn a mostly blind eye to illegal labor. The crude tool of a wage floor is not how you help people. The number one benefit of voting for minimum wage laws is it makes one feel virtuous.
If you really want to help people implement UBI combined with needs based social assistance and get rid of government backed student loans. The market distortions aren’t helping who they are claimed to intend to help.
That is a load of shit. Few corporations use illegal labor in the US. That is just bad propaganda and you should know it isn’t legit.
The minimum wage should have automatically been going up year after year instead of the gross stupidity we’ve used in this country. And now that we’re trying to finally fix it, you get these complaints its too much and these outright lies that it is going to double the wage overnight.
It is a massive misinformation campaign. And before you dismiss me as a lefty socialist. I’m a recovering Reaganite that is not pro-Union as anything more than a balance to the corporations.
If I could do one thing nationally I would have a paid week off for everyone who makes below a living wage to drive home how much of a necessity those jobs are. Why people buy into both the Prosperity Gospel and the idea that poor people somehow deserve to be poor is beyond me.
Just because an illegal immigrants is working a job illegally doesn’t mean they are getting paid less than minimum wages many of them are working with fake social security numbers as a fig leaf for their employers. They are paid at least minimum wage and pay taxes on their income. They do provide a downward pressure on wages in that they will take a job for minimum wage that a legal worker wouldn’t but that is a separate issue from minimum wage.
I agree UBI is a better way to handle the “living wage” than minimum wage but the screams of socialism would ring louder than they do today even through the result would be much less government intervention and more free market control.
I’m old enough to remember minimum wage increases dating back to the mid-Seventies, and every single time, we heard the same arguments claiming the increases would cost jobs, wreck businesses, and generally wreak havoc on the economy. Since none of those predictions were realized after previous MW increases, why continue to make those same arguments?
I’m not sure anyone in this thread is making that argument. Labor and capital are fungible in a global economy and the US worker has no intrinsic advantage aside from proximity compared to his or her counterpart abroad.
That is really unfortunate because UBI could be a far better mechanism.
You don’t have an alternative Earth as a control. So you don’t have a definitive experiment anyways. What we can see is that the nature of jobs do change and once thriving industries in developed nations are now concentrated more and more in developing nations. That is a strategic problem and it’s bad economics. Unfortunately, it’s good politics.
We also have had a lot of inflation since minimum wage came into effect. Why is it that with significantly increased productivity the price of goods and services keep rising?
Furthermore, if historical correlation, however misleading it may be in terms of actually being cause and effect were that strong of a disincentive we wouldn’t have fools who put into place socialism in Venezuela because historical failures would have been instructive.
Yes and no. Liquor, of course, is the biggest profit maker.
Good job, yes. But the reason is mainly because it is a 4 star establishment in a lake/resort area, thus expensive. With drinks/bottle of wine a couple can easily spend $200 for a meal. Even at only a 15% tip that’s $30 per table. Times 4 tables is $120 over 90 minutes=$80/hour. Dinner hours are 4:00pm-10pm. And the tip average is usually well above 20%. The place is usually packed on Fridays and Saturdays and reasonably full on Tuesdays-Thursday (they’re closed Sunday and Monday). The summer tourist months are insane. Three of the women who work there make over $1600 a week working less than 20 hours. Why should he pay them more?
But do you think that it was the people that were for a minimum wage, or those who were against a minimum wage who kept that from happening?
Causing a problem then complaining about the costs of a solution is not really something that you can blame on those who didn’t cause the problem in the first place.
Sure, but you do realize that the people who are against an increase in MW are almost exactly the same people who would be even more against UBI or other social supports as your propose.
I know this has been addressed but I’ll take a stab at it.
During what you’re describing he shouldn’t have to pay them more and luckily there is no requirement in current minimum wage or the proposed minimum wage law that would require him to pay them more. This is why despite raising the minimum wage your son wouldn’t have his entire staff’s minimum wage increasing his prices or decreasing his margins.
On the other hand in the off season (assuming there is an off season) where there are only 4 diners in the restaurants and his staff is sitting around rolling silverware he should have to pay them enough to heat their homes and eat dinner. Their costs don’t go down and he is requiring them to not be somewhere else earning money so they need to be paid a minimum amount for their time. The most probable effect of this increase is that your son will either close the restaurant in the off season since it is losing money or he will lay off serving staff. This will allow the staff to go get other jobs for minimum wage or better and they may or may not come back for the boom times. In general, the remaining staff will be better off as will the ones who find employment elsewhere.
I think UBI can be sold fairly easily to the libertarian wing of conservatives and I know a lot of libertarian types who are in favor of it. The secret is pitching it as a small government initiative. Instead of having the government telling people how much they must get paid we let the free market decide what an hour of someone’s time is worth. We can cut all social services except for single payer and UBI and let the market sort out the rest. Basically move the government’s role to defence, taxing, healthcare, leveling the playing field, and infrastructure.
Of course, this doesn’t appeal to the religious wing or the racist wing of the conservatives so it is still doubtful that there could be enough votes. You’d basically have a shot at the Ayn Rand bunch and the Gordon Gecko types. A lot of people on the left will react negatively to the removal of social services but there is a way to structure UBI for people on the right.
If you think it could well, then we should do it, but anytime I see it come up, people seem to complain about it. Saying that it will encourage people to be lazy, and questioning how we would pay for it if no one is working.
Then there’s the argument among those who are for a UBI in how much it should provide. I personally think that it should be the minimum to give someone a dignified life, but certainly not luxurious, and I think that a substantial amount should be done in the form of non-transferable vouchers, rather than cash payments. This avoids the need for means testing. If you are wealthy, then you have the same right to a tiny studio apartment as someone without a job, but you aren’t going to cash in that voucher, as you want something else. But, there certainly are other thoughts on that, that we should just send everyone a thousand dollars a week or something.
But, anyway, as long as we do not have a UBI, we need to have a minimum wage, and that needs to be enough that if someone works 40 hours, they can pay for rent, food, transportation, and have at least something left over afterwards.