A MW job is not meant to be your final career position. An entry level MW job is a stepping stone to something better. You’ll always have a higher turnover at this end of the wage scale. As employees increase their skills and marketability, they move on to something better and higher paying. For someone starting off at this level, this process usually repeats many times.
Please give a cite that the current Min wage is actually lower than it’s original value- according to what dudes on Minimum wage would buy, and what they can buy now. How much was a decent computer back then? How about a TV? How about certain life-saving modern drugs?
I think your original pemise is flawed.
While the price of gas in New Jersey is certainly comparable (it’s actually lower on average), New Jersey has significantly lower taxes applied to gas than the surrounding states. For example the excise taxes in that area are:
[ul]
[li]Connecticut - 0.25[/li][li]Delaware - 0.23[/li][li]Maryland - 0.235[/li][li]Massachusetts - 0.235[/li][li]New Jersey - 0.145[/li][li]New York - 0.2425[/li][li]Pennsylvania - 0.323[/li][li]Rhode Island - 0.30[/li][/ul]
There are other taxes that also apply to gas that make the difference even larger (20-30 cents lower, depending on the state). In effect, the residents of New Jersey have decided to subsidize the gas stations (and, based purely on personal observation, elected to subsidize gas station owner/management employment of shiftless relatives, at least as far as I can tell in the Princeton area).
The difference would be that even though in both cases I pay more; but with the MW increased, at least some more of the $$ go to actual workers.
I think this is the ethically better position.
I propose that the jobs disappeared because the owners weren’t satisfied with the profits they were making at the time, and looked for ways to cut costs.
I think this is the area that raises the hairs on many people’s backs: the caprice of an owner deciding to cut costs not because he “has” to in order to keep the company floating, but because he “wants” to in order to get richer.
Kind of hard to be sympathetic with a guy who says “I need a bigger boat; your job is gone.”
Sorry for the pre-caffeine post/hijack, but the tea is still steeping…
I was talking with a former co-worker recently. She said the company I worked for was being spun off. At one time it was part of a large company whose main interests were in the automotive and aerospace fields. Our section just didn’t ‘fit’ with the rest of the company, although it created the business in the first place. We were sold to Warren Buffett, who sold us to a company headquartered in Nottingham. Over the years we bought out some of our smaller competitors. Spending so much money meant that the company had to generate more revenue and/or cut costs.
First, they instituted a policy of not accepting smaller data contributors and concentrating on large accounts. The reasoning was that it takes as many resources to process small accounts as it does large ones. The only problem was that we started to lose money. Small accounts add up. Second, the company was ever keen to ‘update the system’. They’d spend a few million dollars on The New System, only to scrap it when it didn’t perform as promised or didn’t generate revenue fast enough.
So they laid people off to boost the bottom line. That worked well for the fiscal year, but not so well for the long term. Then they outsourced to an Indian company. They were supposed to work on the next New System, and they did. A lot of the programmers lost their jobs. Then they decided to outsource many other functions to this company. I was caught up in that wave of layoffs. Turns out The New System didn’t work as promised and it was scrapped, and they went back to the old way (which worked perfectly well). Unfortuntately they had laid off the people who knew how to write the programmes for it. (Like me, as well as half of the Programming Department.) The company is still an industry leader. And according to my friend they are still stuck in the mindset that layoffs are a good way of boosting the bottom line. Since they’re going to be spun off, there may be more layoffs.
The point is that many businesses seem to be short-sighted. They lay people off to increase the stock price with little regard as to how it affects future operations. They try to upgrade systems only to discover that they’ve spent a lot of money for not much gain. A large company can often pick itself up and regroup. A gas station owner may not be able to recover from such a mistake. Sometimes ‘slowly but surely’ really does win the race.
In the meantime the people who lost their jobs have to compete for other jobs, often entry-level minimum wage jobs. Employers seem loth to hire them because they’re ‘over-qualified’. And even if they get a MW job, many of these people are mid-career professionals who have houses and families.
So to bring this post somewhat back on-topic, we need to have jobs that pay a living wage. It’s not about luxuries. Food prices climb, fuel prices climb, utilities such as electricity or gas for heating and living see their prices rising. Housing prices are going through the roof (as it were). A person may find lower-priced housing 50 miles away from their job, but then they have to pay for fuel and maintenance to get there. So we need to generate more higher-paying jobs. We should stop outsourcing our jobs. We need to have a minimum wage that allows a person to live. And we need to beef up our welfare programmes to support people who are ‘between jobs’, provide people with educational/training resources, and support while they’re being retrained.
I think the solution lies with a more liberal jobs policy, fairer taxes (and yes, that means higher taxes in many cases – we all use the roads and schools and fire departments and police and…), and more help for people who are out of work. Businesses should look at the long-term health of the company instead of short-term profits. This will be better for the companies, better for American workers, and better for the country.
From what my banker friends tell me, this is the unviersal mindset to show Wall Street that the company managers are concerned and actively doing something about profitability. So, it’s not just business owners who are short-sighted, it’s the bulk of investors, fund managers, stock brokers, etc. also. Investors do not have the time or education to look through a company’s financial statements and gleam whether or not a company is doing what is really best. The investors look to hard and fast results and data, i.e. the bottom line. Like it or not, this is the way it always has been done. For some companies and arguably most (though, it’s not my argument), lay-offs are the way to go, especially, if a company is trying to save it’s stock price and recapture its influx of capital. I hope you are not suggesting changing the way corporations, investing, and capital work in an economy.
When people discuss the MW, people should not concentrate on the nominal dollar amount, because it’s not about the money. It’s about value. Unfortunately, the best way that value is roughly translated is through price (or wage). When people discuss increasing the MW, they are talking about artificially inflating someone’s value. This distorts the market, which will always cause negative effects, particularly, inflated prices and the problems associated with it. Luckily, as Sam Stone alludes to, we are in an economy where employers can offer higher than MW to attract more valuable employees.
A Living Wage (“LW”) is another thing entirely. As a society, we have to decide what safety nets (if any) we want to afford our citizens, including what universal standard of living (if any) we want to give our citizens as well. A LW is not about value, it’s about subsidization. It’s also bereft of political issues: do the people subsisting on a LW get to drive, own a home, what kind of home, how many kids, what college/education do they receive, what kind of food do they get to eat, eat out, where, how often, etc.? A teenager with ZERO living costs does not need a living wage. Likewise, a part-timer, mostly stay at-home parent doesn’t need a LW.
A LW, while noble, has plenty of issues and pitfalls. Do we have to fund another agency to monitor these people? Do we really need the government telling us where to live, what to charge, what to buy, what to eat, where to study, what to study, etc? IMO, it also fosters an atmosphere of contempt, laziness, and stifles the desire to improve one’s lot because people will become too complacent with the net, as in “why work any harder when I have a home, a car, and food on the table?”
Ugh. MW is hard enough a topic to stay on. If you want to open this one up again, feel free to, I’ll debate anyone on economic principals alone. I’ll just say that I wholly and nigh unequivocally disagree with this statement.
I don’t disagree with any of this, except the higher MW part. Like many other posters, John Mace in particular, I’m all for a good societal safety net, but one that encourages people to be competitive, and add value to society. We (and not just we, but the world economy as well) also need to be less protectionist, that includes quota restrictions as well. I’m all for paying higher taxes if the tax money is more fairly redistributed and doesn’t cause complacency (and added bonus would also be less government intrusion). MW is just a small part of much larger issue.
Most of the jobs in the US do pay a “living wage”. Are you saying that all jobs must pay a living wage? Why? What are the implications of American competitiveness in the global economy if we institute that policy?
What do you think will happen if we forced all jobs to pay a “living wage”? In order to do both of these things (or either one, for that matter), you’d also have to place high tarrifs on imported goods (unless you wanted to completely destroy domestic manufacturing). That would raise the cost of all goods, fuel inflation, and then you’d have to raise the “living wage” again. That would necessitate makeing the tarrifs even higher… get the picture?
But the cost of housing (like everything else) is determined by supply and demand. If supply is limitted (as it is in many places in CA, for example), it won’t matter if the average wage increases-- landlords and sellers will raise their prices accordingly. IOW, demand will have increased, but supply will remain the same. We all know what happens in that case.
I agree that Wall Street rewards bad CEO’s & BoD’s who make massive & often foolish layoffs with a huge jump in stock rpice. Why Wall Street does this is beyond me, but now it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I disgree here. Yes, we need MORE jobs that pay a living wage. But not all jobs should. Not everyone needs or deserves a living wage. Two-paycheck couples, dudes still learning the job, kids with a part-time job, retirees with a part-time job and so forth.
Have to agree with DrDeth on both points. The US has plenty of jobs that pay a living wage or better. However, I don’t believe that minimum wage should equal a ‘living wage’ (which would need to be defined). Minimum wage should be high enough so that one benefits greater being employed than unemployed on welfare. Being a cashier/stock clerk at Wal-Mart should not be a job expected to put a roof over a family’s heads and food in their stomachs. However, it can supplement someone going to school, or give a retiree some extra spending income. It may even be a starting point for someone looking into retail management.
Gee, the wages of the heads of corporations have gone up dramatically. Do you think that raises the cost of goods and services? And since those have gone up, why haven’t those jobs been moved overseas. Surely we can find some German guy to run ConHugeCo for half as much.
Your concern that people on minimun wage will have to pay higher taxes is touching. I’m pretty sure that people who live on the minimum wage won’t mind that.