My solution would be to fund social welfare program by taxing businesses that try to maximize profits at the expense of their employees.
If a business employs at least X number of people, brought in over Y amount of earnings during the year, and the median of the hourly wage of its workforce is less than Z (fixed to the federal poverty level), then the business would be required to pay a special tax. A “social welfare” tax, the size of which changes depending on societal need.
Maybe it made sense to not care about a livable wage when your average minimum wage worker was a high school student saving up for their first car. Nowadays it’s not uncommon to find college graduates lined up to wear a paper uniform. Unless we’re willing to tell an entire generation of people that they don’t “deserve” the basics of a modern life, including having their own families, then it’s incumbent on us to either raise the minimum wage or bolster the societal safety net. I would prefer people actually get paid what they are worth for ONCE in this country’s history. But I’ll take the latter too, as long as the “little guy” isn’t the only one picking up the tab.
It’s about time conservatives pick which one they want and stop with the huff-puffing about “choices”. That bullshit was played out decades ago, but it’s certainly played out now.
If the idiots who are moving all the ‘real’ jobs overseas kept the ‘adult with a family’ jobs here, then the family people wouldn’t need to work a ‘kid’ job.
Sorry, the old ‘buggy whip factories retooled’ argument isn’t working. All the manufacturing jobs are being outsourced to China and other third world countries as fast as the companies develop the products.
You think stockholders have any concern with any of this stuff? How 1950s. Stockholder today are either huge pension funds of traders who hold the stock for a fraction of a second. Companies are run by the C staff and no one else, and they are only threatened if they screw up really big time or if some equity fund things it can make money by taking the company private and selling off the pieces.
The stockholders aren’t going to give a shit if the management can convince them that increasing wages is for their own good.
This wouldn’t seem to include any numbers at all from states with a higher-than-federal minimum wage; so for example, no minimum wage workers in Illinois are counted here at all, because Illinois minimum is $8.25 – which is also not a living wage by any stretch of the imagination. Illinois is not the only state where that’s true, either.
Also, it’s not counting anyone who makes anywhere from a penny above federal minimum to whatever wage might actually pay for a reasonable apartment and food. I think $10 is low for that, especially with dependents, and you saw what those numbers looked like.
Good luck finding a stat that’s going to give you all that information. $10 in Ohio is going to be quite different than $10 in CA. And $10 in Buffalo is quite different than $10 in NYC.
It would be even more difficult to try to figure out something as obscure as “whatever wage might reasonably pay for housing and food” because 50% of minimum wage earners are under the age of 25, the bulk of whom undoubtedly live with their parents. I know a ton of kids who work at McDonald’s, including, incidentally, my own daughter (who is at work as we speak, having started her day at 3am), several of her friends, my niece, and my nephew, and not one of them has to pay a red cent for food or housing. As long as McD’s can staff their stores with kids who live with their parent, they will never voluntarily double the wages of their workers. Why in the world would they?
What I always found interesting is the metric used to measure “poverty” wasn’t that great when it was first made because of limited information, and the items on the list haven’t been updated much since. The original poverty line assumed that all families had a stay at home woman who could cook well, cook every day, and knew how to shop cheap. Even in the late 60’s, they realized it was a problem and said that it should be updated completely based on changing consumption habits about every 5 to 10 years, but nobody ever got around to properly doing that. In the 70’s they spent a couple years arguing about changing the word “poverty” to “low income” and not much else. All they ended up doing was take the original poverty metric and scale for inflation, leaving everything else the same. In fact, medical care was not really ever included, and it wasn’t until the 90’s that lawmakers went “hey, you know, medical care is a huge cost for today’s families but it was never included as a metric for measuring the poverty line”. They didn’t actually do anything though, so the poverty line still doesn’t include the cost of healthcare.
So in reality, our poverty line isn’t really representative of what’s “poor” anymore. This branches out into all sorts of things…including whether lawmakers think it’s worth increasing the minimum wage or not. I dunno, I thought this was interesting and relevant to the discussion.
( http://www.census.gov/hhes/povmeas/publications/orshansky.html )
What we have is an entire generation of people who spent the first 4-6 years of their productive adult lives getting useless degrees and racking up huge debt instead of working, and now complain that they aren’t making $80k/year with their Art History major.
“Higher” Education is not only not needed to be successful and comfortable, it has been turned into an industry out to make a profit as surely as any other. It behooves them to convince young skulls full of mush (and their parents) that you have to have a Lambskin or you’ll be working at McDonald’s the rest of your life… ironic, doncha think?
Unfortunately, all business is a pyramid, with a lot of people at the bottom and a handful at the top fighting like Jet Li in “The One” to stay there. It has always been that way, and no amount of government action short of a full on conversion to Communisim or the invention of replicators will change that. Even then, the leaders of the Party or the makers of the replicators will still be at the top of a much broader and flatter pyramid - but on the top nonethless. And despite what you might think, that pyramid won’t get broader and flatter by bringing the bottom up, but by taking the top down - something I suspect you’d be fine with.
Those who think raising the wages at retail and restaurant jobs as the solution to our poverty level are looking at short sighted solutions. As a country we need more production of durable goods that left the US over the last 20-30 years.
I believe that with the growing abundance of cheaper energy in the US, manufacturing will begin to return to our country and jobs will come with it. Just as much as labor cost is a key component of manufacturing energy cost is equally so or in some cases even moreso. Add to that many of the good that are manufactured overseas are then shipped back here for consumption and purchase, the freight costs to get them here is not cheap. As energy costs in the US come down and freight costs to bring goods back to the US are eliminated, more and more companies will find it compelling to put capital to work in the US as new capacity is needed, as opposed to opening new plants overseas where energy costs are higher.
That’s why its important that we don’t let irrational fears stand in the way of energy production in the US.
I’m sure that we would love to have more $15-$25 hour manufacturing jobs as opposed to $9 hour McDonalds jobs.
So we should kill the younger generation before they bring the pyramid down? Teach our grandchildren to hate and fear us, because then we may reign supreme?
I would suggest that we’ve about reached the peak of our productivity curve. Ever seen a movie from the 1960’s or even 1970’s where a typical office has a “typing pool” of 50+ people typing away at all the correspondence and invoices and whanot the company needs to do it’s thing? That pool of 50+ people has long since been replaced by maybe 3-4 people with computers. 46 or so positions lost due to increased productivity. We were supposed to get 4-day work weeks out of the deal, but you and I both know the world doesn’t work like that. And we won’t even go into the manufacturing side of things, that’s been done to death.
We’ve delayed some of the problems associated with that loss of jobs with an ever-extended “adolesence” where people who in the past would have already been producing and creating/raising families don’t enter the workforce until they’re 22+, with visions of a McMansion and Escalade or two of their own and an equally successful spouse. For awhile, in the early '00’s, we pulled that off. Free and easy credit brought that to an end.
How do we solve it? Not by tossing more money to the crowd from an empty Federal piggybank - worse than empty, up to it’s eyeballs in hock. The government is doing the same thing all these failing people have done, live on further and further over-extended credit lines until poof no more credit. I doubt the country will go the way of the 23-year-olds with the 2500 square foot two story two SUV “family” but it isn’t helping.
Honestly, I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t include a “living wage”. We may well end up going that route, but there unintended consequences would, IMO, be as bad or worse that individuals having to struggle to make ends meet. Life IS struggle, for most people and for most of human history. We haven’t just magically “figured it all out” in the last 100 years or so. We’re not the endpoint of human civilization, the feather in the cap - we’re just one point on a line that will keep going, hopefully.
Sorry to ramble, it’s just that this is a complex problem with complex causes and no easy solutions. Throwing more tax money at it may work, it may not. Who knows.
That’s better than letting the free market decide. It’s just a glorified oligarchy–those who have more have more power than those who have less. It’s still the same fundamental problem that we’ve been fighting since time began.
As long as monstro is not allowed to decide for her own worth, and it not allowed collude with others, her ideas are pretty good. Combine them democratically with everyone else’s, and we’d get an idea of what we really think these jobs are worth. And when it comes to value judgements, what the majority thinks is by definition correct–that’s what I call the “consensus morality.”
Right now it’s all skewed because the system essentially only asks rich people what poor people are worth. And just like in the past, they always undervalue them because it means the rich can get richer.
And, yes, I have no problem if the top of the pyramid goes down. Why would I? All that matters is whether the total volume of the pyramid is bigger. I want a more productive society.
I honestly wouldn’t care if McDonald’s does worse, because that just means that some other fast food restaurant would make up the slack. That’s the real good of the free market.
But see, “free market” means that if McDonald’s corp cares whether it does worse or not, it will make decisions that will make it do better. And if that means not doubling burger-flippers’ wages, then that’s that.
And no, it is not the “rich people” that decide how much I am worth. I decide. That is why I studied hard, went to college, graduated, moved from job to job, improving my situation, then started my own thing, sold it, and am my own boss now. Because I decided that that’s what I am worth.
That should be your first clue that it’s not a solvable problem. Put two children in a room full of toys and they will fight over one of them. Humans are competitive beings. Hell, look at ants. Their colonies are about the most balanced and cooperative societies on earth and even they have queens. It’s survival of the fittest, not survival of the fairest.
Actually, human society as a whole has been slowly, reluctantly, painfully lurched towards increasing fairness over time. And some solutions to the problem are better, dare I say, fairer, than others.
Actually it’s not even that hard. If you show some ambition and common sense, you CAN work your way up in these companies. I know a couple of people who have worked in fast food as adults. In both cases, the people started as “crew” (the entry level job) and were fairly quickly promoted to shift supervisors.
If they had wanted to, both of these people had the option to stay on for Assistant Manager and eventually General Manager. However, both of them used their fast food jobs as spring boards to go on to better paying jobs in other companies. For example, one person was hired as an assistant manager in another industry based on his experiences as a shift supervisor at McDonald’s. From what I understand, the supervisor/manager training at McDonald’s is well regarded by many other companies.
I think part of the problem in American society is that we’ve started to think that “Everyone needs to go to college! Then everyone will be rich!” and have forgotten the old fashioned approach of acquiring work experience/skills and using that to work your way up. That can pay off a lot more than wasting your time in college (or even community college) on a degree that there is no market for.
I do think that companies like Wal Mart and McDonald’s could treat their workers better - however, I don’t put all the blame for this on companies. These companies treat their workers this way because consumers aren’t troubled by it enough to stop buying from these companies.
**Anyone who buys Wal-Mart’s shitty merchandise or eats at McDonald’s IS PART OF THE PROBLEM. ** If you have had a Big Mac lately, it’s YOUR fault that McDonald’s is like this. The CEO is just giving you what you want - and you are telling them that you are okay with the status quo every time you buy something from these companies.
If I were trying to protest McDonald’s, I would focus on the consumers buying from those businesses and tell them stop spending your money there if you think they should treat their workers better. The problem is that most people DON’T care enough to actually take the slight inconvenience of not picking up a Big Mac for dinner.
And I don’t see anything at all wrong with there being jobs that don’t pay a liveable wage, as long as there are plenty of jobs that do pay a liveable wage for those who want and need them.
Given that there’s been extensive discussion in this thread about how low-income employees at places like McDonald’s are NOT just teens with an after-school job who still live at home, I really have no idea what you’re trying to say, here. Who knows if McD’s CAN staff with just kids with no living expenses; but the fact remains that they DON’T.
And frankly, I think the value of the labor is worth more than the federal minimum wage to start with. It has nothing to do with age, and everything to do with rising inflation and productivity, which the wage hasn’t even remotely kept pace with; as well as the fact that standing, moving, bending, lifting, and smiling for 8 hours is physically and emotionally demanding work, and that McD’s would be out of business with no front-line workers which demonstrates that it’s not an unimportant job. “Why would they?” I suppose we’ll see how well they get along during the strike.