Why the Tea Party is hurting Ohio (Columbus, Cleveland: apartment, student loans)
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We're in a miniumum wage economy, people. Market solutions are not going to get us out.
I think some modified market solutions can work.
Why do we say that it's unlawful to pay someone less than minimum wage in the US, but we allow products to be shipped here that were made by people making 50 cents/day?
Why do we say that a factory has to meet minimum pollution standards, but we allow stuff like our cellular phones to be produced in places in China where the air literally corrodes buildings and streams run in colors of orange and blue - so polluted that you couldn't run it through 100 miles of wetlands to clean it up.
We ship off jobs overseas to take advantage of lower wages and pollution standards.
Some stuff just causes my mind to boggle boggle boggle.
Fortunately, we now have the lowest energy costs in the world and that advantage is going to get larger over, at least, the next 20-30 years. While we have that, we should gradually require overseas suppliers meet our wage and pollution standards over the next ten years ( +/- ).
While we have the cheap energy, we need to build out our renewable energy supplies by tapping the new supplies with small taxes that also help build out our infrastructure. Heck, the gasoline tax no longer produces enough revenue to finance the roads and bridges we've already got. We're likely to see gasoline go below $2 in the next six months. If the price of gas drops by $1 then drivers can certainly afford to see the Federal tax go from 18 cents to 50 cents, but people will still squawk if they have to pay $2.50/gal - even if they were paying $3.50 a year before.
Also, as we force foreign suppliers to meet our standards, we need to staff our agencies to make sure domestic suppliers meet our standards. It's our low staffing levels that cause our regulators to make opressive regulations that are expensive to follow. They can't be reasonable and spend a decent amount of time investigating a site, so they just issue orders that make them look like they know what they are doing.
I've been watching the PBS special on the Roosevelts. They both had to get the government involved to save capitalism. I've got a pretty libertarian bent, but the thing that groups like the Tea Party doesn't get is that even if theoretically, people could suffer and sacrifice to "live" on a minimum-wage diet and support rich owners and government employees who live much better than they do, but they won't. There will be rebellion in the streets. The Occupy Wall Street stuff was just a taste.
We need another Teddy. I don't care if he/she runs as a Democrat, Republican, or a Bull Moose.
Despite that, it's a big issue. Our society is creating jobs, but they pay minimum wage. We don't have a need for a ton of engineers anymore, like there was in the '60's with the space race, or finance people, or lawyers (LegalZoom, anyone?), accountants, teachers, etc. Even doctors' work and nurses' work is being simplified to the point where an STNA making $11/hr can do larger and larger pieces of it.
I'm pleased to report that after various criminal matters, the #2 stream of business I get is from people who used a LegalZoom document and something went wrong.
We need another Teddy. I don't care if he/she runs as a Democrat, Republican, or a Bull Moose.
I happen to think we need another Great Depression. The article posted by the OP is only one of many examples of how the system brainwashes people into thinking they are entitled. The attitude never ceases to amaze me from the mba and college grads we get at work. First, they never make it very long. Second, they have all these ideas of a downright fantasy world. They all want and expect to do their hobbies (travel, artsy stuff, socialize, eat at the newest expensive hipster restaurant, etc.) 90% of the time while working 10% and deserve to get paid no less than $80,000 a year. This type of attitude is why most Americans consider an entry level job (minimum wage) beneath them and want paid $15 an hour. Minimum wage jobs were never and are never meant to be life time jobs. They are entry level jobs. Unfortunately, we have at least 3 generations of US citizens who don't think they should start at the bottom. I'm beginning to believe this brainwashing starts in pre-school.
BTW, none of the positions at my employer are minimum wage and we still have problems finding good workers.
I happen to think we need another Great Depression. The article posted by the OP is only one of many examples of how the system brainwashes people into thinking they are entitled. The attitude never ceases to amaze me from the mba and college grads we get at work. First, they never make it very long. Second, they have all these ideas of a downright fantasy world. They all want and expect to do their hobbies (travel, artsy stuff, socialize, eat at the newest expensive hipster restaurant, etc.) 90% of the time while working 10% and deserve to get paid no less than $80,000 a year. This type of attitude is why most Americans consider an entry level job (minimum wage) beneath them and want paid $15 an hour. Minimum wage jobs were never and are never meant to be life time jobs. They are entry level jobs. Unfortunately, we have at least 3 generations of US citizens who don't think they should start at the bottom. I'm beginning to believe this brainwashing starts in pre-school.
BTW, none of the positions at my employer are minimum wage and we still have problems finding good workers.
Have to agree, especially with a lot of what you said in bold.
But for the ending comment, $15/hr, assuming 40 hours per week worked and 50 weeks worked in a year, is only $30,000 before taxes. I wouldn't call it entitled. And it's a far cry from the $80k you mentioned earlier.
I agree people need to have realistic expectations for salary and work requirements. I won't dispute it.
What I have an issue with is the idea that paying people below a living wage makes any sense for anyone whatsoever. It doesn't. All it does is lead to corporate welfare. We subsidize ER trips for people who have literally been worked to death by the system, since they need 3-4 jobs and 70-80 hours of physically hard minimum wage work per week. Employers, not taxpayers, should be footing this bill. To make it even worse, these same employers require that they can't miss their shifts, so they can't recover when they do get ill. Even if policy set by corporate says that is not the case, it really doesn't matter because at the end of the day line managers make the call and line managers really only care that they have enough staff so they don't have to fill the roles themselves. So the employees get sicker, and then they have to go back to the ER again. And again and again. And all the while taxpayers are paying for it.
But honestly, that's only a small fraction of my concern. What really worries me is that we ARE recovering, but with that recovery we learned that we don't need skilled labor anymore. It's just as easy to design a great process any monkey can utilize as it is to hire one great skilled person who can intuitively do the job well. And unskilled labor is worth nothing, and it will always be worth nothing. Automated processes can do almost all of the work in distribution centers, restaurants, factories, even bank branches without the consumer even feeling much of a difference, so the second unskilled labor costs go up past the point of automation costs, people get cut.
That's why minimum wage reform is important. That's why this article is important. The need for all labor is decreasing dramatically, and plenty of skilled labor is getting converted into unskilled labor right under our noses. I don't think many people realize this. And for now, minimum wage reform towards $10.10 an hour will work as a temporary protection against what is rapidly becoming a minimum-wage society.
It's just as easy to design a great process any monkey can utilize as it is to hire one great skilled person who can intuitively do the job well. And unskilled labor is worth nothing, and it will always be worth nothing. Automated processes can do almost all of the work in distribution centers, restaurants, factories, even bank branches without the consumer even feeling much of a difference, so the second unskilled labor costs go up past the point of automation costs, people get cut.
That's why minimum wage reform is important. That's why this article is important. The need for all labor is decreasing dramatically, and plenty of skilled labor is getting converted into unskilled labor right under our noses. I don't think many people realize this. And for now, minimum wage reform towards $10.10 an hour will work as a temporary protection against what is rapidly becoming a minimum-wage society.
A bit paradoxically, raising the minimum wage will only accelerate the trend of automation.
Remember, for every dollar an employer pays a worker, the employer pays another dollar in taxes, social security, medicare, workman's comp, accounting time to do payroll and scheduling, paperwork for said employee, training, etc...
I think this picture, the subject of many memes, captures it pretty accurately:
Minimum wage reform will reduce 0.5 million jobs, or 0.3%, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
It will also:
- Lift 1.7 million people above the poverty line
- Save $7 billion a year in government subsidies
- Boost wages for 27 million workers
Further proving my point, if the minimum wage had been pegged to the overall productivity rate of the U.S. economy since 1968, workers would be earning about $18.42 per hour today.
The last point illustrates the fact that worker productivity has gone decidedly up while wages have been steadily dropping.
Why? As you posted in your meme, process innovation. Many high-skilled tasks can (or already have) been reduced to unskilled labor. And unskilled tasks? Automation.
Doesn't take much to skip the unskilled labor step (a la LegalZoom, TurboTax, etc.) Even H&R Block workers, for the most part, are unskilled labor. STNA's and paralegals are basically unskilled labor. Bank tellers are unskilled labor. Think of how many people you interact with in a day whom have jobs you could easily walk in and do. I bet there's a lot. That's why this is important.
But for the ending comment, $15/hr, assuming 40 hours per week worked and 50 weeks worked in a year, is only $30,000 before taxes. I wouldn't call it entitled. And it's a far cry from the $80k you mentioned earlier.
My point was meant to be that the majority of people don't expect to start at the bottom. For instance, I know a girl in high school who was looking for a part time job. She expected to get an office job and refused to work at McDonald's because it was beneath her. This concept from an average high school kid and her parents boggles the mind.
I'm not willing to see more than the current minimum wage paid to someone who doesn't want to work in the first place. We have a whole nation full of these people.
I happen to think we need another Great Depression.
We are in it now. There is no recovery by past standards and the only reason that the unemployment rate has gone down is the labor participation rate of older middle age workers has dropped by several percentage points.
Every time the suits in Washington come out and trumpet 200k new jobs created, what they are leaving out is that it takes around 300k just to keep up with population growth and that most of the new jobs are of low quality.
The only reason the current depression doesn't seem worse is that welfare roles ( counting the explosion in SS disability recipients ) has been exploding since Bush II took over and continues unabated in the current administration.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bluecarebear
Minimum wage jobs were never and are never meant to be life time jobs. They are entry level jobs.
Right. I don't much care what they set it at. Probably, just to shut people up, they should set it today at whatever the maximum was in the past - adjusted for inflation - add a buck or so and then adjust it every year for inflation. That way, it would stop the constant fighting about raising it. $7.25/hour in 2014 is less than it was in 2013 and so on since it was set there on July 24, 2009. According to google, the max was $8.56 in 1968.
There will be no barrier to hiring at $9, $10 or whatever. The economy will adjust. Once the rate is on autopilot, we can stop a lot of the arguing. McDonalds and WalMart pay $18/hour in ND and do just fine.
I don't care what they set it at. People that don't want to be paid Min. Wage need to up their game.
My problem is all the miserable $12, 13, 14 and so on jobs out there that pass for skilled these days. My other problem is the lack of tax incentives to train people to make the jump to $20+/hour jobs.
One thing is for certain: There aren't many who understand the full gravity of process implementation and automation.
The implementation of process is not to degrade the type of worker needed to do a task. It's to help and instruct workers with similar skill sets to be more productive by eliminating wasted effort. Now, I know the typical MBA/bean counter thinks any person can do any job (if I had a dollar for every time I've heard that uttered), but the fact is that this could not be any further from the truth in the practical world.
Automation can and should be used where a manufacturing/packaging/shipping process can be streamlined. However, automating any process will have its own pitfalls and areas of expense which don't exist in the human worker's realm. The key is to strike a balance between what the human does well and what the machine can make more accurate or productive.
Simply deciding that either of the two will become more prevalent if wages increase is downright foolish.
My point was meant to be that the majority of people don't expect to start at the bottom. For instance, I know a girl in high school who was looking for a part time job. She expected to get an office job and refused to work at McDonald's because it was beneath her. This concept from an average high school kid and her parents boggles the mind.
I'm not willing to see more than the current minimum wage paid to someone who doesn't want to work in the first place. We have a whole nation full of these people.
True. But I'd also argue that high schoolers really are not needed in the employed labor market. After all, most minimum wage workers are middle-aged. I know I couldn't get a job in high school, but a large part of the reason was a) it was 2008 in north Dayton and b) I could not commit enough hours with school and sports.
What I do have an issue with is your last line. Doesn't matter whether they want to work or not, if they rely on that minimum wage job as their primary income they'll get subsidies. And they'll get subsidies if they don't have that job too. That's why it's important we force the minimum wage above the poverty level. Then no one can work AND be on welfare at the same time. Right now, I'm sure plenty of people wonder why they have a job when they could be making almost the same without one at all. I know I'd be wondering.
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