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Slowing increasing the minimum wage is just like cooking a frog with cold water. In the end, the frog dies.
If minimum wage is what kills a business, then that business wasn't worth having to begin with. Sorry, I don't feel sorry for failure businesses. So when an employee asks for a raise, is that what the employer should tell them, increasing their wage is just cooking a frog with cold water?
What many miss is that the push to raise minimum wage is not actually about the people earning minimum wage. According to 2013 data from the US Department of Labor, fewer than 5% of all hourly workers get paid the federal minimum wage. The big support for increasing minimum wage comes from labor unions, most of which have few if any members earning minimum wage. What they do have is labor contracts that peg their members wages to the federal MW. All of you who say that increasing the MW will not really cause labor costs, and therefore the prices paid by consumers, to increase significantly, should investigate the anticipated increases when that MW increase triggers increases in the wages of every employee subject to those labor union contracts.
Disadvantaged people should and will be helped by charity.
What abut economic downturns whether it is localized (oil boom/buat towns) or more national where their resources are drained? You may think that this it's a silly what if but a LOT of charities had issues with people donating to them during the most recent recession. If there are more people needing than putting in, what do we do fir those that need charitable organizations but are limited due to resources?
What many miss is that the push to raise minimum wage is not actually about the people earning minimum wage. According to 2013 data from the US Department of Labor, fewer than 5% of all hourly workers get paid the federal minimum wage. The big support for increasing minimum wage comes from labor unions, most of which have few if any members earning minimum wage. What they do have is labor contracts that peg their members wages to the federal MW. All of you who say that increasing the MW will not really cause labor costs, and therefore the prices paid by consumers, to increase significantly, should investigate the anticipated increases when that MW increase triggers increases in the wages of every employee subject to those labor union contracts.
What is the percentage of workers making between federal minimum wage and $15/hr?
Pretty poorly written article, all the writer did was degrade fast food workers and kept repeating the argument "you would be being paid more than SOME police officers, firemen, etc.."
Quote from the article
Handed what some of us worked decades to earn? lmfao, who are the "some of us" who worked decades to get paid $15 an hour?
Me.
Minimum wage was $2.90/hr when I started working.
Over time I gained experience and got better and more productive at what I do and eventually got raises and promotions that reflected my worth to my employers.
4.00/hr...... $4.75......$5.50.....$6.00.......
When I felt I could go no further in a particular job, I looked for a better one and started the process over at more than I made in the last job. $7.25.... $8.00....$9.00.....
Eventually I got into a position where my experience let me cross over to a similar industry that had more earning potential.
$12.00....13.75.....and finally $15.00......
That took me approximately 16 years.
But I didn't stop there.
Now, 30+ years after my first minimum wage job, I'm a salaried management employee who makes considerably more than $15.00/hr
But I still use the skills I learned and developed at $2.90/hr and I would not be here today if I had given up on moving my career forward.
See, today's youth doesn't have the patience to leaen a trade and develope their skill and therefore their worth over decades....they want everything NOW.
Let me ask you this:
If you had to hire someone in a skilled trade to do something.....fix your drains...rebuild your transmission...whatever.
Would you rather have someone who built their skills to their current worth over decades or someone who's just started but feels entitled to make what someone with decades of experience earned their way to making?
The wages one can truly move up the ladder aren't there at least right now. You could in the past rise up from $2.90 minimum wage to say $20.00 an hour but now wages have stagnated so you maybe locked out at say 35k a year tops.
The wages one can truly move up the ladder aren't there at least right now. You could in the past rise up from $2.90 minimum wage to say $20.00 an hour but now wages have stagnated so you maybe locked out at say 35k a year tops.
So?
Who says you have any "right" to make more than 35k a year if the economy won't support more than that in the field you've chosen?
You only have the right to keep trying.
I never said that what I did was the smartest thing I could have done, and in hindsight if I had it to do over again there's definitely some things I would do differently. But that doesn't mean that the way I did it isn't possible anymore. My 22 yr old nephew is now doing the same thing I did, and he's damn good at it too.
All the choices I made and the resulting consequences are nobody's fault but mine....but so are all the achievements.
The minimal wage should be replaced with a living wage. The living wage should be calculated based on what a single person would need to make in order to live on his own in his area without falling into poverty. Of course the living wage would vary by region. Married men should receive a living wage based on what he would need to make to support his wife and each child the married couple has. On top of this we should get rid of welfare, food stamps, section 8 housing, and all other forms of government assistance except for ones for the elderly and the disabled.
The police, firemen, teachers, those in the medical field and other "higher skilled" workers, etc should also recieve pay increases. I don't understand the facaination with having to work like a slave and still be struggling or this obsession with getting a "marketable skill". I also don't understand why it seems like some people want to make things difficult for people. Some people also do not want a career and are content with working at McDonald's. Some people just want a simple job that pays their bills. Why is that wrong or bad? Some of y'all act like customer service workers are dirt beneath the dirt. Not everyone can get another job or even a second or third job nor should they have to.
There's nothing "wrong or bad" about that, someone has to flip burgers.....
What's wrong or bad is the expectation that choosing such a path should be free from economic consequences.
Why should someone who is content to sit on the bottom rung receive the same economic benefits as someone who is more ambitious and puts forth more effort in life?
Why is it "fair" that people who choose that path have children that they can't afford and then ask the rest of society to bear the burden of their choices?
If we use your logic, then what incentive would anyone have to rise above the the lowest stations in life?
Exactly how much are you willing to pay for a Big Mac in order to achieve your idea of Utopian fairness and what gives you the right to ask everyone else to pay that much too?
i think minimum was should be abolish , we do we need government telling us how much to pay, oh yea that way they control how much taxes are taken in, that why they are pushing $15 a hour, more tax money
The free market is a joke.
If there was no minimum wage, the majority of employers would lower their salary expenses to increase their profits, while taxpayers picked up the tab for the increased amount of social welfare programs an employee making $5 an hour would require.
Personally, I would rather pay an extra nickel for a hamburger than see a company like McDonald's increase their profits by billions of dollars, while sending this country into further dept.
Honestly, I would like to see massive fast food chains like Burger King or Taco Bell forced to pay their employees $15 an hour, while smaller local business only pay the existing minimum wage while having the rest of their employees wages subsidized. This would allow restaurants that actually serve REAL food to compete with the giants, while combating this countries growing health epidemic that's partly caused by the poison that is produced by these mega corporations.
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