Now that the waiter, et al, have more money, they will go to Lamplighter's Emporium and buy $10 of his stuff. Yes, it's a shell game, but results have shown that unemployment is lower when the minimum wage is higher.

The way it should work is that if you make more than $3ook (let's say), you don't get to charge more. You just make less, until you get to the point that you make less than $300k. Then you can raise prices. Should.

So why not raise it to $30/hour?

Because the goal is to help low income workers catch up a little, not give the entire 99% a raise.

Lamplighter
 

Since "minimum wage" varies across the US, maybe the following pic's and table will add some perspective:

While the individual states set their own "state minimum wage" levels,
these levels must meed or exceed the "federal minimum wage" each year.

The 2015 "federal minimum wage" will bring some state levels up to $8.05, and others up to $8.50.
Other states (in green) will exceed this federal mark.

Attachment 50249

If I use the "I Love It" McDonalds wage scale in the US, their "team" average is ~ $8.16 / hr.
At 8 hr/day, 5 days/week/ 50 weeks/yr, this amounts to $16,320 per year.

Attachment 50250

Then I compare that yearly income with the Federal Poverty standards:

Attachment 50251

As I read all this, a household of 2 parents, each working full time for McDonalds,
falls below the poverty line as soon as they have their first child,
(and without zero-cost child-care it means they are working separate shifts)
and essentially each employee on the McDonalds "team" is Medicaid-eligible from the git-go.

Let's get to $15, and see what happens. Then we can give $30 a look.

It seems like this debate ought to diminish over the decades, yet somehow it never does. We've raised the minimum wage before. Employers never like it. But the country has not yet imploded from any of the previous increases. Viable businesses give their employees cost-of-living raises at least every few years.

Not the single, your calculation of $16,320 just misses the $16,105 threshold... unless he takes some sick days. ;)

Oooops... you're right.

How about saying the bloak got no pay for the days he stayed home sick with the measles ? ;)

By fuckin' god if it ain't the American dream right there.

But you wouldn'ta said nuthin if you ain't seen Lolene when she was takin out the trash liners. Good gawd almighty them polyester shirts were pretty used up after a shift sweatin over the fryer, but she would put a knot in the bottom of that thing, and haul up that bag of cups and shit, and dang if she weren't better'n just a regular line worker no more. She could be... assistant manager.

Snob.
Lolene grew up in in a blue/no collar world, lucky if most of the extended family had jobs. She barely finished High School, and has heard of colleges, that's where they build them football teams. She's honest, reliable, hard working, and seems to be pretty smart, but we'll never know because education was always a priority behind food, rent, insurance, taxes, medical bills, etc.

Making minimum wage will guarantee the same for her children and guarantee a steady supply of disposable humans for the 1% to use.

Have you guys personally known any McDonald's lifers? I've only ever encountered one person who tried to make that a career. Never encountered a two-earner-per-household version.

What they are is "starter jobs" for the great majority. You have them for a season or two and they teach you about having a job, holding a job, earning money. You don't stay there. You move on and someone else takes that spot and learns those lessons.

You need that sort of job in the society, to learn from, but doing the job itself is not really any great help to society because it's not really *doing* anything much at all. So the last thing you want is people making it a career, because it's a waste of people and a waste of a career.

But what about the poor people, I hear you say. I know the poor people. I have been with them, I have spoken with them, I will be with them tomorrow. All of them eat at McDonalds and a small number of them work there. It would be FAR better for the poor people if their burgers stayed the price they are, and they all had "starter jobs" that taught them skills. But thanks to you guys who think you're doing somebody a favor, and believe in your hearts that you're helping these people, with the deepest of your middle class compassion and the sorriest of your middle class guilt, that's now not going to happen in Seattle. If there are burgers in Seattle, the middle class is going to be flipping them, the middle class is going to be eating them, and the poor people are going to be fucked over once again.

You're aiming for the CEOs and with all your great intentions you just shot your friend in the face. But I know you'll be able to find statistics that show employment went up. Because the ghetto people aren't counted in those numbers.

What are the grocery stores like by you guys? When I was a lad in Maine, the employees, including cashiers, were 75% teenagers. A few adults managed things. Now it's 100% adults. Are grocery store shelf stocker and cashier a couple starter jobs or (not very good) careers?

I feel like they are unionized, but they can't be making much money, even with a union.

I have. Both were "managers", and they had 2 kids. They lived in a blue collar area, without obvious niceties, but I have no idea of their finances.

Tony, half of the world has a lower than average IQ. There are many people who are not equipped mentally, physically, or emotionally to do much more than cook burgers or greet people at Walmart. Should they be penalized for inadequacies for which they are not responsible?

It's a shame that the CEO won't do the right thing, and pay the workers that are the reason he makes $9.5 million a living wage AND not raise the price for the "ghetto people". But that would mean he'd only make several million dollars a year, and who can live on that?:rolleyes:

What is the incentive for a "ghetto person" to take a job for $8/hour, with no benefits, etc.? Now, if that job pays $15/hour, and includes benefits, ghetto person might just to the plunge.

If the CEO did his job entirely pro-bono and personally wrote a check to every McDonald's employee at the end of the year, dividing his expected salary evenly to each and every one of them, that check would be for five dollars.

Sorry, that job is no longer available to the ghetto person. At $15/hour, it's now viciously targeted by the lower middle class.

Easy to get an idea if you really want to know.
FWIW, they are making more than I am in my white collar world.
Imagine that?!?!?

"Starter Jobs" went the way of sword fighting and knickers. There are less jobs than people who want them, so can you reserve slave wage jobs under the guise of preparing teens for the world? What about the others? Well fuck them, they can rob banks or starve, because they can barely survive on a minimum wage job unless someone else is paying the rent and shit.
Hey, that's it, they could band together and share... but that's communism, we can't have that. Let's see, we can't call them a family, they'll want tax breaks and shit. Hmm, I have it, we'll call them a GANG.

Sooooooooo ... 36% are full-time workers
statistically half or 49.6% are OVER 24.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
and from the ever unbiased Politifact

Rob Portman says 'about 2 percent of Americans get paid the minimum wage'

Looking at the manufacturing sector.

There is something in the air...

Do you smell it too? It smells so fresh
http://motherboard-assets.s3.amazona...ce_630x420.jpg

It smells the perfect time you wanted it in
http://cdn.foodbeast.com.s3.amazonaw...t-burger-3.jpg

It smells like I don't need to worry if it washed it's hands
http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/7-JR2KDRnEY/0.jpg

Come here big boy, you know where I want you
http://www.tpnn.com/wp-content/uploa...ted.Burger.jpg

Oh yea, you beautiful wave of destruction


Was it good for you? Well I'd light up a smoke but nobody can afford too....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.946a7b8a0328

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...-gone-too-far/

Interesting; two studies came out with opposing results; one concentrated on restaurants, including fast food chains, and the other covered all sectors, but excluded multi-location businesses, like fast-food chains. One had excellent access to lots of data, but only in Washington State, while the other used more general data, but made comparisons across the country.

Neither study included multi-location businesses across all sectors, which I would expect to be a fairly significant block. On the one hand, it's a valid point if raising the minimum wage hurts mom & pop shops more than chains, but on the other hand, chains have been knocking out the mom & pop shops already, under historically low minimum wages. A study that purports to talk about the average impact to workers while omitting workers who work for businesses with widespread locations seems suspect. As does one that only includes restaurants, though that seems to be the standard, if these articles are correct.

Well proven repeatedly in economics and history - if machines replace humans, then more human jobs are created, that economy is healthier, people's living standards increase, wealth of the common man increases, and it is all contrary to classic sound byte reasoning.

We also know that an economy is healthier and a Gini coefficient decreases when the minimum wage moves up to an affordable income level. Also known as a living wage.

A minimum wage that is too high may also have adverse affects. But anyone citing 'use of more machines' to lower peoples incomes and job opportunities is using wild speculation and junk science reasoning. History has repeatedly demonstrated otherwise.

Update, new study on this came by.

Seattle Times: A tale of two Seattle job markets for low-wage workers in new minimum-wage study

So far, the bottom line sounds like this. At first, employers reacted to the increase by giving their employees fewer hours. Over time, employers found that if they were offering higher wages, they could now expect more out of their employees. The "good" employees still got fewer hours (if you the math), but they were paid more via the law, and so did better per quarter. The lower half continued to get even fewer hours, and as a result saw no improvement in take-home pay. And then there are the people not getting hired at all:

All this is happening during an economic boom. If it was during a bust the picture would be much more bleak. But it's not the broader unemployment I thought it might be - in a record low time for unemployment in general. It's just stagnant income and fewer opportunities to get started.

Can't vote yourself prosperity.

So, I interpret these two things a little differently. First, someone working 10-15 hours a week ("less than a third" of the close-to-full-time workers) is not someone who is supporting a family. In my recent experience (via my stepdaughter's ongoing part-time efforts,) employers prefer the magic number of 30-34 hours per week--few enough that they don't have to provide health benefits, but just barely, because coordinating the schedules and paychecks of three people at 10 hours each instead of one at 30 is just more headache for the manager and requires more time wasted on training, etc. I posit that anyone working just 10 hours a week wants to be working that little, i.e. the job is intentionally supplemental. So relatively speaking, I'm the least concerned about their wages stagnating compared to others'.

Second, you could look at it as the good employees "got" fewer hours, but you could also say they "had to work less" while taking home a bigger paycheck. They may be using that time to go to school to get a better job--the effects of which won't be seen for several more years--or voluntarily spending more time with their kids because now they can afford to, or (not great, but still) able to apply the extra hours toward a second part-time job since their first employer won't give them the full 40 hours with benefits. Ideally everyone wants to work 40 hours, but if your employer is keeping you at a max of 35.5 anyway, then it seems better to work less for more money.

This, I'll grant you, isn't good. But it is a continuation of a trend that has been going on for a long time now. To me, it goes hand-in-hand with the fact that older workers in manufacturing are also having a hard time finding jobs--we have to figure out what the shit jobs of the New Economy are going to be, for all ages, and that takes some time. Possibly in a few more decades it will be a given that all teens work for, say, Instacart, but that will require them and/or their parents to familiarize them with the life skill of shopping on their own, and consider it as a logical option instead of mentally defaulting to, say, food service, which is where all the teens of my generation worked but isn't a viable option for most teens now.

The 35 hour workers are also getting fewer hours now.

35 hours x $15 x 4 weeks x 3 months = $6300/qtr (gross)

35 hours x $11 x 4 weeks x 3 months = $4620/qtr

They should be making $1632 more per qtr -- but they are only making $251 more per qtr.

But wait, we all made a little more money more during this time. There was inflation. Does the study adjust for inflation? The answer seems to be no; I can't find any evidence that all this is in real dollars. $4,620 in June 2014 is equivalent in purchasing power to $4,902 in October 2018. That's $282 difference.

So the math says the top half people are now working 2 fewer hours per week, and netting a little less money out of their job due to inflation.

But did the hamburgers get more expensive?

In the early days of MacDonalds, one could get a hamburger and coke for less than $1. Today, that is about $8. Replacing humans with more machines has significantly reduced the cost of hamburgers.

I hope that was sarcasm.

I have only seen prices increase for 50 yrs.

Where are the burgers getting cheaper?

I might move for cheap hamburgers.

With the $1 -> $8 comment, I suspect he was being sarcastic about robots decreasing prices.


But a cheeseburger and a drink are each on the dollar menu, so you can get both for $2. That's more than the less than $1 from the early days of McDonalds, but there's probably some point in the intervening years where a cheeseburger and coke cost more than $2.

Attachment 65798

Attachment 65799

Attachment 65801

Attachment 65800

I don't mean since 1940, I mean since the $15 minimum wage went into effect.

Obviously not sarcasm. The coke I once bought for a dime now cost over a dollar. That dime then is now called 90 cents. So the price of coke has increased (but not its cost).

That 63 cent Egg McMuffin is now called $3.10. So automation explains why Egg McMuffin prices have decreased.

When I was working for minimum wage in the early 1960s, that is about $13/hr today.

That is not the cheeseburger that was served back then. We are discussing retail prices - not the price of discounted loss leaders.

That's right. If you are going to use a burger as an economic index, you have to use the Big Mac.

It's also worth noting, however, that automation must occur in bulk offsite in order to be cost-effective, which has only been made possible by the advent of chemical preservatives. If those chemical preservatives were eliminated--either through official safety regulations or general customer refusal--much of the automation trend would grind to a halt, as it were.

What if I used a coup'n?

Use shillings. That is monopoly money. So it does not cost anything.

Nice.

In the paper, Amanda Y. Agan of Rutgers University and Michael D. Makowsky of Clemson University analyzed the effect of 200 state and federal minimum wage increases on 6 million people released from prison between 2000 and 2014. What they found was striking: Raising the minimum wage by $0.50 reduced the chance that a person would end up incarcerated within a year by 2.8 percent.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/...divism/571948/

minimum ain't enough...

That clearly says nothing about inflation. All this was discussed previously:
Would someone give me the short version of this basic economics question?

If they had taken that $20 bill from 1998 and invested it instead of buying all that junk food, they might have been able to fill their cart now.

They'd be real skinny too. :rolleyes:

But notice how hard the dependent will fight over the estate. A tribute to the healthier and deceased.

Right, why don't the poors just invest their money instead of buying groceries? They could eat take-out, so what's the problem?

When told that her French subjects had no bread, Marie-Antoinette had the solution. It still applies. “Let them eat cake.”

There may be some cake in there. That 1998 grocery cart looked liked it was full of junk food, hence my previous comment.

Good. There must be chocolate. Essential for improved (short term) brain activity. Which proves man cannot live on cake alone.

The infographic suggests that the cost of inflation has a terrible bearing on a minimum wage earner's ability to buy things over time. It is wrong.

If you bought $20 of goods in 1998, they would cost $28.92 in 2015

During that same time, minimum wage was increased from $5.15 to $7.25*

$5.15 in 1998 has the same buying power as $7.45 in 2015. So, during that period the wage is slightly underperforming inflation.

An accurate infographic would show the wage earner buying the same cart, but with 2-3 fewer items.





*minimum wage now differs by locality, as states and cities have the ability to set their own minimum wage, always setting it higher and typically much higher.

But more interestingly, in 1998 4.4 million workers were at minimum wage; in 2015, it's 2.6 million. In 1998, 6.2% of all hourly-paid workers got minimum wage. In 2015, only 3.3% do. And by 2017, that number is 2.3%. It looks like the market is giving us a higher labor rate than the federal minimum. FWIW Wendy's pays like $12 out here.

I don't know if there's anything to substantiate whether things track this way, but I guess I'd always assumed that minimum wage is a baseline wage that employers incentivize hiring based on how high "above" minimum they are. I guess I'm remembering that from early jobs I had a long time ago, where twice as much as minimum wage seemed like an awesome gig-- DOUBLE the regular amount!

Of course that makes sense, since the minimum wage wasn't raised during that whole time. If the minimum wage were tied to inflation (which I think it should be, to save us rehashing this stupid political debate every couple of decades), $7.25 in 1998 would be $10.83 per hour now. What percentage of hourly workers would be at minimum wage by that calculation?

My stepdaughter was most recently making $8.40 as a restaurant hostess. The real question is: is the $12-per-hour Wendy's worker in your area able to afford housing in your area? My stepdaughter couldn't even afford to split the ghetto-est of ghetto apartments with roommates, in this area.

It was $5.15 in 1998

Not noticing any tent cities so I'ma say yes. Section 8 around here is like $900/month.

Ah, a perfect example of localities doing their own thing, like you said above. For me, I know it went from $5.15 to $5.25 in Austin around the summer/fall of 1996 because I was working at Domino's Pizza then and was excited to personally benefit from the change. By 1998, I was getting more elsewhere and don't remember it as clearly.

Federal minimum history via Dep't of Labor: https://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/chart.htm

Current state levels via Nat'l Council of State Legislators: http://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-a...art.aspx#Table

GOD DAMN!!

$900 a month?!

I said GOD DAMN!!!:bolt:

I'm not sure I could live on twelve dollars an hour.

Rent, food, car, car insurance, car gas, car licensing, car maintenance, electricity, water, gas, clothes, ohshitthetransmissionconkedout$1000+, and the tires are bald.

And I haven't even fed my two children yet. Or put clothes on them. Or paid the sitter. Or school costs. Dammitthelittleurchinbrokehisdamnleg$5000.

Nope. I, myself, could not live on $12/hour.

It costs more than that just to drive GC1 at interstate speeds.

And you didn't even mention the big ones: Fed and state income Tax, SS, health insurance.