I'll make the libertarian case against the minimum wage too. Why is it anyone's business what a business pays an employee? To ask the same question the other way, why should the government keep some poor single half black half Mexican lesbian mother from working for $5 an hour? Why do you think she should make $0 an hour instead? Why do you hate poor minority mothers? Obviously I'm being dramatic, but it is a serious point. Raising the minimum wage necessarily keeps some people from work because they are simply not productive enough to warrant the wage. That's why I'm not the CEO of Oracle. I am not skilled nor productive enough to be paid $7 million a year or whatever to run that company. Economically, it doesn't make sense to say that the average wage for the people of a country should trend up. The wage for an individual should trend up over his or her lifetime in a properly functioning economy, but that's all you can really say. Prices should also not trend up. With technology, most things are easier and cheaper to make now than they used to be. What keeps things expensive is currency devaluation and increased labor costs because of many factors.
Because when they're working 40-60 hours a week and still need public assistance, there's a problem, and it's a direct cost to the taxpayer. The minimum wage should be set such that the individual can make a living in 40 hours for a week without the need for such assistance.
What about the converse? You just told someone they have to get on assistance instead of working. How will they become more qualified and experienced?
They wont be, but its giving them enough means to not require that assistance. Bottom line is there will always be a segment of society that has to perform unskilled labor. I dont buy into the idea that all blue collar works are just good hardworking people. A lot of them are in fact stupid that will never escape that life. I know because I grew up around them. However, if you dont like the idea of welfare, then increasing the minimum wage is an answer to that problem, albeit not a perfect one. Just paying them 7 bucks an hour and expecting them to deal with it isnt a viable solution.
A $20/hr minimum wage would put eclipse what I made in the professional/business world for a good 3+ years out of college. I was also never working only 40 hours a week. I'm all for raising the minimum wage over 10, probably around 12. $20 is crazy talk.
Dude, no. There is no "supposed" about it. Walmart pays their employees nothing because those employees get their living expenses subsidized by welfare. Walmart is benefitting from underpaying their employees. Taxpayers shouldn't be on the hook because of bad corporate behavior. Eliminating welfare is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's there when you can't get a job. It's not there to pay Walmart's operating expenses.
Or we could impose stricter regulations on a $136 billion sales a year company who refuses to give 500,000 workers a livable wage and healthcare. Instead they flout the law by cutting hours so they don't have to provide healthcare and the employees turn right around to spend government subsidy checks and their own Walmart checks to pay for groceries and other home expenses. So, what is Walmart actually spending on wages? This is where an unchecked free market goes. You want to bring back 1900 lifestyles where low wage earners are basically indentured servants. Free market is wonderful. Invest where you want, how you want. Make a better product, offer different or better services, F the competitor up. But not at the expense of millions of workers, the environment, or subverting the world economy with unsafe practices. Sound familiar? This is how you get rampant unemployment, crashing economies, and people who can't afford to spend. The middle class is what keeps economies floating. Get them employed and get them paid and get them fucking spending. I hate this fallacy that welfare is a flawed, abused system. Of course people will abuse it, they abuse everything. The numbers are completely blown out of proportion. You want to punish 98% of the people not committing welfare fraud. You know who uses welfare mostly? Single moms and the elderly. Instead of removing welfare completely, the idea is to subsidize someone until they can get on their feet and never again have to draw from the public coffer, which is ideally, fucking smart. Welfare just isn't paying people who don't work. It's also food stamps and housing and healthcare and unemployment. Moreover, the average person only receives around 130 bucks a month for food stamps. Try eating on that. Have fun with 29 days of dried beans.
Doesn't this basically assume that the market of unemployed workers is huge and full of people at all skill levels who are looking for menial positions if only they paid better? I'm just not sure that the pool of prospective employees suddenly becomes full of much smarter, higher skilled people who are all vying for a cashier position at Wal-Mart just because they're now paying an extra $5/hour. If those smart, highly skilled people could find a job doing skilled work, they would do so. These jobs are always going to occupy the bottom rung of the employment ladder just by their nature - and are generally only going to be occupied by people who couldn't find more skilled work. I don't really understand why it matters how desirable the worker is - smart people can be poor and on welfare, too. Take an unemployed person, put them to work, pay them a livable wage.
Which pie are you talking about? Maybe public assistance needs addressing, not what they employer is required to pay.
This is an amazing straw man. Why, by God, you're against having your money taxed to go to other people, you must be in favor of living during the dark times of 1900! Have you ever been to a Walmart? I'm hard pressed to say that 1 in 10 Walmart employees should even earn the minimum wage today, much less $15 an hour. They flout the law? What's that mean? They operate within the law, but in a way you don't like? Boo hoo. Do you think Walmart would still have low prices if it paid its employees more? Maybe they could afford it, but there's no way they wouldn't raise prices. No business person would do that if they could get away with raising prices. A company with $400 billion in revenue can certainly get away with it. Walmart's profit margin is 3.75%. They're going to do anything they can to keep that from going down. Welfare: According to Jimmy James it's a cuddly baby.
I'm curious as to what constitutes a skilled job vs an unskilled job? People throw around buzzwords all the time in these discussions, but that's all they are, buzzwords. I work in a corporate business environment that has a range of workers from $10/hr - 300k/yr+. I can tell you without blinking an eye, there is much less difference between the quality of worker throughout this range of people than you would imagine. Granted, there are some "skilled" positions where you need a specific understanding of a specific job function, mostly dealing with computer systems or maintenance, but these are few and far between. Most of the higher paying jobs are given to people who are responsible, able to work long hours without question, have completed some form of secondary education, and people who are "skilled" at babysitting other people. The 50-80k a year jobs that would be roughly $15-20 an hour jobs have almost zero "skill" to them, they just have barriers to entry that are fabricated to present a feeling of exclusivity because you don't need that many of them in most businesses. What you really do need above everything else is basically a hive full of worker bees. It's really comes down to what you want to pay those worker bees. In our current form, we pay those workers a very slim part of the pie because they are viewed as disposable, but not insignificant. To change this, you either have to value those workers contribution and give them a bigger slice, or you make the pool of people to fill those roles smaller. At that point in time, you start to get into the murky waters of who really controls the companies, stock market influence, population control, and it turns into a cluster fuck.
If more people have more money, that increases the size of the revenue pie. I don't know about you, but if I'm being forced to offer a $15 minimum wage, you can be damn sure I'll be looking for employees that deserve it. Maybe the time away from a job and being on welfare gives fuckups an opportunity to train in a trade or something. You don't think it's fucked up that your money is enabling Walmart to take advantage of their employees and enriching their management in the form of an indirect government subsidy? Ok, I guess. I think the Mom and Pop stores that were driven out of business by predatory price gouging would have had a better chance of competing.
How is this a strawman? These are facts, not some amorphous Welfare Queen that was never ever substantiated. This is exactly what is happening. And yes, we use taxes to benefit the society as a whole. This is the social contract. If you do not wish to live in a free and open society, then by all means, to use the nomenclature of your ilk, "You can just get out." I have a problem with sending those tax dollars to benefit a company whose owners are worth a combined $100 billion, most of it in cash. I have a problem with a company forcing its workers, no matter how unskilled, to rely on those tax dollars when the company is HIDING 76 BILLION OVERSEAS. Further, this same company has only recently started using more Made In America products in lieu of Chinese garbage, which fucks even more Amerian workers out jobs. Flouting the law = operating within it to a technically legal point, while thumbing its nose at it. This is why regulatory agencies are necessary and why places like Walmart have come under fire for unsavory, detrimental practices. The same as the tax shelter above, just because it is legal doesn't mean it is right, and just because it is legal does not mean there are not measures on the table to address that in the future. Your idea is to let shit like this snowball at the expense of being "free" while American workers and tax payers experience the brunt of billionaires being stylish. This right here. THAT is a free market.
Skilled job: In general, white collar, need previous training and experience to do what is expected. Unskilled: Manual labor, show up grab a shovel and go. Example: Superintendant at a golf course, skilled job, needed education and experience to perform as expected. Unskilled, grunt raking the bunkers every morning.
I don't agree with this at all. Most of those Mom and Pop stores didn't go out of business because of predatory price gouging, they went out of business because the people that owned them are shitty businessmen. They didn't adapt to competition because there never was competition and they slowly got passed by companies that competed on price alone. Instead of innovating ideas to increase their business, they just slowly died trying to compete on a level they were never going to win.
I think you are significantly underestimating the skills and experience that are used as the basis of hiring workers as you get above the $30k/year line. Just because you don't think your coworker has any skills or requires those skills to do their job, doesn't mean they weren't hired because they have a degree in a relevant field, or experience related to their job. At the very least, most of these people are comfortable in the various skills associated with a modern office. These are all skilled positions. It's not a buzz word, it's a real term used to describe a real thing. Frankly, if your company's benchmark for higher paid jobs is only "working long hours without question," then your company sucks and I'm glad I'm not working there. Your employment in a Dilbert fantasy doesn't mean higher paid jobs are unskilled labor with people just willing to work 18 hours/day.
Yes, they will absolutely be looking for people that can do $15 an hour worth of work. But what about all of the people that can't do that much work because they're inexperienced or dumb or any other reason? They'll be unemployed and on welfare. And no, I don't think that's fucked up. Walmart primarily employs unskilled people in its stores doing work that just about any able bodied person can do. They're gonna offer the lowest amount they can get away with. That's perfectly reasonable. Mom and pop stores were driven out of business because they couldn't compete with low prices. Not the other way around. Mom and pop stores were also harmed more by the minimum wage than larger corporations that could afford to pay more.
What? They went out of business specifically because of predatory pricing. See my earlier comment regarding economies of scale. That is exactly what that is. Walmart has the logistics and resources to ship 1,000,000 units of a given product at a discounted bulk rate than any corner store that pays per unit, and can therefore offer a lower cost. It's microeconomics 101.