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What were expecting, really?

Well, that and the differences such as well-paying manufacturing jobs being largely gone and corporate consolidation eliminating tons of mid-tier positions that low level soda jerks or mail room workers could get promoted to. And replacing jobs with technology while outsourcing other jobs overseas. Oh, and the absolutely massive increases in the cost of tuition if you want the college education (inc community college and trade schools) necessary today to be even considered to get a mid-tier job. And the gradual dismantling of the unions who even made manufacturing and entry level service jobs livable in that era -- not to mention who ran the apprenticeship programs now replaced by for-profit schools.

But, laziness and entitlement. Yeah, those are the differences between the 1950s and today. Kids today are just lazy and entitled.

Xanth Style Talent

You know, originally I was thinking mundane, but maybe we should go for super powers? It'll be less indicting.

As opposed to necrophilia and zombie whores.

I didn't say that customer service jobs aren't real jobs. I said that the kid working the counter at a burger joint probably shouldn't earn enough to support a household on from that labor. You decided two things from this all on your own:

1. That this means it's not a "real job". False. It's a real job. It's just not a high paying job. Which it shouldn't be because the relative value added by that labor is pretty small.

2. That the entire sum of "customer service jobs" consists of the equivalent of working the counter at a fast food joint. That's another bait and switch. I'm sure there are many customer service jobs that require sufficient skill and provide sufficient value to the customer that those working them can make good wages. Say a concierge in a high cost hotel, for one obvious example.



That's your false dilemma, not mine. I pay for minimum wage work exactly what it's worth. Minimum wage. I'm not sure why this concept that people should not be forced to pay more for something than they think it's actually worth is so hard to grasp.



Ok. But now you are comparing the collective "they" of all minimum wage earners, to one person. That's not a very fair comparison, is it? Each individual earning minimum wage does so because that one specific job they are performing by itself isn't that valuable. Sure, if every single minimum wage earner in the country decided to stop working, that would throw a wrench in the works, but to what point? It would certainly not be as much of a problem as if every single bank manager stopped working tomorrow, or every single programmer, or every single engineer, or doctor, or chef, or any of a thousand other occupations that earn more than minimum wage.



It's not the value of the person, but what the person does. And frankly, part of that value is based on replaceability. If a doctor decides to stop doing work, you can't just grab someone off the street to do this job. Same deal with pretty much any skilled labor position, from construction work to architecture. Pretty sure I could teach a random person off the street how to operate the POS system at Burger King in about 5 minutes though.

Value assignments to labor isn't arbitrary. This idea that we should pay people a given wage, not based on the value of the labor, but because we want to ensure that every job pays a "living wage" is absurd. What incentive would the guy working the counter at a fast food joint have to improve the value of his labor? Zero right? I mean, sure he could earn "more" by going out and spending the time and effort improving himself, but a whole lot of them would be perfectly happy just working said menial job and living off of it. It's a lot easier work.

Um... And there's some value in said improvement on it's own merits. People who actually go out and work hard to improve their skill sets and then earn more because of it tend to feel a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. Hand people that success for basically just showing up and putting on a paper hat, and they wont feel good about themselves at all. I guess I just don't understand what you're arguing for. It's easy to say it's unfair for people to earn low wages. And it's easy to equate this to some kind of nefariousness and wanting to keep people poor (or whatever other rhetoric you want to toss around), but what is the solution you're proposing?

"Just do something" is a crappy alternative. Tell me what you'd do different, and then tell me how the result would be "better". Because all you're doing is complaining that the status quo is somehow unfair. Is it? I don't think so at all. But if you think so then instead of just saying it is, tell me what alternative would be fair.

Or just at all.

If value of the labor was truly a factor then congresscritters would be the ones making minimum wage, and arguing how they should be making even less.

Edited, Oct 27th 2015 12:37pm by lolgaxe

How many is "lots"? I'm sure it's a number greater than zero, but how much higher? The last time we had a minimum wage thread, I pulled out some labor stats (which I don't feel like digging up again). IIRC, the number of workers in the labor market earning minimum wage was like 4% or so. And of those, at least half were students. It's unclear what the make up of the other half is. How many of them are single parents struggling to support their families, and how many are people (like me in my 20s) who are just working some random job, rooming with a few friends to share expenses, and basically just slacking off for a few years before getting a "real job".



Again though, how many actually depend on those jobs to support a household, and how many are teenagers or others who are dependents, or don't have a household to support, or can easily share expenses with others, etc? Without some idea of that ratio, then we can't say that the cost to pay all these people who don't need to earn more is a small price to pay to make sure the rest are paid enough to support a household. And that's before looking at the inflationary effect of this. Simply raising the minimum wage doesn't really do anything because you have raised it for everyone. Dollars don't have an absolute value. Their value is based on relative costs for other things. And if you increase the relative cost of every kid wearing a paper hat, then those increased dollars don't go as far.

Put another way, increased wages only really matter if they are increases relative to an earnings floor. If you raise that floor, those earning the new higher minimum don't actually gain anything. And, as I've explained many times in past threads, you will actually hurt a lot of near minimum wage earners in the process. If the current minimum wage is $8/hour, and you raise it to say $12/hour (or even higher), then everyone who was previously earning between $8 and $12 per hour has had all their relative wage gains erased. I just don't see how you can do this without having some way of making a differentiation between those just starting out in the job market, and those who have been there for some time.

The whole living wage argument seems less designed towards producing any actual solution to a problem, and more about politically oriented rhetoric. You propose something that wont work and will almost certainly hurt lots of workers, wait for conservatives to oppose it because it wont work and will hurt lots of workers, and then proclaim them to be big fat meanies who want poor people to suffer. It's all just BS. There's no solution here, but it's something that can be made to sound like a good idea if you don't stop and think about it too much. Which, I suspect, is precisely the point.

I'd make the additional point that the idea that cost of living will increase is predicated on the idea that employers can't afford to pay their employees more, so would have to raise their prices of whatever it is they sell to survive. I would assert that based on profits posted by these companies, there is room right now in the market for increased wages, which would further decrease the negative side affects of a higher minimum wage.

I suppose for the TL;DR crowd, the short version is that it's kinda silly to assume that companies that currently have a certain profit margin would magically stop wanting to continue to have that same margin after a minimum wage increase. If your assumption is that those profits are driven by greed, then why assume they wont continue to be in the future. Raising the minimum wage doesn't change that.

This is why no-one likes you.

No, I would say you can't. The younger and less stable employees will not stay around as long, and so will be far more likely to be at or just above minimum wage. As it increases, even slightly your ratios will shift quickly.