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from the while-my-guitar-gently-weeps dept.
Each holiday season, thousands of teenagers tear gift wrap off shiny, new guitars. They giddily pluck at the detuned strings, thinking how cool they'll be once they're rock stars—even if almost all will give up before they ever get to jam out to "Sweet Child o' Mine."
For them, it's no big deal to relegate the guitar to the back of the closet forever in favor of the Playstation controller. But it is a big deal for Fender Musical Instruments Corp., the 70-year-old maker of rock 'n' roll's most iconic electric guitars. Every quitter hurts.
[...]The $6 billion U.S. retail market for musical instruments has been stagnant for five years, according to data compiled by research firm IBISWorld, and would-be guitar buyers have more to distract them than ever. So how do you convince someone to put down the iPhone, pick up a Stratocaster, and keep playing?
Seems Fender didn't get the memo: the music of the future is hip-hop and autotuners.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday November 23 2016, @06:37PM
Real artists happen to be people. Let's rephrase.
> People should be able to work a job to be able to cover their bills without having to pull a massive amount of overtime...
Is asking for a living wage really feeling entitled?
(Score: 1) by Arik on Wednesday November 23 2016, @08:43PM
Well let's break that down. Why do you think you should get a wage?
Is it because someone finds your work valuable enough to pay this much for your time?
Or is it because you think the world owes you a 'living wage?'
If the latter, then you're entitled. And spoiled.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday November 23 2016, @08:53PM
That would be because someone who needs help should be paying for it. And a country which sees itself as rich and civilized shouldn't be setup in such a way that people can be given wages for their labor which are insufficient to maintain a decent standard of living.
Granted, slavery and exploitation have always existed.
But economists are pretty clear that, when people do not get living wages, all of us pay to support them with our taxes. So not having a minimum wage at a living wage level means that we socialize the salaries of the poorest while their employers pocket the profits.
A "living" minimum wage is anti-socialist !
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @10:03PM
Your analysis, while superficially attractive, is incomplete.
You have three classes of people on the receiving side in this analysis, and two on the giving side (really more, but we can keep this fairly simple).
On the receiving side you have those who have skills or abilities for which people would gladly pay them more than a living wage, you have those who are fundamentally, constitutionally indigent and could not hold down any kind of job, and you have those who could hold down a job - but never produce enough value to merit their employment at what you'd consider a living wage.
On the giving side you have private sector employers (who demand, on some level, value for money) and the noncommercial sector (mostly government, but you could include some charities in here).
The fundamentally unemployable are always going to be there. Whether they are currently hospitalised, basically paralysed, brain dead, or whatever the reason may be, you can't wish them out of existence, so we can agree that they will be the inevitable recipients of largesse from the noncommercial sector, because the commercial sector has no fiscally founded interest in them.
The eminently employable are no big deal; they are desirable employees and can represent themselves usefully to employers in the interest of supporting themselves. Nothing to do there; moving on...
The open question is what happens with people who do not have what it takes to persuade the private sector to employ them at what you'd call a living wage.
If you just ban employment at less than what you think of as a living wage, you render these people unemployable in the private sector. As an act of charity or government generosity you might consider getting them employed but that fact does not magically make them more employable - you're just sponsoring their existence in pretty much the same way as you're doing with someone chained to a bed in a mental hospital.
Conversely, if you go completely hands-off, you doom them to starvation regardless of what wages they might earn, because they can't earn enough. That's their limitation.
So what are you left with? You could scale down their support in a number of ways, essentially subsidising their employment (EIC is an example of this) but you are in no position to magically require the private sector to pay them, net, more than they're worth.
So whenever you claim an imperative for a living wage, make sure that you explain what you want to do with those people whom your proposed living wage renders unemployable, otherwise you're turning your back on them as surely as Daddy warbucks.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday November 23 2016, @11:05PM
What you read is not what I wrote.
Companies who need help should not be allowed to pay people a wage below a certain level, because what that means is that you and me end up picking up the rest of the tab. Either the company needs the help, and they do spend enough money, or they can't afford the minimum wage, and they don't hire. That's already true anywhere there is a minimum wage, but in the US the minimum wage is not high enough to live independently on. The employers do not get to chose to pay anyone below that level, regardless of how menial the task is that they need help with.
With proper enforcement of the law, those you believe shouldn't make a living wage from their qualifications fall into two categories: unemployed or self-sustaining. Wait! You said they can't be valued high enough, what am I smoking? Well, that trash ain't gonna empty itself, and the CFO has better things to do for his per hour.
The problem with your reasoning is that it includes a "what they're worth" value which is what employers won't go over, not a "how much does this need to be done" value.
The government can train the unemployed, and assist the physically/mentally unemployable. But anyone who want to shrink the government and their taxes, has to admit that someone who has a job, along with all the constraints and obligations it implies, needs to be paid enough to sustain themselves without needing extra handouts. The government shouldn't be allowing companies to both dodge taxes and create working poor, because everyone's gonna pay for that, in taxes or in policing.
Whether you call yourself civilized, christian, or just plain "not an exploitative asshole", it's kind of logical.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @12:58AM
I didn't directly respond to what you wrote. I offered a more complete analysis. (Far from exhaustive, but a lot better.) But OK, let's try this again.
Right. And if these people aren't employed at all, we pick up the whole tab. Hm. Some of the tab ... the whole tab. Which would I rather pay? I think I'd like to pay part of it, yup.
You're assuming great inelasticity in the labour market - an assumption that does not hold water in unskilled, low paid environments. There are some areas where the inelasticity is big, and those people make bank. For example, working for a sewage plant. Not a lot of people want to, and so the ones who do, make a lot of money (for their level of education). The reality is that big corporations will cheerfully buy robots, review their procedures and generally do any damn thing they can to reduce their hiring, even if it means that they have to hire one highly paid guy instead of five minimum wage people. If they genuinely need the job done, they'll cut that hiring price every damn time, every way they can. It's not even about being able to afford minimum wage - you're misinterpreting how they calculate this. They're interested in justifying, not affording. Can they justify hiring some warm bodies at minimum wage? Then there they go. If not? No deal.
Yes. That is the definition of a minimum wage. You're not supposed to hire people for less. I think most of us got that. We also know that the US federal minimum wage does not reach, at full time, the US poverty level for a single earner supporting a family of four. That is true.
What is not clear at this stage is whether we will be better off by simply declaring that anybody who cannot justify a higher wage, must sit on the unemployment line, and that the higher wage must be, approximately $15/hour (or whatever your magic number is). There is a substantial societal cost to having people sitting around with their thumbs up their butts. And, to take your position above, we have to pay for ALL their needs, not just top off what they are being paid.
So your logic is that we're going to need so damn many (necessarily overpriced) janitors that we'll have janitorially-mandated welfare?
This isn't reality. We already know from looking at urban employment that companies, engineers, accountants, economists are very good at figuring out how to use fewer people. If I were in charge of a janitorial crew, and I could hire one smart, reliable, efficient girl for $40/hr to replace five people at $15/hr, I'd do it in a hot minute, even if I had to buy $50,000 worth of equipment to enable her to be that efficient. It'd pay for itself in under a year.
The proof of this is that the USA has had an ever-increasing efficiency of labour, with an ever-decreasing efficiency of capital application. We're trading off labour with capital, because labour in the USA is so damn expensive as a way of getting things done, and the returns on the investment of capital are crystal clear.
They're two sides of the same coin. The value of the labour is justifiable in terms of how much the work needs doing, and how willing people are to do it. Supply and demand. People really, really, really need sewage treatment, and so sewage workers get high pay for doing a literally shitty job. These days chimney cleaning does not involve sending kids up chimneys, it's both less hazardous and cheaper to use other techniques - so we do.
No, I need to admit no such thing. Some people need lots of support. I'm quite comfortable with the idea that many people need a little support, and plenty of people require effectively no support. Requiring the government to provide total support to anybody who can't meet some arbitrary bar of employability doesn't shrink the government one iota; it does the opposite.
Working poor are a substantially lesser burden on society than idle poor. I'm not in favour of tax evasion, but if a government is hellbent on creating such a heinously complex taxation and regulatory structure that tax avoidance is easy to the tune of trillions? That will in no way be solved by raising the minimum wage to the point that you're just converting the working poor to the idle poor. More so because you're adding more justification to the companies to sink their money into capital expenditures that they can write off over time, to reduce their long term labour costs. You're actually working hard to justify unemployment, in terms of the pressures generated by the government on business.
I can see how you get to your point of view, but alas it's not based on a broad, educated view of the situation.
Please, study some economics. It's actually an interesting field - you can think of it as the study of the law of unintended consequences, as they pertain to government. And this is, alas, one of the key areas where people moralise without realising what future they are wishing for.
I hope my brief outline of some of the key factors helps you make sense of the field.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @10:06PM
labour in the USA is so damn expensive
President-elect Donald Trump said of the $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage, "you have to have something that you can live on." But perhaps real Republicans can talk sense into him. How about repealing the 13th Amendment too?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @03:53AM
Until recently, that rugged bastion of cutthroat capitalism and pitiless exploitation of the workers, Germany, didn't even have a minimum wage.
Oh, wait, that's not right. They have a robust social welfare system, with comprehensive benefits. They also have a strong industrial economy in which they produce premium products that the rest of the world lines up to buy. They have quite the reputation for reining in large corporations, and a healthy, expansive small enterprise ecosystem, and they built it all ... without minimum wages.
And why did they introduce minimum wages? To save the hapless orphans shivering on the streets?
No, basically as a political sop to pressure groups.
So take your irrelevant nonsense and break it over reality's knee.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Thursday November 24 2016, @05:32AM
Yes, to a point you're right, given a socialist welfare state, the state winds up in one way or another subsidizing those who aren't earning enough.
But past that fact, you've got it exactly reversed. It's not the state socializing the employer here, it's more like the employer subsidizing the state in fact. Think about it. If this person wasn't earning some income honestly, the state would then wind up paying MORE, not less, to support them.
So what do you do when you raise the minimum wage? You simply prohibit the employment of that person, and as a result the state pays the whole cost, rather than only part of it. Plus that person, instead of going to work every day and feeling relatively good about at least somewhat supporting herself, well now she's sitting home idle all day, thinking about how much she sucks, getting depressed and desperate, more likely to commit crimes or to harm herself.
There's nothing good here, nothing positive, it's a net loss for society.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday November 28 2016, @08:52AM
> It's not the state socializing the employer here, it's more like the employer subsidizing the state in fact. Think about it.
> If this person wasn't earning some income honestly, the state would then wind up paying MORE, not less, to support them.
Holly logical fallacy Batman! Quick, to the Poe-Mobile, before we all thank employers for paying us a whole dollar an hour to prevent the state from having to find that dollar in the taxes we don't pay!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @10:25PM
Holy cow buddy, something happened to your font, you should really look into that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday November 24 2016, @02:58AM
Life depends on free sunlight. It is not spoiled and entitled for plants to collect sunshine.
Since massive population increase and thousands of years of technological advancement have made hunter-gatherer living impossible to do on a large scale-- there simply isn't enough wilderness for several billion people to go hunting for all their food-- I rather think that, yes, civilization does owe people some basic needs. Real shitty to demean someone for "mooching", when opportunity is lacking because society has expanded into all available territory and niches. There are no longer any wide empty spaces for young men to go West or any other direction to build a life from scratch.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Thursday November 24 2016, @05:26AM
But it would be if they expected someone else to go collect their daily allocation of sunlight and process it for them.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Touché) by Francis on Thursday November 24 2016, @04:26AM
If they didn't find my time, or any other worker's time valuable, they wouldn't be providing work.
I'm not really sure how that concept is so hard to understand. Jobs aren't created out of the goodness of the employers heart, they're provided because they want to profit off the work. Cases where an employer can't afford to pay a living wage for the work are few and far between. Those are mostly jobs that are marching towards either obsolescence or being off-shored, in neither case does that situation typically last indefinitely.
Pay people the money they've earned and problems like this go away. If people want to spend their free time pursuing the arts, they should be able to do so rather than become homeless because they're only working one job.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by aristarchus on Thursday November 24 2016, @04:42AM
C'mon, Francis! Man up!
I'm not really sure . . .
Be sure! Your opponents are Republicans (or, former Republican, maybe returning Republicans) with no real understanding of 1. economics, 2. social justice (obvious, since they mock people who believe in justice with their SJW shibboleth), and 3. art. So don't just say you don't know why they don't get it: they don't get it because they are idiots, morons, selfish libertarian inclined anti-social assholes! Make this clear to them! (Another helpful hint from your nemesis and greatest critic, ari.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @04:49AM
LOL, and you expect to be taken seriously.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @04:59AM
You think aristarchus wants to be taken seriously? Medic! Medic! Stat! AC with a hook imbedded in his cheek! Repeat: Medics please report! Trolling victim needs assistance!
(Score: 1) by Arik on Thursday November 24 2016, @05:36AM
Exactly.
"Cases where an employer can't afford to pay a living wage for the work are few and far between."
Depending on your definition of 'living wage' (assuming you have one, for many it's more of just a sound that stops thinking) that might be true. So what? Regardless of how many or how few they are, the question is simply whether they are better off being allowed to work and improve themselves, or whether you think it's better to mandate unemployment and welfare for them instead.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?