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You probably remember Subway's famous "five-dollar footlong" promotion as much for the obnoxiously catchy jingle as for the sandwiches themselves. (Sorry for getting that stuck in your head all day.)
The sandwich chain recently resurrected the promotion in a national advertising campaign promising foot-long subs for just $4.99—but the special deal won't fly at one Subway restaurant in Seattle, where owner David Jones posted a sign this week giving customers the bad news.
Sadly, the consequences of high minimum wages, excessive taxation, and mandate-happy public policy are not limited to the death of cheap sandwiches. The cost of doing business in Seattle is higher than the Space Needle, and the unintended consequences of those policies are piling up too.
The biggest cost driver, as Jones' sign mentions, is Seattle's highest-in-the-nation minimum wage. It went from $9.47 to $11 per hour in 2015, then to $13 per hour in 2016, with a further increase to $15 per hour planned.
The result? According to researchers at the University of Washington's School of Public Policy and Governance, the number of hours worked in low-wage jobs has declined by around 9 percent since the start of 2016 "while hourly wages in such jobs increased by around 3 percent." The net outcome: In 2016, the "higher" minimum wage actually lowered low-wage workers' earnings by an average of $125 a month.
And now those same employees will have to pay more for sandwiches from Subway—and everything else too.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RedBear on Saturday January 13 2018, @08:23AM (17 children)
OK.
1. The fact that American employers, especially fast food employers, continue to do their best to screw over American employees by restricting their hours in order to avoid providing stable full-time employment or any benefits such as health insurance or paid sick leave is a completely separate problem from the minimum wage argument. It has its own causes and solutions. They also deliberately screw with the scheduling so that people can't get a second part-time job, and laws are slowly changing that mess as well. Again, separate from wages.
2. Inflation is continuously reducing buying power by a small amount every single year, regardless of wage increases or decreases. You can't sell a sandwich for $5 for 30 years just because it's a catchy jingle and expect to turn a profit forever. Can you still buy a comic book for 10 cents? Eventually component costs increase and you have to raise the price. We've never had $5 footlongs where I live in Alaska because *shock* the general cost of shipping fresh food to an island on the frontier is much higher than the Lower 48. *surprise* Same goes for many other areas with a Subway franchise location. They've been losing money all over the country on the $5 footlong "promotion" for a long time. At this point it's a loss leader to get people in the door trying a Subway sandwich again. But what it should be now is at least $6 footlongs even as a promotion. Because life. This is not a valid argument against paying people enough to survive on.
2(a). Inflation gives everyone a small pay cut every year. You can't pay people $5/hr for 35 years and expect society to continue functioning. The math doesn't work. Minimum wage (like most higher wage tiers already are) should have always been tied to inflation. Is the economy going to have to make a few adjustments as we get back to paying people enough to live on? Of course. If a business has to close up because it can't afford to pay people a living wage, it will be replaced by a legitimate business whose profits aren't propped up by the welfare system. If a business has to slightly raise prices to deal with the wage increase, then that's what the damn prices should have been all along. This is not rocket surgery.
Papa John's pulled this kind of stupid crap before the Affordable Care Act kicked in. The CEO went around moaning that they'd have to fire people or go out of business if they were forced to provide health insurance. But it was calculated that all employees could be easily covered by raising the price of an average pizza by less than 14 cents. Subway can't sell you a $5 footlong sub sandwich now because it costs too much to make the sandwich, but only a vanishingly tiny fraction of that cost increase comes from the company being finally forced to pay their employees a wage that allows them to live within 100 miles of their workplace.
Think about how many sandwiches a Subway lackey can make every hour. An extra $5 per hour pay raise can be covered by increasing the cost of a sandwich by less than 50 cents. Is that going to bankrupt the customers? In a city where everyone buys themselves a $6 coffee every morning? And that's if people only buy a sandwich by itself, but they don't. They buy meals, with soup, drink, cookie, chips, whatever. Which means you probably only need to raise the price of the sandwich by 10 cents to cover a sudden $5/hr INCREASE in the wage. And the minimum wage isn't increasing by $5 every year. The next increase in Seattle is just $2 and then hopefully it will be tied to the inflation index and thus change by less than 2% each year. Oh noes! How will capitalism survive? Tune in next week...
In case it's not clear, I am pointing out here that while prices go up over time, there is not even close to a linear relationship between wages and prices. Raising the minimum wage doesn't suddenly proportionally raise the price of everything in existence and instantly negate the buying power of the minimum wage increase. That is one of the most nonsensical arguments I've seen that constantly comes up when people are objecting to minimum wage increases. By that logic it would make sense to give everyone a 50% pay CUT every year so prices would drop drastically and everyone could afford to buy more. If that makes any sense to you, you need to see some kind of doctor.
The article behind this submission is quite clearly right-wing extremist anti-minimum wage claptrap. I can't wait for the followup article bitching about the fact that we can no longer buy a footlong sandwich for 25 cents like we could back in the '30s when workers made $5 per DAY (and liked it!, uphill both ways in the snow with no boots). It will make just as much sense as this one. I can see the title now: "The $6/Day Minimum Wage Killed the Two-Bit Sammich!!! Damn Commies!!!"
Let us not forget that minimum wage work went from being a small fraction of the economy to being a large chunk of all jobs currently available. It went from a temporary beginner wage for people new to working, like teens sweeping floors, to a career wage for employees of all ages and skill levels, with almost no possibility of promotion (most managers are hired from other companies where they were already managers, not promoted within the company from among low-level employees). Minimum wage got stuck in the '70s and hardly moved for decades as inflation ate up more and more of every dollar, while higher wage earners continued to get their traditional yearly increases. Large corporate employers are raking in profits hand over fist right now while teaching their own employees how to fill out welfare forms so that their corporate profits can be supported by the taxpayers. Remember how McD's calculated that a worker in NYC could live just fine on their wages as long as they went without any form of heating in the winter, among other essentials? I remember. We're not quite back to the Gilded Age, but we're headed that way fast. The weak social contract where corporations used to provide stable lifetime careers is virtually nonexistent now.
Minimum wage has been broken for a long time, and it needs to be fixed, and I have yet to see a valid argument as to why every American doesn't deserve to be paid and treated like a damn human being. If the argument is because you want to be able to keep buying a fixed-price $5 footlong sandwich until we all die of old age, then fuck you. Fuck you and the little spotted pony you rode in on.
tl;dr: Give me a break.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0, Disagree) by khallow on Saturday January 13 2018, @09:29AM (11 children)
This is the standard blame displacement. Blame the employer for policy consequences. In any other market, we'd expect supply and demand to hold (for example, an increase in cost of employees resulting in a reduction in demand for such employees), but somehow that doesn't hold for employment.
Wikipedia says the Subway special [wikipedia.org] has been happening since 2008 (and in Florida since 2004).
So it hasn't been kicking around for 30 years, but rather 9 years for Seattle.
Nor can you expect to pay people increasing amounts for work they aren't doing. Speaking of inflation, mandating high minimum wages is one way to create inflation.
And now we get to the ugly "But we didn't need those jobs anyway" rationalization. Let us recall once again that the actual minimum wage is $0 per hour. And let us recall once again, that "propped up by the welfare system" is merely the label for the employers who happen to pay the lowest wages at the moment. There will always be someone who pays that and hence, always someone that can be blamed for getting "subsidies" for paying poor people to work.
And you perform according to stereotype. In a rational world, they would be lauded for employing poor people. The bleeding hearts might even be evaluating if that welfare was sufficiently high to incentivize the employers! But not today's bleeding hearts! It's terrible that employers are helping their employees survive! War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
In today's world, we can survive Seattle and its misguided laws. Employers can route around the damage merely by employing people outside of Seattle and its mess, automate, or not care, if they already pay more than $15 per hour. But of course, this is just a move in a long term strategy to raise minimum wages to ridiculous levels throughout the US. What happens to all the places that don't have a plethora of high paying jobs (like West Virginia)? Answer is that the unemployed either stay in place and rot or they move to some place with the higher paying jobs. This results in such things as a decline of urban areas (urban minorities having particularly high unemployment) and massive migration from low cost-of-living semi-rural areas to already densely packed, high cost-of-living urban areas.
This is not an academic question. California has already decided to implement [ca.gov] a state-wide minimum wage of $15 per hour (to fully kick in on January 1, 2023 after many annual increases in minimum wage from its current $10.50 per hour). I predict it will be a disaster for places like Fresno which have almost half of their workers paid less than that minimum wage and barely noticeable in places like San Jose, where the market-based minimum wage is already almost $15 per hour.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RedBear on Saturday January 13 2018, @11:39AM (10 children)
There isn't a simple relationship between cost and demand for anything, least of all the labor you need to run your business. There is a relationship, but it's far from simple. Studies of minimum wage changes over several decades lean toward minor increases having negligible or slightly positive effect on overall employment. But it's not even close to simple.
Pardon me, I was being slightly hyperbolic to make the point that prices increase over time. Although I did think it started much earlier than 2008. Have you noticed in your lifetime that prices for everything, especially food, increase over time? Because prices for things, especially food, increase slowly but surely. You know. Over time.
You would agree, I hope, that if they kept trying to sell $5 footlongs for long enough it would eventually become untenable no matter what the location or how far minimum wages were allowed to drop. Point being that a fixed-price product can only survive a limited time in an economy subject to any amount of inflation (as all healthy economies seem to be), and that this is only tangentially related to minimum wage variations.
For work... they aren't... doing. Holy shithole, Batman. Textbook conservative response. The low wage earners don't "deserve" a pay increase, because they are low wage earners, and therefore lazy and unproductive. So... explain why everyone in all the pay grades above lower middle class have been getting pay increases every year, beyond what was required to keep up with inflation, for the entire 35 years or so when minimum wage was stagnating. Were they all doing more and more productive work every year? How? How is that possible? Why did higher wage earners "deserve" to make more and more money while the lower wage earners literally earned less and less as their wages failed to keep up with inflation? It's literally a damn self-fulfilling prophecy. The poorer they get, the less they "deserve" to get paid more, because the fact that they aren't being paid more already is proof positive that they don't deserve to be paid more. Right? That's how it works in conservative minds, right? "Poor people" are worthless scum who should lick their employers boots clean every morning for being given the privilege of employment. Right? And if you didn't want to be a "poor person" you should have chosen different parents. Got it.
And if we got rid of minimum wage, would inflation suddenly stop, or reverse? I don't see how, since all higher wages would still continue to go up faster than inflation, as they have for several decades, and the prices of a great many things will follow the increase in higher wages just easily as other things might follow the increase in minimum wages. But the increase in minimum wages is pocket change to the increases in the wages for the upper crust. We already have inflation, and a minor amount seems to be part of every normally functioning economy that isn't rapidly shrinking, so what do you mean "create inflation"? How high does the minimum wage need to be before it triggers increased inflation? What is the exact relationship between the minimum wage and inflation? What is the relationship between the highest wages and inflation? Somehow I doubt that you can find specific answers to these questions that you haven't cherry-picked to match what you already believe. It just isn't that easy. It's very, very complicated.
But what isn't complicated is that minimum wage used to be reasonably adjusted to keep up with inflation in the past, and then at some point people started promoting things like trickle down economics (a.k.a. "Fairy Dust") and minimum wage was allowed to go off the rails and lag inflation for decades. And all anybody is really asking for is to realign the minimum wage with inflation, at an equivalent level of buying power as it had prior to the '70s. Is that really, seriously too much to ask of the MOST PROSPEROUS NATION ON EARTH (AND APPARENTLY GOD'S NEW CHOSEN KINGDOM)? Oh, excuse me, sorry for raising my voice. Anyway, I don't think it's too much to ask.
You are legitimately insane, as expected. It's like you're incapable of realizing that those people are only "poor" because their employer is filling its own pockets with taxpayer dollars while they make more than enough profit to pay everyone much higher wages. Instead of noticing that they are screwing their employees out of a reasonable level of prosperity, you believe they are actually doing their employees a huge favor by deigning to employ those "poor people" in all their unresplendent worthlessness, at a wage level that would never allow them to escape poverty. But if they paid higher wages they wouldn't be heroically employing "poor people", they would be unheroically employing "middle class people". The intense self-referential circularity of this concept is extraordinary. If the minimum wage was 30 cents per hour, just imagine how much more "heroic" those big-hearted companies would be for employing those worthless people wallowing in abject poverty. Why, we should give them all medals! And prop up their company profits with even more taxpayer funds! Why don't we just wire the welfare checks directly into the company bank account and cut out the middleman? After all, people in abject poverty only buy booze, hookers and drugs, right? A respected Republican Senator said so just the other day. What was his name, ASSley or something? (I jest.)
Didja miss the part where these companies are pulling in higher profits than they ever have before? They are literally making record profits and are in no danger of going out of business. And their employees don't deserve any piece of that action because... ? Oh, I forgot, because they are Poor People[TM]. And Poor People[TM] don't "deserve" to not be Poor People[TM]. What I tell you three times is true, eh, Alice? At least in Looking Glass Land.
"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"
Um, no, you do not understand this concept. If the employees of a company are being supported by welfare checks to reach a total wage level that allows them to live at a permanent address and eat food, that company's profits are literally being SUPPORTED and INCREASED by the taxpayers. And they are making YUUUGE profits. They are having no problems filling their bank accounts and paying all their high level management megabucks. So why are we wanting to feed them even more money and increase their profits even more if none of it goes to benefit working people who actually need it? (ZOMG! The specter of "wealth redistribution" rears its ugly head! Socialist, begone! Out, foul demon!)
I'm sorry? In no functional society could that possibly be true. There is a level far above zero where it simply becomes easier for the populace to kill off all the rich people and redistribute their resources, a la French Revolution, and then turn to something awful like communism or heaven forbid, democratic socialism. If I have to work for 70 hours to afford to buy a hamburger, you are done. Capitalism is done. Over. That would happen long before anybody gets to $0/hr. It's as if people like you actually want capitalism to collapse, and millions of Americans to reach starvation level poverty.
There's actually a word for being paid $0/hr: slavery.
Yes, isn't it wonderful? Many more will follow. And I predict the Moon won't fall from the sky, and red states will continue to be by far the poorest states in the union, leeching off the taxes of blue states, as they have for decades now. Shall we come back in a couple more decades and see which of us was right? Anyway, there's no way in hell we're going to agree on any of this. We both think the other is looking at the world upside-down and inside-out. So this is all a remarkably fruitless exercise.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @06:32PM (1 child)
There are numerous federal employees in blue states, both direct and contractors. By increasing the minimum wage, you force the federal government to supply more money.
You raise your taxes, but your economy doesn't suffer the full result. People are allowed to deduct that from federal taxes. This forms a subsidy to the blue states.
Lots of people are being paid off-the-books due to illegal alien status. This cuts the burden of federal taxes in those states, particularly California.
Blue states ought to be paying far more than red states, because they vote for the expensive things. The red state people are at least trying to save money. If you vote for it, you should pay for it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RedBear on Sunday January 14 2018, @01:04AM
I live in a red state, BTW.
I've never seen evidence that the federal government paying people to do real work is a terrible thing, unless it's like half the population. Sure helped pull us out of the Great Depression.
Thanks to the new GOP tax plan blue states are now being actively penalized for having higher state taxes by a limit to state tax deductibility. Even if things were quid pro quo, the blue states still pay significantly more in federal taxes and receive fewer benefits back from the federal government (because they don't need them as much, because they have higher state taxes). Blue state taxes that go to the federal government get redistributed to red states. You have things completely backwards. If blue states lower their taxes to avoid penalizing state residents under the GOP tax scam, less money will flow through the federal government to the red states. Then red states will have an even bigger shortfall. I don't think the results will be what you expect.
What percentage of jobs are held by undocumented workers, even in California? If this cuts the burden of federal taxes in blue states by a significant amount, why do blue states still pay way more in federal taxes than red states? Blue states already pay much more than red states, but you want them to pay even MORE than more? How the hell does that work in your mind?
What expensive things are you talking about, that blue states vote for, that affect red states? Schools? Roads? Hospitals? The military? You'll have to be more specific.
Thanks, I now have a better understanding of the specific conservative insanity that created the GOP tax scam.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Saturday January 13 2018, @07:04PM (3 children)
We're not speaking of minor increases here.
To give an example of how deceptive the assertion of the last sentence is, consider the case of Puerto Rico. They are indeed "slightly positive" after minimum wage was increased (over the period 1974 to 1983) to match US mainland minimum wage. But that happened by about 2-3 million Puerto Ricans moving off the island between 1980 and present to places with higher wages. That has resulted in two effects that are ignored in the studies above: cost of living and increased migration.
The great unanswered question here is what does a lower demand for labor look like? People aren't just going to stop working. They'll move, they'll accept lower pay relative to their costs, accept workplaces with more difficult conditions, etc. And that's what we see. Much has already been written of the decline in wages+benefits relative to productivity in the US. Much has been written of the "greed" of employers. Much has been written about living wages and the people who don't receive that arbitrary threshold of income. That's all signs of reduced demand for labor just as one would expect from a half century of policies that make US labor more expensive.
Yes. Next question.
Then don't pay those employees, if you don't like it. The policies create the (alleged) problem. But really what problem is there here? You wanted to support these employees. And that had the effect of supporting this company's profits. It's working as intended.
Or we could look at what works. Your angst is the result of half a century of supposedly helping out the US worker. Destroying jobs and forcing people into high cost of living areas is not fixing the problem.
Meanwhile, I predict Fresno [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Sunday January 14 2018, @02:04AM (2 children)
It's my understanding that we've basically been leeching off Puerto Rico for decades without doing any real reinvestment to build them up. That's why they are having major infrastructure problems now. Because they aren't a state and we've never treated them like one.
Yet you have no answer for how America doesn't turn into a 3rd world shithole if we don't pay people enough to be simultaneously employed and housed and fed. Or perhaps you're fine with that happening.
Wow. Now that's integrity. But will you go so far as to admit you believe "poor people" to be genetically inferior? You feel it in your bones, don't you? I'll bet you even wish you could have Bill Gates' genetically superior baby.
Don't pay... Oh, you mean don't provide welfare checks so people can feed their children while working at Walmart. What reveals your intellectual dishonesty most clearly is how you continue to shy away from acknowledging that these corporations we're talking about are making record profits and therefore have no reason not to pay their employees a reasonable wage. Record. Profits. Not revenue. Profits.
High cost of living areas are created by the fact that we don't place any limits on the upper end of income levels and the limitations we place on developing new housing, not by having a reasonable minimum wage.
Guess we'll just see about Fresno.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Sunday January 14 2018, @04:56AM (1 child)
And yet we have:
In other words, Puerto Rico receives more in net benefits per capita from the federal government than two thirds of the states. If spending at levels comparable to far wealthier states is not reinvestment, then what is?
I certainly do have an answer here. Get out the way of employers. One of the most obvious things about an economy is that just because you have a need, doesn't mean that you have a means to fulfill that need. You need the infrastructure in place. For example, most people have a need to not die. But we don't have any sort of infrastructure that would allow us to radically extend our lifespans beyond the usual range. No matter how much one could pontificate about the importance of not dying, it's not going to matter in today's world.
Same goes for space colonization. One can decide that humanity living off of Earth is the most important thing ever, but mere money isn't going to make that happen. We'll need to build all kinds of Earth and space-side infrastructure to make that happen down the road.
At least with your above paragraph, we have the means to do so. But it involves maintaining infrastructure for employing people gainfully. The key part of that infrastructure are employers. Without them, it's just as impossible as having your 200th birthday, or living on Mars would be without the corresponding medical or space-side infrastructure. I'm tired of people telling me what they want, without offering a way to get that (or worse proposing all sorts of road blocks to getting the very thing they claim to want). Thus, my usual response that you don't actually deserve this thing any more than you deserve that 200th birthday or that Mars bungalow. And if you're not going to try to get it with approaches that actually work, then of course, you won't get it. Economics like most of reality doesn't go away merely because you can't be bothered to think rationally.
Your race-baiting is noted.
There's no problem here. Subsidize the companies that employ these people and there is no problem. But you can't have that. Envy is your downfall.
Of course, I already explained how that is incorrect. A reasonable minimum wage in San Jose is not a reasonable minimum wage in Fresno or Puerto Rico.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 14 2018, @05:02AM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @07:21PM (1 child)
This is why I want the south to succeed. Whole gulf coast. So they will be forced to live this bullshit without taxes from the blue areas. The south is a hidden welfare state. And the idiots who support it dumb enough to fall year after year for changing Fox News propaganda.
The south is a cancer. Let them feed of each other.
Please Texas. Succeed like you pretend (manly like) to want. But in reality you like you hidden rural welfare system.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday January 13 2018, @11:13PM
Gods, yes. The entire South. They won the fucking civil war; they made us keep them. They make all this noise about seceding? Well they can put their money where their toothless sister-screwing mouths are and get the fuck out. They'll be a basket case inside of 6 months, and then we can conquer them and *properly* reconstruct them like what should have been done in the first place. Or maybe just burn the entire place to the ground.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @11:53PM (1 child)
khallow is basically a medieval feudalist. He doesn't call them kings, dukes, barons, knights and lords, but his attitude towards the rich is exactly that of a peasant who truly believes that god mandated their stations in life. It is an honor just to serve them, and the scraps from their table are more than a peasant deserves.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday January 21 2018, @08:32PM
It's called being thankful. It's called GRATITUDE. You should try it!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @09:39AM (4 children)
A lot of that seems obvious. That doesn't make it true. Those arguments give us modern Venezuela, with a population that is literally starving. Failure to understand basic economics has killed well over a hundred million people in the past century.
You talk of minimum wage being "a career wage for employees of all ages and skill levels". If I were satisfied with that wage, which would be the case if it were much higher, then I might choose a different career. I could put my high-skill valuable profession aside for something that would help me lose weight. Instead of hacking all day, I could be a gym teacher. This kind of decision, replicated millions of times over, would crash our economy.
My son has a minimum wage job at Ace Hardware. He got it at age 14 so that he would come to understand a work environment, get a reference, and gain a better understanding of why he must do well in school. The money is a bonus. Your ideas would deny all that to him, because he wasn't worth a high wage.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @11:11AM (1 child)
> My son has a minimum wage job at Ace Hardware. He got it at age 14 so that he would come to understand a work environment, get a reference, and gain a better understanding of why he must do well in school. The money is a bonus. Your ideas would deny all that to him, because he wasn't worth a high wage.
That works for a 14 year old, but try the argument on a 35 year old single mother of two or whatever. Times change, and unlike in the 80s, most minimum wage jobs are no longer occupied by teenagers trying to get some work experience and pocket money.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @06:39PM
The 14-year-old needs to job. It helps train him for a productive future.
The 35-year-old single mother of two is already a failure. She shouldn't be taking jobs from children.
I think "single mother" is part of the problem. A mother should be supported by her husband, the father of 100% of her children. Anything else is fucked up. Abandoning the traditional family is a huge source of poverty.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RedBear on Saturday January 13 2018, @12:23PM
Venezuela? What?
You seem to be imagining a scenario in which the minimum wage just keeps uncontrollably climbing until it rivals wages for specialized jobs. Yet that is not what anyone actually wants. The $15 people are asking for is just a realignment of the minimum wage with the buying power it had decades ago when it was $2 in the '60s, or $5 in the '80s. Nobody wants the minimum wage right now to be $50/hr (at least not until 2075 or so when that might make sense), nor has anyone ever requested a minimum wage of $100,000/hr as they hyperbolically talked about on Faux Noose one day a few years ago. The fear so many conservatives seem to have that a $15 minimum wage by 2020 or 2025 will collapse the economy is in my opinion nonsensical. If you're getting anywhere close to $15 for a specialization like programming, yeah, we have a problem.
As to the other thing, I don't believe that any person doing the same job as someone else should be paid a drastically lower wage. If you work, you should get paid. Period. What you aren't remembering clearly is that the same job you might have had as a teen would have given you much more relative buying power. I think teaching your children that you should be forced to rely on a corporation "doing you a favor" by employing you is a terrible idea. The favors go both ways. You work for them and help them make money, and they share the wealth in a reasonable manner. I think your son is worth a reasonable wage that might give him a chance to build up some savings, buy a car, find a place to live, get more education and in general find his own path in the world as soon as he graduates. A job at $7.55 ain't gonna cut it.
You're also assuming that the people above him at Ace are making much more. In all too many areas, that isn't true. People of all ages in our workforce have been stuck in dead-end jobs at minimum wage for years. Do you want your son to still be making that same minimal "starter" wage five years from now? Because that's what's happened to millions of workers in this country, as their employers are in turn making record profits. If you don't think there's something wrong with that, well...
Let me see if I can say this even more clearly. Corporations in America, in recent decades, have taken to abusing the minimum wage simply because they can. People all over America are stuck in jobs where nobody ever gets a raise and nobody ever gets promoted no matter how good they are at their job. They can keep people in those jobs because so many other companies are doing the same thing. And inflation gives them all a pay cut every year. It's time for the backward slide to stop. That's all that is being fought for here. The idea that this will turn us into Venezuela is silly. Besides, Venezuela is collapsing because of bizarre artificial controls on trade, from what I understand.
Imagine for a second that you had to try and support your family by working at your son's job. That's exactly what millions of Americans are doing, quite literally.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 14 2018, @02:51AM
OMG Socialism! Hitler! Stalin! Mao! Pol Pot! Venezuela!