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Look at working conditions in the 19th century. Child labor, 14 hour workdays and pay were the norm back then.
without a minimum wage law, would $2 an hour and no benefits be the norm?
Look at working conditions in the 19th century. Child labor, 14 hour workdays and pay were the norm back then.
The US Has Lowest Minimum Wage and Most Young People Without Jobs Among Wealthiest Countries
The minimum wage in the country right now, at $7.25 an hour, is about $3 an hour--more than $3 an hour below what it actually was in 1968 in this country. In 1968 in this country, the minimum wage, after we properly adjust for inflation, was $10.65 an hour. That means in 1968--let's take a young girl in Texas walking into her job at McDonald's on the first day. Legally she would have to have been paid $10.65 an hour. That's in 1968. So the proposal by Congressman Alan Grayson is basically just to bring the United States minimum wage today back to where it was in 1968.Now, on top of that, if you allow for the fact that the economy's productivity has grown, which of course it has, which means that we can do things more efficiently, the economy's labor productivity has grown by 135 percent since 1968. So if you say that the--take the 1968 federal minimum wage and adjust for inflation and adjust for productivity, if you bumped up the minimum wage each time average worker productivity went up as well, the minimum wage today, the minimum wage today should be $25 an hour. So if we could afford a $10.65 minimum wage in 1968, we can easily afford a $10.50 minimum wage today.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?...&jumival=10563
The reason Kock Bros, ALEC, US CoC, etc want to lower/abolish the minimum wage is that employers could pay less, make more profits, and "externalize" their labor costs to taxpayers paying for public assistance.
How to Move Millions into the Middle Class
President Obama should issue an executive order to guarantee a living wage for millions of workers employed by federal contractors.
In the 1930s, and again in the 1960s, the federal government helped raise wages for workers. Congress passed laws and presidents issued executive orders that required businesses with federal contracts to pay their workers their industry’s prevailing wage. That meant better pay.
Those laws are now outdated. They only cover one out of five federally funded private-sector workers. Even for those workers still covered, wage rates can be little higher than the federal minimum. According to a recent study by the think tank Demos, the federal government now funds over two million jobs paying under $12 per hour — more than Walmart and McDonald’s combined — in such industries as food, apparel, trucking, and home health care.
http://otherwords.org/how-to-move-mi...-middle-class/
But I thought all your beloved regulations were supposed to help us avoid that?
raising the minimum wage to $15/hour would help, but Repugs do and will block any such regulation.But I thought all your beloved regulations were supposed to help us avoid that?
faulty logic.
The productivity of the average minimum wage worker hasn't increased by 135% since 1968. On the contrary, the average 2013 minimum wage worker is probably LESS productive than the 1968 worker.
so you'd rather have min wage workers on $7.25/hour, or less, and let taxpayers' public assistance give them enough to live on?
I didn't say that head. I said you were posting crap logic as usual.
what I said is what we have now, eg, with Walmart and all the low-wage employers.
So what do you propose for a minimum wage, if you even believe in one, o mighty social engineer?
Low wages are just a way to say, "hey buddy, step up your game".
maybe. It's much more productive to hire twice as many workers that do 7hr shifts.
Child labor was a holdover from the agricultural era that the 19th century just moved out of, but the affluence that capitalism brought allowed for parents to look at schooling as a better investment.
If you were to introduce child labor these days, businesses would still not hire out of public boycott or pressure or out of the fact that children are more likely to get hurt and that would amount to a heavy lawsuit. It's much cheaper to hire illegals and they are way less brittle.
anyway the whole let's look at the 19th century to gauge how labor standards would be in a freer market is a faulty way of looking at the way a true labor market would look like today if we advanced towards that era. It is void of context of the fact that if you had a society in which child labor was necessary because of the rural and aggie lifestyle, in which 14hr days was the norm, then in a transition to an industrial age would take awhile for those norms to phase out. It's not as if you have technological improvement that old traditions die overnight, it's a gradual process.
"If you were to introduce child labor these days"
which is exactly what some Repug congress assholes want to do, repeal the child labor laws, and probably repeal any regs that require school attendance.
name ONE that advocates for not making school mandatory. Just ONE.
More Bou
per par
based on recent Repug/tea bagger drift, which includes ALEC destroying public k-12 by privatizing it, my prediction is reasonable.
lol prediction. Your statement was not a prediction.
Nevermind the asinine juxtaposition of exactly and probably.
You can't make a case so you resort to buzzwords.
buzzwords? which ones zipped right over your head?
keep up with the semantic, and grammar talk to avoid discussing the isssue.
TB
buzzword alert: GFY
keep up with the bull you can't back up.
lol simpleton
The only Repug who comes to mind as advocating for the repealing of child labor laws is Noot, and nobody takes him seriously anyway
Point is that laissez faire has never been good for the common man.
Man's state of nature as being a desirable has no empirical basis. Quite the contrary.
You can theorycraft all you like but there is zero empirical basis from any era. Again, quite the contrary.
The commonality was the motive for the use of unsafe and usurious work conditions and the lengths people are willing to go in any era to achieve said motives when left to their own devices. The elite barely give a damn about social norms and don't follow them as it is. Never have for that matter.
If you are truly laissez faire I hope that you are wanting to remove all of the liability protections that firms are legislated as well.
This is not true. Child labor in vietnam dropped by 30 percent between 1993 -97 because of a rise of GDP.
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