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And with every succeeding generation since the "Happy Days", we've fallen further from our perch as the world leader.
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we've fallen quite a bit behind in income mobility and inequality, yes.
Our first world poverty is still a standard of living greater than most of the world.
Also, proportionate correlation is something we don't understand. It's not coincidence we're the only 1st world country with a population over 130 million.
depends on your criteria for what cons utes a 1st world country
Sorry you're having issues hiring but no one is making $40K a year from unemployment so I don't think that's your problem.
A big factor for admin jobs in that salary range is mothers of young children have to decide if it's worth taking a job where the entire salary is going to day care. Your applicant pool is smaller because of it.
or not, depending. this is the USA
tanstaafl unless you're already rich.
I don't know how many of you guys actually talk to people working minimum-wage jobs, but most of the ones I talk to actually like what they do. What they don't like is all the bull that goes with it. So many jobs have been metricized. So now it's not just being a cashier and meeting people while ringing up their purchase. It's making sure you're ringing up so many people an hour or pushing so many credit cards or saying the specific catch phrases or running around stocking the front end and so on. We are way better at "efficiently using man hours" than we used to be, and that leads to a bull amount of extra pressure and physical strain.
Like back in the forever-ago, I used to work at Victoria's Secret. Each box we'd get off the truck would have a time written on it with black marker. That represented the aggregate fastest times someone had stocked the included items. It wasn't on there to be a record you were trying to hit. They'd take that fastest time, call it the maximum time and then discipline you if you didn't hit it. The standard at home depot to get a bonus was to sell more each day than that store sold on that day the year before. Many of these jobs have a culture of pushing their people to work faster, harder, to take fewer breaks, spend less time with each customer and so on. That's miserable, and it's ing unnecessary, because we produce more and sell more than we have at any point in human history. We don't NEED to work as hard as we do. We used to get paid more for less work. Now, you have people working 60 hours wading through bull just to make ends meet, and because they work less than 32 hours at any individual job, they don't get benefits, since we basically let companies weasel out of the social programs workers in 1965 could rely on.
And don't even get me started on sub-contracting.
It's no wonder at all why someone would consider minimum wage jobs to be ty when their own bosses treat the jobs as disposable. If a job at McDonald's was for 40 hours a week, at a wage where folks could just do that one job and be able to afford their essentials and some savings while also getting insurance, leave and retirement options, no one would look down on it. But this has nothing to do with the character of modern workers. Jobs are tier now, and folks are starting to really understand how bad things have gotten. I'm sympathetic to the idea that small businesses can't all afford to pay a huge minimum wage. But the solution is for them to apply for some kind of payroll assistance from the government to bridge the gap (think revenue sharing in the NBA), not for their workers to break their bodies and spirits just for the privilege to make enough to be in debt.
I'm also amendable to a regional/situational minimum wage. The federal government already does that with their locality scales. They can look at something similar to figure out how to adjust minimum wage.
wage theft lawsuits are an acceptable cost of doing business for Amazon, nothing more.
That's the flip side to the minimum wage issue. As the value of an employee's compensation rises, so does the value of the production required of the employee in order to sustain the viability of their job. You can't raise the minimum wage without simultaneously raising the minimum production required in order to enter or remain part of the work force.
Then there's the uncomfortable discussion about whether or not the impacts of raising the minimum production required to enter or remain in the work force hits certain demographic groups disproportionally.
Well, I don't think raising the minimum wage is the problem here. If I'm parsing what you're saying correctly, this is inevitable. Now or 10 years down the road.
Might as well accelerate it and face it now than keep on kicking the can down the road and having people continue to fall through the cracks until we can't ignore it anymore.
depends on what percentage of the selling price is the labor cost
MacDonald's CEO said $15/hour would add pennies to Big Mac price
It is inevitable, but in the ideal world we would be able to delay that moment as long as possible while we try to figure out how the we're going to reform our educational system into one that does a dramatically better job of preparing kids to enter the work force.
unless for years we've had increases in production without a proportional increase in wages. if the wages have been artificially too low for some time, then you absolutely should be able to raise them without demanding a further increase in production
That's because McDonalds knows they can offset the cost of paying $15/hr by getting rid of a bunch of workers through the self ordering kiosks and requiring their remaining workers to produce more. You'll have fewer employees who are expected to produce significantly more than before, but they'll be making more money per hour.
There are other factors, but I disagree with the basic argument you seem to be making. Production isn't the issue. Labor is more efficient now than it ever was before. Folks in the 60s had a higher wage controlled for inflation while not being as productive as modern employees. So in that regard, we are certainly producing enough as a society to where we should be able to have a higher minimum wage. The "uncomfortable discussion" that shows up in mainly based on economic assumptions that we've been taking as fact when they're not.
Automation should be making everyone's lives better. The reason why it's not is because we're directly allowing for individual private ownership of automated processes and AIs and allowing owners to trade out human labor for machine labor while pocketing the savings. We don't actually have to do that.
And don't get all Randian by suggesting that captains of industry would just stop making the world a better place if we taxed them more or did not allow them exclusive rights to automated processes. The US government is by far the largest funder of research and development, including AI. These advancements exist in large part because the government throws a ton of money at scientists in a way that a corporation really can't.
I don't think it's an education problem. We're inevitably heading to a breaking point where the workforce just doesn't offer enough jobs for everybody. It's not even low or middle paying jobs, there's robots that do incredibly precise work as well.
If it only would be a matter of re-training, we've done that many times in the past, all the way back to the industrial revolution. I don't think that's what we're facing here though.
The counterargument to that is that the company fiduciary duty is to make more money for shareholders, so 'optimizing' the production vs cost ratio and showing a good result next quarter take priority over how well compensated the employees are.
oh, of course. i'm not suggesting that increasing wages just because they can is going to be the optimal decision for their shareholders. however, plenty of firms pay above market wages so that they can have less turnover, less wasted money training, better morale, etc
To an extent, sure. The challenge specific to most minimum wage positions is that virtually all of them are concentrated in fast food and retail which are low margin industries. The lower the margin, the less room you have to raise wages without impacting productivity requirements or prices to the consumer.
and yet for years those same industries have benefitted from increased production and efficiency without a proportional increase in wages
Oh, I know. I'm pointing out that when we talk about the inevitability of automation, that 'optimization' is what we're looking at.
What I'm positing is that if there's a robot right now that can do your job much more efficiently but it's more expensive than paying you, but that won't be the case in 10 years, then we should really start addressing this thing with you right now, not wait 10 years until you're kicked to the middle of the street with no re-training to do anything else.
There's obviously no interest on the company to do that (it's an added cost for no tangible immediate benefit), and so this then becomes a political/government problem.
This goes as well to what Chinook is saying about companies not really paying a price for 'optimizing'. I don't know what the solution is, but we should definitely be talking about it.
50 year trend of hourly compensation falling vs productivity, fwiw.
Then there's also the whole argument that because automation increased productivity, the rest of the employees are not en led to a raise, since it was the robot that made it happen.
Another prong to this discussion is the dwindling power, if not outright disappearance, of unions as well, which is another can of worms on it's own.
You could be right about the bigger picture, but I do think we have an education problem. I think the skills gap is very real. We don't have nearly enough kids going into the STEM fields or the trades. I'm a hiring manager in one of the engineering fields and pretty much every hire I make is a multiple offer situation.
On the flip side, we've got a bunch of people graduating college with degrees they can't use and our high schools are cranking out way too many kids who aren't qualified to do anything more than work at McDonalds or Walmart.
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