The Glade 4.0

I was reading about Seattle's plan to raise their minimum wage to $15 by 2021, and came across this article saying that after San Jose raised their minimum wage to $10 that things are looking pretty rosy.....I thought raising the minimum wage to $15 would be a recipe for economic disaster and lead to major lay-offs and implementation of computerized replacements for the bottom rung, but maybe I'm wrong?


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/02/11/1276860/-What-happened-when-San-Jose-CA-raised-the-minimum-wage#

_________________
"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

Turns out when people get paid more that they spend more and everyone kind of wins. Neat how that works out.

Looks that way, doesn't it?

_________________
"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

If they raised minimum wage to $15, would I get a corresponding bump in my salary to offset that I'm now just making a bit over minimum wage as opposed to a bit more than double it?

_________________

Holy shitsnacks!

You'd have to negotiate that with your employer. Fortunately that isn't the city's concern. Unless you work for the city, but then it's still on you to negotiate.

Though I don't see why it would matter. You don't get paid what you get paid now because it puts you a certain amount above minimum wage.

No he gets paid more because he has skills. Paying people who do not have any skills more money disincentives acquiring those skills. Why go to college and start at $20 an hour if you can skip the debt and hard-work and just flip burgers at McDonald's for $15? #economics

_________________

He gets paid what he negotiates. No more, no less. The baseline has nothing to do with that. What makes you think you'd only be able to get $20 with an education if the baseline is $15?

Going to college for 33% more income doesn't sound like a bad deal, anyway.

Going to college, incurring tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt, getting certifications in a skilled field, or work for min wage for about the same wage.

Why is an unskilled entry level clerical position worth $15/hr? Why is an unskilled fast food employee worth $15 an hour?

If those are worth $15 an hour according to the government, my labor, currently set at about double minimum wage, should be worth about $30 an hour then.

_________________

Holy shitsnacks!

Maybe you are worth $30 an hour. Prove it to your boss, though. He or she doesn't give a **** about your student loan debt.

Inflation demands that minimum wage must increase eventually. If it didn't, it wouldn't be worth those people working at all and they'd be even more of a "drain" on society.

If the min wage goes up to $15 then my high skill high stress job just becomes pointless unless I get a 210% percent raise to. Might as well sling burgers. Less stress, nearly same pay.

_________________
I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Then go for it! I might join you, haha!

_________________
"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

It's actually worse than that, Rorinthas. Due to inflationary pressures based on the lower class having more available spending money, your effective spending power will end up dropping more than the minimum wage earners gained.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Other than the military, what kind of high skill high stress job only pays $15 an hour? Any "high stress" in that kind of job is almost certainly related to the low pay and financial insecurity that comes with having such a job, and not the job duties themselves. You don't have horrible consequences for failing hanging over you like a doctor, pilot, or engineer does. McDonalds isn't high stress, if it was you wouldn't have teenagers working there.

Assume a can opener!

Raising the minimum wage is a deleterious process. Any single percentage increase in the minimum wage has a corresponding increase in the velocity of money. However, what no one see, is the near immediate increase in volatile goods inflation, which isn't tracked correctly in the numbers the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out.

The minimum wage in 1955 was $1.00 per hour. That works out to roughly $9.95 per hour in today's dollars, higher than the current minimum wage. Today's dollar has, if we want to trust our government, 75% of the purchasing power of a 1955 dollar. That 1955 dollar went further than today's. Every corresponding increase in the minimum wage since 1955, even those in states where it is higher than the Federal standard, has resulted in a near geometric increase in the cost of goods, particularly staple goods like food, gasoline, and other high consumption items. This coupled with every increasing regulatory shifts in the supply curves of various necessary commodities and universal product sectors means that raising the minimum wage ALWAYS hurts more in the long run. It takes about 90 days before an increase in the minimum wage starts generating negative economic impact.

Handling more dollars is not handling more money. Zimbabwe should have taught all of you that.

_________________

He's not saying he only makes the new minimum wage. He's saying that if he used to make 200% minimum wage when it was $9/hr, he should still make 200% of minimum wage when it's $15/hr.

Basically, he's objecting to the purpose of minimum wage - to close the wage gap. He believes that he has earned and works for the privilege of making that much more than unskilled laborers, and by boosting their income, you're cheapening the value of his contribution. He's saying that skilled workers are actually worth that much more than unskilled ones.

There is merit to this argument. If you refuse to admit that some people are just that much more valuable in monetary terms than others, then you're essentially going with a lenninist argument that nobody should have the option of getting ahead.

There's no shades of gray here, it's one or the other. Either the market should set the value of the individual's contribution, or government does. If you do the latter, you obliterate the former.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

It's sort of like education, Xequecal ...

If you make it mandatory for everyone, it has no value.

_________________

In turn, that creates more demand for goods and services, resulting in increases in price of those things (inflation) and demands for yet more increases in minimum wage. Meanwhile, people like Mus who have skills get told they have a "Sense of entitlement" when their purchasing power is devalued.



No it doesn't. It demands we not have a minimum wage in order to avoid inflation as much as possible.



The baseline has everything to do with that. The jobs that demand the absolute least from the worker get the minimum wage, or in the absence of one, whatever is the minimum people are willing to accept for that work. Any other job's pay is, in part, a factor of how much more it's worth than those least valuable jobs.

_________________
"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Addressing the original post, though, minimum wage increases on a small scale may mask the deleterious effects of such an increase by essentially importing the products of cheaper labor elsewhere.

San Diego doesn't seem so bad off because it's essentially importing cheap labor from other cities and states. Mississippi is now, essentially, San Diego's 3rd world sweat shop, so San Diego doesn't see inflation of prices on things manufactured in Mississippi.

Now, if Mississippi raises its minimum wage, too, San Diego starts to see the hurt.

Likewise for surrounding communities and services. If only SD proper raises the minimum wage, the gas prices outside city limits are probably only marginally affected, because their cashiers are still costing only the lower minimum wage. Likewise fast food joints. If the entire metro area raises the minimum wage, your dollar menu becomes $1.25 or more not only in-town, but in the suburbs near your home, too...

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I guess everything is relative. Driving to various locations, scheduling appointments, and having to have technical skill on a variety of devices is more stressful than being behind a lunch counter. At the end of counter shift, you take your apron off and the workload is someone else's problem. With my job, I still have parts to manage and dozen calls on my plate to figure out how and when to get done. Yeah no one's shooting at me, but its certainly more involved, both technically and logistically than food service. So yes If I found out that food service was suddenly paying the same, I'd jump on that boat. If a bunch of people with good work ethic and CS skills follow me, where does that leave all those young folk starting out who haven't developed their soft skills? It further places them out of the workforce.

_________________
I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Do people really believe that operating a cash register is worth $31,200 a year?

Is there any indication what the market rate for entry labor was before the increase?

_________________
"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I'm pretty sure you already know this, but It doesn't really work this way, at least not in large'ish companies who hire generic engineering/tech workers. There are grades, and pay bands, and geographic ranges in play.

You can tell your boss you are worth 100% more than you are making, and he or she might even agree with you. Unfortunately, getting that 100% raise is not going to happen.

This is kind of a self-defeating argument. If you don't get a raise, and don't leave, you aren't worth the raise.

This is correct. It's also part of the problem.

No, you aren't worth the raise. But neither were the unskilled minimum wage workers. They only got the raise because government enforced it.

Value is always relative to something else. If you increase the wages of the unskilled workers without increasing the skilled workers by the same amount, you have just devalued skilled labor, and disincentivized people to gain those skills, or even to outperform their peers since there is less of a reward to do so. People are less able to better themselves, and the economy stagnates.

Compare to a communist system, where people were assigned jobs, there was no advantage to being a doctor instead of a janitor. There was no incentive for people to productive, you cannot better yourself, and the economy collapses.


What we're doing is just a scaled down version of a communist system.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █