Yeah, if each of us bought less of course total output would not need to be as high as if each of us bought more. It's really just simple math.
That was not the case only a few short decades ago. This type of thinking made a resurgence after Milton Friedman taught everyone that its all a matter of choice and we bought it. Companies do have more at stake than the income statement and balance sheet, some get it, some don't.
No but a company should have responsibility to treat it's employees well, consider their impacts upon society, maximize customer satisfaction and be a good citizen of the community. Unfortunately, so many only care about shareholder value which is a product of the movement towards agency which produced greenmail, takeovers, balance sheet rape, incredible CEO and executive compensation schemes, fraud and all the wonderful things we now think is perfectly fine.
The employee is treated better by his employer than by everyone else. The employer is actually giving him money. Nobody else is. If people are concerned with the employee's financial situation, perhaps they should also give him money, just as his employer is already doing.
Not sure what you are saying but you are right, sales = output. Savings takes money out of the system, so does less government spending and so does lower incomes. Since we have higher than desired unemployment, we need more sales. If more sales came from profits then we would have full employment wouldn't we?
Spoken like a happy serf who loves the king...I have no idea how so many of you have become toothless participants in your own abuse by power and money but it sure seems like you enjoy getting reamed. Perhaps that is why so many on the right are so fixated on gay sex.
I'm agreeing with your earlier statement that if we were to reduce spending by purchasing less things then less things would be produced, lowering GDP. This doesn't seem to be problematic because if we are spending less we oviously want less. We also require less money. It all equals out in the end.
It would seem to me that if you considered your current employment to be the equivalent of "getting reamed" that you would quit your job and start your own business. That's always an option. That way, instead of having one boss that you hate you could have hundreds or thousands of bosses that you love.
So instead of having fair and decent wages by employers, your advice is to either take it, like it or go on your own. We cannot assume that millions upon millions will start new businesses so we are left with what to do about the first group, those that have to bear it. if this group was small, one might be callous enough to ignore them and go about ones business much like all of us do when we see a homeless person. But when data suggests that for millions upon millions of us incomes have been stagnant or dropping for decades caused by economic policies that we control, one should assume that correlation means causation. I say this because prior to Saint Ronnie, the income distribution was very fair to the majority of us. Post Ronnie, it did exactly what he wanted it to do, make us poor and the rich richer.
My point is that you are picking on the one person that is actually helping the employee. Everyone else refused to hire him, and the one guy who decides to hire him and pay him is now the villain. Until you step up and hire people for a wage you consider fair, I'll take all your complaining with a grain of salt. You (*)(*)(*)(*)(*) at the one the one guy who is actually giving this employee money and you say he's not givin enough. Meanwhile you give nothing at all.
Lets move outside minimum wage jobs. The average salary for skilled workers had been stuck at 50k for over 25 years while the value of the dollar has been cut in half. This means that prices for products and services has doubled in that timeframe, except wages have remained the same. If someone was getting paid 50k to do something back in the 90s they should now be getting paid 100k, but they're not. Why is that? Greed. It's simple. The earnings of top earners has increase about 300% over that timeframe while the 90% has been paid the same. Not only that but you're failing to see the economic issues with this low pay. Out recession recovery took so long and was so weak because the lower and middle class (which has been hollowed out) has pretty low buying power. When people at factories were making 40-50k a year and everyone had decent buying power out economy was growing quickly. You also fail to realize that 34% of our economy consists of low wage jobs. Having more skills is no gauruntee, couple that with a $400 a month student loan payment and you've got college graduates who can't even afford to move out of their parents house. Something's got to change and conservative ideology fails to address the problem. Not only that but how do you expect people to make it through college if they're starting out on the bottom income? Right now I'm getting ready to start college, my parents are poor, despite my father having a masters degree in a marketable skill set, he has failed to find gainful employment, so I'm working 25-45 hours a week just so I can afford food and transportation, taking full time classes and working this many hours is possibly going to cause my grades to suffer. I already dropped out of school once, know why? Because I wasn't able to study and work enough hours to support myself and I didn't have wealthy parents to provide it all for me and I was getting behind on classes because I didn't have enough time to study, and my job kept repeatedly scheduling me on class days because there was no "gauruntee" they could give me the days off. If I was making $15 an hour I could have worked part time, had money for food and transportation etc. and been fine, but nope, I was making $7.35 an hour working 34 hours a week and bringing home less then 800 a month after taxes. I also dropped out because the first half of my degree was at a local community college, the second half was out of town, too far to drive, and even transferring my job I wouldn't have made enough to get an apartment let alone I didn't have access to enough student loans to cover the second half of my degree so there's no way I could've done it anyways. How do you not see a problem here? There is a reason those born to a particular economic class generally die in that class and despite your conservative fiends claiming its simply put of laziness that's not true at all. The rest of the developed world has decent mobility while America lags far behind....for a reason.
I don't see how you blame the one person who was actually willing to pay you $7.35 an hour for your ills when everyone else was only prepared to pay you $0.00 an hour. If anything, I would think that you would thank them for being the only ones who would actually shell out and give you money when nobody else would. The fact that you have no value to offer is not anyone's problem but yours. And as I said before, if you are concerned about the poor, give them the money you think they deserve. But that's not their employer's problem. In fact, the employer is the only one doing anything other than (*)(*)(*)(*)(*) about it. The employer is actually giving the guy money. Everyone else is giving the guy $0.00.
The problem of low wages is at the macroeconomic level, not at the microeconomic level of employer and employee. The minimum wage has declined more than 40% since 1970 in real terms, with ever increasing government spending for low wage worker income support making up much of the difference. The result is that the entire wage curve has been depressed to the point where half of the workers in the US are exempt from the income tax and half of them receive substantial direct payments from the government in the form of Earned Income Tax Credits. The US decided that increasing government spending to subsidize low wage employers is better than maintaining the minimum wage, and the entire wage curve, at the rate of inflation. The minimum wage sets the bottom point of the entire wage curve, by keeping the minimum wage artificially low the government has managed to keep growth in wages below the inflation rate for forty years, which is why the median income is no longer high enough to generate income tax liability and why median income earners are unable to qualify for a low interest mortgage or car loan.
Technically this relates to contract law but contract law nullifies any contract where coercion exists and there is extensive coercion in the employment contract. In virtually all low paying jobs the person is forced (i.e subjected to coercion) to accept wages because if they don't they can't pay their bills. Very few Americans can refuse to accept employment because the wages are too low for them to live on. The "labor market" itself creates coercion in the employment contract and that coercion violates the principles of contract law.
This is technically true because the employer's underpayment to the employee must be offset by government welfare assistance to the employee to mitigate the effects of the underpayment. If all employers provided adequate compensation to their employees there would be no necessity for welfare assistance to working Americans. This is a fact that most Republicans can't seem to grasp. If they want to reduce the costs of government welfare to working Americans the best means of accomplishing this is to ensure that the employers provide adequate compensation that removes the necessity for the welfare assistance.
Blacks Law Dictionary: A person is guilty of criminal coercion if, with purpose to unlawfully restrict another's freedom of action to his detriment, he threatens to: (a) commit any criminal offense; or (b) accuse anyone of a criminal offense; or (c) expose any secret tending to subject any person to hatred, contempt, or ridicule, or to impair his credit or business repute; or (d) take or withhold action as an official, or cause an official to take or withhold action. Unless an employer does any of the above, he has not coerced the employee.
This is a two sides argument with a conclusion that's not easy to solve. Lots of businesses will do fine with a higher min wage, lots wont. I know for a fact (by actually seeing the numbers) the majority of fast food restaurants cannot afford to pay $15 an hour without a business model alteration that is harmful to employees. The other problem with welfare is its entirely possible that if used excessively it could artificially keep wages low. Many employers have raised their pay over the years. Most retail starts out between $8-$9 dollars and Walmart just recently decided to make a jump to $10 by next year. Several other retailers have increased wages as well because as the economy has recovered people are quitting for better paying jobs. If the market can sort itself out wages could rise all by themselves. It will take a combination of skilled employees quitting for better paying jobs and unskilled employees quitting for better paying jobs. For example, I recently quit working a job that paid $7.25 an hour for one that pays $10.25 an hour. Now that other companies are boosting wages other low skilled workers will be doing the same introducingarket competitiveness, something that's been nonexistent during the recession. Things like EITC and food stamps are all great and I think EITC should be expanded, but like I said you've got to be careful otherwise you make it easy to artificially supress wages. Low wage workers also need to quit applying for fast food if they think it pays too little. Practically every retail establishment pays higher wages. People also have to realize theres just not a lot of money in fast food and retail. The only reason these big chains turn so much profit is because they have hundreds or even thousands of stores, the profitability of a single store operating on the same model is pretty low. I used to work for an IGA and knew the owner personally, barely a middle class guy and he eventually dumped the place because he just wasn't getting enough out of it, and he had a fault steady stream of customers. Walmart is really the only exception and that's simply because of their large buying power and ultra cheap business model.
The EITC should be eliminated and replaced with a higher minimum wage. If the minimum wage is artificially low, which it is because of EITC and other welfare spending, then the next wage tier is also artificially low etc, etc all the way up to and beyond the median wage. If the minimum wage of 1970 had been indexed to inflation it would be over $18 an hour now and the median wage would be closer to $80,000 a year instead of $50,000. Low wage employers are parasites, completely dependent on government welfare for their profits. They deserve to go out of business if an increase in the minimum wage makes them unprofitable. I am not interested in my tax money buying the Mercedes the owner of the local McDonalds or Dunkin Donuts franchises drives. If he cannot pay his employees a decent wage he should be gone so other businesses that will pay their workers decently do not have to compete with his taxpayer subsidized prices. I will gladly pay another dollar for a burger if I knew the person handing it to me was making enough to live on without my tax dollars subsidizing them, their job, or their employer.
Not true. It was only worth $9.46 if adjusted for inflation. A large amount of people working in various retail trades make between $8-$12 an hour. Right now I currently make $10.24, so even without a min wage increase, my pay has kept up with inflation. Whodda thunk? Cost of living vs minimum wage is no different, and even slightly better now. A cheapo apartment back in the 70s averaged $100 a months, a worker being paid the minimum wage of $1.60 would have made 277 a month, things like food are cheaper now then in the 70s. Right now i could work minimum wage and make $1260 a month at 40 hours, and find a crappy apartment for about $580 a month, so in some ways i have more purchasing power, things have gotten much cheaper and people making min. wage can buy more goods today then before. Back then though, there were plenty of unskilled gainful jobs to go around, that's the difference. There's a whole lot of reasons median salary hasn't budged since the 90's, and a big portion of it is because of recessions and high unemployment. Once the unemployment drops more and more (which it hs been) salaries will increase, there has also been a slight increase now even.
We're not addressing criminal coercion but instead coercion in a contract. http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/contract-coercion.html A person that must work for a living or become homeless, possibly even starving to death, is being coereced into accepting employment "at any wage" even if that wage is below what it costs for them to survive over the long term. We no longer live in the natural state where a person can go out into the wilderness to provide for themselves. The vast majority lack the knowledge and skills required for self-employment and in all cases our society relies on commerce making "employment" a mandatory condition for the person even if self-employment is considered. To quote Bob Dylan, "You’re gonna have to serve somebody." People no longer have a choice when it comes to either working for the wages offered or not working at all. For the vast majority that can't afford to say "No" to an employment offer they're forced to accept the wages for the job offered regardless of what those wages are. If the choice is "work for $5/hr" or "go hungry" they're forced (coerced) to accept the $5/hr job. Only if the person is not forced into accepting the job at the wages offered is there no coercion in the employment contract and few, especially the poor, cannot afford to say "no" to the job offer.
False on both counts but it does touch on a truth. The business model (i.e. business plan) must be one that accomodates the higher compensation. There is nothing preventing a successful business plan from accomodating the higher compensation without adversely affecting the employees, the customers, or the enterprise. The problem, often noted by the Small Business Adminstration (SBA), is that few enterpises even have a business plan much less a successful business plan. The high rate of new business start-up failures (4 out of 5 new businesses fail in the first five years) is generally attributed to the lack of a viable business plan. This fact of business is applicable to all businesses including fast food restaurants. Anecdotally I always like to use Dick's Drive-in here in the Seattle area. Locally owned Dick's provides far superior compensation (wages and benefits) when compared to national chains like McDonalds and it will easily be able to incorporate the future minimum wage increases to $15/hr mandated for Seattle businesses that are a phased implemention by 2021. Dick's current employment wages and benefits are in the link provided below. http://www.ddir.com/employment On a subjective note Dick's serves the best damn hamburger in the Seattle area and is well known for that.
A practical minimum would simply reserve labor at the rock bottom cost of a form of minimum wage and also function as a social safety net that doesn't increase any regulatory burden on the private sector.
Let me put this another way. Let's say a young man graduates high school and now must decide how he is going to make his living. Who exactly is coercing him?
