Do you believe in a living wage?

The problem is that to get 40 hours a week employment, they have to have 2 or 3 part time jobs. These jobs also often carry little to no benefits such as health care coverage.

Yep. They have no skills, and no time or money to acquire them.

 

The Corporate State, generally speaking, won't pay a living wage and not enough hours either. They will do anything to prop up their bottom lines. They have no social responsibility. None. Not in this country.

 

You can't legislate value. If a person is choosing to work full time at a job where their contribution isn't worth a living wage to the employer they are no more entitled to a raise than the person who spends his full days staring at clouds.

My thoughts are both people should find more productive ways to spend their full days.



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It's an interesting discussion. I used to be dead-set against MW hikes, but I've changed. Now, I do wish that a 40-hour work week would equal financial independence at a minimal level. We could eliminate welfare for millions of people, leaving it for a very small percentage of people.

It also occurs to me that when we resist the idea of financial independence through full time work, we are taking a de facto position in favor of using tax money to sustain low-income people. You see, one way or the other, people are going to have food, shelter, clothing, and medical care in this country. And if a full time worker can't make enough to pay for that, the rest of us do it for them anyway.

So why not let them work for a modest, minimalist, but financially independent living, and reduce the tax burden on the rest of us who make more than that?

 

The idea is correct but liberals get the details wrong. Making living wages needs to be done in sustainable ways and not by dictating minimum wages.

The two ways to increase wages:
1) Make the country a place that companies want to go to to produce goods and bring their higher earning jobs with them.
2) limit immigration so that unemployment stays low and wage competitivness returns. Currently companies push for more and more immigration so that they don't have to pay the higher wages that Americans would work for.

 

You get what you earn in the human labor marketplace. If you are worth a million bucks, you make a million bucks. If you can't make enough to get by then you'd better start doing something else. It is not up to government to force anyone to pay you more than you are worth. Besides if government jacks up the minimum wage then prices on everything go up fast and absorb it. Nothing new about this, the rich get richer and the poor stay poorer. The only way to get ahead is to know more and be able to do more than other people.

 

Wages in our contemporary societies might not be determined solely by skills anymore. It's like someone else pointed out, they are also dependent on whether there is a large pool of surplus labor. If there are many people with similar skills (doesn't matter what kind. Maybe it's burger-flipping or it could be brain surgery), it will drive wages down.

Are you referring to the logical conclusion of the free market idea, namely the laissez faire type of economies? I will point out to you that if the government didn't intervene, people would be working more than 8-hour days without over-time, there would still be child-labor, and there would be no workers compensation.

Agreed.

However if we don't bump up minimum wages, the businesses will retain more money (in the form of higher bottom-lines). This is still money out there in the circulation. So why doesn't this cause inflation? It's still money, it is just being in a different place (as in, being in the pocket of business-owners instead of the workers').

This is exactly the type of thing I am speaking out against. We the tax-payers should not have to subsidize the workers of mega-corporations, who severely under-pay them.

Also I am honoured that a mod chose to participate in my thread...XD

I absolutely agree with this. For quite a few of the people who are no longer entry-level workers who nevertheless still work at "dead-end", minimum-wage jobs, they very probably can't help it. It is not their fault that they are not smart enough to acquire schooling or new skills. They are willing to and do work, full-time hours even, however the pay is simply not enough. Just because some people are born not as smart as you or I, it does not mean they don't have the right to adequate housing, food, shelter, and maybe even being able to raise kids.

People who work full-time are very different from people who spend all day staring at clouds.

 

Because they would not be working for that living, it would be gifted to them as charity. And instead of asking all of us to collectively provide that charity you are saying the guy who game them a modest way to be productive must provide all of it.

That's not going to work. That employer will need to decide if he can still offer that modest avenue of productivity at the cost of providing the considerable charity. Many won't and those people will then neither receive charity from him nor be able to make that modest contribution.

You can't change a mostly useless activity into a self sustaining one by passing a law. Either it creates that value or it doesn't.



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A mandatory living wage is wrong for lots of reasons. I'll state one. Dictating a "living wage"makes about as much sense as dictating how ones "living wage" is spent or that it is spent wisely. Otherwise you're likely just enriching car dealerships, jewelers, juke joints, drug dealers, prostitutes, casinos, and every business that advertises to get your hard earned money for stuff you don't need before your money ever gets to providing just the basics. Responsibility has to be learned.

 

The guy who works full time at Wall-mart greeting people who enter the store and the guy who works all day counting clouds, produce about the same value.

I value that we find ways to make folks with limited abilities feel included, that we may be able to get some modest value from their efforts. It's good that we do these things.

But we have to admit some folks, even some folks staying busy for a full day, are not producing value equal to what they are consuming. What exists in that gap is the same as what exists in the cloud counters work day.


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It seems to me that the term 'living wage' is so vague as to be undefinable. It is, however, a great talking point for SJWs who are always seeking to find more 'victims' to bolster their ranks of dissension which is their power base.

 

"Living wage" is pretty complicated. Someone could live near me in North Carolina on a $30,000/year income fairly comfortable; that person wouldn't lead an incredibly glamorous lifestyle, but it would be enough to get by. However, that same person likely couldn't live somewhere like Miami making $30,000/year without some sort of government assistance.

Decision making is also a big factor of living wage. You can work 40 hours a week, but if all you're doing is flipping burgers at the fast food join on the corner, then you decide go out and lease a new car because you can swing the monthly payments (although not by much), you're never going to get ahead. There are reasons why some places (such as pawnshops, low-end used car dealerships/repo lots, rent-to-own stores, and advance payday loan centers) are typically only found in poor areas, and that's because those businesses make a living ripping off poor people who do not understand how they are being ripped off and taken advantage of with egregious loan and interest rates.

Really though, you are only limited by yourself and how much you're willing to work. There are welders out there who only make $25,000 a year, and there are welders out there who work their butts off and make $150,000 each year.

 

Learn new skills and advance yourself. Get a part time job or a second job. Take some initiative.

 

Hmm..How so? Aside from food stamps, and reduced/subsidised child care, what welfare programs are you talking about?

Addressing the thread as well at this point.:

Food stamps in my opinion add to the low skilled employees position of bargaining..as now that is not something any employer can dangle over the heads of the low skilled employee pool they are combing through.
Child care is just necessary...It is illegal to bring your children to work, and at about $300 a week per child, employment would be impossible without that assistance.

Healthy, or childless people do not get those benefits, nor should they...Before my son, I could survive on $10 a day easily and was still loving life. I think the living wage argument is mostly applied to family's whom have reached their glass ceiling with no way of breaking through, displaced breadwinners due to automation, unskilled widows/divorce men/woman with children, or disprivliged unskilled young adults whom are against abortion.

Those are the groups whom champion a living wage, and want to just be able to survive doing an honest days work plus some.

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What you produce with the Wal-mart greeter is a consumer, and tax payer.
The cloud counter not so much.

 

I think everyone here knows that..the problem in my opinion is not childless people. They have many options, even the option to live in a box.

 

That must be long form for "mo betta" as in "Big Island..."

 

The work of saying "hi" isn't creating that consumer or tax payer. Wal-mart's charity is. You could get the same effect by giving free money to the cloud counter.

Look I'm not saying charity isn't reasonable or even necessary in a civilized society. But we need to be honest about it. Some convoluted to plan to pass free money to a person isn't producing anything more than a straight forward less expensive way to pass free money to him.

It's just hiding it.



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A living wage is grotesquely subjective and nebulously vague and over-burdening.

http://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/state-minimum-wage-chart.aspx

https://www.zumper.com/blog/2017/02/...february-2017/

Median rent in Toledo for a 1 bedroom: $420

Median rent in Los Angeles for 1 bedroom: $2,000

Minimum wage in Toledo: $8.15

Minimum wage in California: $10.50

It takes 51 hours for a minimum wage worker in Toledo (Ohio) to pay for an apartment, while it takes 190 hours for a minimum wage worker in Los Angeles (California) to pay for an apartment.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/58...983741!6m1!1e1

This is what $430 rents in Toledo.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/46...olC0oQxB0IHDAA

This is what $2,095 rents in Los Angeles

That proves the federal government should get out of the minimum wage business and let the Market set the rates, since the Cost-of-Living varies so greatly across the US.

 

We have to solve how to effectively implement (1) and (2).

1a. abolish the U.S. Dept. of Ed. and move education back to the state and local level. someone in an earlier post also mentioned adopting an military style approach to assessing individual gifts, talents, and aptitude. Aligning resources with requirements goes a long way toward efficient use of resources
1b. fix the tax code where wage earners are not punished for earning and put the income on consumption.
1c. lower taxes on business.
1d. lower regulation burden on business.
1e. fix the bloat of government workers who are duplicates through attrition
1f. fix higher ed. so it meed the demand for high-tech and high-science industry needs; there are too many people holding 7-year social degrees already

2a. implement selective immigration program that seeks to lure talent where there are true deficiencies (if you come here, you should contribute: language skills, work, cultural identity, civic responsibilities)
2b. end the import of lower-paid high-tech workers who displace our high-tech workers (same goes with outsourcing to foreign countries)
2c. end the import of low-paid low-skill workers who displace our entry-level workers.

an so on and so forth....

 

No, you wouldn't since Liberals would continuously raise the bar.

People need to learn how to do less with less, even if it means decreasing the Standard of Living and Life-Style.

 

Get the government out of our wallets, paychecks, bedrooms, farms, national parks, doctor's office, schools, ...

 

Wages are based on the Supply & Demand for a given Skill-set within a Geographical Labor Market, and not how it feels.

If you got rid of the $1.3 TRILLION in Welfare Programs, people would be forced to alter their Life-Style and Standard of Living to meet the new normal.

 

And what I'm saying is, that greeter has to get up in the morning, get transportation, take a lunch break, run work related errands, keep up his appearance, clothing, get home, then get prepared for the next day...all that is not free and creates the consumer of someone to leave the house.

The cloud counter getting a check in the mail not so much.

Getting to work and back is what usually dives an economy.

I'm not totally disagreeing..but him having a living wage just being a greeter is not as much charity as you think...

A single person without a job $10 can last a week sometimes.

Someone with a job $10 wont make it through the work day...creating a thriving economy.

 

Wouldn't wages be even lower because without then even more people would be looking for work?