A friend of mine recently posted something about if McDonald's were to double the income of the people that work for them, their menu prices would only change by roughly $0.14, but McDonald's refuses to raise their pay rates, and instead published an "Employee Budget Guide" in which they recommend getting a second job to help pay for some things. And in the end, the weekly spending money that the employee would have for food, clothing, gas, ect. was only $25. That is not enough for people to live on.
Now then, the problem is not minimum wage, because as stated already, the companies would just compensate by raising the prices of their products, thus rending moot the increase of wages.
Instead, we need to take a look at welfare. It should be mandatory that applicants on welfare get tested for any and all illegal substances each month. If you are caught with anything in your system, you lose your benefits. In my area alone, hundreds of people would be forced off of welfare and would have to actually find a job instead of taking the easy rode. And if the applicants cannot provide accurate receipts for the money that is supposed to be used to help them survive, then they should be investigated. You see it a lot on social media sites where people get their welfare checks, and then go out and by new shoes, makeup, jewelry, or other things that they did not need to survive when the old shoes were doing just fine. There are also people that spend the money on drugs, which again is a point for mandatory monthly drug screens for all applicants.
Many people do not understand exactly how much money taxpayers are losing on people who are on welfare not because they require it, but because they are too lazy to walk and find a job. Honestly, it infuriates me to see people spending money that was supposed to help them survive another month while looking for a job on frivolous, wasteful habits and objects. My own cousin is trying to become pregnant so that she can get on welfare. Why? Because she doesn't want to get a job. She had gotten a large settlement from a lawsuit recently, and within 5 days went from $10,000 to just $500. It disgusts me that she wants a child just so she can continue to be a wasted existence.
Raising minimum wage won't help anything, investigating those on welfare will.
So, you're upset that we're spending too much money on welfare, and your solution is to spend a huge amount of money auditing and drug testing welfare recipients?
It sounds like you're moving the wrong direction there.
A friend of mine recently posted something about if McDonald's were to double the income of the people that work for them, their menu prices would only change by roughly $0.14, but McDonald's refuses to raise their pay rates, and instead published an "Employee Budget Guide" in which they recommend getting a second job to help pay for some things. And in the end, the weekly spending money that the employee would have for food, clothing, gas, ect. was only $25. That is not enough for people to live on.
Now then, the problem is not minimum wage, because as stated already, the companies would just compensate by raising the prices of their products, thus rending moot the increase of wages.
Instead, we need to take a look at welfare. It should be mandatory that applicants on welfare get tested for any and all illegal substances each month. If you are caught with anything in your system, you lose your benefits. In my area alone, hundreds of people would be forced off of welfare and would have to actually find a job instead of taking the easy rode. And if the applicants cannot provide accurate receipts for the money that is supposed to be used to help them survive, then they should be investigated. You see it a lot on social media sites where people get their welfare checks, and then go out and by new shoes, makeup, jewelry, or other things that they did not need to survive when the old shoes were doing just fine. There are also people that spend the money on drugs, which again is a point for mandatory monthly drug screens for all applicants.
Many people do not understand exactly how much money taxpayers are losing on people who are on welfare not because they require it, but because they are too lazy to walk and find a job. Honestly, it infuriates me to see people spending money that was supposed to help them survive another month while looking for a job on frivolous, wasteful habits and objects. My own cousin is trying to become pregnant so that she can get on welfare. Why? Because she doesn't want to get a job. She had gotten a large settlement from a lawsuit recently, and within 5 days went from $10,000 to just $500. It disgusts me that she wants a child just so she can continue to be a wasted existence.
Raising minimum wage won't help anything, investigating those on welfare will.
Average welfare benefit is $170/mo in the United States of America - and for the states that have enacted mandatory drug testing they have ended up paying over ten times what they saved from being able to kick people off.
Similarly Texas and NYC have done house by house investigations of welfare fraud and found themselves spending almost twenty times more than what they saved to do the investigations because fraud is so slight.
It's called chasing windmills. (See Don Quixote)
The only real way to reform welfare is to make it so that it doesn't "trap" people within it - right now if you're on welfare and you try to return to the workforce and fail for whatever reason you're actually going to have reduced benefits (below the $170/mo average!) for the next 6-24 months depending on the rules of the given state regarding returning to work.
Logically if you want people off of welfare, you adjust that to make it painless to return to work - with welfare continuing while you work for the first few months (3 months maybe) then diminishing gradually.
Will it cost more? A bit in the shortrun - but in the longrun you'll have every single motivated person that feels "stuck" on welfare off of the program.
I personally now that I'm disabled use my HR expertise to volunteer to help people in such circumstances groom themselves for a return to work - people that want to, but so many that are afraid to fail because if they do, they know they're going to be worse off than before they tried. I'd say half the people that I start to help end up backing out because of that (likely doesn't help that I make sure they're quite aware of the risk) - and every single one referred to me is someone that's voluntarily looking to return to work and motivated to get themselves on a management track. (usually fast food and the like, nothing lofty in most cases - but do have one huge success story so far that keeps in touch - might have others too though, only a handful keep in touch)
A friend of mine recently posted something about if McDonald's were to double the income of the people that work for them, their menu prices would only change by roughly $0.14, but McDonald's refuses to raise their pay rates, and instead published an "Employee Budget Guide" in which they recommend getting a second job to help pay for some things. And in the end, the weekly spending money that the employee would have for food, clothing, gas, ect. was only $25. That is not enough for people to live on.
Now then, the problem is not minimum wage, because as stated already, the companies would just compensate by raising the prices of their products, thus rending moot the increase of wages.
Instead, we need to take a look at welfare. It should be mandatory that applicants on welfare get tested for any and all illegal substances each month. If you are caught with anything in your system, you lose your benefits. In my area alone, hundreds of people would be forced off of welfare and would have to actually find a job instead of taking the easy rode. And if the applicants cannot provide accurate receipts for the money that is supposed to be used to help them survive, then they should be investigated. You see it a lot on social media sites where people get their welfare checks, and then go out and by new shoes, makeup, jewelry, or other things that they did not need to survive when the old shoes were doing just fine. There are also people that spend the money on drugs, which again is a point for mandatory monthly drug screens for all applicants.
Many people do not understand exactly how much money taxpayers are losing on people who are on welfare not because they require it, but because they are too lazy to walk and find a job. Honestly, it infuriates me to see people spending money that was supposed to help them survive another month while looking for a job on frivolous, wasteful habits and objects. My own cousin is trying to become pregnant so that she can get on welfare. Why? Because she doesn't want to get a job. She had gotten a large settlement from a lawsuit recently, and within 5 days went from $10,000 to just $500. It disgusts me that she wants a child just so she can continue to be a wasted existence.
Raising minimum wage won't help anything, investigating those on welfare will.
So, you're upset that we're spending too much money on welfare, and your solution is to spend a huge amount of money auditing and drug testing welfare recipients?
It sounds like you're moving the wrong direction there.
Standard drug tests cost $20, which is not a huge chunk. In fact, since it is mandatory, the government could remove it right from the welfare check that each participant would receive. If after so long of the results coming back negative, they could then discontinue it for those people. Add into the fact that people on welfare already have to list the welfare aid on their taxes each year, it would not cost much more to have them thoroughly examined. The IRS workers are paid either hourly or on salary, never by commission, so the price on that would not increase.
Given the amount already spent on welfare alone, it is not hard to see how this is a feasible, if not plausible, answer to help cut spending on those that do not do as they should.
Vaclav, could you please post your sources to prove that those with mandatory drug screenings lose more than what they get back from people who have lost their benefits?
"Standard drug tests" are not $20 for a full panel. I ran partial panels on my employees and those ran us $70 a piece (after insurance mind you, we didn't screen uninsured employees) here in MD and didn't cover most hard drugs.
For a "full panel drug test" in Florida they run upwards of $170. And they're not even technically a full panel, since some drugs like bath salts and meth can't be detected under any normal drug testing that's offered last I checked. (And supposedly that's with Scott Walker's connection making the drug testing cheaper than normal with the deal he negotiated with his wife or whatever, mind you)
There are about 4 million people on welfare. You want to spend $80 million a month, or nearly a billion dollars a year to test them for drugs. This doesn't even factor in the administrative costs of analyzing 4 million results every month, administrative costs, court costs for challenges, etc.
In Florida, where they tried this, 2% of welfare recipients had a positive test. There, drug testing lost them a significant amount of money because the savings from kicking those 2% off the program weren't enough to make up for the cost of all the tests.
So what evidence do you have that this would work out any differently elsewhere?
"Standard drug tests" are not $20 for a full panel. I ran partial panels on my employees and those ran us $70 a piece (after insurance mind you, we didn't screen uninsured employees) here in MD and didn't cover most hard drugs.
For a "full panel drug test" in Florida they run upwards of $170. And they're not even technically a full panel, since some drugs like bath salts and meth can't be detected under any normal drug testing that's offered last I checked. (And supposedly that's with Scott Walker's connection making the drug testing cheaper than normal with the deal he negotiated with his wife or whatever, mind you)
I found an article mentioning that they were using $30 tests, and were in fact losing money from it in Florida. However, just because the results were such in one state does not mean it would hold equal to all states. However, I know when I am beaten in this manner, so I will not make any further statements.
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Nothing, I have just gotten back after a long hiatus, and am just now starting to rebuild my collection.
The tests were costing the state $30 and the Fed $140 dollars via Medicaid (remember all welfare recipients qualify for Medicaid) according to an article my bro-in-law was quoting me from a Florida paper a couple weeks ago when I found out about the Scott Walker connection a bit ago. (On this forum IIRC in fact)
He's always been accurate to my knowledge, but being that I didn't see the data firsthand there is room that he may have misled me.
A friend of mine recently posted something about if McDonald's were to double the income of the people that work for them, their menu prices would only change by roughly $0.14, but McDonald's refuses to raise their pay rates, and instead published an "Employee Budget Guide" in which they recommend getting a second job to help pay for some things. And in the end, the weekly spending money that the employee would have for food, clothing, gas, ect. was only $25. That is not enough for people to live on.
I don't think this is correct. they took a lot of their items off the dollar menu the last time minimum wage was increased and people through a fit because they had to pay more.
well when you increase my wages I have to pay then you have to pay more.
I am simply not going to eat my profit margin up to pay wages.
some items increased 20 cents. the double cheeseburger went from 99 cents to 1.20 that is like a 30 cents increase per burger.
or like a 1.25 now they have taken off the menu for the mcdouble (almost the same but they cut out a slice of cheese per burger).
to get it back down to the 99 cent range.
I personally hate the place and will only eat there as a last resort. which means I can't get taco bell.
Wendy's has basically taken almost all of it's items off the 99 cent list. the ones on there are horrible.
many lower income people buy from those menu's. they are not going to pay 8 bucks at mcdonalds or Wendy's.
people are going to have to face the fact that working at these places they just are not going to pay more than what they have to.
forcing them to pay more only hurts their customer base and their employee's.
if people are tired of making 7.50 an hour then go do something so you will be worth more than someone paying you 7.50 an hour.
everyone has had to do it. my first job in 1996 I was making 5.15. my next job after I graduated paid me 11.
I can't say what I make now due to contracts I have signed but it is way more than what I made then. of course I have me 4 year degree and a few months ago passed my ITIL foundations certification.
next year I am going to be a certified trainer.
these things increase my value not only to my current company but to other companies.
I had a guy the other day ask me if I knew anyone hiring. I asked him what he did. he said he was a plumber. which stinks since most of that work is down south.
I told him that it would be difficult here that most of those jobs are more south of me where people are still building.
I said he might want to check with the AC companies around here because they are always busy and the work is usually steady all year.
he went I don't know AC. I said well you might have to expand your job skills but they do use plumbers to run exhaust lines and stuff.
it would be a good thing to learn and it expands your jobs skills, but he didn't seem interested. to bad for him. he will lose out on another opportunity and work simply because he didn't want to look into something different.
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There are about 4 million people on welfare. You want to spend $80 million a month, or nearly a billion dollars a year to test them for drugs. This doesn't even factor in the administrative costs of analyzing 4 million results every month, administrative costs, court costs for challenges, etc.
In Florida, where they tried this, 2% of welfare recipients had a positive test. There, drug testing lost them a significant amount of money because the savings from kicking those 2% off the program weren't enough to make up for the cost of all the tests.
So what evidence do you have that this would work out any differently elsewhere?
They're just conservative bugaboos. The welfare queen and the druggy on welfare aren't enduring because they're accurate pictures of how welfare works, they're enduring because they're catchy ideas. It doesn't matter how many times you disprove them, the ideas stick in people's minds more than the disproofs do.
You want to get people off welfare? Stop subsidizing the profits of corporations like McDonalds and Walmart by paying for the health care (at emergency rates, no less!), food and some clothing/shelter for their workers. Make them do it. Their profit margins are so huge because they're passing a significant chunk of the costs of their businesses off to the rest of us. Not that I have a problem with corporate profits, mind - but make your profits honestly, not by gaming the system to profiteer off the unwillingness of those around you to allow fellow citizens to starve to death or die from lack of access to medical care.
A friend of mine recently posted something about if McDonald's were to double the income of the people that work for them, their menu prices would only change by roughly $0.14, but McDonald's refuses to raise their pay rates, and instead published an "Employee Budget Guide" in which they recommend getting a second job to help pay for some things. And in the end, the weekly spending money that the employee would have for food, clothing, gas, ect. was only $25. That is not enough for people to live on.
It's not just the employee's of McDonald's that are on strike to get paid $15 an hour on minimum wage, the same thing is happening for all employee's across America's fast food industry stretching from Wendy's to Taco Bell and beyond. If nothing about this gets done then the Fast Food Industry will be in serious economic trouble.
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Fun fact on McDonalds. They actually loose money on McDoubles. The vast majority of their menu has stupid low profit margins to the point its amazing they manage to stay open.
The only way they can even stay in buisness is of these few reasons.
1) They routinely pay their employees the lowest possible standard out there and keep the number of their employees at bare minimum.
2) Make sure to keep all employees at below full time hours to prevent any extra costs in the forms of benifits.
3) Often do not pay weekend or 3rd shift bonus.
4) McCafe actually has some decent profit margin while selling incredibly well.
5) They get more business than any other fast food chain period.
So their recipie for sucess is make sub-par food that is just good enough for people to get when they are busy while at the same time paying the very least amount possible to any other expendatures such as labor, food or quality. But they are the chepest and most sucessful of them all.
if people are tired of making 7.50 an hour then go do something so you will be worth more than someone paying you 7.50 an hour.
everyone has had to do it. my first job in 1996 I was making 5.15. my next job after I graduated paid me 11.
So what you're saying is: if you don't have enough money to stay afloat because of your 40+ hour minimum wage job, get an education? Because what you're saying is: "just break out of the circle of poverty".
As for minimum wage jobs: I don't see why Americans have such issues with increasing it. Over here, we have a minimum wage of 11.40 or so dollars an hour. I still think this is a really small amount of money, but then again: I'm getting by on much less (800-ish dollars government student grant/loan and 100 to 150 in parental help). So, it is possible. However, I only have to support myself. If you're paying for one or more children, which many people on minimum wages are, you're going to have a hard time.
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International pricing is really weird too Rodyle don't forget - every time I've done musing about moving internationally every place I've seen actually has incredibly affordable housing compared to the US, but then other things like food are ridiculously overpriced compared to what I'm used to. (Or perhaps the reverse? It's been quite a while - I do know whichever it was that Japan pretty much was the reverse of the norm though)
So what you're saying is: if you don't have enough money to stay afloat because of your 40+ hour minimum wage job, get an education? Because what you're saying is: "just break out of the circle of poverty".
minimum wage =/= living wage. it was never meant to be that and never was that. this is a rumor that was started from i don't know where.
minimum wage was put in place as an accept minimum standard of pay. it is the lowest pay for the least skilled job.
bagging groceries doesn't take a lot of skill hence why they get paid minimum wage. flipping a burger or taking a burger from the belt or whatever system they use to a bun doesn't require that much skill.
running a cashier does take a bit more skill hence cashiers get paid a bit more.
being a lead on shift requires a bit more skill so they get paid more etc ..
if you want more pay then well you have to be able to justify the pay.
if you can't justify the pay then you don't get it. having better jobs skills and a education justifies more pay.
there is a huge unemployment rate among teenagers. in fact it is almost 24%. why? as the pay goes up so do the requirements to get the job.
increasing minimum wage hurt no skilled and entry level workers. why? because in order to justify the pay increase you have to justify the skills.
it is far worse for black teens. their unemployment rate is 41%. this is bad because this means that teens in general will turn to other activities to make money most of which could be illegal.
Over here, we have a minimum wage of 11.40 or so dollars an hour.
yes but it is on a sliding scale yes depending on your age and how many hours you work?
raising minimum wage has impacts on employment whether these people want to believe it or not.
so if a burger flipper wants 15 bucks an hour what does my job as a project support analyst get paid?
my salary has just been greatly devalued. people that are making 15 bucks an hour doing technically challenging work will demand more money than the guy flipping burgers.
otherwise what is the point of getting an education to make more money when the guy bagging your groceries is making as much as you do at more challenging work.
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minimum wage =/= living wage. it was never meant to be that and never was that. this is a rumor that was started from i don't know where.
Where I agree in the beginning, the minimum wage was not meant to be lived off of, things have changed and the economy has gotten worse. Many people rely on those minimum wage jobs to get by. 1996 was almost 20 years ago, and not even you can say things are the same now as to back then. When you have career fast food workers, and older, displaced workers competing with new employees to survive. Maybe minimum wage needs to be adjusted.
Not everyone can do as you suggest for various reasons.
"Standard drug tests" are not $20 for a full panel. I ran partial panels on my employees and those ran us $70 a piece (after insurance mind you, we didn't screen uninsured employees) here in MD and didn't cover most hard drugs.
For a "full panel drug test" in Florida they run upwards of $170. And they're not even technically a full panel, since some drugs like bath salts and meth can't be detected under any normal drug testing that's offered last I checked. (And supposedly that's with Scott Walker's connection making the drug testing cheaper than normal with the deal he negotiated with his wife or whatever, mind you)
This is why I've moved to the position that rather than drug testing everyone and their dog at the expense of the company to only drug test though that will be operating machinery. Does a desk worker really a need drug test? Or do you want the forklift operator who has a taste for liquor to do so?
Sure you get that drunk that mouths off to the big customer, but to be honest I've seen that with people who do pass drug tests. It's just become a customary right of passage to reduce the size of the pull. However, if you're at the hiring stage I really do wonder if it's necessary for everyone and their dog for some companies.
There are 4 things that companies do when faced with floor pay raises.
This is what minimum wage increases are it raises the floor.
1. They eat it out of their profit margin.
2. They cut back on employee and hours
3. raise prices
4. a combination of them all
most companies are not going to take a bite out of their profit margin. this is pretty much a set calculation.
so really they only have a few other choices. cut hours get rid of people and raise prices.
the other issue is that they lower the amount of full time employee's and go with more part timer's.
This is one of the reasons that government shouldn't be setting wages.
Except for rare circumstances, it's very unlikely a business knows the exact amount of revenue generated by its employees.
actually they do. they can track orders and re-orders etc... if i have a shift that is getting 30% re-orders then i am losing money and i need them trained or replaced.
retail stores it is a bit harder to track. same as grocery stores, but they have an idea of the production level of each shift and the people on that shift.
The other problem of raising floor prices is that you devalue higher paying jobs.
so if minimum wage is 8 dollars and now paying 10 dollars. the person that is making 13-15 dollar or even 20 dollars an hour just had their job devalued.
no one is going to give them a 2 dollar raise and they have to deal with the consequences of higher prices.
I do not know if they get food stamps or such though. Is the car new? nope. But they are living with in their means.
that is key. when i first started working i was making 9-10 bucks an hour and i was able to make ends meet. the thing is
you don't need full range cable HBO etc ... you don't need the 30 gig internet.
get a digital box non-cable and a 3 mbit line probably 40 bucks if that a month.
if you have that type of a job you don't need a 300 car payment. used cars here you come.
the cell phone thing is huge. that is 100 bucks a month at least.
The question I often come to though, is that if they're producing a high value shouldn't they get paid more?
Sometimes you also have to look at the business model in general, and the competition over EDLP has become an anathema to low wage workers. It is not so much that the low wages are low, it's that they stay low for years at a time.
The purchasing power decreasing and not keeping up also makes people feel "worthless" and "uninspired" to achieve greater returns or an ownership mentality in a business and their job. In order to identify with the company and brand there has to be career tracks and rewarding difficult labor.
I never quite understood the need for such slim profit margins in the first place, as there are places such as Kroger's or Costco's that pay quite well relative to McDonalds franchisees. The problem with keeping such low pay as well is that others do not raise their bottom floor that much.
A sharp spike in costs does create a cascade effect, but a slow gradual increase relative to inflation as a fixed cost in the business structure creates a different mess. The problem with food service is like a 150% turn over rate with retail at a 65% turn over. So your training costs and uneven quality over time doesn't necessarily lead to greater efficiency gains, and this has been something I have argued for years since I started working.
Give them the "old reliables" and pay them well, while the new guy gets paid minimum wage. Many companies will start a person at a certain wage, do a 3 month evaluation and jack up the wage, while increasing the wage after a 6 or 9 month evaluation and then finally the yearly wage increase. This prepares the amount of money it takes for retraining while giving the person the first year the incentive to keep working hard.
Part of the issue I have with performance based pay is also we tend to have too many overemployed people as well, and we need to shrink some of those top management wages and consultant fees that suck companies dry. Especially with certain companies whenever middle and upper management becomes a civil service.
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Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Minimum wage being a living wage was part of the initial arguments when it was started in the US - you might argue it's been meant to no longer be a living wage, but initially it absolutely was.
When you have career fast food workers, and older, displaced workers competing with new employees to survive. Maybe minimum wage needs to be adjusted.
that is the problem fast food was never meant as a career unless you wanted to get into managment easily or get management experience.
it was meant to learn job skills and move on. guess what the people that learn the skills move on.
same as with my company i started off in operations. the good people in operations move on. i know people that have been operators for years and years and go no where.
Not everyone can do as you suggest for various reasons.
this is just simply not true. anyone can go get some kind of secondary education or training.
there are plenty of programs out there for people to do it.
this is just a cop-out excuse.
Minimum wage being a living wage was part of the initial arguments when it was started in the US - you might argue it's been meant to no longer be a living wage, but initially it absolutely was.
simply not true. minimum wage was part of the job act of like 1930's. it was meant to establish the lowest wage a worker could be paid. since most factories at the time were paying people 5-10 cents an hour at times.
the first minimum wage was 25 cents an hour.
this $10-15 minimum hour wage for no skill jobs is just impossible.
does that mean my job since the skill is so much greater i should be making 6 figures?
what then now 10-15 dollars an hour isn't enough as costs have risen to meet the wage. also you have just un-employed a good deal of people.
since if i am going to pay 10-15 dollars an hour to 1 person the casher (if i don't install automated tellers are going to bag groceries.
i am going to install POS (point of sale) terminals in my restaruant so that people can order themselves, and i just need 1 or 2 people to run food.
as it posted in the article food costs would go up 30% and employment oppertunity would go down 20%.
Give them the "old reliables" and pay them well, while the new guy gets paid minimum wage. Many companies will start a person at a certain wage, do a 3 month evaluation and jack up the wage, while increasing the wage after a 6 or 9 month evaluation and then finally the yearly wage increase. This prepares the amount of money it takes for retraining while giving the person the first year the incentive to keep working hard.
every person i know of that has worked hard at one of those places don't stay at minimum wage long. they move up pretty quick.
companies invest in their good workers.
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this is just simply not true. anyone can go get some kind of secondary education or training.
there are plenty of programs out there for people to do it.
this is just a cop-out excuse.
So that 40 something person who has a mortgage and a family that just got displaced because of whatever reason is suppose to go back to school and not even try for the fast food job to get by?
You need to get off your high horse, its not a cop out or an excuse. People need to do what they need to do to get by and take care of their responsibilities. They just cant tell the kids they are not eating this week because I have to go back to school. You take what is available. It happens more often then you probably wish to believe it does.
this is just simply not true. anyone can go get some kind of secondary education or training.
there are plenty of programs out there for people to do it.
this is just a cop-out excuse.
So that 40 something person who has a mortgage and a family that just got displaced because of whatever reason is suppose to go back to school and not even try for the fast food job to get by?
You need to get off your high horse, its not a cop out or an excuse. People need to do what they need to do to get by and take care of their responsibilities. They just cant tell the kids they are not eating this week because I have to go back to school. You take what is available. It happens more often then you probably wish to believe it does.
More than likely he won't be hired by the fast food joint anyway.
why? he is a net loss as soon as something better comes along he is gone.
i am not on a high horse. if you are stuck making minimum wage then you obviously have no other skills than to be paid minimum wage.
the pay is according to the skill required to do the job.
if you have more skills and job experience then you should be able to find a job that pays more than minimum wage.
entry lvl workers don't have the skills to be paid 10-15 bucks an hour.
nor do the jobs they are doing make it worth 10-15 bucks an hour.
if you want better pay then you are going to have to have the skills that are required for that pay.
i never said anything about him not getting a minimum wage job. so i have no idea where you got that from.
the odds of him getting it are low. most of those places don't want people that have good qualifications.
i know i applied for quite a few of them at one time.
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When you have career fast food workers, and older, displaced workers competing with new employees to survive. Maybe minimum wage needs to be adjusted.
that is the problem fast food was never meant as a career unless you wanted to get into managment easily or get management experience.
it was meant to learn job skills and move on. guess what the people that learn the skills move on.
same as with my company i started off in operations. the good people in operations move on. i know people that have been operators for years and years and go no where.
Not everyone can do as you suggest for various reasons.
this is just simply not true. anyone can go get some kind of secondary education or training.
there are plenty of programs out there for people to do it.
this is just a cop-out excuse.
Minimum wage being a living wage was part of the initial arguments when it was started in the US - you might argue it's been meant to no longer be a living wage, but initially it absolutely was.
simply not true. minimum wage was part of the job act of like 1930's. it was meant to establish the lowest wage a worker could be paid. since most factories at the time were paying people 5-10 cents an hour at times.
the first minimum wage was 25 cents an hour.
this $10-15 minimum hour wage for no skill jobs is just impossible.
does that mean my job since the skill is so much greater i should be making 6 figures?
what then now 10-15 dollars an hour isn't enough as costs have risen to meet the wage. also you have just un-employed a good deal of people.
since if i am going to pay 10-15 dollars an hour to 1 person the casher (if i don't install automated tellers are going to bag groceries.
i am going to install POS (point of sale) terminals in my restaruant so that people can order themselves, and i just need 1 or 2 people to run food.
as it posted in the article food costs would go up 30% and employment oppertunity would go down 20%.
Give them the "old reliables" and pay them well, while the new guy gets paid minimum wage. Many companies will start a person at a certain wage, do a 3 month evaluation and jack up the wage, while increasing the wage after a 6 or 9 month evaluation and then finally the yearly wage increase. This prepares the amount of money it takes for retraining while giving the person the first year the incentive to keep working hard.
every person i know of that has worked hard at one of those places don't stay at minimum wage long. they move up pretty quick.
companies invest in their good workers.
To be honest, some of those jobs are rather labor intensive and complex to do accurately and swiftly necessary to have a high return on investment. We're having another problem that comes from Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management. The basic premise to all scientific management has been to find the fastest worker relative to the best pay, which quite frankly this isn't even practiced at all in the food industry or the retail industry itself.
The problem is that the pay remains low, but the productivity remains stagnant because there is little advancement except for management. Even then the penuriousness for American businesses has left some gluts in quality management controls since the start of the recessions which when you do a cost benefit analysis end up costing more money. This includes supply chains to even sales and the like.
Wal Martization of several industries and flirting with that business model may make for top end wages for an established corporation, but also leads to a vicious cycle in the income trap. This also leads to the high turn over rate, because of the inability to retain workers without having them go management.
The question is how to increase the work load while increasing productivity and efficiency standards, yet to have personalization with standardization. As my mentor once said, "There are best practices and then there is what works." You must consider "conditions on the ground" to gain a full perspective for how everything must work relative to the entire process from beginning to end. This is what made scientific management such a popular point, and other fads such as Kaizen and the like.
However, the basic premises can be read in Jackson's seminal work. You can see these concepts play out in things like Undercover Boss or concepts like Liberation Theology. It's basically looking at things from the base perspective, and then build out. Money worries do not always motivate and creates a Darwinian Cycle that approaches more of a Phyrexian system than a humane economy.
The point of a double bottom line is to keep people out of poverty and struggle. To upbraid the worthy, and fire the unworthy. People talk about innovations and systems, but so little to study them or to apply those studies. This is what happens with leadership studies and theories from actual practice.
Whenever I walk down and ask people about certain things I will find out their personal lives and ask them different things about how they feel about this or that. The reason why I get results over other people is because I stay informed and act on it. It's fun to see people with "leadership theory" puddle around whenever they lack the basic relationships and trust with informants about problems around the workplace.
I hate inefficiency, and when I see overworked people and people sitting on the unemployment line we're losing our competitive edge since people aren't getting the necessary skills for a 21st century economy.
It's because we don't allow them to innovate a damned thing.
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Minimum wage being a living wage was part of the initial arguments when it was started in the US - you might argue it's been meant to no longer be a living wage, but initially it absolutely was.
simply not true. minimum wage was part of the job act of like 1930's. it was meant to establish the lowest wage a worker could be paid. since most factories at the time were paying people 5-10 cents an hour at times.
the first minimum wage was 25 cents an hour.
You do realize that in 1938 the average rent was $15-25/mo, right? (with the high end being high cost areas like NYC) And that food costs were around $15/mo, right? (penny coffee, 15c for a loaf of bread, etc) It wasn't comfortable, but it absolutely was livable to be earning $10/wk at full time in 1938. You could pay for housing and food with a minimum wage job and no external support - barely. [Hell, some people were lucky enough to find similar housing even later down the line - my parents in the 50's paid $30/mo in rent for their first house before any of us kids came along in Canton, Baltimore - we actually walked by the exact house like two years back and there was a for rent sign asking 30 times that now, heh - and at ~$900/mo it actually was reasonable sounding by today's standards....]
Not to mention that the "first minimum wage" wasn't actually $0.25/hr - the initial implementation to the first minimum wage was phased in over a few years (surprisingly hard to verify how many years - sometime between 1938 and 1944) to the laws initial target of $0.40/hr which was also scheduled to increase in the initial law to $0.75/hr on the 10 year anniversary of the bill. (And in 1949 when the $30/wk rate was established, that just barely missed the middle class! It landed in the middle of the THIRD tax bracket - AKA Upper Lower Class) [Note: The phase in is why the US Dept of Labor doesn't really like to quote pre-1955 statistics on it - although the 1955 increase wasn't established in the bill it was established that the minimum wage would be revised on or before 1958 - so it was loosely connected to the bill and where the bill truly "ended"]
The 1938 start point of $0.25/hr was meant to be a slight improvement for workers that didn't hurt employers that much but wasn't the actual targeted value for the bill, which was $0.40/hr. The $0.75/hr was them preparing for inflation every ten years. (Which note, previous to the past few decades it was revised and kept at a similar point against inflation every ten years or less)
Bills need to be looked at by their full content not their phase-in stuff. You should know this by now.
As for "self-checkout" type things - as I've explained to you in the past - and provided articles for - they've been relegated to a consumer convenience for the impatient that doesn't replace actual workers for businesses that use them across the board - the only places that "mandate" their use actually have to dedicate 2-3 humans to cover 6-12 terminals to keep things going at a reasonable clip otherwise you need an impractical amount of floorspace dedicated to setting up transactions that hurts the profitability of the business. Fast food may be an exception, but then again - you're talking about replacing 1-2 people that are on at any given shift at that point - and you'll be losing some degree of customers for it because some people hate having to deal with machines over humans (note: I'm absolutely not one - I've loved this ATM over teller era we're in). But talking like it would cause a great exodus of jobs in the one place it could actually work is ludicrous because in a given shift at a Wendy's or McDonald's or whatever you're talking about 2 workers out of 12-20 on at a given time.
this is just simply not true. anyone can go get some kind of secondary education or training.
there are plenty of programs out there for people to do it.
this is just a cop-out excuse.
So that 40 something person who has a mortgage and a family that just got displaced because of whatever reason is suppose to go back to school and not even try for the fast food job to get by?
You need to get off your high horse, its not a cop out or an excuse. People need to do what they need to do to get by and take care of their responsibilities. They just cant tell the kids they are not eating this week because I have to go back to school. You take what is available. It happens more often then you probably wish to believe it does.
More than likely he won't be hired by the fast food joint anyway.
why? he is a net loss as soon as something better comes along he is gone.
i am not on a high horse. if you are stuck making minimum wage then you obviously have no other skills than to be paid minimum wage.
the pay is according to the skill required to do the job.
if you have more skills and job experience then you should be able to find a job that pays more than minimum wage.
entry lvl workers don't have the skills to be paid 10-15 bucks an hour.
nor do the jobs they are doing make it worth 10-15 bucks an hour.
if you want better pay then you are going to have to have the skills that are required for that pay.
i never said anything about him not getting a minimum wage job. so i have no idea where you got that from.
the odds of him getting it are low. most of those places don't want people that have good qualifications.
i know i applied for quite a few of them at one time.
I know plenty of people who have skills and have degrees and can not find a 'skilled' job. They have responsibilities and have to work at these low paying minimum wage jobs or lose everything they have earned over the years. These are not out of high school kids. These are people who have put in the time and have skills. Some times those skilled jobs dry up and you have more people applying for the number of jobs available. In those instances people do what they have to.
Back on subject, minimum wage should be increased on a yearly basis for cost of living and inflation.
@mystery: The 'low wage worker' that you are describing is not, and has not been, the only type of person that works for that wage for awhile now. Probably 2 decades. That is nothing more than a myth that Conservatives propagate to keep the masses amenable while they keep wages low. A ton of those jobs are now operated by people with degrees that can't find any other work, and have to have SOME kind of job because of student loans. Or because they have kids. Etc.
Ironically, this entire situation is largely due to a lack of education. Which is exactly what Conservatives have always wanted. They don't want people to be educated, and they never really have. They want the masses to be stupid and easily mislead. This is because an educated consumer can actually make a difference against large corporations(Democrats, on the other hand, don't care if people are educated, because when the government has all of the power, it doesn't really matter how smart the people are..they are still stuck living under that government. Armed revolution is really not a concept that can actually work in today's society).
But anyway. If people were more educated when it comes to money, they wouldn't make such poor decisions about it. Kids should start learning about money management in like Middle School/early High School. It should literally be a mandatory elective, and this has been the case for decades. Not only is it not required, but most schools don't even offer it as an option.
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So, you're upset that we're spending too much money on welfare, and your solution is to spend a huge amount of money auditing and drug testing welfare recipients?
It sounds like you're moving the wrong direction there.
Average welfare benefit is $170/mo in the United States of America - and for the states that have enacted mandatory drug testing they have ended up paying over ten times what they saved from being able to kick people off.
Similarly Texas and NYC have done house by house investigations of welfare fraud and found themselves spending almost twenty times more than what they saved to do the investigations because fraud is so slight.
It's called chasing windmills. (See Don Quixote)
The only real way to reform welfare is to make it so that it doesn't "trap" people within it - right now if you're on welfare and you try to return to the workforce and fail for whatever reason you're actually going to have reduced benefits (below the $170/mo average!) for the next 6-24 months depending on the rules of the given state regarding returning to work.
Logically if you want people off of welfare, you adjust that to make it painless to return to work - with welfare continuing while you work for the first few months (3 months maybe) then diminishing gradually.
Will it cost more? A bit in the shortrun - but in the longrun you'll have every single motivated person that feels "stuck" on welfare off of the program.
I personally now that I'm disabled use my HR expertise to volunteer to help people in such circumstances groom themselves for a return to work - people that want to, but so many that are afraid to fail because if they do, they know they're going to be worse off than before they tried. I'd say half the people that I start to help end up backing out because of that (likely doesn't help that I make sure they're quite aware of the risk) - and every single one referred to me is someone that's voluntarily looking to return to work and motivated to get themselves on a management track. (usually fast food and the like, nothing lofty in most cases - but do have one huge success story so far that keeps in touch - might have others too though, only a handful keep in touch)
Re: People misusing the term Vanilla to describe a flying, unleash (sometimes trample) critter.
Standard drug tests cost $20, which is not a huge chunk. In fact, since it is mandatory, the government could remove it right from the welfare check that each participant would receive. If after so long of the results coming back negative, they could then discontinue it for those people. Add into the fact that people on welfare already have to list the welfare aid on their taxes each year, it would not cost much more to have them thoroughly examined. The IRS workers are paid either hourly or on salary, never by commission, so the price on that would not increase.
Given the amount already spent on welfare alone, it is not hard to see how this is a feasible, if not plausible, answer to help cut spending on those that do not do as they should.
Vaclav, could you please post your sources to prove that those with mandatory drug screenings lose more than what they get back from people who have lost their benefits?
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For a "full panel drug test" in Florida they run upwards of $170. And they're not even technically a full panel, since some drugs like bath salts and meth can't be detected under any normal drug testing that's offered last I checked. (And supposedly that's with Scott Walker's connection making the drug testing cheaper than normal with the deal he negotiated with his wife or whatever, mind you)
Re: People misusing the term Vanilla to describe a flying, unleash (sometimes trample) critter.
In Florida, where they tried this, 2% of welfare recipients had a positive test. There, drug testing lost them a significant amount of money because the savings from kicking those 2% off the program weren't enough to make up for the cost of all the tests.
So what evidence do you have that this would work out any differently elsewhere?
I found an article mentioning that they were using $30 tests, and were in fact losing money from it in Florida. However, just because the results were such in one state does not mean it would hold equal to all states. However, I know when I am beaten in this manner, so I will not make any further statements.
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He's always been accurate to my knowledge, but being that I didn't see the data firsthand there is room that he may have misled me.
Re: People misusing the term Vanilla to describe a flying, unleash (sometimes trample) critter.
I don't think this is correct. they took a lot of their items off the dollar menu the last time minimum wage was increased and people through a fit because they had to pay more.
well when you increase my wages I have to pay then you have to pay more.
I am simply not going to eat my profit margin up to pay wages.
some items increased 20 cents. the double cheeseburger went from 99 cents to 1.20 that is like a 30 cents increase per burger.
or like a 1.25 now they have taken off the menu for the mcdouble (almost the same but they cut out a slice of cheese per burger).
to get it back down to the 99 cent range.
I personally hate the place and will only eat there as a last resort. which means I can't get taco bell.
Wendy's has basically taken almost all of it's items off the 99 cent list. the ones on there are horrible.
many lower income people buy from those menu's. they are not going to pay 8 bucks at mcdonalds or Wendy's.
people are going to have to face the fact that working at these places they just are not going to pay more than what they have to.
forcing them to pay more only hurts their customer base and their employee's.
if people are tired of making 7.50 an hour then go do something so you will be worth more than someone paying you 7.50 an hour.
everyone has had to do it. my first job in 1996 I was making 5.15. my next job after I graduated paid me 11.
I can't say what I make now due to contracts I have signed but it is way more than what I made then. of course I have me 4 year degree and a few months ago passed my ITIL foundations certification.
next year I am going to be a certified trainer.
these things increase my value not only to my current company but to other companies.
I had a guy the other day ask me if I knew anyone hiring. I asked him what he did. he said he was a plumber. which stinks since most of that work is down south.
I told him that it would be difficult here that most of those jobs are more south of me where people are still building.
I said he might want to check with the AC companies around here because they are always busy and the work is usually steady all year.
he went I don't know AC. I said well you might have to expand your job skills but they do use plumbers to run exhaust lines and stuff.
it would be a good thing to learn and it expands your jobs skills, but he didn't seem interested. to bad for him. he will lose out on another opportunity and work simply because he didn't want to look into something different.
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This math is amazing.
They're just conservative bugaboos. The welfare queen and the druggy on welfare aren't enduring because they're accurate pictures of how welfare works, they're enduring because they're catchy ideas. It doesn't matter how many times you disprove them, the ideas stick in people's minds more than the disproofs do.
You want to get people off welfare? Stop subsidizing the profits of corporations like McDonalds and Walmart by paying for the health care (at emergency rates, no less!), food and some clothing/shelter for their workers. Make them do it. Their profit margins are so huge because they're passing a significant chunk of the costs of their businesses off to the rest of us. Not that I have a problem with corporate profits, mind - but make your profits honestly, not by gaming the system to profiteer off the unwillingness of those around you to allow fellow citizens to starve to death or die from lack of access to medical care.
It's not just the employee's of McDonald's that are on strike to get paid $15 an hour on minimum wage, the same thing is happening for all employee's across America's fast food industry stretching from Wendy's to Taco Bell and beyond. If nothing about this gets done then the Fast Food Industry will be in serious economic trouble.
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The only way they can even stay in buisness is of these few reasons.
1) They routinely pay their employees the lowest possible standard out there and keep the number of their employees at bare minimum.
2) Make sure to keep all employees at below full time hours to prevent any extra costs in the forms of benifits.
3) Often do not pay weekend or 3rd shift bonus.
4) McCafe actually has some decent profit margin while selling incredibly well.
5) They get more business than any other fast food chain period.
So their recipie for sucess is make sub-par food that is just good enough for people to get when they are busy while at the same time paying the very least amount possible to any other expendatures such as labor, food or quality. But they are the chepest and most sucessful of them all.
So what you're saying is: if you don't have enough money to stay afloat because of your 40+ hour minimum wage job, get an education? Because what you're saying is: "just break out of the circle of poverty".
As for minimum wage jobs: I don't see why Americans have such issues with increasing it. Over here, we have a minimum wage of 11.40 or so dollars an hour. I still think this is a really small amount of money, but then again: I'm getting by on much less (800-ish dollars government student grant/loan and 100 to 150 in parental help). So, it is possible. However, I only have to support myself. If you're paying for one or more children, which many people on minimum wages are, you're going to have a hard time.
Re: People misusing the term Vanilla to describe a flying, unleash (sometimes trample) critter.
minimum wage =/= living wage. it was never meant to be that and never was that. this is a rumor that was started from i don't know where.
minimum wage was put in place as an accept minimum standard of pay. it is the lowest pay for the least skilled job.
bagging groceries doesn't take a lot of skill hence why they get paid minimum wage. flipping a burger or taking a burger from the belt or whatever system they use to a bun doesn't require that much skill.
running a cashier does take a bit more skill hence cashiers get paid a bit more.
being a lead on shift requires a bit more skill so they get paid more etc ..
if you want more pay then well you have to be able to justify the pay.
if you can't justify the pay then you don't get it. having better jobs skills and a education justifies more pay.
there is a huge unemployment rate among teenagers. in fact it is almost 24%. why? as the pay goes up so do the requirements to get the job.
this is back in 2009 but still shows the effect.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574402820278669840.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/31/more-evidence-that-the-minimum-wage-is-too-high-for-teens/
a better article from forbes.
increasing minimum wage hurt no skilled and entry level workers. why? because in order to justify the pay increase you have to justify the skills.
it is far worse for black teens. their unemployment rate is 41%. this is bad because this means that teens in general will turn to other activities to make money most of which could be illegal.
yes but it is on a sliding scale yes depending on your age and how many hours you work?
http://www.expatax.nl/kb/article/what-is-the-minimum-wage-per-hour-in-the-netherlands-in-2013-289.html
so we should pay them more simply because they choose to have kids when they can't afford them?
not making enough money is probably a good reason not to have kids.
again if you want more pay do something to earn yourself that pay.
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-fast-food-minimum-wage-strikes-20130827,0,6607607.story
raising minimum wage has impacts on employment whether these people want to believe it or not.
so if a burger flipper wants 15 bucks an hour what does my job as a project support analyst get paid?
my salary has just been greatly devalued. people that are making 15 bucks an hour doing technically challenging work will demand more money than the guy flipping burgers.
otherwise what is the point of getting an education to make more money when the guy bagging your groceries is making as much as you do at more challenging work.
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Where I agree in the beginning, the minimum wage was not meant to be lived off of, things have changed and the economy has gotten worse. Many people rely on those minimum wage jobs to get by. 1996 was almost 20 years ago, and not even you can say things are the same now as to back then. When you have career fast food workers, and older, displaced workers competing with new employees to survive. Maybe minimum wage needs to be adjusted.
Not everyone can do as you suggest for various reasons.
This is why I've moved to the position that rather than drug testing everyone and their dog at the expense of the company to only drug test though that will be operating machinery. Does a desk worker really a need drug test? Or do you want the forklift operator who has a taste for liquor to do so?
Sure you get that drunk that mouths off to the big customer, but to be honest I've seen that with people who do pass drug tests. It's just become a customary right of passage to reduce the size of the pull. However, if you're at the hiring stage I really do wonder if it's necessary for everyone and their dog for some companies.
The question I often come to though, is that if they're producing a high value shouldn't they get paid more?
Sometimes you also have to look at the business model in general, and the competition over EDLP has become an anathema to low wage workers. It is not so much that the low wages are low, it's that they stay low for years at a time.
The purchasing power decreasing and not keeping up also makes people feel "worthless" and "uninspired" to achieve greater returns or an ownership mentality in a business and their job. In order to identify with the company and brand there has to be career tracks and rewarding difficult labor.
I never quite understood the need for such slim profit margins in the first place, as there are places such as Kroger's or Costco's that pay quite well relative to McDonalds franchisees. The problem with keeping such low pay as well is that others do not raise their bottom floor that much.
A sharp spike in costs does create a cascade effect, but a slow gradual increase relative to inflation as a fixed cost in the business structure creates a different mess. The problem with food service is like a 150% turn over rate with retail at a 65% turn over. So your training costs and uneven quality over time doesn't necessarily lead to greater efficiency gains, and this has been something I have argued for years since I started working.
Give them the "old reliables" and pay them well, while the new guy gets paid minimum wage. Many companies will start a person at a certain wage, do a 3 month evaluation and jack up the wage, while increasing the wage after a 6 or 9 month evaluation and then finally the yearly wage increase. This prepares the amount of money it takes for retraining while giving the person the first year the incentive to keep working hard.
Part of the issue I have with performance based pay is also we tend to have too many overemployed people as well, and we need to shrink some of those top management wages and consultant fees that suck companies dry. Especially with certain companies whenever middle and upper management becomes a civil service.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Re: People misusing the term Vanilla to describe a flying, unleash (sometimes trample) critter.
that is the problem fast food was never meant as a career unless you wanted to get into managment easily or get management experience.
it was meant to learn job skills and move on. guess what the people that learn the skills move on.
same as with my company i started off in operations. the good people in operations move on. i know people that have been operators for years and years and go no where.
this is just simply not true. anyone can go get some kind of secondary education or training.
there are plenty of programs out there for people to do it.
this is just a cop-out excuse.
simply not true. minimum wage was part of the job act of like 1930's. it was meant to establish the lowest wage a worker could be paid. since most factories at the time were paying people 5-10 cents an hour at times.
the first minimum wage was 25 cents an hour.
this $10-15 minimum hour wage for no skill jobs is just impossible.
does that mean my job since the skill is so much greater i should be making 6 figures?
what then now 10-15 dollars an hour isn't enough as costs have risen to meet the wage. also you have just un-employed a good deal of people.
since if i am going to pay 10-15 dollars an hour to 1 person the casher (if i don't install automated tellers are going to bag groceries.
i am going to install POS (point of sale) terminals in my restaruant so that people can order themselves, and i just need 1 or 2 people to run food.
as it posted in the article food costs would go up 30% and employment oppertunity would go down 20%.
every person i know of that has worked hard at one of those places don't stay at minimum wage long. they move up pretty quick.
companies invest in their good workers.
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So that 40 something person who has a mortgage and a family that just got displaced because of whatever reason is suppose to go back to school and not even try for the fast food job to get by?
You need to get off your high horse, its not a cop out or an excuse. People need to do what they need to do to get by and take care of their responsibilities. They just cant tell the kids they are not eating this week because I have to go back to school. You take what is available. It happens more often then you probably wish to believe it does.
More than likely he won't be hired by the fast food joint anyway.
why? he is a net loss as soon as something better comes along he is gone.
i am not on a high horse. if you are stuck making minimum wage then you obviously have no other skills than to be paid minimum wage.
the pay is according to the skill required to do the job.
if you have more skills and job experience then you should be able to find a job that pays more than minimum wage.
entry lvl workers don't have the skills to be paid 10-15 bucks an hour.
nor do the jobs they are doing make it worth 10-15 bucks an hour.
if you want better pay then you are going to have to have the skills that are required for that pay.
i never said anything about him not getting a minimum wage job. so i have no idea where you got that from.
the odds of him getting it are low. most of those places don't want people that have good qualifications.
i know i applied for quite a few of them at one time.
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To be honest, some of those jobs are rather labor intensive and complex to do accurately and swiftly necessary to have a high return on investment. We're having another problem that comes from Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management. The basic premise to all scientific management has been to find the fastest worker relative to the best pay, which quite frankly this isn't even practiced at all in the food industry or the retail industry itself.
The problem is that the pay remains low, but the productivity remains stagnant because there is little advancement except for management. Even then the penuriousness for American businesses has left some gluts in quality management controls since the start of the recessions which when you do a cost benefit analysis end up costing more money. This includes supply chains to even sales and the like.
Wal Martization of several industries and flirting with that business model may make for top end wages for an established corporation, but also leads to a vicious cycle in the income trap. This also leads to the high turn over rate, because of the inability to retain workers without having them go management.
The question is how to increase the work load while increasing productivity and efficiency standards, yet to have personalization with standardization. As my mentor once said, "There are best practices and then there is what works." You must consider "conditions on the ground" to gain a full perspective for how everything must work relative to the entire process from beginning to end. This is what made scientific management such a popular point, and other fads such as Kaizen and the like.
However, the basic premises can be read in Jackson's seminal work. You can see these concepts play out in things like Undercover Boss or concepts like Liberation Theology. It's basically looking at things from the base perspective, and then build out. Money worries do not always motivate and creates a Darwinian Cycle that approaches more of a Phyrexian system than a humane economy.
The point of a double bottom line is to keep people out of poverty and struggle. To upbraid the worthy, and fire the unworthy. People talk about innovations and systems, but so little to study them or to apply those studies. This is what happens with leadership studies and theories from actual practice.
Whenever I walk down and ask people about certain things I will find out their personal lives and ask them different things about how they feel about this or that. The reason why I get results over other people is because I stay informed and act on it. It's fun to see people with "leadership theory" puddle around whenever they lack the basic relationships and trust with informants about problems around the workplace.
I hate inefficiency, and when I see overworked people and people sitting on the unemployment line we're losing our competitive edge since people aren't getting the necessary skills for a 21st century economy.
It's because we don't allow them to innovate a damned thing.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
You do realize that in 1938 the average rent was $15-25/mo, right? (with the high end being high cost areas like NYC) And that food costs were around $15/mo, right? (penny coffee, 15c for a loaf of bread, etc) It wasn't comfortable, but it absolutely was livable to be earning $10/wk at full time in 1938. You could pay for housing and food with a minimum wage job and no external support - barely. [Hell, some people were lucky enough to find similar housing even later down the line - my parents in the 50's paid $30/mo in rent for their first house before any of us kids came along in Canton, Baltimore - we actually walked by the exact house like two years back and there was a for rent sign asking 30 times that now, heh - and at ~$900/mo it actually was reasonable sounding by today's standards....]
Not to mention that the "first minimum wage" wasn't actually $0.25/hr - the initial implementation to the first minimum wage was phased in over a few years (surprisingly hard to verify how many years - sometime between 1938 and 1944) to the laws initial target of $0.40/hr which was also scheduled to increase in the initial law to $0.75/hr on the 10 year anniversary of the bill. (And in 1949 when the $30/wk rate was established, that just barely missed the middle class! It landed in the middle of the THIRD tax bracket - AKA Upper Lower Class) [Note: The phase in is why the US Dept of Labor doesn't really like to quote pre-1955 statistics on it - although the 1955 increase wasn't established in the bill it was established that the minimum wage would be revised on or before 1958 - so it was loosely connected to the bill and where the bill truly "ended"]
The 1938 start point of $0.25/hr was meant to be a slight improvement for workers that didn't hurt employers that much but wasn't the actual targeted value for the bill, which was $0.40/hr. The $0.75/hr was them preparing for inflation every ten years. (Which note, previous to the past few decades it was revised and kept at a similar point against inflation every ten years or less)
Bills need to be looked at by their full content not their phase-in stuff. You should know this by now.
As for "self-checkout" type things - as I've explained to you in the past - and provided articles for - they've been relegated to a consumer convenience for the impatient that doesn't replace actual workers for businesses that use them across the board - the only places that "mandate" their use actually have to dedicate 2-3 humans to cover 6-12 terminals to keep things going at a reasonable clip otherwise you need an impractical amount of floorspace dedicated to setting up transactions that hurts the profitability of the business. Fast food may be an exception, but then again - you're talking about replacing 1-2 people that are on at any given shift at that point - and you'll be losing some degree of customers for it because some people hate having to deal with machines over humans (note: I'm absolutely not one - I've loved this ATM over teller era we're in). But talking like it would cause a great exodus of jobs in the one place it could actually work is ludicrous because in a given shift at a Wendy's or McDonald's or whatever you're talking about 2 workers out of 12-20 on at a given time.
Re: People misusing the term Vanilla to describe a flying, unleash (sometimes trample) critter.
I know plenty of people who have skills and have degrees and can not find a 'skilled' job. They have responsibilities and have to work at these low paying minimum wage jobs or lose everything they have earned over the years. These are not out of high school kids. These are people who have put in the time and have skills. Some times those skilled jobs dry up and you have more people applying for the number of jobs available. In those instances people do what they have to.
Back on subject, minimum wage should be increased on a yearly basis for cost of living and inflation.
Ironically, this entire situation is largely due to a lack of education. Which is exactly what Conservatives have always wanted. They don't want people to be educated, and they never really have. They want the masses to be stupid and easily mislead. This is because an educated consumer can actually make a difference against large corporations(Democrats, on the other hand, don't care if people are educated, because when the government has all of the power, it doesn't really matter how smart the people are..they are still stuck living under that government. Armed revolution is really not a concept that can actually work in today's society).
But anyway. If people were more educated when it comes to money, they wouldn't make such poor decisions about it. Kids should start learning about money management in like Middle School/early High School. It should literally be a mandatory elective, and this has been the case for decades. Not only is it not required, but most schools don't even offer it as an option.