Minimum wage
 

Seattle set a minimum wage of $15 per hour regardless of age, experience or usefulness. I think it may be a tad high for someone pumping gas etc..

Also should minimum wage be expected to be a living wage, regardless of the value of the labor?, as in return on investment (wage).

Re: Minimum wage
 

We'll know the answer from the seattle experiment soon.....

Re: Minimum wage
 

Well yes... but I was interested in opinions on the wisdom of so radically raising the minimum over the local or national norms.

After Sea Tac and Seattle, opening a McD's in Fife may be a sound idea.

Re: Minimum wage
 

In my opinion, $15 is too high and it probably should be in the $10-$12 range. $15 is $31,200 annually and that is not far below medium income.

In the 1980s, France cut the maximum hours to create more jobs but it had the opposite effect and reduced the number of people employed as costs rose. Then France significantly increased the minimum wage and employment dropped further as costs rose further and employers cut costs by hiring less people. Although the medium income in France is currently above the UK, the gdp per capita and medium family income are both significantly below the UK because the workforce participation rate is 53% compared to 63% in the UK. Another issue is job dissatisfaction in France is lower than the UK since a very high percentage of employees are working for minimum wage with a perception of a dead end job.

Therefore in my opinion, raising the minimum wage too much can have a severe adverse effect on the economy.

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I agree that $15 is too much - I think $10 would be reasonable.

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Sury you mean "higher"? ..... I read that too, that to keep total payroll costs under control, employers reduced the pay for more experienced staff, so promotions for more responsibility do not give much more pay.

No matter what level the MW is set at, more effort needs to be put into training people to get them off MW jobs. Rather like unemployment pay, MW jobs should be seen as a safety net and a stepping stone to better work, not a long term career choice.

Re: Minimum wage
 

Job satisfaction has been said to be lower since about 20% of the French workforce is working at minimum wage and even if they are promoted, they still work at or near minimum wage. I suspect that is one of the reasons that Americans tend to have a more positive attitude about work since a minimum wage job is considered short term and temporary and even though they may eventually only make $15-$16 per hour, they feel they accomplished something since that wage is double the minimum wage. It's mostly a matter of perception.

A person that works at or near minimum wage for their entire lifetime may not have a feeling of self worthiness. Nobody wants to be at the bottom of the food chain during their entire life.

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OK, agreed on all the above, .... but you said DISsatisfaction!

Re: Minimum wage
 

Oops.:o

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OTOH wages below living wage result in the employer being subsidised by the taxpayer as the employees get tax credits for low incomes, have to claim food stamps etc to make ends meet. Why should my taxes subsides the Waltons' failure to pay their employees properly?

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Agreed. $8/hr is nowhere near a living wage where I am.

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But is somewhere near approaching it in rural GA. So the question then becomes about state minimums, rather than a federal one.

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I did read something about it.

Will not come all of a sudden, takes a long time.

Obviously it is not just the increase to $15, everything else that is an add on goes up as well.

There some things you can do operationally, much more careful with your scheduling, split shifts etc

If you are for example in the food business you can buy more in pre prepared, cut out labour intensive procedures as far as possible.

Obviously you have a good reason to increase your prices.

Presumably for say construction companies it depends where your business is located rather than the construction site? Could the same thing work for labour masters?

Re: Minimum wage
 

You also always refer to 'medium' income and prices. Do you mean 'median', or is it a separate term?

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True. But $20 an hour wouldn't be considered a living wage where you are. I'd imagine you're not going to find too many struggling families in your neck of the woods.

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I meant in LA in general. Plenty of people struggling.

Obviously not me in my glorious ivory tower turning everyone green with envy.

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Oops again.:o

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You're where I'd like to be, yes. Certainly not for material reasons, I have standards! :p

Southern California is very expensive, it is up here as well. $15 an hour might help with rents, so I'm glad to see that it was passed.

Re: Minimum wage
 

Most US min. wages are far too low, and end up likely costing the government more in government assistance programs then it would to just provide a decent wage and reduce the need for these programs. Part of why they have to exist is because its becoming harder and harder to find employment that pays a wage you can survive on.

10/hr in Seattle, Los Angeles, and other major city's is not enough for a single person, let alone anyone with a kid.

We have 10.25 CAD min wage here in BC, and its even too low for a single person to make ends meet. If working 40 hours per week, brings in 1,640 per month pre-taxes. After tax take home pay is approx 1,400 per month.

Where I am average rent for a 1 bedroom apartment is 900 per month.

Do the math and you can quickly see even 10/hr is not a wage one can live on.

Some say min. wage jobs are for teens and not adults, well we are now at a point where adults rely on them. We don't have the kind of blue collar jobs we used to have in North America, so the blue collar workers who would have worked in say manufacturing, are now in service jobs with none of the opportunity blue collar workers had in the past.

Re: Minimum wage
 

At the risk of making interactions with you circular, the answer is in your own hands: get some qualifications whether academic or vocational, and work towards getting better paid work. Not just you, of course, but most of those on MWJs.

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I wouldn't want to survive on $10 an hour where I am. I wouldn't want to survive on $15 an hour even.

Re: Minimum wage
 

I understand that, but you also have to understand not everyone can for whatever reason go to school and do those things.

That said, I have decided to give school another go, wont start til January, and first 2 years is all academic upgrading to meet entrance requirements for the program of interest, once in the program its another 4 years, so within 7 hopefully I'll be done.

Of course its all dependent on government funding as the tuition is beyond my ability to pay out of pocket.

Re: Minimum wage
 

$15 per hour is about equivalent of $23.50 in Switzerland since the Swiss Franc is so overvalued. When the referendum was voted on, the Swiss overwhelming rejected the minimum wage. Although that wage would only affect about 10% of the Swiss workers, it can have a negative psychological effect on about a 1/3 of the workforce since they can perceive themselves as being in a sub class instead of middle class.

Most large California cities already have a minimum wage above $10 per hour but pushing the minimum wage to what would be considered a "living wage" in those large cities could be higher than $27 per hour or $56,000 per year and consumers would pay the bill. Unfortunately if $27 was the minimum wage, employment for gardeners, day care, maid service, and many other jobs would likely drop as people could no longer afford those services.


http://extras.mnginteractive.com/liv...1minimum90.jpg

Re: Minimum wage
 

surviving? living on? steak on food stamps? Obama Phone? 60 inch flat screen TV?

Re: Minimum wage
 

To whom does the term "living wage" refer?

A single person earning 10 bucks an hour, for a 40 hour week, in rural "anywhere" would probably manage quite well on their 19K a year.

The same person living in a large metropolitan city would struggle more.

A guy with 2 children and wife earning 10 bucks an hour even in rural "anywhere" is definitely going to struggle - but should the mininum wage (commonly interchanged with living wage) be increased because he decided to have children but not to improve his earnings to accommodate his growing family.

As has been said in this thread, minimum wage jobs have in the past been regarded as entry level, getting started jobs with people moving on up the career and salary ladders - usually undertaken by younger, single workers.

Nowadays one hears constantly about whole families (husband, wife, children) surviving on minimum wages, with calls to increase such wages to support the needs of such families.

Whatever happened to that saying "cut your coat according to your cloth"

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For what it is worth I can think of quite a few people earning not a lot who have gone through higher education.

I have also come across quite a few who have many qualifications but to whom I would not pay minimum wage.

The issue is that the growth has been in the low wage sector and the loss in the middle.

The only trend I can see is that this will continue.

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It seems people are getting stuck in these jobs and the minimum wage has stagnated.

Education may be part of the answer but cannot fully address it.

A lot of adult children seem to live with their parents here as they cannot afford their own place.

The people really suffering are the day workers who have to turn up at places like those that supply WalMart and just see if anything is available each morning. They are merely eking out an existence.

Possibly with the huge profits WalMart makes, this could be seen as a little unjust.

Then again, it's the system we have here and no doubt I will be told to FIFO.

Re: Minimum wage
 

Unfortunately you are right for once.:ohmy: Raising the minimum wage too high doesn't solve the problem since if it is too high, jobs will be lost as consumers decide that they can't afford those services.

It's a complex issue and most developed countries don't have an easy solution to solve the problem without causing job losses. A good example is day care where both parents may work but nearly 100% of one parents salary is being used to pay for day care. If the cost of day care increases 50%, for many families it won't make financial sense for both to keep working.

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I always wondered how many jobs require the education they ask for.

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Day care is a classic example, not only is it labour intensive but Governments on both side of the pond have made it more and more expensive to provide.

And will continue to do so.

Re: Minimum wage
 

In my experience in the Silicon Valley, a person's educational background has not been the determining factor as to who is productive for software engineering unless the employee is going to develop new low level protocols, encryption, structural analysis, physics/nuclear analysis, heavy mathematical calculations, etc. Over 90% of the software engineering jobs don't require that knowledge even if the project is about those capabilities. For example, I wrote a VPN application which required encryption and changes to the protocol on the router and all I needed to do was understand the interface to call the already developed encryption module and understand the basic protocol of routing to make those changes. The encryption and protocol implementation was less than 1% of the total project and was actually one of the easier tasks in the project.

I suspect many managers are biased since they may have a post graduate degree and expect their employees to have the same.

With my educational background, I wouldn't attempt to define and develop new encryption algorithms or define and develop a new protocol such as a faster WI-FI, Bluetooth, USB, SATA, Internet backbone, or 4G protocol. For that, someone should have post graduate degrees with emphasis in those fields. On the other hand, most of the work in software engineering is logically thinking how to implement the project and writing the code without the need for in depth knowledge in any field since an already designed and developed application program interface (API) is available to perform any of the above.

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So if you can't afford kids then don't have them :confused:

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Which is why your job is essentially low wage in the global economy where code monkeys (NOT engineers) are two a penny in India.

Embedded Software Engineer is the real software real job.

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I was expecting more IT jobs to be outsourced than seems to have been the case. I know from experience years ago there are issues but nothing that could not be got over.

As far as children, earnings, benefits, child care etc, then for many people you need to look at the totality of the package, wage is just one element of it.

Re: Minimum wage
 

personal responsibility and living within your means defines your "package" though doesn't it?

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I would like to think so, I was more commenting on the nature of means, just limiting it to waged income.

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Until there is a birth control method that is 100% effective, there will always be people having kids who can't afford them.

If in the low income bracket, you probably cannot afford the medical procedure for a permanent fix, but who is to say someone at 25 who can't afford a kid, wont be able to at 40, so even the permanent fixes are not really viable.

A low min. wage probably ends up costing society more in the long run via more people on various assistance programs.

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Who is going to get sterilized at 25 believing their situation will never improve? Not really the 'American Dream'.

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Probably very few, its just not a viable option, and since other forms of birth control are not 100% effective, there will always be the oops babies where people did their best to prevent a baby, but a baby still happened.

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No, the 'American dream' is not entitlement, you need to go back to the UK for that, you've been told before.