Minimum Wage

Parent Cafe
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<p>Working as a life guard is pretty hard work- to qualify anyway.
My D working as a residential counselor- which was hard work because she worked more than 40 hours, worked with several autistic kids in same cabin and was barely out of high school, wasn’t paid min wage.
this year she is working at a chain store- is covered by a union and earns about double mi wage for her summer job.</p>

<p>I feel like if you don’t meet the small business req who aren’t obligated to pay min wage- yet you can’t afford it- I wonder if you can afford to be in business?</p>

<p>Of course where the scandal really is- is at the top.</p>

22

<p>

When you say ‘who will benefit from the implementation’ you’re already drawing a conclusion and it’s one many people will dispute - as have some of the posters here - i.e. some of those people may no longer have jobs at all as a result. You’d be more accurate if you changed it to ‘who will be impacted from the implementation’ and keeping an open mind as to the actual result based on your research with both minimum wage employees and employers. You need to make sure you get a balanced perspective.</p>

23

<p>A lot of folks can’t really afford to be in business, especially the way they want to be in business. My husband’s family bought an ice cream shop as a business for themselves. He scrutinized the numbers carefully. What he did not get was that the couple who owned the shop worked themselves to the bone. They had few employees and only in strategic places and took the burden themselves. Doing that, they were able to net a tidy sum from the shop.</p>

<p>Following company guidelines, H’s uncle couldn;t make enough to make ends meet. It was a huge blow for him. But he couldn’t sell the shop without incurring a loss he truly could not afford. Many of us find ourselves in such impossible situations. You’re right, he could not really afford to be in business, but the alternatives were worse, so he had to limp along until he could find a buyer at a time when he could get rid of the place. And then he was unemployed, and not eligible for unemployment benefits as an owner of a small business. It is not easy. </p>

<p>I’ve known this man for years. He would pay everyone generously and let others run the store if he could afford to do so. No can do. So he struggled along for years working too many hours, probably less than min wage if you counted all of the time he had to work on shop related things. Wife made cakes, cleaned the place without getting a paycheck to save money. It was not easy. And there are alot of small businesses like that.</p>

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<p>I just prefer to let the open market determine who can and who cannot afford to be in business, rather than government regulation.</p>

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<p>It’s textbook economics that the creation of a minimum wage law or a hike in existing minimum wage laws results in higher unemployment, IOW people put out of work or people who were already unemployed will remain unemployed longer than they otherwise would have. And if you’re thinking this is a big business-friendly, Republican type of argument, you’re wrong, this is beyond politics, it’s one of the things virtually all economists agree on.</p>

<p>Non-economists (laypeople) expect that the result of a minimum wage law will be that people who weren’t making much money will start making more. The real result on balance is that people whose productivity is not high enough to merit being paid at the new, higher wage required by the government will be laid off, or not hired for a job if they are currently looking for one.</p>

<p>There is a continuous gamut of possible paychecks, from zero dollars an hour (unemployment) to eight bucks an hour, eighty bucks an hour, etc., and everything in between. If the minimum wage law is raised to, say, 8 dollars an hour, then anybody whose productivity puts their market value below 8 dollars an hour, say somebody who averages six dollars an hour at any job they get, will be out of a job. (marginal cases are people whose productivity is below the new minimum wage, but who stay hired on and get the minimum wage increase because of a property of prices called elasticity, but due to the resulting rise in prices because of the minimum wage the benefit is nil, on balance)</p>

<p>A minimum wage is just a special case of what economists call a “price floor,” a price set by the government (rather than the market forces of supply and demand), which is the lowest a good or service can be legally sold for. If the government says “cigarettes cannot be sold for cheaper than five dollars a pack” or some such thing, this is a price floor. All other factors aside, the result of a price floor is a surplus. A surplus of available workers is called high unemployment. Politicians (or their econ advisers) know this, which is why they are careful to keep the minimum wage below the equilibrium point for unskilled labor. The reason they don’t just abolish it is because it takes too long to explain the economics of it to the average voter, and they just look heartless, even though the minimum wage is responsible for high unemployment rates among black male teenagers, ex-cons, the homeless, and many other demographics which, for a variety of reasons, tend to have lower productivity than average.</p>

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<p>BTW, the notion that minimum wage laws protects workers from employers who would otherwise have too much power in the labor market is silly. By shrinking the (legal) pool of available workers, which the minimum wage law does, this gives employers more overall influence than they otherwise would have.</p>

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<p>I considered minimum wage laws as protection for workers against other workers willing to take low or very low wages.</p>

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<p>Another perspective that you might get would be employers that pay slightly above minimum wage (certain call centers, places with low unimeployment numbers, etc). That could possibly give you insight into how the market affects quality of workers, employee retention, etc. I would even talk to someone at a temporary agency to see if employers reduce the wages of temporary posting after the minimum wage is raised.</p>

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<p>Enginox, are you saying that those other workers who are willing to sell their labor for a lower cost than somebody else should be forbidden by law to do so? If I’m in the market for a new tv, I’ve picked out my model, and I head to HH Gregg to buy it, but on the way I hear an ad on the radio from Best Buy selling the same tv for twenty dollars less, you’re saying that in order to protect HH Gregg, Best Buy should be stopped by the government from selling that tv for less?</p>

<p>Yes, you are protecting one group of workers, but you are harming another group of workers (and arguably a more vulnerable and needy one) as well as the employer by making them pay more than they should for labor, and hence making consumers pay more than they should for goods (as unnecessarily high labor costs result in unnecessarily high prices at the cash register).</p>

30

<p>but you are harming another group of workers (and arguably a more vulnerable and needy one) as well as the employer by making them pay more than they should for labor, and hence making consumers pay more than they should for goods (as unnecessarily high labor costs result in unnecessarily high prices at the cash register).</p>

<p>I disagree.
for instance- a restaurant meal is $20 per diner.
( for example)
That covers the meal, the service, the 20% tip.
If I can’t afford that- then I do not go out to eat.
I might * think* that I am being harmed by not being able to be served a meal for $10- but my perceived loss is more than offset by knowing that the restaurant owner can afford to buy healthy food for me to eat instead of meat covered with sauces to hide the rancidity and that the workers have ins. and can afford health care so I am not going to catch tuberculosis.</p>

<p>What are the goods that are so needed by society that it is more important to sell them cheaply than to have adequate funds to maintain a safe manufacturing facility, with workers who are paid a living wage and who can afford to buy their own product?</p>