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Six wage protesters arrested at Logan Terminal E
By adamg on Mon, 01/18/2016 - 6:06pm
State Police report protesters demanding a $15 minimum wage at Logan Airport were allowed to protest and listen to a few speeches, then, when told to disperse, six refused and were arrested.
Those arrested on a trespassing charge: Michael G. Gallagher, 67, of Boston, Marvin A. Martin, 61, of Dorchester, Mary D. Lombos, 41, of Roxbury, Jacqueline Wesley, 51, of Roxbury, Yusuf Farah, 57, of Cambridge and Roxana L. Rivera, 46, of Warwick, RI.
Innocent, etc.
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Comments
$250 minimum price law for plane tickets?
?
In 1912 men, women and
In 1912 men, women and children who worked in the textile mills in Massachusetts went on strike for better wages and other considerations
The mills were made possible by the public financing of canals for water power, and railroads for mill owners to move their goods to port. Horace Mann sponsored the bill to build canals for water power and rail transportation to move goods to port. Taxpayers provided the capitol. Mill owners raked in profit.
Men, women and children who worked in the mills won the standoff and bargained for better wages and other considerations. This is how low wage, 12 hours a day, 7 seven days a week jobs became good jobs with good pay and other considerations. The mill owners still earned a profit. They just shared more of it with the workers who made the profit possible.
This is how working people can capitalize on their power to bargain collectively and democratically for more of the benefits of their productivity ...unless the job gets outsourced or off-shored but not all can.
We are a rich country. The richest the world has every seen. But much of the wealth is concentrated at the top. And 95% of new income is going to the top 1%, while the rest of us share the remaining 5%. Our economy is rigged to move new income to the top earners.
It is a values statement to say that an adult working full time shouldn't live in poverty.
The protests at airports like the protest at WalMart and the fast food protests are protests against large national and international corporations that make big profits. They pay poverty wages and many of their employees use food assistance and other safety net programs to make ends meet.
In a recent year, McDonald's booked $5.1 billion in U.S. profit and McDonald's US employees got about $1.2 billion in govt (taxpayer-funded) benefits like food assistance, housing and healthcare. Thus, about 20% of McDonald's profit is taxpayer subsidy backdoor via poverty wage employees.
If McDonald's, WalMart and airport workers got their $15 an hour wage. they'd get a bigger share of the profit they make possible and taxpayers wouldn't have to subsidize the low wages.
There's a bill in the legislature that would require all companies in Mass. with 200 or more employees to pay a minimum wage of $15. That includes fast food, WalMart, big big stores and airport workers.
My take is that it would pass the Senate if it gets a vote and it would pass the house, if the Speaker will give it a vote but he's owned by the business lobby so he may use his power to serve lobbyists and not leave it to democracy (give it a vote.)
Two election cycles ago, 15now sponsored a non-binding ballot question about a $15 minimum wage in many greater Boston house districts and they won by large margins. A $15 min wage for large companies is a winner with voters.
Even if McDonalds required customers to absorb all of the cost instead of financing it out of stock buybacks or cutting margins, a big mac would cost $0.30 more and a happy meal $0.47.
In 2009, there were 90,000 (non-college-student) people living in Boston in poverty, and 18,000 families. It doesn't take a big increase in the minimum wage to lift working people out of poverty.
Oxfam re-released at study yesterday that found lobbying and tax avoidance are big contributors to income inequality.
C'mon people. Get woke.
More history
Then there's the part of 19th-century history where when they abolished slavery, farms switched to automation (for example, cotton gins) rather than pay workers.
That's where we're going to be headed again if people want $15/hr for work that can be done by robots. You might be able to force people to pay workers a minimum amount if they hire workers, but you can't force them to hire in the first place.
Not one sentence in your paean to emotion explained why the kind of work that is done by people who could be replaced by robots is worth $15/hr. Just that big evil corporations have lots of money so they should be forced to spread around their wealth because you don't have it and they do.
BTW, I was looking around at city government jobs recently and you know what Cambridge -- that vaunted socialist workers paradise and bastion of social justice -- pays for semi-skilled jobs like "driver", "crossing guard", and "youth workers"? $14.95/hr. One nickel less than your so-called living wage. It's also clear from the kind of hours that they hire for that they like to play the same "ehhhh just sort of full-time / short of benefits-required hours" games that those huge, evil corporations like Walmart and McDonald's like to play. Go look yourself on the city website. Government: "Do as we say, not as we do."
Welcome, burger-flipping robots!
Talking out of your ass
Do you know how much you have to pay engineers to design, code, update, and build burger flipping robots? How about the support staff to repair, install, and maintain them? And how much do they cost to make in the first place?
No, you don't. Which is why "burger flipping robots" sounds like the solution to a few bucks an hour more.
Companies react to costs
Companies react to costs like they are bleeding . Go to a fast food drive up joint. The employees are wired for sound with headsets, there is an elaborate carousel machine to make the drinks, that you can see. Notice the rubbish trucks have no shakers at the end, they have robotic arms to lift the trash up and dump it, There is automatic self checkouts at the supermarkets.Any action causes a reaction, be careful what you wish for.
You could do it for a billion dollars.
and replace half the burger flippers.
Replacing half the burger flippers saves a 5/hr x 2000/yr x 50,000 flippers replaced* = 0.5 billion/yr.
McDonalds employs something like 100k people in the US from my recollection of a BBC article from last spring.
One team composed of two or three skilled technicians, each earning maybe 30-40/hr can service the robots for maybe 50 restaurants, representing maybe 200 burger flippers replaced by robots, meaning you need 250 such teams to cover all the robots replacing the 50k burger flippers. So the annual maintenance will cost
120/hr/team x 2000 hrs x 250 teams = 60 million.
So once you've replaced half the burger flippers who now make 10/hr, but would have been making 15/hr, and thereby saving 500m/hr in payroll, you net 440m per year by replacing those 50,000 low-skilled employees with robots and 750 high-skilled employees for Operations and Maintenance.
This means that if you need to spend a billion dollars to design, build, program, field-test, and deploy your army of BurgerBots(TM), you'll recoup your upfront cost in about three years, and praesto, magic, you're immune from minimum wage hikes forever!
Liberalism and math don't mix it seems.
That's cute
Flawed assumptions:
1) Everyone employed by McDonalds flips burgers (half of 100,000 is 50,000) and/or anything a "burger flipper" does is entirely able to be replicated by a robot
2) "Burger flippers" only work 8 hour shifts per day (2040 hrs is how you annualize the salary for a 9-5 job)
3) "Robot technical staff" only make $30-40/hr and don't need managers, trainers, coders, etc. skilled in robotics/engineering
4) A single team of 3 people can cover 50 locations at all hours of McDonalds' operations (some 24 hour locations included)
5) Only 8 "burger flippers" per restaurant at McDonalds
6) Your technician's wages are "immune" from minimum wage hikes...even though as minimum wage closes in on $20/hr, your $30/hr technicians are going to stay happy?
7) Your robots are free once they're "deployed" and have no upgrade costs, no "new menu" ability costs, no repair part costs, no business costs due to downtime until one of your 3 technicians can get to the 49th restaurant he has to fix that day, etc.
Liberalism and math mix just fine. You're just too far in the weeds of the Dunning-Kruger effect to realize your math is garbage.
Gotta love that Dunning-Kruger effect
Look up the Fermi Estimate while you're googling for a comeback.
I said the operating & maintenance costs of the robots would be 60m. Maybe I'm off by a factor of whatever because burgerbots are science fiction at the very moment I'm writing this post.
The point that so merrily whooshed over your head is that even if the techs that actually have screw drivers in their hands make 50/hr and there's twice as many of them as I guesstimated, it's still hundreds of millions per year of savings just from the fact that (say) 10k bots and a 1-2k techs replace 50k low-skilled employees. That's where the savings comes from.
Do robots need fixin'? Sure. Do they need a dedicated team of coders pushing out new menu options and the like? Sure. But once the things are deployed (which costs roughly 1billion), all of those tasks can be done with fewer than 100 engineers.
I happen to be an engineer, and I've done robotics & automation in my time, so I can tell you that you don't need a cast of thousands costing hundreds of millions to do that caretaker work once the fleet of robots is built and deployed.
The lifecycle question is, how often do I need to spin everything up and pay a billion dollars to refresh the fleet? Even if my O&M only lets me save 200m/year or even 100m, then I do the tech refresh every 5 or 10 years, which honestly is within the realm of reasonableness for a large deployment like that, and I'm pretty sure that if the first round costs 1b, the second round will cost less since you won't be inventing BurgerBots from scratch.
You're quite right, by the way. It does help to know what you're talking about.
Your grasp on history need
Your grasp on history need improvement. The invention of the cotton gin is what made plantations and slaveholding viable, and caused an explosion in the number of slaves being held.
http://www.civilwar.org/resources/civil-war-history-how-the.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3narr6.html
Also, automation doesn't always net eliminate jobs. Sometimes, it net creates them. In the case above, it created the need for a lot more slaves.
Trying to apply supply-side economics everywhere is asinine. But there are instances where increasing supply (due to decreasing costs) increases demand (due to decreasing costs), to the point at which more workers are needed beyond the numbers that were replaced by automation.
$25 minimum through growth, not legislation
The only thing that raises wages is competition for labor.
Anything else will result in unemployment at the bottom of the pay scale (France) or working off the books (Greece) to reach the actual competitive wage.
Minimum wage laws appear to work when the actual minimum wage is higher than the legislated minimum.
I'm all for $25/hour minimum wages, but through growth that creates demand for labor, not through legislation. To the extent that your approach gets enacted in law, it hurts workers.
A $15 state minimum would cause serious unemployment in Western Mass, and a $15 national minimum would destroy the southern US. Is that what you had in mind?
You can't have "growth"..
You can't have "growth" if the lion's share of the profits are siphoned off for executive bonuses rather than reinvested in the business. All you have is a sad, sick parody of it. Fool yourself, you're not fooling me.
Cite evidence. Put up or shut up.
Hmm
Cite evidence. Put up or shut up.
Ok.
https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity
Now you go.
And that money sits under a matress, I take it
or in a big giant vault so the evil capitalists can go all Scrooge McDuck and take a swim in their cash?
It gets spent, or it gets invested, which is just as good as being spent because now two or three or ten people get to use it.
Like I said before, put the communism back in its holster before you hurt yourself with it.
You have no idea what you're talking about
It goes into stock buybacks that make the company seem to be doing better and gives the C-level that have all the stock more valuable assets to trade against and/or liquidate.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3523236-a-review-of-mcdonalds-stock-buyb...
Instead of investing in tomorrow (or their staff), they are "investing" in their shareholders' pockets by pumping up their valuation by removing stock from the world using the company's profits to do so.
They're not the only one...this is being played out all over the market.
Dodging the question is nice
when you don't like the answer.
OK. Say all the "shareholders" (read: the average Joe who has a 401k, among others) get invested in. That's bad how?
Let's say all the C-suite trade in their more valuable stocks now for what...gold coins to go into the vault? At some point, all money has to be spent.
Good point.
Good point. On the other hand, all of recorded history.
Hahahaha
Great job. Now tell another one.
Recorded history, you know, like real history, and not lefty fantasy history, is a story filled with failures of socialism (Russia, Cambodia, Cuba, Venezuela, Red China...) and the success of (relatively) free markets (England, America in the 19th century, America in the 20th century, China since the 80's, ...).
supply and demand
Competition in the sense of supply and demand. If you capitalize labor you can restrict supply.
A $15 min wage at McDonalds and/or WalMart could be financed by halting stock buyback programs, which reduces shares, thus increases earning per share without increasing earnings.
If they want customers to pay for $15/hour wage, a big mac would cost $.30 more and a meal $.47
We live in a consumer economy. Imagine the momentum if low wage workers got a 50% raise to $15?
These aren't radical ideas. Countries that pay everyone a livable wage have McDonalds employees who sell big macs, make a profit and pay their workers $23/hour.
Looks like someone is feeling the Bern!
"Our economy is rigged."
No. It's not. Quite the opposite, actually. We have a free market-based economy and that market works pretty efficiently. Our economic model has produced more prosperity for more people than any nation in the history of the world. You want to see what a rigged economy looks like? Impose artificial wage floors, price ceilings, hiring and production quotas.
equitable distribution of income
Our economy really doesn't work well for an awful lot of people, which is a problem because we are the richest country in the history of the world.
Almost all the new income goes to the super rich. They're not working longer for hour less, everyone else is.
Martin Luther King said poverty is violence and he's right.
Right here in Boston more than half the kids in BPS live at or near the poverty level. 90,000 people in 2009, 18,000 families. Ask any teacher, poverty is a problem. Also, only white people in Boston have seen a reduction of poverty in two decades.
In 2008, free market capitalism produced a financial crisis which cost the middle class $4 trillion in wealth.
Free market capitalism is not a panacea, it just happens to have some nice properties and currently, equitable distribution of income is not one of them.
$15
To sweep floors, bag groceries or flip burgers? Sure thing, right after EMTs, mechanics, social workers and countless other folks who do a whole lot more than repetitive hand motions get $30! Until that happens (hint: never) either accept what the market dictates or better your skills so you can get a better-paying job.
Wrong answer
Why do people like you always act as if you will be somehow less special if another person makes a living wage for doing hard work?
You should be happy - you clearly know nothing about how poverty traps people and makes it impossible to "improve their skills" and all that empty blather.
I am tired of subsidizing corporations with my tax money so that they can pay less than a living wage. I'm also tired of people like you jumping on the bandwagon, hurling tired truthy tropes around as if they were factual reality in the last 20 years, and covering for the people who should just pay their full-time employees enough to keep them off of food stamps.
If the corporations who underpay their workers were required to pay living wages, then that tax money that we save could go to raises for EMTs and the like.
I like Swirly :)
It's not the wages that suck, it's the burgeoning cost of living. The best advice given to me as a young person in a lucrative field is this, never stagnate. Get better. But also there should be more options for people to do so. Naysayers who criticize tend to be those who grew up in the 70's and 80's when the cost of living wasn't a burden as today.
And did you grow up in the 70s or 80s?
When inflation reached a peak of, what, 21% a year and there was a nice recession to start the 1980s with. The challenges were different, but, please, life was hard back then as well.
Not the Same
Sure there were similar challenges back then. The difference being that millennials have gone through inflation and a recession, but with the additional burden of huge student loan debt, and housing prices that are higher than we could ever afford.
My mom went to Harvard and graduated with less than $7,000 in debt. My parents bought a house for less than I've already paid back in student loans. I will likely never own my own house, and certainly not one within 20 miles of Boston.
It is not the same. We are paying more for the same services and educations than anyone had to a few decades ago. Boomers and the older generations just love to talk about bootstraps and how hard they had it and how we're all idiots for paying for our degrees. Well, just be glad you weren't part of this generation and won't have to live it (and realize how rigged all really is).
http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/tuition-an...
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/11/daily-chart-0
Sigh
As somebody whose daughter just finished college applications, yes, I'm very aware of student-debt issues. And as somebody who bought a house in Boston well before the current boom, yes, I'm painfully aware of how hard it will be for her to live in the city she grew up in, at least on her own (her room will always be hers!). So please don't stereotype an entire generation the way you think is being done to yours - or I'll be forced to tell you how at least you never have to worry whether that flash outside is lightning or the beginning of the end of the world (sorry, ISIS is not the same threat as nuclear war and sorry, you're not going through life with the same existential dread that people who grew up through the 1980s had).
One correction, though: Outside of higher education, you really don't know from inflation. For 30 or more years, the primary fiscal policy of the US government has been to drive down inflation - even to the point of dampening the wage increases that people used to expect in the US. Add to that the triumph of the 1%ers in leveling the union movement, of making corporations the be-all and end-all of American society and you begin to get to an understanding of just why it is so many people seem to be falling further behind even as the economy supposedly booms.
Generalization
Sorry, not trying to over generalize, here. I've been talked down to and lectured on this subject ("You should have done [x,y,z] instead of going to college!" "Your generation is lazy and expects everything to be handed to them.") so often lately that I've become a bit more sensitive about it than usual.
Although I have to say, I'd trade for existential dread for crippling loan debt any day. I have to learn to live with my own anxiety anyway, might as well do it with an affordable education and in a house of my own with a family that I can afford to have.
/end of grumpy griping
You forgot to mention that
You forgot to mention that you are making more than boomers and olderists. And you haven't mentioned disposable income. I think the youts today live the high life , plenty of gadgetry , (iPhones , ithis and ithats, craft beer, no cheap dime drafts, the list goes on.There is a different perception of how life is to be lived , in my opinion.The high cost of education is your own self investment, maybe you should vent on Liz about what Harvard paid her to teach one course. I started out looking up to men older than my generation, some who had fought in World War II and also Korea , and boy those guys didn't complain. They just carried on and did what they had to do.
Put the communism back in its holster please
You hike up the pay for the floor sweepers then two things will happen quickly and one thing will happen slowly:
Effect 1: Somehow the airport finds a way to do with fewer floor sweepers than they have now.
Consequence 1a: some lucky guy gets a pay raise, some unlucky guys (plural) find themselves in the job line.
Consequence 1b: the airport bathrooms stink more than they do now and run out of soap and paper towels more frequently than they do now.
Effect 2: The cleaning company starts charging the airport more for a minimum level of service, the airport starts charging the airlines more for usage fees, and they pass them on to their customers.
Consequence 2: You, me, evil corporate executives, poor college students, and the rest of the unwashed masses have to pay more for their plane tickets.
Effect 3: The guys sweeping the floor have a little more change in their pockets, and being human, will be more apt to spend it. Not wanting to lose out on a good thing, their landlords, their neighborhood grocery stores, check-cashing stores, and everyone else they normally deal with will raise their prices ever-so-slightly, what with all the new money flowing in from the largess of fat cats who run the airport.
Consequence 3: Prices go up, slowly but surely, for everyone, because economic freedom is funny that way.
And where will we be when this lovely example of the invisible hand plays itself out?
Right back where we are now, except the pinko set will be screaming bloody murder about a 20/hr minimum wage. Because the 15/hr wage worked so well. Just like the 10/hr wage in Mass, and the 7.whatever federal wage before that, and the 5/hr min wage of the late 90s and on and on.
But anything to keep them teaming masses voting socialis---I mean democrat, amiright?
And just for laughs, explain to me in coherent sentences free of the usual lefty talking points why it is that people who, let's be honest, generally aren't capable of much more than sweeping those proverbial floors and flipping those proverbial burgers should be making 15/hr, which at the time of this writing is just a hair below the starting wage for mail carriers at the postal service who, I'm sure you'd agree, do fairly important work for us.
You pass Econ 101. Now take Econ 102
You're absolutely right if we're talking about a small closed hypothetical economy.
Too bad we don't live in a small closed hypothetical economy.
No, we live in Tammany Hall
where only the connected few get to have that coveted 15/hr job.
Oh, what's that? You say that one job getting themselves a 15 dollar floor will inspire other "community organizers" to demand the same for their voting bloc of burger flippers, followed by the dog walkers and the adjunct professors?
Well, then I'm not exactly clear on how my point about raising the minimum wage just hurrying inflation along loses validity.
Stop fantasizing
How exactly do you know the outcome in a situation that doesn't exist? You're just blowing hot air, admit it.
My memory goes back to before last week
There's no such thing as a min wage hike for one class of unskilled labor that doesn't propagate into wage hikes for all unskilled labor.
Or it doesn't and you've got your patronage and your voting blocs just like I said.
The burden of proof is on those demanding a change in policy: prove to me that it'll solve the problem instead of being the same kind of band-aid that previous minimum wage hikes were.
Hello Clue Phone
It's for you.
Really? So who gets to dictate that "market".. seems like corporations do, and they do so just to meet federal and/or state minimum wage laws. If we didn't have those, corporations would pay everyone pennies on the dollar for a wage. There's a reason why we have minimum wage laws. But it's not enough. Economics dictates that the cost of living has gone way up (and even more so in Boston) to the point where 7,8,9/hr isn't a living wage anymore.
Oh and you're funny with "better you skills".. How so? Like go to College?!? How can someone afford to go to college these days? Or even have the time (when you're too busy working two minimum wage jobs to support yourself).
Oh yeah, here's how you do it... you take out massive loans with high interest rates and put people further into debt. Yeah, making 55k is alot better than 10 or 15/hr but when you have a massive student loan payment, it isn't much better at all because it's all going right back out the door. And then of course, some people are not college material (or even trainable). There will *always* be a need for entry level jobs and the workers who fulfill them because they can't get anything better.
I agree that fast food or any entry level job isn't a career. It's a job tho. It should pay enough to support yourself. Would you rather people collect welfare instead and cost the tax payers money?
Oh wait.. we already do. Did you know that many people who make minimum wage still qualify for Food Stamps, WIC, and Welfare? Yeah so we have people working who don't make enough end up getting state assistance anyways because they can't afford to live.
So not only are the tax payers getting screwed because now we're supporting "the working poor" who collect benefits, but also by mega corporations who get sweetheart tax deals/breaks and/or move HQ's out of the country to avoid paying taxes all together. I call that a "taxpayer spit roast", we get screwed in both directions from both the "working poor" and the corporations.
The solution.. increase wages so people can support themselves, and no longer need or qualify for assistance. In the very long run it saves everyone money. The tax payers, the workers, and even the employers (think lower turn over, and less training costs). Plus it improves the workers quality of life.. so maybe they can afford (and not work two low wage jobs) to go to college and improve themselves to get that better job you say they need.
I'd rather pay a little bit more at the cash register knowing those workers make a living wage, than to have my taxes go up because we need to have more funding for benefits programs. Wouldn't you?
It just the right thing to do.
Newsflash
This isn't communism, no one owes you comfortable middle-class lifestyle if you don't have any marketable skills. Also, you don't have to go into massive debt to get a degree from a state school - in fact, there's so much financial aid it'll be essentially free as long as you qualify. Now, we all know a master's in early 20th century sub-Saharan African transgender history from Emerson will cost more than an average Boston condo, but that's not what we're talking about here.
As far as taxes go, are you really naive enough to think they'll go down if minimum wage gets jacked to $15? I guarantee they won't change, but your 401k will evaporate once all those evil corporations stop pulling in those massive profits and the value of their stocks in your retirement portfolio gets wiped out. Just look at Walmart after they raised their wages - their stock went down the crapper well before the oil fiasco, while the market was still steadily climbing. It's the middle class that's going to get screwed, their income won't change, they'll lose their retirement savings and also get stuck paying higher prices for everything. Is that what you want, just because paying burger flippers way more than their labor is actually worth is "the right thing to do?" It's going to be the working stiffs like you and me making between 40 and 80k who will really feel the pain, not the welfare crowd who would still collect regardless of the minimum wage or the six figure earners.
Newsflash
The value of people's 401(k)s and IRAs seem to be collapsing quite nicely of late without any massive increase in the minimum wage.
Newsflash
It's clear you're trying to bait people, and you have no clue what you are talking about. None.
But you do have a right to live and not be homeless on the street or not work two jobs to be able to pay your rent or put food on your table and not be a burden on society.
You also have a right not to be enslaved to corporations because you have to work two jobs because corporations refuse to pay more than just the required minimum.
Being free and having freedom is a cornerstone of the foundation of this country. And freedom doesn't always have to mean freedom of speech, it can also mean freedom from poverty, and freedom from being massively in debt. What good is being 'free' in this country when you're a slave to a low paying job?
You really don't have a clue. Really? Free? Tell me how you go about doing that. I want exact details of how you go about getting schooling paid for 100%. Don't forget about supporting & feeding yourself along with money for materials (books). Because I want to share your knowledge with the world since you seem to have this all figured out.
Oh yeah, you can't include any loans or anything that has to be paid back. And it has to be 100% paid.. no partials.
So tell me how people can get schooling for free, I'm waiting for your answer.
I never said taxes would go down. You did. I just said raising the minimum wage would less the burden on the tax payers and probably save money. Never said a word about taxes going down, because truthfully, if more people got off welfare, so I doubt I'd see my taxes go down anyways, it would just get allocated for something else.
hahahaha 401k.. the biggest scam on the middle class out there. You obviously don't have a 401k.. I do. Mine has lost value, long before a massive increase to the minimum wage. So your argument is moot. Nice try though.
Do you think I give a crap about WalMart? hahahaha I actually wish the entire company would go away. WalMart, which is one of the nations largest employers, is one of the major cause of not paying a living wage. And my reply above about people who collect benefits while working was about WalMart employees. Most WalMart employees qualify for state assistance. Yet we give them huge tax breaks and incentives. So as I said before... 'taxpayer spit roast'.. we get it from both ends.
Why yes.. yes I do. I have many, many, many people I know from where I am from who barely make it by each month who are 'working poor'. A good portion of Americans are one paycheck away from being out on the street. How is this good?
Regardless, the cost of goods isn't going up to such a point where it's going to really break the bank for most people. As stated above by another poster, it would work out to pennies. Even still, look at a place like Papa John's, who's owner (John Schnatter) was against the ACA because it would 'cost him too much', when in reality, it would only raise the price of one his pizza's by PENNIES. But no, that cut too much into his profits for him to support such an idea.
"regardless of the minimum wage". You must have no clue how people qualify for assistance. It's INCOME BASED. Raising the minimum wage to 15/hr would remove a good portion of people who collect, because 15/hr @ 40hrs* a week would be ~28k. vs 9/hr which is ~17k. In order to qualify for assistance, in many cases, you need to make LESS than 150% of the poverty line (which is about 11k), so raising it to 15/hr would eliminate most from collecting.
* of course this is assuming these are FULL time jobs. Most entry level jobs are not full time, as corporations keep these positions under 32 hours so they don't have to pay benefits (which is an entirely different discussion). Even still, at 15/hr, a worker would still earn 23k, which is still above the "150% of the federal poverty line" needed to qualify for assistance.
So "newsflash", you don't have a clue about what you're talking about.
401k
Yes, it's a scam. Also, that company match you're getting us in monopoly money.
On a more serious note, do you even know what's in your portfolio? Chances are, it's stocks of all those evil corporations. What do you think will happen to all those food, retail and service industry stocks, along with the broader matket, when those allegedly massive profits dry up?
I do
I'm probably one of the few who actually did their homework and selected investments in my portfolio that meet the type of companies I want to support. Most people don't, and take the default. I am down right anal about my finances and anything that has to do with my money. I'm one of the few who knows what's in their checking account down to the penny and know where every penny goes. I can't say that for most. (and I'm not poor by any means, just money wise)
I tend to do more high risk investments because I started late. And yes I'm aware that this may be the reason why mine shrank, but I had to start somewhere.
I also don't think "massive profits" will dry up. You make it sound that a few pennies on the dollar away from profits to support a wage increase will bankrupt a company. Not so. It just means fat cat execs and board members won't take home as much. Or in WalMart's case, raising the minimum wage to a living wage for every WalMart employee would cost the Walton family less than a percent to do, and would only raises prices by a few pennies.
Massive profits
http://corporate.walmart.com/_news_/walmart-facts/corporate-financial-fa... - looks like Walmart paid out $7.2 billion via dividends and share buybacks last year. Now, they employ about 1.4 million people here - let's just assume half of them are minimum wage drones that according to you should get a $10,000/year raise from what they make so they're earning a living wage because it's the right thing to do. It'll obviously cost walmart much more than that once all taxes are taken into account, but let's keep it simple. That, my friend, is $7 billion right there. Now, you might be happy not getting a dividend and seeing stock price getting obliterated (not just walmart but any industry that relies on low-skilled, low cost labor,) but I'm sure many would not agree with you.
And, before any clown brings up their Costco darling - they employ about half as many drones per square foot as walmart, which is why they can afford to pay twice as much.
better for people to know what their labor is actually worth
Workers make crappy wages because the job is one that a lot of people can do.
Which is the basis for Unions
Unions have plenty of problems but one of the better arguments for them is that it keeps people with fairly generic (but important) skills from being screwed over by employers who know they can be replaced quickly and easily.
If you need work you'll take a job even it pays too little to live because any money is better than no money. Is that a reason to pay someone poorly just because they are somewhat desperate and don't have other options?
This is an oversimplification of a complex problem to be sure. However, the people protesting aren't exactly slacker college drop outs -- they are middle aged adults. To sit back and criticize them for not having having made other decisions 20 years ago or for circumstances beyond their control is daft.
union work
Union work involves a lot of unemployment in my experience.
What's your experience, old-timer?
Do tell us! What exactly is your experience with "union work" and "a lot of unemployment"? Facts and figures, please.
If a job needs to be done....
... the person doing it should get a living wage, Period.
Nope
The person doing the job should be paid what the work is worth.
Otherwise, we get to have the fun and excitement of having to make a decision by committee on what exactly constitutes a "living wage."
Should it be enough for a 500 square foot apartment or does anything under 550 get classed as substandard? How about cell service? Is a bare bones talk and text plan for 30/month acceptable or is the ability to stream cat videos while riding the bus now an essential need?
You say it's 15/hr, the next guy over demands with all his sole that he can't feed his wife and three kids on less than 20, and some jerk next in line says you can make do with less than 10 if you practice basic financial discipline.
And I say the discussion is not even wrong because there's no way in shell that standing at the front door of Target and saying "hi" to the customers is worth 15/hr, but it's worth more than zero so why on earth shouldn't that be the wage?
This is why we have experts
Just because you don't understand how a poverty line is determined or how much time people spend researching questions like "what is a minimum requirement for living" doesn't mean that it isn't something we already have an answer for.
If you're not just arguing from personal ignorance as if these are unfathomable questions, then you should go research the answers to these questions and come back and argue for why we shouldn't pay what experts have already determined is a minimum required salary to stay out of poverty.
Yes, let's put the experts in charge
of something that isn't a neat mathematical abstraction but is instead a large ensemble of personal decisions that don't always conform to the theory. After all, economists are so good at predicting the future, I'm sure that *nothing could possibly go wrong* by giving a small group of people the power to decide what everyone else should do with their money.
There's absolutely no chance of waste, miscalculation, or corruption that could screw over everyone.
Sounds like you need yourself some America Lessons.
Yawn
Your constant appeal to the gods of "free market" and "American exceptionalism" grow tired, overused, misused, and about as useless as Trump at solving today's problems.
You haven't sourced ONE assertion you've made, suggesting they're all coming from "your gut" (or your ass by way of the gut anyways).
Sounds like you need some lessons. What kind? Any kind. You're woefully under-educated but think you've got the whole world in a neat little bundle in your pocket...if only we'd all listen to how simple it could all be. Yes, simple...good description.
Here's a lesson about sourcing
Name-calling principles and ideologies as "tired" "overused" and "useless" just because you disagree with them may work on two-year-olds and True Believers, but it really doesn't work on anyone with more than half a brain.
American exceptionalism is false? Prove it. Point by point. Pretend you're in geometry class. Can't do it? Then you've got nothing. Move on.
The free market doesn't work? Prove it, and more importantly, explain away all the obvious cases where it does work, like the fact that the supermarkets are full of food, the best buy is full of kitchen appliances, and the home depot has tomato plants on sale every june. And I do mean all of them.
Also, don't confuse me with The Donald. I know it's hard, but even chimps and two-year-old humans have the ability to distinguish between the mental states and identities of distinct people. Embrace your inner human (or chimp, if that's your thing), I know you can do it!
And now some more serious lessons:
You don't need to source 1+1=2. Because it, and everything that derives from it is true by virtue of itself.
You shouldn't cite "studies" about hot-button political issues produced or paid for by groups with an overt political agenda and call it objective.
You shouldn't cite studies whose broad strokes come down to "let me and my friends decide for you because I said so". I believe there's also a lesson about the shell games by the bus station that's related to that one.
The two things I learned from all my apparently deficient education in formal and applied mathematics is that statistics can and will be abused to show anything and confirmation bias is everywhere.
Well then
Let's just trust you to have no confirmation bias and not need any sources or statistics because they're all bunk anyways.
Whew, go on then prophet of truth, America, and free markets. Please tell us more from your pure position unassailable by anyone else's data, evidence, or thoughts to the contrary.
Cute
except that my argument is that no small group of people should be empowered to make decisions for the rest of the free citizenry.
Precisely because they can't have all the information they need to please all the people all the time, assuming they're not in somebody's pocket, which historically is a very charitable assumption to make.
Like I said, someone needs America lessons, and reading comprehension lessons.
So, for you...
... no child labor laws, no minimum wage laws, no regulation of breaks (or other working conditions). Just one big, libertarian paradise -- in which each individual worker pits his strength mano-a-mano against global, trillion-dollar corporations.
Interesting that you think that THIS is what America is (or should be) all about.
Kids these days just don't
Kids these days just don't want to do any work! Always demanding more!
Oh wait, 41-67 year olds are getting arrested because they can't afford to live on these crap wages for hard jobs? Maybe we should listen and do something.
Free tickets
to North Dakota when the price of oil ticks up again?
Don't hold your breath
With diplomatic relations with Iran, there's less incentive than ever to pay high extraction costs. Too bad for those who thought they'd profit from the boom...
Notice all of them are 40
Notice all of them are 40 plus years old...
Serious Question......
Does raising the minimum wage to a certain extent ($20, $25, $50) have the same effect as just printing more money? Would printing more money and just giving it to minimum wages now have the same effect?
And........
At some point, those making $15 an hour will lose some sort of government subsidized assistance since they would no longer be below or at the poverty line? (Assuming at least some mim wage workers will be above this line after an increase)
Pete
See my looong comment above. Yes they will no longer qualify.
thanks cybah
I kind of skimmed through a lot of the above posts...
No
Raising the minimum wage requires the companies to stop turning to their payroll as a source of profit margin. They will have to innovate, see stock declines, or raise prices. Of course you've now potentiated a LOT more consumers by giving them a salary that allows them to spend (it's known that increases in salary for the poor all gets spent, so the money circulates). So, you have more consumers, more demand, prices can stay low due to volume of sales going up. Mandatory wage increases almost always come out of profitability which companies have been abusing to make their company owners more money in any way possible and less to do with innovation/improving the market.
None of this requires more money to be printed. These days "printing more money" just puts more money in investors hands to flip stock, etc. and never even finds its way to the lower classes. It's a great source of pumping up the economy but it does next to nothing to wages, pricing, etc.
I'm just curious
as to what it is that you do for a living that you can have such ...a special...understanding of how businesses are run.
I work in defense and my employer has exactly one client, so I'm not exactly Mr. Free Market over here, but even I know that you can't expect people to just take a hit on their profits when their costs go up, those costs will get passed on to everyone because...get this...There's No Free Lunch
I think I get that Kaz....
I guess I'm asking a hypothetical in terms of what if you raised it too much? Wouldn't that have a direct impact on prices and then on inflation?
Would it be better to just raise it 50 or 75 cents a year for 20 years guaranteed than just make it $15?
I do like the "innovative" concept, but I'm not sure that works as well with smaller businesses, which may simply have to rely on raising prices. But if Walmart said they would give their workers a 40% discount on goods instead of 20%, that might accomplish as much as raising their wages.