6 ms·

The higher the minimum wage gets, the harder it'll be for those with little or no skills to get a job.

by jayess 10y ago

deciplex 10y ago
You're right. Minimum wage is a hack from a previous era. We should do away with it and replace it with basic income.
- Alupis 10y ago
  > We should do away with it and replace it with basic income So instead of encouraging (or mandating?) young folks get trained or educated (or both!), we simply give them money for existing? I don't see how that solves the bigger issue. We, as a society, are very good at band-aid solutions (like minimum wage from the get-go). We're not good at solving the real hard problems. The real hard problem here is folks are getting neither a good education, nor are being trained for highly skilled jobs. Folks want to have a cake, and eat it too. This dwells into the highly debated economics of a BI economy, however we do know (and mostly agree) that a shrinking workforce will not be able to sustain a BI. Rather, we need that workforce to evolve into higher level jobs, but this requires even more education and/or highly skilled job training.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    > The real hard problem here is folks are getting neither a good education, nor are being trained for highly skilled jobs. Folks want to have a cake, and eat it too. Or there are aren't enough jobs? What are you going to do? Will good jobs into existence? That's not going to happen. > however we do know (and mostly agree) that a shrinking workforce will not be able to sustain a BI. Completely wrong. We already harvest enough food to feed everyone. We're well on our way to 100% clean, renewable energy. We're already well on our way to self-driving electric cars. The rest? We're on our way to automating that as well (doctors and lawyers first, the most expensive skillsets, and then quickly down from there). Basic Income is easy when automation and clean energy are doing the heavy lifting. I don't need to take from you to give to someone else because what you offer (your labor) would no longer have value.
    - Alupis 10y ago
      > Or there are aren't enough jobs? That's the thing about higher education and/or highly skilled training. It enables the creation of more jobs. (A job can be self-employed). And to that end, we have jobs, plenty... but we don't have folks willing (or qualified) to fill them. This is inside the "bubble", but there's very few software companies that are not constantly hiring. We simply don't have enough qualified engineers to fill all the available seats. I'll concede that there are certainly fields where jobs are disappearing, and as you hinted, this is part of the "new economy". We need these folks (and our young generation) to gain new skills that are more useful in this new economy. Sure, many things will become automated, but we need folks to create the automation. (and no, I don't believe doctors nor lawyers will ever fully be automated, as these are not just knowledge/task-based skillsets). > I don't need to take from you to give to someone else because what you offer (your labor) would no longer have value This is not how an economy runs. The government can't print money to hand out, so it must come from someplace. This someplace is taxes, paid for by the workforce in majority (payroll tax + income tax equal about 80% of federal revenue[1]). If this workforce shrinks, so does federal revenue, which means not enough funds to support a BI long term (this is part of the reason a BI has never been implemented, even though it's a very old idea. We have to wait and see how it works out for the volunteer test nation in the long term...). > Basic Income is easy when automation and clean energy are doing the heavy lifting This goes back to my earlier point. We need fewer low skilled laborers, instead replaced with more highly skilled laborers. We need folks to design and implement the robots that will eventually build all these other things. We'll always have a human workforce - but the landscape of "work" is indeed changing. [1] http://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-federal-tax-revenues-come-from http://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-federal-...
  - knieveltech 10y ago
    There simply aren't enough jobs to go around and automation is wiping out entire career tracks faster than they could possibly be replaced. Example: in the area I grew up in if you weren't headed off to college and didn't want to join the military you always had the option of working on a pulp wood crew. The work was back-breaking, the pay wasn't great, but you could get by and turnover was so high that if you stuck it out for a few years you'd end up running your own crew. Fast forward a couple decades and the work of 60 men with chainsaws, trucks, and manning equipment at the lumber yard has been replaced by three or four heavy equipment operators, a truck driver, and a couple of engineers at the sawmill that monitor the line for faults. That's work that isn't coming back and nothing new has popped up to replace it.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - tensafefrogs 10y ago
    > So instead of encouraging (or mandating?) young folks get trained or educated (or both!), we simply give them money for existing? I don't see how that solves the bigger issue. No, you give them money to pay rent and eat while they go to school if they want to, or learn whatever new skills they might be interested in instead of having to wait tables. Plenty of people would love to go to school but can't afford to on a minimum wage job.
    - Chronic51 10y ago
      Why do they love to go to school? To learn? No - they can do that with the Internet today. They want a higher paying job, nothing else.
    - Alupis 10y ago
      > No, you give them money to pay rent and eat If every person gets X dollars per month, then over time, everything will cost at least X dollars. We have 78 years of a "grand experiment" to prove this (minimum wage). Proponents of BI often forget that our economy will not remain how it is today. Sure, if everyone today had an extra guaranteed $1,000 every month, it would short-term be fantastic. But the economy would eventually adjust, as it always does. Rent would slide upwards, so would goods prices, etc, to the point where we wind up where we are today with minimum wage (perpetually raising it every few years in a never-ending game of cat and mouse, the essential cost of living). > Plenty of people would love to go to school but can't afford to on a minimum wage job. We do have programs in place that solve this. Yes, you have to pay it back, and it can certainly add up to a large sum if you decide to not work at all and use your loan to pay for food and rent. Perhaps our universities should change the paradigm, and require students to work at minimum part time, as this yields a tremendous amount more than just money... but I digress.
      - deciplex 10y ago
        > Sure, if everyone today had an extra guaranteed $1,000 every month, it would short-term be fantastic. But the economy would eventually adjust, as it always does. Rent would slide upwards, so would goods prices, etc, to the point where we wind up where we are today with minimum wage (perpetually raising it every few years in a never-ending game of cat and mouse, the essential cost of living). If implemented by idiots, I agree basic income would tend to result in the consequences you describe [1]. It is very important that any implementation of basic income also do away with minimum wage at the same time. If a person is currently working a job which pays them $1500 / month, then ideally basic income would result in (assuming that we agree on $1000 / month as the minimum subsistence-level income) that same person making $500 / month at the same job, and receiving $1000 / month in basic income. So to be clear, anyone currently getting a wage exceeding the agreed-upon basic income level, should not see much difference in how much they take home each month. Properly done, the only price inflation you should see are from people who are seeing more money each month than they were before, because they were previously working at below-subsistence wages. But even then, they were probably receiving other government assistance anyway, and with basic income we'd start phasing that stuff out as well. [1] Which, I admit, means it stands a good chance of happening that way. Difficulty of proper implementation is an argument against basic income, but it is also reflective of our broken, irresponsible government.
  - deciplex 10y ago
    > So instead of encouraging (or mandating?) young folks get trained or educated (or both!), we simply give them money for existing? I don't see how that solves the bigger issue. It solves the issue with minimum wage pointed out by jayess, at least. Employers would be able to hire people for whatever wage they like, even pennies a day if they wanted to (or financials forced them to). Meanwhile, the people working for very low wages or unable to find work at all, would be guaranteed enough to live on regardless. That seems to be a goal of economic policy these days. I don't see anyone arguing that we must - by dint of constrained resources - simply have some people live below the subsistence level (which is another way of saying we must leave some people to die). If that is your position then please show us that we don't have the resources we need to keep our current population alive. Because otherwise, one way or another, we ought to be providing people with food and housing - simply for existing. We've tried government housing and food stamps and soup kitchens: government housing is a disaster, food stamps seem nearly equivalent to giving people cash anyway, and soup kitchens probably can't scale. We've tried minimum wage and that did mostly work while the supply (and type) of labor matched the supply (and type) of jobs available, but it's not clear that will be the case going forward. And, even if it is the case going forward, basic income might still work better, anyway. I'm all for educating people, or training them, etc. However it is a fact that some people will fall through the cracks, and it is a fact that not everyone can be trained or educated into a vocation that society actually needs people for. For these cases basic income seems like the most efficient means of keeping them alive, fed, and sheltered. I am open to other solutions.
  - slackstation 10y ago
    The real meta problem is that if you don't work, you don't eat. Who cares if they have a job or they just sit at home and play videogames. Basic Income would allow people the freedom to pursue the things that truly interest them. It will be a golden era of video games and movies and art. A huge percentage of the population will be only concerned with pleasure. Overall, we produce more with less labor and robotic automation only accelerates that. It's not just factory workers and cashiers either. Many white collar tasks, bookkeeping, simple accounting, simple contracts, simple law are being swallowed by automation too. I see a future where everyone is in a play or a movie, making a game, working on a novel, reading a metric ton of fan-fiction. What's probably true is alot more porn, video games and arguing on Reddit about porn and video games. Either way, it's better than millions doing jobs they hate, badly as they watch automation swallow them up like an ocean does an exhausted overboard sailor.
    - douche 10y ago
      > Overall, we produce more with less labor and robotic automation only accelerates that. I recently visited a reconstruction medieval village museum on the outskirts of Berlin. It's almost unimaginable how labor-intensive simple subsistence was for our ancestors. Try running a scratch-plow behind a team of oxen, reaping wheat with a sickle, grinding flour with a quern, spinning wool into yarn by hand with a spindle, weaving that yarn into cloth on a hand-loom, chopping hazel whips with a hatchet, splitting them into withs, and weaving a basket. Now I can walk into Walmart, and grab a loaf of bread, a five-pack of t-shirts, and a Rubbermaid storage tub for less than an hour's worth of labor.
    - lexhaynes 10y ago
      Where would the money for Basic Income come from?
ahoy 10y ago
What a goofy thing to think. Effective minimum wage(that is, min. wage adjusted for inflation) has been slowly declining for decades. Minimum wage isn't getting higher, it's getting slowly lower.
- Alupis 10y ago
  > Effective minimum wage(that is, min. wage adjusted for inflation) has been slowly declining for decades. Minimum wage isn't getting higher, it's getting slowly lower. This is simply not true. Minimum wage was introduced in 1938, and was for a whopping $0.25 per hour. This is about $4.22 per hour in 2016 dollars. Federal minimum wage is currently at $7.25. Some states have even higher minimum wages, with California coming in at $10.00 (soon to coast up to $15.00 per hour in the next few years). So no, the purchasing power of minimum wage is not getting lower, quite the opposite.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    It has been getting lower until these increases have kicked in (as they should! without them, everyone else is getting labor at an artificial discount).
    - Chronic51 10y ago
      The higher the stated minimum wage gets, the lower the real minimum wage gets. You can be certain all other expenses will increase and job benefits will decrease to compensate.
  - Retric 10y ago
    In 1969 the minimum wage was 1.4$/hour which works out to $10.34 in 2012 dollars. You can go back to 1956 and see eq $8.29 or forward to 1972 @ eq $9.10 vs now at less than 7.25$ in 2012 dollars. More recently it peaked in 2009 and has fallen every year after that currently it's down 15%. PS: In fact you need to go back to 1949 to find a worse year than 2006.
    - 10y ago
douche 10y ago
We're rapidly approaching the point where the utility of an untrained, low-skill worker is less than the cost of technology to replace them. Self-service checkout lines for retail are already an improvement - how long until fast-food restaurants simply turn around the POS systems at the counter, and you have Siri or Cortana taking your order at the drive-through? The floor for employability is getting higher, and I'm worried for the people with low ceilings.
- imron 10y ago
  > Self-service checkout lines for retail are already an improvement For some, but not for others. There are plenty of people who prefer manned checkout counters.
  - imtringued 10y ago
    Current self service checkouts are far from what they should be. Ideally we'd have an rfid gate which you pass through that scans all the items in your cart without scanning them manually.
imron 10y ago
Data from countries with a high minimum wage show that it's not difficult for people with little or no skills to get a job. Not only that, but they also have a living wage.
biswaroop 10y ago
But the article is about those without college degrees, not those with little skills.

The higher the minimum wage gets, the harder it'll be for those with little or no skills to get a job.

by jayess 10y ago

The higher the minimum wage gets, the harder it'll be for those with little or no skills to get a job.

deciplex 10y ago

You're right. Minimum wage is a hack from a previous era. We should do away with it and replace it with basic income.

Alupis 10y ago
> We should do away with it and replace it with basic income So instead of encouraging (or mandating?) young folks get trained or educated (or both!), we simply give them money for existing? I don't see how that solves the bigger issue. We, as a society, are very good at band-aid solutions (like minimum wage from the get-go). We're not good at solving the real hard problems. The real hard problem here is folks are getting neither a good education, nor are being trained for highly skilled jobs. Folks want to have a cake, and eat it too. This dwells into the highly debated economics of a BI economy, however we do know (and mostly agree) that a shrinking workforce will not be able to sustain a BI. Rather, we need that workforce to evolve into higher level jobs, but this requires even more education and/or highly skilled job training.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  > The real hard problem here is folks are getting neither a good education, nor are being trained for highly skilled jobs. Folks want to have a cake, and eat it too. Or there are aren't enough jobs? What are you going to do? Will good jobs into existence? That's not going to happen. > however we do know (and mostly agree) that a shrinking workforce will not be able to sustain a BI. Completely wrong. We already harvest enough food to feed everyone. We're well on our way to 100% clean, renewable energy. We're already well on our way to self-driving electric cars. The rest? We're on our way to automating that as well (doctors and lawyers first, the most expensive skillsets, and then quickly down from there). Basic Income is easy when automation and clean energy are doing the heavy lifting. I don't need to take from you to give to someone else because what you offer (your labor) would no longer have value.
  - Alupis 10y ago
    > Or there are aren't enough jobs? That's the thing about higher education and/or highly skilled training. It enables the creation of more jobs. (A job can be self-employed). And to that end, we have jobs, plenty... but we don't have folks willing (or qualified) to fill them. This is inside the "bubble", but there's very few software companies that are not constantly hiring. We simply don't have enough qualified engineers to fill all the available seats. I'll concede that there are certainly fields where jobs are disappearing, and as you hinted, this is part of the "new economy". We need these folks (and our young generation) to gain new skills that are more useful in this new economy. Sure, many things will become automated, but we need folks to create the automation. (and no, I don't believe doctors nor lawyers will ever fully be automated, as these are not just knowledge/task-based skillsets). > I don't need to take from you to give to someone else because what you offer (your labor) would no longer have value This is not how an economy runs. The government can't print money to hand out, so it must come from someplace. This someplace is taxes, paid for by the workforce in majority (payroll tax + income tax equal about 80% of federal revenue[1]). If this workforce shrinks, so does federal revenue, which means not enough funds to support a BI long term (this is part of the reason a BI has never been implemented, even though it's a very old idea. We have to wait and see how it works out for the volunteer test nation in the long term...). > Basic Income is easy when automation and clean energy are doing the heavy lifting This goes back to my earlier point. We need fewer low skilled laborers, instead replaced with more highly skilled laborers. We need folks to design and implement the robots that will eventually build all these other things. We'll always have a human workforce - but the landscape of "work" is indeed changing. [1] http://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-federal-tax-revenues-come-from http://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-federal-...
- knieveltech 10y ago
  There simply aren't enough jobs to go around and automation is wiping out entire career tracks faster than they could possibly be replaced. Example: in the area I grew up in if you weren't headed off to college and didn't want to join the military you always had the option of working on a pulp wood crew. The work was back-breaking, the pay wasn't great, but you could get by and turnover was so high that if you stuck it out for a few years you'd end up running your own crew. Fast forward a couple decades and the work of 60 men with chainsaws, trucks, and manning equipment at the lumber yard has been replaced by three or four heavy equipment operators, a truck driver, and a couple of engineers at the sawmill that monitor the line for faults. That's work that isn't coming back and nothing new has popped up to replace it.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- tensafefrogs 10y ago
  > So instead of encouraging (or mandating?) young folks get trained or educated (or both!), we simply give them money for existing? I don't see how that solves the bigger issue. No, you give them money to pay rent and eat while they go to school if they want to, or learn whatever new skills they might be interested in instead of having to wait tables. Plenty of people would love to go to school but can't afford to on a minimum wage job.
  - Chronic51 10y ago
    Why do they love to go to school? To learn? No - they can do that with the Internet today. They want a higher paying job, nothing else.
  - Alupis 10y ago
    > No, you give them money to pay rent and eat If every person gets X dollars per month, then over time, everything will cost at least X dollars. We have 78 years of a "grand experiment" to prove this (minimum wage). Proponents of BI often forget that our economy will not remain how it is today. Sure, if everyone today had an extra guaranteed $1,000 every month, it would short-term be fantastic. But the economy would eventually adjust, as it always does. Rent would slide upwards, so would goods prices, etc, to the point where we wind up where we are today with minimum wage (perpetually raising it every few years in a never-ending game of cat and mouse, the essential cost of living). > Plenty of people would love to go to school but can't afford to on a minimum wage job. We do have programs in place that solve this. Yes, you have to pay it back, and it can certainly add up to a large sum if you decide to not work at all and use your loan to pay for food and rent. Perhaps our universities should change the paradigm, and require students to work at minimum part time, as this yields a tremendous amount more than just money... but I digress.
    - deciplex 10y ago
      > Sure, if everyone today had an extra guaranteed $1,000 every month, it would short-term be fantastic. But the economy would eventually adjust, as it always does. Rent would slide upwards, so would goods prices, etc, to the point where we wind up where we are today with minimum wage (perpetually raising it every few years in a never-ending game of cat and mouse, the essential cost of living). If implemented by idiots, I agree basic income would tend to result in the consequences you describe [1]. It is very important that any implementation of basic income also do away with minimum wage at the same time. If a person is currently working a job which pays them $1500 / month, then ideally basic income would result in (assuming that we agree on $1000 / month as the minimum subsistence-level income) that same person making $500 / month at the same job, and receiving $1000 / month in basic income. So to be clear, anyone currently getting a wage exceeding the agreed-upon basic income level, should not see much difference in how much they take home each month. Properly done, the only price inflation you should see are from people who are seeing more money each month than they were before, because they were previously working at below-subsistence wages. But even then, they were probably receiving other government assistance anyway, and with basic income we'd start phasing that stuff out as well. [1] Which, I admit, means it stands a good chance of happening that way. Difficulty of proper implementation is an argument against basic income, but it is also reflective of our broken, irresponsible government.
- deciplex 10y ago
  > So instead of encouraging (or mandating?) young folks get trained or educated (or both!), we simply give them money for existing? I don't see how that solves the bigger issue. It solves the issue with minimum wage pointed out by jayess, at least. Employers would be able to hire people for whatever wage they like, even pennies a day if they wanted to (or financials forced them to). Meanwhile, the people working for very low wages or unable to find work at all, would be guaranteed enough to live on regardless. That seems to be a goal of economic policy these days. I don't see anyone arguing that we must - by dint of constrained resources - simply have some people live below the subsistence level (which is another way of saying we must leave some people to die). If that is your position then please show us that we don't have the resources we need to keep our current population alive. Because otherwise, one way or another, we ought to be providing people with food and housing - simply for existing. We've tried government housing and food stamps and soup kitchens: government housing is a disaster, food stamps seem nearly equivalent to giving people cash anyway, and soup kitchens probably can't scale. We've tried minimum wage and that did mostly work while the supply (and type) of labor matched the supply (and type) of jobs available, but it's not clear that will be the case going forward. And, even if it is the case going forward, basic income might still work better, anyway. I'm all for educating people, or training them, etc. However it is a fact that some people will fall through the cracks, and it is a fact that not everyone can be trained or educated into a vocation that society actually needs people for. For these cases basic income seems like the most efficient means of keeping them alive, fed, and sheltered. I am open to other solutions.
- slackstation 10y ago
  The real meta problem is that if you don't work, you don't eat. Who cares if they have a job or they just sit at home and play videogames. Basic Income would allow people the freedom to pursue the things that truly interest them. It will be a golden era of video games and movies and art. A huge percentage of the population will be only concerned with pleasure. Overall, we produce more with less labor and robotic automation only accelerates that. It's not just factory workers and cashiers either. Many white collar tasks, bookkeeping, simple accounting, simple contracts, simple law are being swallowed by automation too. I see a future where everyone is in a play or a movie, making a game, working on a novel, reading a metric ton of fan-fiction. What's probably true is alot more porn, video games and arguing on Reddit about porn and video games. Either way, it's better than millions doing jobs they hate, badly as they watch automation swallow them up like an ocean does an exhausted overboard sailor.
  - douche 10y ago
    > Overall, we produce more with less labor and robotic automation only accelerates that. I recently visited a reconstruction medieval village museum on the outskirts of Berlin. It's almost unimaginable how labor-intensive simple subsistence was for our ancestors. Try running a scratch-plow behind a team of oxen, reaping wheat with a sickle, grinding flour with a quern, spinning wool into yarn by hand with a spindle, weaving that yarn into cloth on a hand-loom, chopping hazel whips with a hatchet, splitting them into withs, and weaving a basket. Now I can walk into Walmart, and grab a loaf of bread, a five-pack of t-shirts, and a Rubbermaid storage tub for less than an hour's worth of labor.
  - lexhaynes 10y ago
    Where would the money for Basic Income come from?

ahoy 10y ago

What a goofy thing to think. Effective minimum wage(that is, min. wage adjusted for inflation) has been slowly declining for decades. Minimum wage isn't getting higher, it's getting slowly lower.

Alupis 10y ago
> Effective minimum wage(that is, min. wage adjusted for inflation) has been slowly declining for decades. Minimum wage isn't getting higher, it's getting slowly lower. This is simply not true. Minimum wage was introduced in 1938, and was for a whopping $0.25 per hour. This is about $4.22 per hour in 2016 dollars. Federal minimum wage is currently at $7.25. Some states have even higher minimum wages, with California coming in at $10.00 (soon to coast up to $15.00 per hour in the next few years). So no, the purchasing power of minimum wage is not getting lower, quite the opposite.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  It has been getting lower until these increases have kicked in (as they should! without them, everyone else is getting labor at an artificial discount).
  - Chronic51 10y ago
    The higher the stated minimum wage gets, the lower the real minimum wage gets. You can be certain all other expenses will increase and job benefits will decrease to compensate.
- Retric 10y ago
  In 1969 the minimum wage was 1.4$/hour which works out to $10.34 in 2012 dollars. You can go back to 1956 and see eq $8.29 or forward to 1972 @ eq $9.10 vs now at less than 7.25$ in 2012 dollars. More recently it peaked in 2009 and has fallen every year after that currently it's down 15%. PS: In fact you need to go back to 1949 to find a worse year than 2006.
  - 10y ago

douche 10y ago

We're rapidly approaching the point where the utility of an untrained, low-skill worker is less than the cost of technology to replace them. Self-service checkout lines for retail are already an improvement - how long until fast-food restaurants simply turn around the POS systems at the counter, and you have Siri or Cortana taking your order at the drive-through? The floor for employability is getting higher, and I'm worried for the people with low ceilings.

imron 10y ago
> Self-service checkout lines for retail are already an improvement For some, but not for others. There are plenty of people who prefer manned checkout counters.
- imtringued 10y ago
  Current self service checkouts are far from what they should be. Ideally we'd have an rfid gate which you pass through that scans all the items in your cart without scanning them manually.

imron 10y ago

Data from countries with a high minimum wage show that it's not difficult for people with little or no skills to get a job. Not only that, but they also have a living wage.

biswaroop 10y ago

But the article is about those without college degrees, not those with little skills.