9 ms·

Typical workers increased by about 10% in the same time and minimum wage workers decreased by 5.5%. Something is rigged. https://memepoliceman.com/misleading-

Typical workers increased by about 10% in the same time and minimum wage workers decreased by 5.5%. Something is rigged. https://memepoliceman.com/misleading-with-inflation-since-1978/ https://memepoliceman.com/misleading-with-inflation-since-19...

harryh 7y ago
Globalization simultaneously brought competition for many workers and allowed for large multinational companies with the ability to pay their CEOs more. Is that rigged or is that just change?
- ajross 7y ago
  Changes to minimum wage levels are policy, not competition. The majority of these positions are things like service jobs not subject to global workforces. Basically: you can reasonably argue that a US textile job might pay less today because of competition from abroad. You can't say that about burger flipping or fruit picking. Those jobs are payed less because we deliberately dropped (in real money terms) the legally mandated floor on the salary.
  - twblalock 7y ago
    > The majority of these positions are things like service jobs not subject to global workforces. They are subject to automation. If you make service labor more expensive than robots, you'll be buying your Big Macs from robots instead of human cashiers.
    - ajross 7y ago
      Trivially disproven by the handful of high minimum wage metropolitain areas. If New Yorker cooks aren't getting displaced at $15/hour, I think Missisippi or Wyoming employees probably have safe jobs too. There's always an excuse. Yet real wages continue to drop.
      - hollerith 7y ago
        It is not trivial to estimate how many unemployed people would have jobs as cooks in New York if New York's minimum wage were lower. The fact that NY's minimum wage didn't eliminate all the cook jobs does not by itself allow us to make the estimate. Grandparent talks about robots, but it might also be the case that many cook jobs were displaced by the decision of consumers who would've eaten out if the minimum wage were lower deciding instead to cook at home or brown-bag it. Make the US minimum wage high enough and the US might become like Spain where in 2014, 57.9% of young people in were unemployed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_unemployment_in_Spain#Current_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_unemployment_in_Spain#Cu... Spain had a minimum wage of 752 euros per month in 2014: https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=ml9s8a132hlg_&met_y=minimum_wage&idim=country:es:fr:pt&fdim_y=currency:eur&hl=en&dl=en#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=minimum_wage&fdim_y=currency:eur&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=country&idim=country:es&ifdim=country&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=ml9s8a132hlg_&m... Of course, Spain was in the middle of an economic slowdown in 2014, but it is not impossible for a severe slowdown to hit the US, and if it does, the US government probably would not compensate for the slowdown by lowering the minimum wage. (The Spanish government didn't lower its minimum in response to their slowdown.)
        ajross 7y ago
        > it might also be the case that many cook jobs were displaced by the decision of consumers who would've eaten out if the minimum wage were lower So... paying people more makes them less likely to eat at a restaurant? That logic doesn't work, you're forgetting the other side of the consumer equation. Look: you can find all the excuses you want. There will always be excuses.[1] But in real terms wages are declining at the bottom of the income scale, and that's not something you get to brush away as not a problem via some cherry picked data. Is it genuinely your opinion that there is money in the US economy to give the super elite a 10x raise but none at all for anyone flipping burgers? Just say it if so and argue the moral level instead of all the excuse-making. [1] Hell, Spain isn't even the only crazy outlier from 2014! Go look at Greece! Gosh, it's like both of those countries had something else going on besides simple market pressure due to wages, but whatever. There will always be an excuse.
    - freehunter 7y ago
      So by keeping minimum wage below the poverty line, not only are we not realizing efficiencies the market could be providing, but we're also subsidizing the lack of market efficiency in social welfare benefits. All while the companies increase their profits on the backs of every taxpayer who subsidizes the employees those companies are not paying appropriately. If replacing humans with robots is so easy, we should do it. We're already giving those humans taxpayer money to survive anyway. It's not like we're saving money with the current system, we're just funneling taxpayer money straight into the pockets of Walmart, McDonalds, etc.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - maximente 7y ago
      believe me, capital will find a way to automate any potentially automatable job: it's just a matter of time and incentives. if you believe in what Andrew Yang has to say, truck driving and even some white collar stuff is on the chopping block, and those people aren't making minimum wage. therefore one must conclude that automation is driven by capital trying to save on labor, and the rest is a matter of intensity and investment/risk/reward tradeoff. sure, you may turn the dial up on the acceleration by bumping the minimum wage, but if you're arguing that people working full time yet still being relatively poor is worth briefly "saving" these jobs, i think you won't win many people over.
  - harryh 7y ago
    Ya, my point was more about "typical workers" than minimum wage ones.
  - mdorazio 7y ago
    That argument doesn't really hold unless you assume workers can only do one kind of job. If globalization destroys any blue collar & low-end white collar jobs or depresses wages for them, that's going to depress the entire pool of jobs available to workers who would otherwise have the opportunity to work those jobs instead of minimum wage service jobs. Put in example form, let's say we have 10 jobs that a group of blue collar and service workers could do in our economy. 3 of them are manufacturing, 5 are service, and 2 are skilled trades. Now 2 of the manufacturing jobs get eaten by globalization. We've still got 10 workers, but now they're competing for 8 jobs, and the 2 that lost their jobs are going to be willing to work for less money because less money is better than being unemployed. We've just depressed wages for the entire group. Meanwhile, of course, the owners of the factory picked up the gain from this entire transaction. Minimum wage doesn't really factor into it because it's an artificial floor that doesn't reflect market supply and demand.
- maximente 7y ago
  yeah. it is rigged. globalization, from the perspective of someone in a so called advanced country, seems to generally turn into a dressed up way of arbitraging less regulated (environmental, workers' rights, etc.) environments in order to increase profits. this is an easy way for capital to defeat labor's hard fought gains in e.g. minimum wage, maximum hours, benefits, "strict" environmental regulations, paying taxes, and so forth. the proof is in the pudding: US mass manufacturing isn't outsourcing to Germany, Denmark or Switzerland, because the arbitrage in differences in regulations aren't there. capital loves globalization because it can do things like pit a bunch of desperate places against each other then simply up and move to the "winner", sort of like the Amazon HQ search but internationally. labor, you'll find, typically doesn't have quite the same mobility. it then wags "low low prices" in front of the consumers who then find it easy to ignore their now jobless brothers and sisters as they shave a couple bucks off something or other. the first wave of globalization took goods-producing jobs and moved them into places where the calculus of (labor + environmental regulation + taxes cost savings etc. > additional overhead/compliance + logistics), then shilled the people on the meme of "lower prices" while their communities rotted away back in country. now the boomerang is on its way back and we're realizing that the loss of revenues, environmental ruin, illnesses of despair/desperation, etc. etc. may not be quite worth the alleged cost savings we were promised.
  - harryh 7y ago
    Globalization might have been tough for certain classes of workers in high cost companies but it was a HUGE HUGE HUGE BOON to workers in the many parts of the rest of the world. Literally billions have been lifted out of poverty because of it. If it's rigged, it's important to remember that it's rigged in favor of those people too.
    - maximente 7y ago
      > Literally billions have been lifted out of poverty because of it. i hear this meme a lot. can you point to statistics that indicate global poverty outside of China has materially changed in recent decades?

harryh 7y ago

Globalization simultaneously brought competition for many workers and allowed for large multinational companies with the ability to pay their CEOs more. Is that rigged or is that just change?

ajross 7y ago
Changes to minimum wage levels are policy, not competition. The majority of these positions are things like service jobs not subject to global workforces. Basically: you can reasonably argue that a US textile job might pay less today because of competition from abroad. You can't say that about burger flipping or fruit picking. Those jobs are payed less because we deliberately dropped (in real money terms) the legally mandated floor on the salary.
- twblalock 7y ago
  > The majority of these positions are things like service jobs not subject to global workforces. They are subject to automation. If you make service labor more expensive than robots, you'll be buying your Big Macs from robots instead of human cashiers.
  - ajross 7y ago
    Trivially disproven by the handful of high minimum wage metropolitain areas. If New Yorker cooks aren't getting displaced at $15/hour, I think Missisippi or Wyoming employees probably have safe jobs too. There's always an excuse. Yet real wages continue to drop.
    - hollerith 7y ago
      It is not trivial to estimate how many unemployed people would have jobs as cooks in New York if New York's minimum wage were lower. The fact that NY's minimum wage didn't eliminate all the cook jobs does not by itself allow us to make the estimate. Grandparent talks about robots, but it might also be the case that many cook jobs were displaced by the decision of consumers who would've eaten out if the minimum wage were lower deciding instead to cook at home or brown-bag it. Make the US minimum wage high enough and the US might become like Spain where in 2014, 57.9% of young people in were unemployed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_unemployment_in_Spain#Current_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_unemployment_in_Spain#Cu... Spain had a minimum wage of 752 euros per month in 2014: https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=ml9s8a132hlg_&met_y=minimum_wage&idim=country:es:fr:pt&fdim_y=currency:eur&hl=en&dl=en#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=minimum_wage&fdim_y=currency:eur&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=country&idim=country:es&ifdim=country&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=ml9s8a132hlg_&m... Of course, Spain was in the middle of an economic slowdown in 2014, but it is not impossible for a severe slowdown to hit the US, and if it does, the US government probably would not compensate for the slowdown by lowering the minimum wage. (The Spanish government didn't lower its minimum in response to their slowdown.)
      - ajross 7y ago
        > it might also be the case that many cook jobs were displaced by the decision of consumers who would've eaten out if the minimum wage were lower So... paying people more makes them less likely to eat at a restaurant? That logic doesn't work, you're forgetting the other side of the consumer equation. Look: you can find all the excuses you want. There will always be excuses.[1] But in real terms wages are declining at the bottom of the income scale, and that's not something you get to brush away as not a problem via some cherry picked data. Is it genuinely your opinion that there is money in the US economy to give the super elite a 10x raise but none at all for anyone flipping burgers? Just say it if so and argue the moral level instead of all the excuse-making. [1] Hell, Spain isn't even the only crazy outlier from 2014! Go look at Greece! Gosh, it's like both of those countries had something else going on besides simple market pressure due to wages, but whatever. There will always be an excuse.
  - freehunter 7y ago
    So by keeping minimum wage below the poverty line, not only are we not realizing efficiencies the market could be providing, but we're also subsidizing the lack of market efficiency in social welfare benefits. All while the companies increase their profits on the backs of every taxpayer who subsidizes the employees those companies are not paying appropriately. If replacing humans with robots is so easy, we should do it. We're already giving those humans taxpayer money to survive anyway. It's not like we're saving money with the current system, we're just funneling taxpayer money straight into the pockets of Walmart, McDonalds, etc.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - maximente 7y ago
    believe me, capital will find a way to automate any potentially automatable job: it's just a matter of time and incentives. if you believe in what Andrew Yang has to say, truck driving and even some white collar stuff is on the chopping block, and those people aren't making minimum wage. therefore one must conclude that automation is driven by capital trying to save on labor, and the rest is a matter of intensity and investment/risk/reward tradeoff. sure, you may turn the dial up on the acceleration by bumping the minimum wage, but if you're arguing that people working full time yet still being relatively poor is worth briefly "saving" these jobs, i think you won't win many people over.
- harryh 7y ago
  Ya, my point was more about "typical workers" than minimum wage ones.
- mdorazio 7y ago
  That argument doesn't really hold unless you assume workers can only do one kind of job. If globalization destroys any blue collar & low-end white collar jobs or depresses wages for them, that's going to depress the entire pool of jobs available to workers who would otherwise have the opportunity to work those jobs instead of minimum wage service jobs. Put in example form, let's say we have 10 jobs that a group of blue collar and service workers could do in our economy. 3 of them are manufacturing, 5 are service, and 2 are skilled trades. Now 2 of the manufacturing jobs get eaten by globalization. We've still got 10 workers, but now they're competing for 8 jobs, and the 2 that lost their jobs are going to be willing to work for less money because less money is better than being unemployed. We've just depressed wages for the entire group. Meanwhile, of course, the owners of the factory picked up the gain from this entire transaction. Minimum wage doesn't really factor into it because it's an artificial floor that doesn't reflect market supply and demand.
maximente 7y ago
yeah. it is rigged. globalization, from the perspective of someone in a so called advanced country, seems to generally turn into a dressed up way of arbitraging less regulated (environmental, workers' rights, etc.) environments in order to increase profits. this is an easy way for capital to defeat labor's hard fought gains in e.g. minimum wage, maximum hours, benefits, "strict" environmental regulations, paying taxes, and so forth. the proof is in the pudding: US mass manufacturing isn't outsourcing to Germany, Denmark or Switzerland, because the arbitrage in differences in regulations aren't there. capital loves globalization because it can do things like pit a bunch of desperate places against each other then simply up and move to the "winner", sort of like the Amazon HQ search but internationally. labor, you'll find, typically doesn't have quite the same mobility. it then wags "low low prices" in front of the consumers who then find it easy to ignore their now jobless brothers and sisters as they shave a couple bucks off something or other. the first wave of globalization took goods-producing jobs and moved them into places where the calculus of (labor + environmental regulation + taxes cost savings etc. > additional overhead/compliance + logistics), then shilled the people on the meme of "lower prices" while their communities rotted away back in country. now the boomerang is on its way back and we're realizing that the loss of revenues, environmental ruin, illnesses of despair/desperation, etc. etc. may not be quite worth the alleged cost savings we were promised.
- harryh 7y ago
  Globalization might have been tough for certain classes of workers in high cost companies but it was a HUGE HUGE HUGE BOON to workers in the many parts of the rest of the world. Literally billions have been lifted out of poverty because of it. If it's rigged, it's important to remember that it's rigged in favor of those people too.
  - maximente 7y ago
    > Literally billions have been lifted out of poverty because of it. i hear this meme a lot. can you point to statistics that indicate global poverty outside of China has materially changed in recent decades?