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I don't think anyone is saying that these sorts of companies have lots of money. These business have a model that relies on poverty wages changing the minimum

• humanrebar 5y ago
  A teenager making change on bagel purchases isn't working for "poverty wages". And a business that providing tennagers jobs isn't being exploitive. I do think employers should be conscious about the kinds of lives they set their employees up for, though we can talk about that without overgeneralization.
  • dstaley 5y ago
    Two things: 1. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, about half of people making minimum wage or less are older than 25 years old. 2. A single person working a full-time job (32 hours) at minimum wage makes $12,064. The US federal definition of poverty for this individual would be anything below $12,880. So yes, minimum wage workers are literally, by definition, working for poverty wages.
    • humanrebar 5y ago
      I don't find those talking points convincing. For one, even with your statistics, half of folks employed are school-age. Also, poverty is measured by household. Confusing the math isn't a good way to make a quantitative argument. But mostly your argument is a semantic trick around the word "poverty" to rationalize weighted terminology. Again, I have strong feelings that employers should be conscious of the lives and prospects of their employees. For instance, having policies that lead to irregular patterns of night and day shifts that have to be unhealthy long-term. But we can have rational discussion about these issues.
      • ncallaway 5y ago
        > Also, poverty is measured by household. Confusing the math isn't a good way to make a quantitative argument. The figure they used was for a household of size 1, so I don't think they confused the math and I think they made a perfectly strong quantitative argument. https://aspe.hhs.gov/2021-poverty-guidelines#threshholds https://aspe.hhs.gov/2021-poverty-guidelines#threshholds
    • AdrianB1 5y ago
      Where is a full time job 32 hours? We work 40 hours in most of the world, that is 25% more.
      • WarChortle18 5y ago
        Many companies in the US limit their employees to 32 or 36 hours a week so they don't have to pay benefits. It's a horrible system.
  • bp0017 5y ago
    Be careful with this argument, it's a talking point that over-represents the amount of these jobs held by teenagers earning pocket money. Quite a lot of minimum wage jobs are held by single parents or people just trying to stay afloat. By the way, even if it is just teenagers, I don't think that should somehow disqualify them from earning fair wages. They aren't being "provided" jobs, they work to produce value for a company, and and should be compensated fairly regardless of their financial situation.
    • humanrebar 5y ago
      I'm more concerned that teenagers in poverty won't be able to get jobs at all.
      • rbg246 5y ago
        But you have said yourself it's 'bagel' money, it doesn't seem to be coherent to be defending both teenager after school jobs and teenagers in poverty.
        • humanrebar 5y ago
          Teenagers getting whatever after school jobs they can contribute to incomes for households in poverty. If the McD's kiosk takes the cashier job, the family loses income. I don't want households in poverty. I'm just unconvinced by this mechanism. I'd rather see minimum incomes or policies to deflate housing costs.
        • shkkmo 5y ago
          You seem to have read too quickly, the poster was talking about someone working a cashier in a store that sells bagels, not about someone making money to buy bagels.
  • kixiQu 5y ago
    https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-workers-older-88-percent-workers-benefit/ https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-workers-older-88-percen... 88 percent of people making the federal minimum wage are older than 20. A third are older than 40. Median age is 31. More than half work full time.
    • humanrebar 5y ago
      You have a good point, and I appreciate the evenhanded approach. I'm still far from sold that "poverty wage" is a useful term if we want to have a healthy discussion. It leaves too much nuance out.
      • vlahmot 5y ago
        It doesn’t though. Poverty is well defined (and is defined based on the number of people in the household). https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines
        • AdrianB1 5y ago
          So wages should be linked to the number of people in the household? Workers with more kids should earn more by law? We do this is Europe, we pay something called 'kid allowance'. In some places people make 10 kids for the allowance, ignore them or mistreat them and live on that money.
      • adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
        Name one state where someone making minimum wage can afford an apartment, food, healthcare, and utilities, and some form of transportation. I think it's fair to say that if you can't, that counts as poverty.
        • humanrebar 5y ago
          Who says that's the point of minimum wage? That's where we disagree.
  • Pfhreak 5y ago
    I was a teenager working a minimum wage job. I also had to pay for housing, meals, healthcare, etc. Don't assume a teenager has a life less complex than yours.
    • humanrebar 5y ago
      With all due respect, you don't know me or what I've been through either.
      • Pfhreak 5y ago
        Sure. Point stands: I was literally a teenager making change on bagel purchases. (Yes, actual bagel shoppe.) I was absolutely making poverty wages. If I did not have free meals from work as a perk I would have starved.
        • humanrebar 5y ago
          And I worked minimum wage and it allowed my poor household to make ends meet. And another minimum wage job helped me stay solvent enough to survive university.
          • 8note 5y ago
            In what location though? Living costs are notably different by location
            • humanrebar 5y ago
              Apologies, but I'd rather not reveal too much personal info. But I did get need-based financial assistance in university. And I did attend a low cost school for financial reasons. I didn't "pay my way through school washing dishes" or anything like that. I wasn't supported by my family so the extra income through low pay jobs was critical.
              • 5y ago
  • cjohnson318 5y ago
    > A teenager making change on bagel purchases isn't working for "poverty wages". Aren't they though? You don't get a discount on rent because you're not 20 yet, and being under 20 doesn't mean you have rich parents that can subsidize your lifestyle.
    • humanrebar 5y ago
      I'm not arguing for low wages. But it's dishonest to conflate household income and individual salary. More specifically, having a roommate or two or living with some family unit is fairly normal at that age. So other income needs to be accounted for to make that semantic argument stick. Of course not everyone can have employed housemates. But even in those cases, it's not clear to me that banning 16 year olds from working those jobs helps all those 16 year olds. It seems likely that many of them end up worse off.
      • pnutjam 5y ago
        I'm sorry, but I think you absolutely have to give reasons to create a subclass. People do not need to explain why they should be treated the same.
        • humanrebar 5y ago
          How is paying a teenager to sweep a floor making a subclass? Seems like we're on a trajectory to replace that teenager with a vacuum drone, and I don't see as many teenagers employed in that world. The wealthy wouldn't notice. Their teenagers are entrepreneuring and racking up unpaid volunteer hours to pad resumes. The teenagers with jobs are the ones that could use the money.
          • pnutjam 5y ago
            It's pretty asinine to pretend these entry level jobs teach anyone anything. Let it be automated. The kids that are hard-working and poor will find something else to do. You don't have a right to exploit kids.
  • rbg246 5y ago
    Any gap in labor law leads to exploitation by a business owner, anything that can lead to business advantage gets used. Besides I found really distasteful when I was in my 20s being told that I didn't need the additional money because I didn't have a mortgage. I don't think we need to rely on employer moralism, so Dickensian.
    • humanrebar 5y ago
      I'm not arguing for ageism. I'm only arguing that "poverty wage" isn't a helpful term.
  • pnutjam 5y ago
    How do you feel about kids saving for or working while attending college? It's pretty rich to say people don't deserve money when they need it.
    • humanrebar 5y ago
      I worked while attending college. I suspect the supply of those jobs will be affected, meaning marginally employable youth will just be unemployed.
      • pnutjam 5y ago
        But they are supposed to pay for an ever increasing tuition bill with 1990's minimum wage?
  • lolbert 5y ago
    >without overgeneralization says they who are overgeneralizing you assume teenagers are only making pocket money, whereas there are definitely teenagers working so the family can make ends meet
• andrei_says_ 5y ago
  Exactly. Maintaining laws which force working employees into poverty in order to support inadequate business models is not the solution. Employees outnumber business owners - more people having spending power is vital for the economy.
  • kukx 5y ago
    Please, define what is a poverty wage, it is important. How much stuff one should afford to avoid being called poor. What is the change of the model in case of the restaurant? I can see only one, automate the jobs away to reduce the costs, namely replace humans with robots. But, if we consider these crappy jobs, what about people that are not qualified/able to do any more advanced jobs? People have vastly different cognitive abilities, it is not like we can teach everyone to code. It will not work.
    • rbg246 5y ago
      There are definitions and I believe another commenter in this thread has defined it very solidly about poverty. There will always be service sector jobs, this is the argument luddites were having in 1815 (I don't want to get into this as it is distracting from my main point). We should be ensuring that anyone putting in 40 hours a week should be able to support a family. The wealth is there to be able to create this society (not saying it's easy not saying there are not problems).
      • kukx 5y ago
        What does it mean to support a family? Is getting them sheltered, clothed and well fed good enough? I think it is way easier to achieve today than in almost any other time in a human history, even for the low earners. Restaurants are a part of the service sector. A service job does not imply that it is attractive. And they differ in requirements. The well paid ones get more and more complicated and hence, proportionally to the whole population, less and less people will be able to qualify for them.
        • 5y ago
• parineum 5y ago
  A lot of people who support minimum wage increases don't think that way though. They _do_ think the local McDonald's is raking in cash and not sharing the profits. Conceptually, I agree with what you're saying (I also feel very strongly about off shore manufacturing for the same reasons) but, practically, when you increase the minimum wage, the poverty jobs will disappear and _eventually_ be replaced. The problem is the transition period. The real minimum wage is always zero.
  • Frondo 5y ago
    Do you have anything to back that assertion up, that the poverty jobs will disappear? The only articles I've ever found that say that come from the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute, and neither of those is anywhere near an unbiased source. All the research (excluding the pieces from those two think tanks) suggests that the job markets remain stable through minimum wage increases, and in some cases the labor markets actually gain jobs -- possibly because more money in the hands of poorer people is going to go right back out into the community, as a matter of need.
  • ncallaway 5y ago
    > but, practically, when you increase the minimum wage, the poverty jobs will disappear If we're talking about raising the minimum wage arbitrarily high, then this is true. But this argument also gets made a lot when we're talking about a specific proposal (such as $15). For a specific proposal this argument is not always true. It was raised a ton in Seattle when Seattle was considering a $15 minimum wage. Endlessly. The main argument was that it would devastate employment for the jobs it was supposed to improve. Then the minimum wage increase passed and it didn't do that. Employment in those jobs actually went up slightly (probably not a casual increase, probably more coincidental). But it certainly didn't devastate the employment in minimum wage jobs. So, the argument is one that feels compelling since it is true in the extremes. But it needs to be evaluated with the facts of each proposal.
• atoav 5y ago
  I don't see it. McDonalds pays minimum wages in most european nations, yet their menu isnt that much more expensive than in the US. Maybe they have a slimmer margin over here, but they are still profitable. That implies that the model is (in principle) just alright, but there are financial flows that will have to change in the US. Of course you don't like to pay more for the labor you use to generate profit — ideally you wouldn't have to pay anyone at all! If you can't run you business with minimum wage labor, maybe tou are not good at doing business and should change careers instead? Because many businesses in many nations have not the slightest issue doing just that.
  • dogman144 5y ago
    Well, without knowing how the Corp is setup, that’s a bad example as this could easily exist: an international company can very easily be paying for high wages in one nation (ie loss leading) by low wages in another. Or staying profitable and with open doors. And so on. Unless you’ve done an FSA class and you can explain me your thinking more, it’s worth appreciating there are a ton of levers that impact Corp finance. Same way you have performance trade offs for one algo vs the other.
    • kjksf 5y ago
      It makes zero sense for McDonalds (or Starbucks or anyone else) to operate a money loosing restaurant. Furthermore, 82% of McDonald restaurants are franchises i.e. not owned by McDonald. https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/03/what-percentage-of-mcdonalds-restaurants-are-owned.aspx#:~:text=All%20told%2C%20a%20full%2082,for%20the%20company%20to%20run https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/03/what-perce...
      • dogman144 5y ago
        The franchise part is interesting, although McD’s owning them or not doesn’t matter as the cash flow is what’s relevant. In this case I wonder what the terms are for franchise owners in EU vs USA and if they account for higher wage laws. There are a number of reasons corporate entities operate certain or many stores at a loss. Very well known example is flagship locations that are locally at a loss, but earn for the brand on other ways. Example being Times Square NYC locations. This still makes sense at a franchise model, but less likely I bet. EU isn’t a flag ship obviously, but I also didn’t say loss. Loss leading is similar, but not a perfect analogy (sure). My earlier example still holds, even with franchisees per the term, but you should expand your bad event set to loss or low profits. On the net, being in Europe is worth it despite higher operating costs, but maybe USA operating costs need to be lower as a result. I mean this all to say, there are so many factors involved such that it’s a false premise argument without controlling for intra-market differences.
• bluedino 5y ago
  A combo meal at many fast food places is nearing the $10 mark, and has passed it for places like Firehouse or Panera. Labor is typically 20-30% of a restaurants costs, doubling that from say $9 to $18 would add another $2-3 to the price of a meal.
• treis 5y ago
  >These business have a model that relies on poverty wages changing the minimum wage will disrupt these businesses greatly and I don't see a problem with that. Doesn't that just end with bankrupt businesses and unemployed workers?
  • ncallaway 5y ago
    Not really. Look at empirical studies of past minimum wage increases and you don't often see unemployment increase. The employment rate is often stable through a minimum wage increase.