6 ms·

The Fight for Fair Wages

35 points by mitchbob 3y ago

mitchbob 3y ago
https://archive.ph/1Uduj https://archive.ph/1Uduj
mitchbob 3y ago
From the article: "Nearly a third of the US workforce makes less than fifteen dollars an hour—40 percent of female workers, 47 percent of Black workers, and 57 percent of working single parents."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- PostOnce 3y ago
  A good thing in to keep in mind when it feels like everyone on HN claims to make 250K a year working 3 hours a day 4 days a week.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  That sounds about right from the number of people who live in lower cost of living areas. People have a poor intuitive understanding of this -- they can't understand how someone could live on less than $15/hour because they live in New York City or San Francisco where that would be unreasonable. But it's much less unreasonable in Memphis or El Paso where things cost a lot less. The real problem is that things, especially housing, still cost too much everywhere -- much worse in San Francisco, but not great no matter where you are in the US. Which requires higher wages to make a living, which puts pressure on employers to cut labor costs by making people do more with less. And then you get problems. But employers can't just raise wages unilaterally -- if they paid more (and thereby raised prices), first of all that increases the cost of living even more, second of all the people who are already hurting because of the high cost of living are going to switch to any competitor who can offer a lower price, so the employers who do this lose to any that don't. What we really need to do is lower the cost of living.
  - soupfordummies 3y ago
    15/hr is about 1900/mo after taxes (assuming you get full 40 hours a week which is pretty rare in most hourly jobs where overtime for your employees is avoided like the plague.) Where in the US is LCOL enough for that?
    - mattmcknight 3y ago
      Well, Wichita Kansas is maybe the biggest one? You can rent a place there for 500/month. Here's the thing though- if you raise wages, the prices for the finite quantities of housing get bid up. The goal should be bringing the cost of living down.
    - leetcrew 3y ago
      lots of places, if you're willing to live like a college student. for example, you can find 3BRs around baltimore for ~$2000/month. split 3-4 ways (sometimes there's an additional room with a door that doesn't technically count as a bedroom), your share is $500-700. main issues are going to be health insurance and a car if you can't find $15/hr work within walking distance.
      - whoknowsidont 3y ago
        >lots of places Well you see that's exactly the problem. There are in fact, not a lot of places.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - naniwaduni 3y ago
      NYC, apparently, if you'd accept the "international grad student" standard of living.
_uhtu 3y ago
The book that much of this is based on, On The Clock, is very good and I'd recommend it.
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  Or we live in a demand starved economy and the fastest way to stimulate Gdp is getting dollars into the hands of people that will spend it. If all the money is owned by the rich, that is only a fixed number of brain cycles to buy things In addition, advancement in technology really comes from mass markets, and the masses having money funds those economies of scale that delivers life enhancing or saving technology to everyone. But I'll admit I don't have numbers.
BMc2020 3y ago
When I try to get people to apply by far the hardest part is the get them to complete a resume and come up with a couple references. That's where most give up.
linuxftw 3y ago
This will never change. The country is too big, it needs to be dissolved into much smaller units. If Belgium can exist as an independent state, surely NY can.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  The end result of that would be that the poorer states would descend into something resembling anarchy, absolute misery. They currently depend on the richer states to support them and the way all 50 are collectively linked together by federal programs is what makes it possible for a lot of states to exist. Of course NY and CA and some of the other states would be just fine on their own but we'd be basically abandoning millions of people to suffer and potentially die. Not a good thing to do.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
    Many of the "poorer" states as some define them, actually supply a fair bit of the food for those "richer" states and beyond. It's not a simple task to figure out which states would survive as independent countries, if for no other reason than there would be, ah, "territorial disputes."
    - kevingadd 3y ago
      Saying that they are poorer doesn't mean they have no value, and that's part of why it's important for all of the states to be linked together federally.
  - leetcrew 3y ago
    the US is certainly stronger as a whole than as a sum of its parts, but this seems like a massive exaggeration. even the poorest US states compare favorably to other first-world nations on a per capita GDP basis. it would be a major adjustment, but states like mississippi do have the raw productivity to provide a decent life for their citizens if they could get out of their own way.
  - linuxftw 3y ago
tiahura 3y ago
Some might say their fair wage is their marginal product. Unfortunately, the typical output of our unionized public education system is pathetic and probably only capable of adding about $10/hr of value.
jalapenos 3y ago
A bizarre attitude that sadly will never go away. You're paid what you're known to be worth. All this stuff is about abdicating responsibility because it feels warm and fuzzy to be a victim, say it's out of your control, and those badies are responsible for your predicament. The solution to people having low wages isn't them complaining about it, it's specialising into something with more demand or less supply, and getting better at personal marketing. But that's hard work, so they'd rather pour a bottle of whine. Schools should do a way better job of facilitating this, but again, that's not ultimately their responsibility, but the responsibility of the parents to make sure they do.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Instead of more bootstraps, why can't we make sure everyone has a livable wage?
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Employers are not going to employ people who cost more than they produce.
    - musicale 3y ago
      This does not appear to be true for the tech companies I am familiar with. Or other employers, for that matter.
    - adfhietinoi 3y ago
      We hear this all the time, but it seems largely irrelevant. There's no good reason to believe that the lowest-paid workers would lose their jobs if they had to be paid more. There are no randomized controlled trials about raising the minimum wage, but quite a few natural experiments suggest a minimal effect on unemployment with reasonable increases. Low-paid workers have won raises with collective bargaining while your theory suggests they would be laid off en masse. There is no consensus amongst economists that raising the minimum wage as high as $15/hour would substantially increase unemployment. You are, of course, welcome to disagree with them, but you can't claim this is just Econ 101. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/what-economists-think-about-a-15-minimum-wage https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/what-economists-think-ab...
mcshicks 3y ago
US minimum wage has not increased since 2009 and is $7.50. How many people in the private sector are at the same job for 14 years with no pay increases. Minimum wage at a minimum should be tied to inflation and I think $15 an hour increase over 4 years is more than fair to employers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_S...
- PredictorX1 3y ago
  What of the unemployment provoked by legally forcing the price of labor higher? Think about it: WHen the price of something goes up, do you buy more or less of it? One might as well call the minimum wage the "ceiling employment".
  - Shish2k 3y ago
    Why use our imaginations to “think about it”, when we can look at the data and see what actually happens in reality? The minimum wage has jumped up several times in the past due to government updates, and it has gradually shrunk over time due to inflation, and neither of those things has been particularly correlated with employment rates
    - PredictorX1 3y ago
      According to the BLS, workers earning the federal minimum wage or less represented only 1.4 percent of all hourly paid workers in 2021. Taking into account all workers (not just those who are hourly paid), this small fraction would shrink even further, so I wouldn't expect them to have much affect on the overall unemployment rate.
- brutusborn 3y ago
  Minimum wage changes are counterproductive in almost all instances. They consume a large amount of political capital, are rendered pointless by inflation and penalise those who produce less value than the minimum. There are better policies to protect poor workers, like reducing taxes on the poor or allowing government welfare for those with jobs. These help workers without distorting markets and hurting workers. The only case minimum wages are useful is if all the alternatives are impossible.

35 points by mitchbob 3y ago

https://archive.ph/1Uduj https://archive.ph/1Uduj

From the article: "Nearly a third of the US workforce makes less than fifteen dollars an hour—40 percent of female workers, 47 percent of Black workers, and 57 percent of working single parents."

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
PostOnce 3y ago
A good thing in to keep in mind when it feels like everyone on HN claims to make 250K a year working 3 hours a day 4 days a week.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
That sounds about right from the number of people who live in lower cost of living areas. People have a poor intuitive understanding of this -- they can't understand how someone could live on less than $15/hour because they live in New York City or San Francisco where that would be unreasonable. But it's much less unreasonable in Memphis or El Paso where things cost a lot less. The real problem is that things, especially housing, still cost too much everywhere -- much worse in San Francisco, but not great no matter where you are in the US. Which requires higher wages to make a living, which puts pressure on employers to cut labor costs by making people do more with less. And then you get problems. But employers can't just raise wages unilaterally -- if they paid more (and thereby raised prices), first of all that increases the cost of living even more, second of all the people who are already hurting because of the high cost of living are going to switch to any competitor who can offer a lower price, so the employers who do this lose to any that don't. What we really need to do is lower the cost of living.
- soupfordummies 3y ago
  15/hr is about 1900/mo after taxes (assuming you get full 40 hours a week which is pretty rare in most hourly jobs where overtime for your employees is avoided like the plague.) Where in the US is LCOL enough for that?
  - mattmcknight 3y ago
    Well, Wichita Kansas is maybe the biggest one? You can rent a place there for 500/month. Here's the thing though- if you raise wages, the prices for the finite quantities of housing get bid up. The goal should be bringing the cost of living down.
  - leetcrew 3y ago
    lots of places, if you're willing to live like a college student. for example, you can find 3BRs around baltimore for ~$2000/month. split 3-4 ways (sometimes there's an additional room with a door that doesn't technically count as a bedroom), your share is $500-700. main issues are going to be health insurance and a car if you can't find $15/hr work within walking distance.
    - whoknowsidont 3y ago
      >lots of places Well you see that's exactly the problem. There are in fact, not a lot of places.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - naniwaduni 3y ago
    NYC, apparently, if you'd accept the "international grad student" standard of living.

_uhtu 3y ago

The book that much of this is based on, On The Clock, is very good and I'd recommend it.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago
Or we live in a demand starved economy and the fastest way to stimulate Gdp is getting dollars into the hands of people that will spend it. If all the money is owned by the rich, that is only a fixed number of brain cycles to buy things In addition, advancement in technology really comes from mass markets, and the masses having money funds those economies of scale that delivers life enhancing or saving technology to everyone. But I'll admit I don't have numbers.

BMc2020 3y ago

When I try to get people to apply by far the hardest part is the get them to complete a resume and come up with a couple references. That's where most give up.

linuxftw 3y ago

This will never change. The country is too big, it needs to be dissolved into much smaller units. If Belgium can exist as an independent state, surely NY can.

kevingadd 3y ago
The end result of that would be that the poorer states would descend into something resembling anarchy, absolute misery. They currently depend on the richer states to support them and the way all 50 are collectively linked together by federal programs is what makes it possible for a lot of states to exist. Of course NY and CA and some of the other states would be just fine on their own but we'd be basically abandoning millions of people to suffer and potentially die. Not a good thing to do.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
  Many of the "poorer" states as some define them, actually supply a fair bit of the food for those "richer" states and beyond. It's not a simple task to figure out which states would survive as independent countries, if for no other reason than there would be, ah, "territorial disputes."
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    Saying that they are poorer doesn't mean they have no value, and that's part of why it's important for all of the states to be linked together federally.
- leetcrew 3y ago
  the US is certainly stronger as a whole than as a sum of its parts, but this seems like a massive exaggeration. even the poorest US states compare favorably to other first-world nations on a per capita GDP basis. it would be a major adjustment, but states like mississippi do have the raw productivity to provide a decent life for their citizens if they could get out of their own way.
- linuxftw 3y ago

tiahura 3y ago

Some might say their fair wage is their marginal product. Unfortunately, the typical output of our unionized public education system is pathetic and probably only capable of adding about $10/hr of value.

jalapenos 3y ago

A bizarre attitude that sadly will never go away. You're paid what you're known to be worth. All this stuff is about abdicating responsibility because it feels warm and fuzzy to be a victim, say it's out of your control, and those badies are responsible for your predicament. The solution to people having low wages isn't them complaining about it, it's specialising into something with more demand or less supply, and getting better at personal marketing. But that's hard work, so they'd rather pour a bottle of whine. Schools should do a way better job of facilitating this, but again, that's not ultimately their responsibility, but the responsibility of the parents to make sure they do.

candiddevmike 3y ago
Instead of more bootstraps, why can't we make sure everyone has a livable wage?
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Employers are not going to employ people who cost more than they produce.
  - musicale 3y ago
    This does not appear to be true for the tech companies I am familiar with. Or other employers, for that matter.
  - adfhietinoi 3y ago
    We hear this all the time, but it seems largely irrelevant. There's no good reason to believe that the lowest-paid workers would lose their jobs if they had to be paid more. There are no randomized controlled trials about raising the minimum wage, but quite a few natural experiments suggest a minimal effect on unemployment with reasonable increases. Low-paid workers have won raises with collective bargaining while your theory suggests they would be laid off en masse. There is no consensus amongst economists that raising the minimum wage as high as $15/hour would substantially increase unemployment. You are, of course, welcome to disagree with them, but you can't claim this is just Econ 101. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/what-economists-think-about-a-15-minimum-wage https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/what-economists-think-ab...

mcshicks 3y ago

US minimum wage has not increased since 2009 and is $7.50. How many people in the private sector are at the same job for 14 years with no pay increases. Minimum wage at a minimum should be tied to inflation and I think $15 an hour increase over 4 years is more than fair to employers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_S...

PredictorX1 3y ago
What of the unemployment provoked by legally forcing the price of labor higher? Think about it: WHen the price of something goes up, do you buy more or less of it? One might as well call the minimum wage the "ceiling employment".
- Shish2k 3y ago
  Why use our imaginations to “think about it”, when we can look at the data and see what actually happens in reality? The minimum wage has jumped up several times in the past due to government updates, and it has gradually shrunk over time due to inflation, and neither of those things has been particularly correlated with employment rates
  - PredictorX1 3y ago
    According to the BLS, workers earning the federal minimum wage or less represented only 1.4 percent of all hourly paid workers in 2021. Taking into account all workers (not just those who are hourly paid), this small fraction would shrink even further, so I wouldn't expect them to have much affect on the overall unemployment rate.
brutusborn 3y ago
Minimum wage changes are counterproductive in almost all instances. They consume a large amount of political capital, are rendered pointless by inflation and penalise those who produce less value than the minimum. There are better policies to protect poor workers, like reducing taxes on the poor or allowing government welfare for those with jobs. These help workers without distorting markets and hurting workers. The only case minimum wages are useful is if all the alternatives are impossible.