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Siegehammer
Guest
American fast-food workers who protested in September over their wages are in the UK to help prepare British employees to launch a similar campaign.
UK fast-food workers get US lesson in protesting against poverty wages
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ucfengr
Guest
I think it’s high time we set the minimum wage at $1M/yr. Then we’d all be millionaires and Obama could raise all of our taxes, and we could all afford “green energy”, stopping “global warming” in its tracks.
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DeniseNY
Guest
Pfft! Why stop at 1M?? How about 2, or 5 or 10M!!!
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madtom
Guest
what exactly is a “poverty wage?” is that when an intrusive government sets a minimum wage so high that it causes rampant unemployment, putting more people in a state of poverty?
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J_Peterson
Guest
How about we stop putting corporate profits above human beings and pay people a living wage. Sure it’s funny to joke about unless you have children to provide for. I guess it’s better to leave people on public benefits so that the corporations can continue to not be bothered that the people that actually make the money for them can’t afford to live.
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J_Peterson
Guest
It’s when people can’t afford the necessities of life despite working full time in an industry that sees millions upon millions in profits.
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madtom
Guest
Minimum wage jobs are not intended to be for people who need full time jobs so they can afford the necessities of life. Minimum wage jobs are intended for high school and college kids looking to make a few dollars and gain some real world experience while in school. I don’t know about the UK, but here is the US, every American - EVERY single person - can attain a High School diploma for free. On top of that, community colleges are very affordable (and again most can go for free or near free with financial aid). If any able-bodied adult in this country is stuck in a dead-end minimum wage job, then they may want to blame their own poor decisions in life rather than demanding the company they work for take them on as a charity case. The current inequities of corporate crony-capitalist America are another issue and really irrelevant to the minimum wage debate. Forcing a higher minimum wage will hurt local business just trying to scrape by, while corporate conglomerates will just fire people.
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VeritasLuxMea
Guest
Seems to me that minimum wage laws and protesting your wages are two different things. Fast food workers have every much of a right to protest their wages as anyone in a cushy office job does to express disapproval of theirs.
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JimmyG88
Guest
Greedy employers regard the minimum wage as a target rather than a starting point. If a business cannot afford to pay workers a wage that enables them to live with dignity, then that business is not viable. To have a viable business you need to make a proft and pay a fair wage.
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Dawnia
Guest
Minimum wage must pay better for some people. I’ve made minimum wage before. No way did my minimum wage job cover the cost of living expenses AND trips overseas.
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frizzgrig
Guest
Minimum wage jobs don’t come with any thing that says they are intended for “high school and college kids looking to make a few dollars and gain some real world experience while in school.”
Yes you can go to high school and earn a diploma, but beyond that you pay. Community college is not available everywhere, and is not “very affordable.” Yes most students can get LOANS to pay for tuition, but those LOANS have to be paid back and come with other issues. I don’t know of too many average students who get through college with everything paid for through grants and scholarships.
There are plenty of older, able bodied Americans “stuck in dead end minimum wage jobs” because they were “downsized” from better paying jobs and haven’t been hired to do the work they trained for because of their age or their experience would “require” a higher wage than the employer was willing to pay.
It is not “charity” when an employer pays a living wage, it is justice. It is injustice to pay less than a living wage.
I suggest reviewing Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html
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JimmyG88
Guest
In the UK most workers on minimum wage are entitled to a wage subsidy from the government. So the tax payer is paying a proportion of the wage earned by people who work for greedy multi nationals such as Wal Mart. I have no idea why the minimum wage is set so low by the government when they freely admit it isn’t sufficent to live. If it was set higher then tax payers would not be supporting money grubbing corporates. There is an alternative of course the employers could accept that in order to pay fairly their profits would have to be smaller. But that suggestion is probably going to be chacterised as more left wing than Karl Marx.
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JimmyG88
Guest
A just wage is the legitimate fruit of work. To refuse or withhold it can be a grave injustice. In determining fair pay both the needs and the contributions of each person must be taken into account. "Remuneration for work should guarantee man the opportunity to provide a dignified livelihood for himself and his family on the material, social, cultural and spiritual level, taking into account the role and the productivity of each, the state of the business, and the common good.Agreement between the parties is not sufficient to justify morally the amount to be received in wages.
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Mintaka
Guest
The reason fast food jobs don’t pay a “living wage” is that you don’t get full time unless you’re a manager.
Traditionally in the US, full time is 40 hours a week. Nowadays, for Obamacare purposes, it’s 30 hours a week. Most fast food jobs are 20-25 hours a week, because they don’t want to have to pay the government regulated benefits and pay rules that come if people work full time. This is why some lucky people have second and third jobs that are also part time. (I say lucky, because I don’t have any job, and I’ve been out of work three times in the last four years.)
The only exception is if a lot of people quit or get sick, in which case workers will be assigned crazy amounts of overtime hours, before going back to 20-25 hours a week.
The real problem with part time jobs is that employers sometimes try to be too flexible to those who need time off. This leads to everybody else having to work crazy hours that are different every week, and it makes it difficult to job hunt or plan one’s life. (Although nowadays nobody is hiring and nobody has jobs at all, so everybody has plenty of time to job hunt.)
Of course, total automation is the obvious next step for truly fast food. You could indeed have it your way as a customer, nobody would ever spit on food or drop it, and nobody would need uniforms or training videos except the machine-maintenance guys.
So yeah, there’s no such thing as a “living wage” with part-time jobs; they’re part time. You can weld together enough part time to make a living, but it’s never going to be like a full time job. A lot of part time jobs will go away entirely if regulation is pushed too far.
Traditionally in the US, full time is 40 hours a week. Nowadays, for Obamacare purposes, it’s 30 hours a week. Most fast food jobs are 20-25 hours a week, because they don’t want to have to pay the government regulated benefits and pay rules that come if people work full time. This is why some lucky people have second and third jobs that are also part time. (I say lucky, because I don’t have any job, and I’ve been out of work three times in the last four years.)
The only exception is if a lot of people quit or get sick, in which case workers will be assigned crazy amounts of overtime hours, before going back to 20-25 hours a week.
The real problem with part time jobs is that employers sometimes try to be too flexible to those who need time off. This leads to everybody else having to work crazy hours that are different every week, and it makes it difficult to job hunt or plan one’s life. (Although nowadays nobody is hiring and nobody has jobs at all, so everybody has plenty of time to job hunt.)
Of course, total automation is the obvious next step for truly fast food. You could indeed have it your way as a customer, nobody would ever spit on food or drop it, and nobody would need uniforms or training videos except the machine-maintenance guys.
So yeah, there’s no such thing as a “living wage” with part-time jobs; they’re part time. You can weld together enough part time to make a living, but it’s never going to be like a full time job. A lot of part time jobs will go away entirely if regulation is pushed too far.
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Gregory_Olson
Guest
Exactly!
Greedy employers actually don’t have much real choice in what they pay their workers. Any given salary, aka the money value of labor, is really determined by labor competition. I.e., Employers supplying jobs will compete with each other for a limited amount of workers, and workers demanding jobs will compete with each other for a limited amount of jobs. The former causes the salary to go up as workers become more scarce, and the latter causes the salary to go down as jobs become more scarce. Wherever they meet int the middle is the value of that job. For example, a construction company couldn’t pay their employees half of what everyone else paid, because no one would work for them. Likewise, the company couldn’t pay them much more than average either, because it would make less profit than its competitors and eventually be driven out of business.
See the graph: thedrpete.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/minimum-wage-graph1.jpg (Demand = demand for workers, Supply = supply of workers, Price = salary, Quantity = number of jobs.)
Forcing a salary to be anywhere but its true value (aka, setting a minimum or maximum wage), necessarily creates waste, and is unhealthy for a nation. If a salary is higher than its true value, more workers will want that job, and less employers will offer it. In the end, workers will be fired (or be turned down when they otherwise would have been hired–same thing) until the company can afford to pay those that remain the unnaturally high salary. Most importantly, the total amount of money made by all workers will be less than it would have been without the minimum wage; thus, waste.
This has been your economics lesson for the day
.Depending on one’s standards, it does take a certain amount of money to live, and the value of some kinds of work can in fact be beneath this amount. Nevertheless, artificially raising the salaries for those jobs is arguably one of the worst solutions possible for *everyone *concerned in the long run.
–Greg
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Dawnia
Guest
It really doesn’t matter what you set minimum wage at, it will never be a “living wage” because it will always be at the bottom. No one has ever been raised out of poverty by raising the minimum wage. Poverty just goes up to meet them at the new minimum.
Suudy
Active member
Very few make minimum wage:
pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/08/who-makes-minimum-wage/
Only 4.3% of hourly workers make minimum wage and only 2.6% of all wage and salary workers make minimum wage. Further of those making minimum wage 50.4% are ages 16-24. And 64% are part-time workers.
And there’s more:
forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2014/01/30/almost-everything-you-have-been-told-about-the-minimum-wage-is-false/
Nearly 2/3 of those making the minimum wage are second or third workers in a household. They aren’t the primary bread winners. And 43% of those making minimum wage are in households that make $50k or more.
Further, as Thomas Sowell points out, the people making minimum wage this year are not the same people making minimum wage next year. These are not the same people living year after year on the minimum wage.
The minimum wage does not affect nearly as many people as the scaremongers would have us think.
pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/08/who-makes-minimum-wage/
Only 4.3% of hourly workers make minimum wage and only 2.6% of all wage and salary workers make minimum wage. Further of those making minimum wage 50.4% are ages 16-24. And 64% are part-time workers.
And there’s more:
forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2014/01/30/almost-everything-you-have-been-told-about-the-minimum-wage-is-false/
Nearly 2/3 of those making the minimum wage are second or third workers in a household. They aren’t the primary bread winners. And 43% of those making minimum wage are in households that make $50k or more.
Further, as Thomas Sowell points out, the people making minimum wage this year are not the same people making minimum wage next year. These are not the same people living year after year on the minimum wage.
The minimum wage does not affect nearly as many people as the scaremongers would have us think.
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ucfengr
Guest
What is the wage that will enable a person to “live with dignity”? Is it different for a single person or someone supporting a family? How much are you willing to pay to ensure that every person gets this “wage”?
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Deltadeliquent
Guest
Hear, hear! I TOTALLY agree.
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JimmyG88
Guest
In the UK unions and others have calculated that minimum wage is £6.50 but a wage that would enable people to move out of poverty would be £7.45 and many good employers have signed up to pay the living wage.
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