Well, firsr, how are wages too low? The median income in the US is $54,000 per year. Even if you exclude the 1%, it doesn't drop below $50,000.Second, is college the right answer for these people? I went to college. I got my BS when I was 40. I went to about two semesters of college right out of high school. My GPA for that time was a solid 2.0. It was rounded up. So I joined the Army. I had a great 21 year career. I nicked and dimed an education together. Now I teach. I work with a lot of kids who went from high school to college to teaching. They're lovely, intellegent and eager people with no life experience out side of academia. They are ignorant of the world and working.In my little neighborhood in Georgia, I have about ten neighbors. We live on a lake in what some of us describe as a small national park. I am likely the poorest person in my neighborhood. I also am the best educated. None of my neighbors have college beyond a two year degree. They are electricians, plumbers, mechanics and machinists. About half own their own business. They have skills, not education. They got those skills working their way up through a profession.Several of them worked for below minimum wage when they were kids. I had a similar experience building pools. I worked for well below minimum wage as a summer job. But, I got a lot of skills and connections that led me to very high paying jobs (particularly for a high school kid) in construction. Two of my friends went on to become contractors as a direct result of that illicit job.Now, college is great, but it isn't everything. Minimum wage is a sweet idea, but it hurts a lot more people than it helps. Instead of trying to figure out how the government can help, lets maybe try and see what we can do for ourselves. Let's keep a small safety net. Let's reward the ambitious. Let's get back to the idea that producing is what work is, and rewards will come from that production. Let's focus on working as a virtue again.
The whole political idea of raising the minimum wage is discussed only because politicians know that they need to appear to be helping the Working Class if they expect to get the labor votes. So the challenge to the politician is to do something to make the public think they are being helped by the politician, while at the same time, not doing anything to upset the billionaires who support the campaigns of the politicians themselves.That is what is behind the concept of “incremental change” promoted by Hillary Clinton in 2016, which also explains the proposed six year wait for full implementation of the proposed increase in the minimum wage. The idea is to make the public think they are getting a benefit, while at the same time reducing the effects of that benefit to the point that the wealthy class, who actually design economic policy in the US, don’t necessarily oppose it.Incremental change essentially means “no change”. Because in the year 2024, the $15.00 minimum wage will have about the same purchasing power that the current New Jersey minimum wage now has. The wealthy/corporate class would prefer that there be no increase at all, but they are practical thinkers.So yes…waiting until 2024 for full implementation is indeed too long to wait.Every time the minimum wage has increased in US history, economic expansion, job creation, and improvements in the Working Class standard of living have always been the result. If we want an increase in the minimum wage to have a positive economic outcome, we have to make it meaningful. Raising the wage to $15.00 tomorrow would accomplish that. Waiting until 2024 makes the entire effort to increase the minimum wage virtually irrelevant.
Life will be better for most of us. We’ll have more automated kiosks and fewer surly cashiers to deal with. Robots will ship products more accurately with less damage than human warehouse order pickers.Companies without the organization, budget, and/or expertise to automate will go out of business. This is why Jeff Bezos’ support of a $15 minimum wage is brilliant - Amazon can afford that for the fewer workers in their large automated warehouses, while Walmart and small competitors can’t replace enough people with machines in their brick and mortar stores to make it work.More people will be unemployed sooner.Eventually, most will be incapable of doing work worth more than the wage floor and depreciation on machines replacing them.The poor will eat the rich, metaphorically at first.Society as we know it will end.
Should the miniuim wage be raise to 9, 10, or 15 dollars an hour?
No it should not. I tire of our governments, local, state, federal being assured of a rising base amount of tax revenue flow. Based on the numbers of workers and the average wages they make. Because you raise the base wage by decree? You know the skilled workers wages will rise. To hold the balance of unskilled to skilled merit/reward system of pay. Raise the wages artificially only serves the government's assessment of how much to spend and how much to borrow. While lowering the assessment of how much will outlay in welfare, social security and refunds.
$7.25/hr is a perfectly livable wage for a single person who has not incurred large financial obligations and is healthy enough to work full time.If you need more than that, you are amending too much money now or in have done so in the past.
Thanks for your A2A.You’re right — it is a ridiculous system. (And I have actually gotten into an argument with someone here on Quora about it.) But it is what we have, and it would take legislation at the federal level to change the tipping culture in the U.S.But let me answer you question…First, restaurants do pay the minimum wage in the United States. Let me explain how it works:Minimum wage for service industry workers is $2.13 per hour (as opposed to $7.25 per hour for everyone else), so as long as a restaurant pays their servers $2.13 per hour, they are legally paying the minimum wage.But there’s a catch…The server has to make at least $7.25 per hour when they add their tip income to the $2.13 per hour. If they don’t, the restaurant is obligated to make up the difference.A server works 40 hours per week and makes $2.13 per hour from their employer. That’s a paltry $85.20 for a week! But the server must also receive tip income of at least $204.80 in that week. If they don’t, the restaurant needs to make up the difference.To show you how this works, let’s take a look at a couple of scenarios:SCENARIO ONEA server gets paid $85.20 per week from their employer and makes $300 per week in tips. The employer owes the server no additional wages.SCENARIO TWOA server gets paid $85.20 per week from their employer and makes $100 per week in tips. The employer must pay an additional $104.80 for that week so the employee makes a minimum of $7.25 per hour.FULL DISCLOSUREWe pay our servers over twice as much as the federal minimum wage for service industry employees. We are working towards raising the minimum we pay to the actual federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour through frugal management and cost control, but we aren’t there yet.
Why do Conservatives hate the Minimum Wage?
Unions began as a way for workers to unite against employers' exploitation or greed-driven cruelties directed towards their workers, and minimum wage laws were enacted to providing a LIVING wage that kept up with inflation for those workers at the bottom rungs of society, most of whom had no union representation. The argument that validates the need for both of these worker-protecting changes is found in the words of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan to a Senate committee: "I was WRONG to believe that they [banks, housing markets, credit markets, etc.] could or even WOULD self-regulate." If left unregulated, would wealthy corporate leaders choose to be fair to their workers? History has shown us that they would NOT, for the most part, pay livable wages, have even minimum safety standards or decent working conditions, nor would there be any benefits paid whatsoever---no health care coverage, no vacation days, no 40-hour work week with added pay if required to work longer, no retirement plans (and especially no VESTED retirement where the company matches the investment), no EEOC or equal pay for equal work...---the wealthy greedy-guts would try to "expand profit margins" at the expense of the American workers (as happened after Reagan fired PATCO and began a nationwide wave of union-breaking that eventually led to massive OUTSOURCING to the third-world countries as GREED because the order-of-the-day). Republicans favor the GREEDY-GUTS and, in many cases, ARE those greedy-guts! There was PROSPERITY during the Clinton years when the minimum wage was RAISED, enabling workers at that level to BUY MORE. We really really need to keep DEMOCRATS in the majority to prevent the WAR that is being waged upon American workers by the greed-driven corporate-colluding Republicans!
Because raising minimum wage has an adverse affect on the economy.Let's say we raise minimum wage to $25/hr. Since we were previously paying 10 employees $10/hr, we were spending $100/hr for every employee. Even though min. wage has been increased, we are still making the same amount of money as income, so we don't have extra money to give our employees. To compensate, we can do one of the following Raise our pricesfire 6 of the 10 employees, leaving us with 4, which still makes $100/hr for all the employees.We are definitely not raising prices, because this would result in less people buying our product, killing our sales, and sending the company into bankruptcy. So we fire 6 guys.Since 6/10 employees are now unemployed, we have created a bigger problem than we solved. Now pretend we LOWER the minimum wage. We can do one of the following with our extra cash:Put that money back into the company, using it for equipment upgrades, newer technology, research, etc...Give raises to the employees that actually deserve them. Instead of being forced to give it to employees who just started working and will probably quit after a few months anywaysYou see, when you raise minimum wage, you cause less people to have money, which stops the circulation of that money, which lowers GDP a LOT, and eventually leads to everything being more expensive.This is why we need to get rid of the minimum wage policy, or at least lower it, and adjust it based on certain career fields
Why not make the Minimum Wage $50 an hour?
Then everyone would have a "living wage" and be happy! Haha, yea...right! Minimum wage laws hurt the low-skilled workers they are intended to help. Raising the minimum wage hurts these workers even more. Deep down everybody knows it. We all know that if the government raised the minimum wage to $50 an hour, many employees would be laid off. Businesses are not charities; they hire workers only when the workers create more revenue for the business than they cost in wages and compensation. Some workers, particularly teenagers in part-time jobs, have very low productivity that makes it unprofitable to pay them more than $6.75 an hour. For these workers the politicians’ proposed 15 percent increase in the minimum wage will mean unemployment. In 2004 the Employment Policy Institute studied the impact of raising California’s minimum wage by $1. They found that approximately 18,600 Californians would lose their jobs and in the process would miss out on $220 million in total income.