Minium Wage/ McD's/ Sense of Entitlement

[Colleen27]

It's also become the way to go to be gov dependent. It's how socialism works.

For socialism to take root, there has to be a lack of opportunity to provide those things that the government offers for oneself. That's why we're seeing such expansion of the food stamp rolls right now, as one example - not because of an expansion of the program itself or any increase in income limits or any other government action, but because economic opportunities are disappearing for the working classes.

Higher wages make socialist policies less attractive. Who would want a subsistence level existence on the dole when they could work and have much more? Who would want sub-standard government health care when an employer would offer a better plan? Reliance on government comes when the benefits of working don't surpass the benefits that the social safety net offers or when the wages of that work are so low that employment and poverty are not mutually exclusive. Higher wages tip that balance in favor of work; low wages and low opportunity tip it in favor of more government aid.

 

[mom2rtk]

What does that even mean?

It means that if we want to guarantee someone a "living wage" now, we will have to do better than the $15/hour these folks want. At 40 hours a week that's roughly $30K. If you want someone to make $30K/year now, that will require a lot more than $15/hour. At the far more typical 28 hours/week schedule now in use, that would require about $20/hour.

I dare you to find a fast food place hiring ANYONE but upper level management for over 30 hours a week right now. If you do find one, odds are pretty high those hours will be cut back very soon.

 

[Colleen27]

Does everyone realize that in the 1950's the average family paid 0 taxes? The reasons were #1, communities helped each other and #2 if you couldn't pay the bills, you worked more than one job.

You forgot reason #3 - more companies felt a moral/economic obligation to compensate workers fairly. That was prior to the rise of the corporate form (it existed, but as a minority of American businesses), businesses had ties to their communities, and felt more connection/obligation to their employees and customers than to shareholders. You can't demand this country somehow try to re-discover your #1 and #2 values without talking about #3.

Higher wages reduce dependency - people live on what they earn. Low wages increase it - people turn to government support (or private charity) to make up the difference between what they earn and what they need to survive.

 

[Colleen27]

It means that if we want to guarantee someone a "living wage" now, we will have to do better than the $15/hour these folks want. At 40 hours a week that's roughly $30K. If you want someone to make $30K/year now, that will require a lot more than $15/hour. At the far more typical 28 hours/week schedule now in use, that would require about $20/hour.

A living wage is figured at the per-hour rate, not an annual rate of pay. It is the wage at which working a reasonable number of hours (I've usually seen it figured at 40 or 50 hour workweeks) would provide a basic but independent standard of living.

 

[ebtbmom]

I have problems with this period.

College degreed medical assistants drawing blood and getting patients ready make $12-15 an hour.
School bus drivers make around the same, with the safety of 70 students per route per day in their hands, most with multiple routes.

You're telling me that pressing the "I want fries" button or counting 6 McNuggets in a box should pay more than skilled labor? Really?

Here is my background-1st in my family to attend college from a poor family. I made $4.25 an hour stocking clothes and ringing registers at a KMart for 6 years. I drove 55 miles round trip to a school I could afford for 16 credit hours a week, along with 40+ hours of work. My first apartment in 1995 had a black and white TV, lawn chairs, and garage sale furniture, my car was 8 years old. My schedule between school and work was 5:30 AM until often midnight 5 days a week, with the weekends working 16 hours at KMart and catching up on school work. It was tough, very tough. Nobody owed me anything, hard work earned the "better" life.

Now the thought process is that everything should be given....what happened to our society that hard work is no longer needed to get ahead in life? Now folks expect cel phones, drive expensive cars they cannot afford, buy houses too big, and then gripe that it's someone else's fault when they fail. Frankly it's sickening.

One thing I learned while working minimum wage for a few years is that I would get nowhere in life making that wage. I put on my big boy pants and did something about it, instead of griping that someone else is responsible. Instead of camping out in a city somewhere complaining of Wall Street greed, I went to school. Instead of whining about wages, I did something about it.

Enough is enough.

Well said, and congratulations on your achievements!

It seems that we all have vastly different life experiences which cause us to view this issue from such polar opposites.

I have been a public health nurse for 6 years, and honestly, some days I seriously consider if I want to continue. On Friday. I had a particularly challenging situation with a pt, I literally laid my head on my desk after the phone call and reexamined what I'm doing in life. I just don't know how much more I can take.

While I'm in the job though I have to put aside my personal feelings and opinions and do what I was hired for, which is "connect people to resources".

So, from my personal experience, the majority of people on public assistance do very little to get themselves off. Quite the opposite, they expend so much energy on trying to get "excuse" notes that they could do a 40hr a week job and probably have more free time.

I think one thing that hasn't been mentioned is the issue of professional liability. Jobs with a high degree of professional liability should be compensated accordingly, and the pay scale for jobs with no professional liability should reflect that as well.

 

[Colleen27]

So, what did people do 40 years ago before everyone went to college? They learned a trade or started a business. No reason that can't be done today.

Actually, there are reasons. Compare the regulatory requirements of 40 years ago to those today, and then take a look at the health care marketplace. Starting a business today is for people who don't need the money and who are married to someone who has health insurance through his/her employer.

 

[POPCITY]

I think the "living" part of living wage is a lot of the issue. I have friends and family members who work part time minimum wage, and others on public assistance. I don't know one single person that doesn't have a cell phone, cable TV, and a computer or tablet with Internet, not to mention the accessories that go along with those things. All of them consider these things necessities for living. People's expectations of what is "necessary" have gone up tremendously on the last 20 years.

 

[ilovemk76]

Exactly!

There are certain economic facts that people don't want to face these days. First of all, the job market for college grads is quickly becoming oversaturated. Education is a self-limiting solution - it can only work for so many people before the number of educated applicants devalues the degree.

I agree. Not all degrees are created equal and not all graduates with the same degree are created equal.



Second, we have lost milllions upon millions of middle class jobs in the recent recession and the jobs that are replacing them are largely low wage/service industry. That means displaced workers who already have families and mortgages and adult obligations left with no alternative to McJobs.

Many of these people are not improving their skills and are finding they can only get entry level jobs. Everybody needs to keep updating their job skill and not just be happy to press that button, not learn new programs that are not being used by their job or looking for a new path as soon as they see their job becoming obsolete, just to name a few.

And third, what we're seeing with the increasing number of people relying upon government assistance is a simply us subsidizing the success of Walmart and McDonalds and other huge companies that horde their profits while letting the taxpayers provide for their employees.

I would rather have a person get off their butt and do a job and then the government supplement that income rather than just pay them to stay on their butt.

I also think many of the people ranting about the push to increase minimum wage are far, far removed from what is happening to wages for the working class. When I was in high school, fat food and retail jobs started around $7.50/hour. Those same jobs are paying the exact same wage today. Discussions of a living wage aside, there is absolutely no convincing argument that can be made, IMO, that would justify companies that post profits of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter not raising wages one thin dime in a decade and a half.

When I was in high school those jobs only paid minimum wage and not a cent more. No pay raises after working there for years. Maybe you are the one who was removed and got paid way more than most of the country paid. When you were a kid, Detroit was still booming and McDonald's needed to pay more since a starting job at GM was way more than that $7.50/hour.


It is a simple economic fact that 20 households earning 50K/year generate more economic activity and growth than a single household earning a million a year. We can't stimulate economic growth or jobs recovery by cutting taxes and spending less -businesses hire only when consumer demand justifies it, and consumer demand has a direct relationship to wages. Higher wages benefit us all, but to say that these days is political suicide. So we'll continue down our current path of high profits for a few and falling wages for the rest, increased reliance on welfare programs, stubbornly high unemployment, negative savings rates... and we'll blame it all on the poor, lazy people who didn't go to college without even one harsh word for the business owners who continue to demand that all gains in productivity and market share benefit only those at the top.

We are creating a larger and larger entitled class of people. They will be the end of this country. We have entitle poor people who think others owe them a living. We have entitle middle class people who think paying $5/week should get them unlimited medical care. We have entitled rich people who think they are the only ones who deserve anything and everybody else should serve their needs.

Even with all that, the government spends too much money and we cannot sustain it.

Minimum wage is not meant to be a living wage and it should never be. It is mean as a beginning wage that one uses as a stepping stone to get ahead. Ahead does not have to mean college. But is does mean learning new skills, be it at college, a trade school, online, or on the job.

 

[mom2rtk]

A living wage is figured at the per-hour rate, not an annual rate of pay. It is the wage at which working a reasonable number of hours (I've usually seen it figured at 40 or 50 hour workweeks) would provide a basic but independent standard of living.

Then "living wage" is nothing more than a name. It means nothing. If you want them to live on it, then it needs to be something they can actually live on, right? Go ahead and own it. Ask for $20 an hour. Heck, why not $25?

 

[mom2rtk]

People's expectations of what is "necessary" have gone up tremendously on the last 20 years.

Why yes they have.

 

[Colleen27]

Yep. People really don't want socialism. Yet, socialism is really what some are looking for when they want everyone to make a certain amount. There will always be those that make more, and I've accepted that. Obviously some haven't and don't understand a free market economy which is what made this country what is used to be, not so much anymore, unfortunately.

We don't actually have a free market economy. In a free market economy, there would be no such thing as "too big to fail", for example (and talk about socialism... we all bailed out some of the richest people in our nation, and here we sit complaining about the price of a Big Mac and helping a poor mom buy food for her kids). Many of the rules of our economy are written by those who profit from them. Immigration law gets liberalized, not because we can afford to extend a warm welcome and government services to a new influx of foreign families but because it keeps the value of labor down. Business regulations are written by "experts in their fields" (ie, successful heads of their industry) who craft rules that make it much more difficult for new competitors to enter the market. And our thinking on these matters, regardless of political bent, is shaped by a media that shares ownership interests with other industries and thus has a vested interest in supporting certain viewpoints.

 

[ilovemk76]

A living wage is figured at the per-hour rate, not an annual rate of pay. It is the wage at which working a reasonable number of hours (I've usually seen it figured at 40 or 50 hour workweeks) would provide a basic but independent standard of living.

Why do you think you need to be paid at a rate to get " independent standard of living"?

If you go back to the end of my generation and the ones before, you did not get to " independent standard of living" at the start of you adult life (when you graduated or dropped out of school). You lives with your parents, a relative, a friend or rented in a room a person's house. Why can't they do that now? It is the entitlement mentality. I want my own place. I want a cell phone. I want an IPod. I want.........

They should want to better themselves and not let others provide it for them.

 

[Colleen27]

If gas prices ever get back under control, the economy will improve and so will wages.

Gas prices will never get under control again. That's also basic supply and demand - supply is declining (or more accurately, getting more expensive to extract and refine) and demand is ramping up around the world. Don't look to gas prices to help out our economy - in the long run they have no where to go but up.

 

[ariel71]

The dollar menu fries become three dollar menu fries. Might as well get my fries at a sit down restaurant.

Or in theory I could argue that they could stay at a dollar if McD's used some of its $5 billion annual net income to pay workers higher wages instead of using all of it for dividends and stock repurchases. Plenty of studies have shown those dividends are not trickling down. I'm sure there are plenty of studies trying to prove that they do.

Y'all can argue all you want back and forth and keep this going. But there have always been the have's and have nots, and it will always be that way. It's really a waste of time to discuss all this.

Yes, there will always be haves and have nots, but it's hard to ignore the growing disparity in income equality over the past 40 years between those haves and have nots.

That said, I do agree that it's a waste of time to discuss this (and recognize the paradox of even posting myself). My own points are so simplistic as to be laughable when it comes to defining such a complex issue. There apparently are many world class economists on the dis who think they can summarize the problem and solution in a few paragraphs.

 

[mom2rtk]

But is does mean learning new skills, be it at college, a trade school, online, or on the job.

So I assume you mean ..... say..... something more than laying on mom's couch sleeping for the first year or two after high school graduation?

I find this entire discussion comical. My son just graduated high school and we take him to college in one week. I am shocked at the number of kids he graduated with who still don't have plans for what they want to do. Is my son excited about leaving the comfort of our home, and his free time to hang out with friends and play video games..... to head off for school to study Chemistry, Calculus and Economics? I'd be lying if I said he was. He's going to work his little tail off. But, God willing, when it's done, he'll get a good job. I don't want to hear the kids who laid on mom's sofa for another year or two, complaining that they don't make enough money.

Last I heard, those jobs don't fly through the front window and land in your lap.

 

[ilovemk76]

You forgot reason #3 - more companies felt a moral/economic obligation to compensate workers fairly. That was prior to the rise of the corporate form (it existed, but as a minority of American businesses), businesses had ties to their communities, and felt more connection/obligation to their employees and customers than to shareholders. You can't demand this country somehow try to re-discover your #1 and #2 values without talking about #3.

Higher wages reduce dependency - people live on what they earn. Low wages increase it - people turn to government support (or private charity) to make up the difference between what they earn and what they need to survive.

At the end of WWII, the USA was the only large industrialized country in the world that could still pour out items that were sold all over the world. The company could charge what they liked and thus would offer incentives to those working age males who were still alive and not debilitated from the war. This was an anomaly and we need to recognize that we are no longer the owner of the world but just a small player in all the world.

In the 50s, most families did not vacation, have a second car (many did not have one), the average house was under 1000 sq feet (3 bedroom/1 bath/kitchen/living room), kids pants were patched, no closet full of clothes, no pool in the backyard, no tv (just a radio) and on and on. We can go back to that way of life, but those McDonald employees would be so happy with how their standard of living just went down.

 

[Colleen27]

I think the best way to go about this is to spend money at places that pay better if you're able.

But, when it comes to our own money, the rules change (me included).

People are pro living wage, buying meals at McDonalds and groceries at Wal-Mart.

Pro-union, driving a Toyota.

Pro-child labor laws, wearing clothing from a 3rd World sweat shop.

And so on.

I personally have given up on political solutions. Until the day comes when McDs workers can buy as much ad time as McDs owners/stockholders, it just isn't going to happen. The best we can do is to "be the change" as the old saying goes. So you'll never find me at Walmart, only rarely at McDonalds, and my cars are built with pride by the UAW.

 

[ilovemk76]

So I assume you mean ..... say..... something more than laying on mom's couch sleeping for the first year or two after high school graduation?

I find this entire discussion comical. My son just graduated high school and we take him to college in one week. I am shocked at the number of kids he graduated with who still don't have plans for what they want to do. Is my son excited about leaving the comfort of our home, and his free time to hang out with friends and play video games..... to head off for school to study Chemistry, Calculus and Economics? I'd be lying if I said he was. He's going to work his little tail off. But, God willing, when it's done, he'll get a good job. I don't want to hear the kids who laid on mom's sofa for another year or two, complaining that they don't make enough money.

Last I heard, those jobs don't fly through the front window and land in your lap.

Yes

 

[Colleen27]

Our economy seems to be becoming more and more service oriented. People used to be able to make a decent living working in manufacturing but those days are over and I imagine that many of the less skilled blue collar workers ended up having to take service jobs. As already mentioned not everyone is college material and many can't be trained in one of the skilled areas.

What should they do? It's true that no one can live off of most service industry salaries. Truthfully I don't know what the answer it.

The Atlantic had an interesting piece on this a while back, in which the author proposed that the solution is the same solution that made those manufacturing jobs so good in the first place - a worker-oriented movement to organize, coupled with government policies to support the effort. It worked in the early years of manufacturing - we went from the same sharp "haves"/"have nots" division that is taking shape today to the strongest middle class the world has ever seen. I'm just not sure there's the political will for that to happen again, given the current convergence between money and politics in our nation.

ETA: Found the link. http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jo...-little-better-can-make-huge-difference/3966/

 

[Colleen27]

Why do you think you need to be paid at a rate to get " independent standard of living"?

If you go back to the end of my generation and the ones before, you did not get to " independent standard of living" at the start of you adult life (when you graduated or dropped out of school). You lives with your parents, a relative, a friend or rented in a room a person's house. Why can't they do that now? It is the entitlement mentality. I want my own place. I want a cell phone. I want an IPod. I want.........

They should want to better themselves and not let others provide it for them.

Because it isn't about individuals. It is about the net social and economic effect of a huge segment of the American job market paying too little to generate the consumer activity upon which our economy relies. Making it about any one individual ("laying on the couch for a year or two after graduation" or not) is an appeal to emotion that merely obscures basic facts. We are a consumer driven economy. Most of the jobs our economy has added during the recovery do not pay a sufficient wage to be a net gain - they generate little consumer activity, add nothing to the income tax base, and do not reduce the strain on our social safety net. That is an unsustainable economic course, and no amount of second guessing what any one individual working at McDs may have done wrong in life changes that fact.