Minimum Wage Hike Approved - finally

I don't see anyone can begrudge skill workers a honest wage for their hard labor which we need.

Wouldn't an ordinary jo/joe blow spend more money at walmart if they make more money so the need to raise their prices or reduce their labor force wouldn't be there?

The trouble is, with hard nosed businessmen the way they are, the worker will only be able to buy Chinese goods, as that's all there is on the shelves. Who cares whether that toolbox/garden furniture is being made by underaged workers who just about get enough in the way of coins as to survive another day. It's dirt cheap, folks, so we'll import it and make a killing.


The ideal scenario for big bosses (anywhere) is when their workers are too worried about trying to make ends meet, to think about anything other than working as many hours as possible and not doing anything to upset their boss.
Give them a decent wage and anarchy will follow. For god's sake, they might become so affluent that they may even decide not to do any overtime eventually, preferring to spend more time at home with the kids.

Perish the thought.

Pretty fiscally conservative here, but minimum wage increase is A-OK in my book.

Look, at some point, minimum wage is absolutely indexed to the wage of relatively unskilled workers. If the newest hires are making $7.25 instead of $5.15, then the guy who's been there two, three years isn't going to also be making $7.25; or if he is, then the place next door will hire him away for $8. Sure, it's not going to affect wages of college graduates or anything, but there's no denying that there's an escalation in general low-skill wages attendant with a minimum wage increase (well, with a significant one, hm?)

Certainly you can't set the minimum wage arbitrarily high without causing problems and economic dislocation. But it's been a pretty good amount of time since the last increase, and to put it frankly, the buying power of $5.15 is not what it was when the minimum was raised to that point. What wages we've lived with, we can live with again. (In fact, indexing this wage to inflation wouldn't be a terrible thing either, now would it?)

Finally, at the margin, we don't want people working for a wage that requires that they receive government assistance to live. Yes, yes, the minimum can be a bit below that, because you have a lot of part-timers and students and whatnot in the market too. But if you're allowing a business to pay someone to work for so little that we have to give them additional money so they don't starve or go homeless, that's the government subsidizing the profits earned by that employer. So if we lose a few jobs at the margin of profitability, that's not -that huge- a loss... sure, sucks for the individuals involved, but if you're raising a family, you need to get a job that can pay for that family, not a minimum wage one and then some of my tax dollars too.

If a skilled worker is making minimum wage, he/she has zero inititive.

BBB-
Your article by Carol Daly was correct, but failed to mention one slightly important fact. The Secure Rural Schools and Communities Act (a/k/a PL 106-393) was only authorized for six years. It reached its sunset last November. What Congress did was only to grant a one-year extension with no further authorization. I'm quite familiar with the legislation. I have chaired the Central Idaho RAC for the past six years, and we have actually been able to do some remarkably beneficial projects on an annual budget of only $123,000 contributed by the three counties we represent. Sadly, all these efforts will disappear in another six months, and our good work will come to a screeching halt.

Whoopee, big accomplishment, the minimum wage is raised so that there are less jobs for entry level people, and anyone that has any smarts or training soon makes more than minimum wage anyway. Great accomplishment. But at least the Democrats can feel good about themselves, because "they care." Cheaper than going to a shrink.

The other great effect is that some clear thinking kids might now think they can make a living forever now on minimum wage, so no need to go get any more training. After all, why aim for excellence when mediocrity will suffice? Great laws like this are so wonderful.

This is all such bull crap I don't know how you all got away with selling it for so long.

The plain fact is that some people can't afford to go college but still need a decent wage to feed their families (or just themselves) without food stamps. We need entry level skilled workers and they need money to survive while working at that level.

I am not saying we should raise their wages outrageously, but at least keep it at a level where they can survive in todays prices. We have done that and it is a good thing. I bet most Americans agree.

Surviving and earning a good living are two different things. Most people want to earn a good living to have two cars and all the other luxuries that come with higher skilled workers. After all we are not talking about $10 an hour but merely 70-cent increases this year and in the next two years, topping out at $7.25 an hour in 2009. So the incentive for people to exceed will still be there.



source

It's also very possible, that increasing the minimum wage will cause a loss of jobs, that would be required to now offer their workers more $$.

For those kids who can't afford college or who don't want to attend a college, the trades offer the best hope for both on the job training and excellent wages, once they become full fledged tradesmen.

CEOs vs. Slaves
CEOs vs. Slaves
By Barbara Ehrenreich
The Nation
Tuesday 29 May 2007

Recent findings shed new light on the increasingly unequal terrain of American society. Starting at the top executive level: You may have thought, as I did, that the guys in the C-suites operated as a team-or, depending on your point of view, a pack or gang-each getting his fair share of the take. But no, the rising tide in executive pay does not lift all yachts equally. The latest pay gap to worry about is the one between the CEO and his-or very rarely her-third in command.

According to a just-reported study by Carola Frydman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Raven E. Saks at the Federal Reserve, thirty to forty years ago, the CEOs of major companies earned 80 percent more, on average, than the third-highest-paid executives. By the early part of the twenty-first century, however, the gap between the CEO and the third in command had ballooned up to 260 percent.

Now take a look at what's happening at the very bottom of the economic spectrum, where you might have pictured low-wage workers trudging between food banks or mendicants dwelling in cardboard boxes. It turns out, though, that the bottom is a lot lower than that. On May 16, a millionaire couple in a woodsy Long Island suburb was charged with keeping two Indonesian domestics as slaves for five years, during which the women were paid $100 a month, fed very little, forced to sleep on mats on the floor and subjected to beatings, cigarette burns and other torments.

This is hardly an isolated case (see my book Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, co-edited with Arlie Hochschild). If the new "top" involves pay in the tens or hundreds of millions, a private jet and a few acres of Nantucket, the new bottom is slavery. Some of America's slaves are captive domestics, like the Indonesian women in Long Island. Others are factory workers, and at least 10,000 are sex slaves lured from their home country to American brothels by promises of respectable jobs.

CEOs and slaves: These are the extreme ends of American class polarization. But a parallel kind of splitting is going in many of the professions. Top-ranked college professors, for example, enjoy salaries of several hundred thousand a year, often augmented by consulting fees and earnings from their patents or biotech companies. At the other end of the professoriate, you have adjunct teachers toiling away for about $5,000 a semester or less, with no benefits or chance of tenure. There was a story a few years ago about an adjunct who commuted to his classes from a homeless shelter in Manhattan, and adjuncts who moonlight as waitresses or cleaning ladies are legion.

Similarly, the legal profession, which is topped by law firm partners billing hundreds of dollars an hour, now has a new proletariat of temp lawyers working for $19-$25 an hour in sweatshop conditions. On sites like Temporary Attorney, temp lawyers report working twelve hours a day, six days a week, in crowded basements with inadequate sanitary facilities. According to an article in American Lawyer, a legal temp at a major New York firm reports being "corralled in a windowless basement room littered with dead cockroaches," where six out of seven exits were blocked.

Contemplating the violent and increasing polarization of American society, one cannot help but think of "dark energy," the mysterious force that is propelling the galaxies apart at a speed far greater than can be accounted for by the energy of the original Big Bang. Cosmic bodies seem to be repelling each other, much as a CEO must look down at his CFO, COO, etc., and think, They're getting too close. I've got to make more, more, more!

The difference is that the galaxies don't need each other, and are free to go their separate ways nonchalantly. But the CEO presumably depends on his fellow executives, just as the star professor relies on adjuncts to do his or her teaching and the law firm partner is enriched by the sweated labor of legal temps. For all we know, some of those CEOs go home to sip their single malts in mahogany-walled dens that have been cleaned by domestic slaves.

Why is it so hard for the people at the top to graciously acknowledge their dependency on the labor of others? We need some sort of gravitational force to counter the explosive distancing brought about by greed-before our economy imitates the universe and blows itself to smithereens.