Author Topic: 15.00 minimum wage-Does it work (Read 4240 times)

poche · « **Reply #15 on:** January 30, 2017, 05:41:16 AM »

15.00 minimum wage-Does it work?

What will happen is that the price of just about everything else will go up also and before you know it we will be talking about the need for another raise to the minimum wage.
:scratchchin: :scratchchin: :scratchchin:

RomanCatholic1953 · « **Reply #16 on:** January 30, 2017, 10:00:32 PM »

Raising the minimum wage in this day and age in which many jobs can be
done by robots and machines and unprofitable places will be closed and
shut down leading to more unemployment.
A leading business just laid off all their American born employees and
replacing them with recent migrants, immigrants. You know the
reason is that they will pay them a lower wage.
The government does not tell us the true scope of unemployment. It has
been never been 5% it has been closer to 30% about as high as the
great depression of the 1930's. Their are about 90-95 million Americans
willing to work but are unable to find work. Most of all have used up their
unemployment insurance long ago and subsisting on food stamps, welfare
and the underground economy.
I was hoping that President Trump would stop all immigration into this
country until Americans willing and able to work find jobs.
Those with green cards should exit the country along with the recent
legal and illegal immigrants.
Instead of building a wall. Just enforce the immigration laws already
on the books and penalize the employees that hire illegals.

Go to my post "Why you cannot find a job".

RomanCatholic1953 · « **Reply #17 on:** March 01, 2017, 05:49:58 PM »

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Wendy's Install Robots in 1,000 Stores to Counter Minimum Wage

3-1-17

Source: Matt Aguris

blacklistednews.com

The fast food industry is now reacting to the mandatory minimum wage increases…

For the last several years, the Free Thought Project has been predicting what will happen as government continued to arbitrarily fix wages across the US. As politicians deceive their constituents into thinking financial success can come through an act of legislation, employers will find a way to offset this cost. It will either come through higher prices or, in this most recent Wendy’s case — robots.

To offset the costs of being forced to pay employees $15 an hour, Bob Wright, Wendy’s Chief Operating Officer told investors last week Wendy’s has found a solution. In the past two years, Wright noted, Wendy’s has figured out how to eliminate 31 hours of labor per week from its restaurants and is now working to use technology, such as kiosks, to increase efficiency.

The automated kiosks serve two purposes: they give younger customers an ordering experience that they prefer, and they reduce labor costs.

“There is a huge amount of pull from (franchisees) in order to get them,” David Trimm, Wendy’s chief information officer, said last week during the company’s investors’ day.

“With the demand we are seeing … we can absolutely see our way to having 1,000 or more restaurants live with kiosks by the end of the year
The spike in demand stems from restaurant owners who want to maintain low prices while sustaining profitability.

A typical store would get three kiosks for about $15,000. Trimm estimated the payback on those machines would be less than two years, thanks to labor savings and increased sales. Customers still could order at the counter.

Kiosks are where the industry is headed, but Wendy’s is ahead of the curve, said Darren Tristano, vice president with Technomic, a food-service research and consulting firm.

“They are looking to improve their automation and their labor costs, and this is a good way to do it,” Tristano said. “They are also trying to enhance the customer experience. Younger customers prefer to use a kiosk.”
While Wendy’s is ahead of the curve as far as outsourcing labor to robots goes, other fast food restaurants are not far behind.

Last month, the Free Thought Project reported on McDonald’s latest attempt to stave off minimum wage hikes. However, unlike Wendy’s kiosks that simply take your order, the McDonald’s machines do it all — including spitting out a piping hot, 563 calorie, Big Mac.

While automation in the labor market is inevitable as technology increases, laws that dictate minimum wages only serve to speed up this automation. Sadly, many people will read this article and immediately assume that it’s some fascist right wing rant that ignores the plight of the working class. However, that assessment couldn’t be further from the truth.

Raising the minimum wage does nothing to protect the working class. In fact, as we see with these Wendy’s robots, a mandatory minimum wage destroys the working class.

As Nobelist Milton Friedman correctly quipped, “A minimum wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.”

If the economic effects of a minimum wage aren’t convincing enough, perhaps consider the racist background of such laws. As Andrew Syrios points out, most Americans have no clue about the racist intentions and subsequent effects of the original minimum wage.

When Apartheid was collapsing in South Africa, the economist Walter Williams did a study of South African labor markets and found that many white unions were seeking to increase the minimum wage. He quotes one such union leader as saying “… I support the rate for the job (minimum wages) as the second best way of protecting white artisans.” By pricing out less educated black laborers with a minimum wage, white unions were able to insulate themselves from competition.

Indeed, the Davis-Bacon Act, which demands that private employers pay “prevailing wages” for any government contracts, was explicitly passed as a Jim Crow law in order to protect white jobs from cheaper black competitors. And while the minimum wage is supported with much more pleasant rhetoric these days, the effects on black employment, particularly black teenage employment, have been devastating. As Thomas Sowell observes,

In 1948 … the unemployment rate among black 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds was 9.4 percent, slightly lower than that for white kids the same ages, which was 10.2 percent. Over the decades since then, we have gotten used to unemployment rates among black teenagers being over 30 percent, 40 percent or in some years even 50 percent.

It’s hard to imagine that black unemployment was actually less than that of whites. But that is the effect minimum wage laws can have.

Ending poverty and giving people additional income are praiseworthy goals, but there are no free lunches in this world. And trying to force prosperity through a minimum wage simply creates a whole host of negative and unintended consequences especially for those who are the most vulnerable.
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MMagdala · « **Reply #18 on:** March 02, 2017, 12:53:22 AM »

Quote from: Stubborn

Everything is so screwed up it's almost unbelievable.

A low minimum wage acts as an incentive that is designed to advance the person out of that low paying job and move on to a career that either immediately or eventually pays a better or a living wage, a career where one starts at the bottom and works their way up the corporate ladder with the expectation of an increasing salary with each advancement. Depending on the career, one can expect to reach their plateau after about 10 years or so. Certainly with exceptions, but that's the way it used to be.

Those who chose to remain a waiter / waitress or fast food employee or whatever, whether of their own free will or out of necessity, cannot expect that low paying position to pay a whole lot above minimum wage because if it did, that would only mean higher prices paid for all the consumers, which, as common sense should dictate, it's only a matter of time before that $15/hour will need to go up to $20/hour, then $25/hour and so on.

My advise is to tell them to get a real job, otherwise all they get is minimum wage and they should be thankful they're getting that. Whose fault is it that they can't find a real job, that they're not qualified for available ones or perhaps that they want to make a career out of working at Taco Bell?

I'm not an economist, so I don't pretend to have solutions for the high cost of living in the U.S., but I will make this one observation. There has been an almost tangible shift (certainly a visible one) from what The Average Joe expected out of life and out of government when I was growing up vs. today.

As Stubborn notes, many workers are not motivated to improve themselves enough to exit from a wage ceiling and an opportunity ceiling. That category of worker existed during my childhood as well. They might have been manual laborers or other kinds of hired help, including lifelong store clerks and such. They had at best a high school education (usually). However, their material aspirations matched their abilities. Even if they fantasized about become rich one day (usually only through luck), overall they expected to live within their means throughout their lifetimes, and they demanded nothing of the governmentr. And overall, they were able to live on their salaries, because inflation was more moderate and more predictable.

The major metropolitan centers in the U.S. have increasingly become unaffordable to all but the upper-middle-class. The change became noticeable, and began building momentum, in the 1980's. Survival in these regions approaches some Darwinian version of the macabre. That's Problem One, and a problem that was not a widespread reality in my childhood.

Problem Two, however -- and something equally modern/novel in origin -- is that low wage earners are for the most part no longer willing to live within their means, assuming they can survive somewhere on some basic level and are not in true peril. The entitlement mentality has mushroomed out of control and is a significant factor among pressure groups and others who lobby the government. The thesis is that those who have not accomplished and are not specially skilled should be able to buy what those much richer can buy. Unearned opportunity is described increasingly as an essential right of the working man and woman.

The right to exercise unjust avarice and reap what one does not sow.

Swell.

It is an impulse not born from desperation and poverty but from plenty and from envy.