Simple question- why hasn't minimum wage been tied/indexed to

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

inflation lo these many years? It is absolutely ridiculous that everything else under the sun goes up except for the federal minimum wage. We have a gigantic disconnect between work and wages and expenses in this country. Did it all have to go to Corporate CEOs earning hundreds of times the salaries of the workers in their companies? They can only buy so many $6,000 shower curtains apiece - the real wages of real Americans is what keeps our cities and towns and service sectors and industries afloat.

[valerief]

1. If it was tied to inflation, it would be higher than it is today.

And rich people wouldn't be as rich. And that would be horrid for reasons I've yet to understand.

[Poppyseedman]

9. And rich people wouldn't be as rich

yes, they would.

Do you really think people get rich by paying people $5.15 instead of $8.15 per hour ???

[valerief]

13. No, but I didn't say that.

[AirAmFan]

14. That $3 an hour per person adds up. 2000 hrs a year times 25 people

times $3 an hour = $150,000 a year extra profit. In seven years, that's over a million dollars!

[valerief]

16. Some Walmart guessitmates

7,000 Walmarts
35 min wage ees * 7,000 = 245,000
245,000 * $150,000/yr = $36,750,000,000

I'll bet there's more than 35 min wage employees per Walmart store.

[Poppyseedman]

24. I'll bet you there aren't

I'll bet there's more than 35 min wage employees per Walmart store.

In most stores the average starting wage is way over minimum

[Poppyseedman]

23. did it ever occur to you that a business would need

more people at $5.15 an verses paying $8.15 an hour to get the same labor done


BTW, a million dollars over seven years isn't a lot a money

[tularetom]

2. That's a rhetorical question right?

You answered it in your post. Yes of course it had to go to CEO's. Remember the response of the roman senators in History of the World Part I - "Fuck the Poor!"

[Neil Lisst]

3. Every year, the minimum wage pays for less and less

The real buying power of the minimum wage declines each year, as inflation makes the dollars go quicker.

A gallon of gasoline today is about one-half the minimum wage for one hour.

Forty years ago, in the 1960s, a gallon of gasoline was about 1/8 of the minimum wage for one hour.

By design, the right opposes indexing of it, and that is effectively force the minimum wage down.

[wakeme2008]

4. One of the things the voters of Florida did right

in 2004 they passed the Florida Min. Wage at around $1.00 more than the Fed one, and indexed it. So every year it will go up...

And for the ppl that eat at Outback, the owners of Outback spent a ton of money to stop the Florida min. wage. and lost :)

[Poppyseedman]

6. That wasn't all of "Florida" just Hillsbourgh county

[DemBones DemBones]

8. Good for Hillsborough County, especially

as it's so heavily GOP.

[wakeme2008]

10. No all of Florida

http://election.dos.state.fl.us/initiatives/fulltext/37732-1.htm

Plus it goes up by 26 cents in 2006 :)

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:kuDt1Bdf7-MJ:www.wftv.com/news/5042261/detail.html+Florida+minimum+wage&hl=en

[Poppyseedman]

11. I always thought it was just the county. Thanks

[SledDriver]

5. It would hurt "small business"...

if they had to pay their workers $10/hr instead of just $5. Twice as much.

[DemBones DemBones]

7. While it's true that CEOs can only buy so many $6000 shower curtains

apiece, the Bushistas want to ensure, by permanent elimination of the estate tax, that their children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren will not be deprived of their very own $6000 shower curtains. Permanent tax cuts for the rich will also allow those heirs to keep up with inflation since $6000 won't buy the quality of shower curtain in, say, 2050, that it buys today.

The Bushistas don't understand, or care about, the lives of anyone else, all living in their bubbles of privilege like Marie Antoinette.

[AirAmFan]

12. Over the last 25 yrs, the National Retail Merchants Assn and other Republican

lobbies bribed Congresspeople (D as well as R) not to index minimum wages. They funded many "junk economics" studies to try to show that keeping the minimum wage at its traditional level (about 50 percent of the average manufacturing wage) would produce "unemployment".

Before then, when there were solid Democratic majorities in Congress, I believe Democratic pols preferred to "negotiate" with organized labor every few years to raise the minimum wage in return for votes and money. Labor was strong enough to demand indexation, but too shortsighted and too focused on the interests and demands of high-paid trades such as Air Traffic Controller, carpenters, electricians, etc.

Today, the Pew Foundation has a poll showing that 86 percent of the public feels minimum wages are too low. But a hike in the minimum is anathema to the Wall Street wing of the Republican party--the big money source for the WH and both houses of Congress.

[Zynx]

17. The Republicans have always spewed that minimum wages cause

unemployment. This is TOTAL bullshit. Generally, the minimum wage is well below the equilibrium price for unskilled labor and thus does not have an effect on the job market or at least not a noticable one. Also, to further disprove this, let's use history.

According to Republicans, if wages are allowed to fall during a recession, then you will keep full employment during a recession since labor will be cheap enough that everyone can have a job. Basically, if we allow average wages to fall to $4 an hour, everyone will have a job. Well, let's look at the Depression of 1893-1897. Wages collapsed in this period and the economy contracted VERY sharply. Did we have unemployment? 18%+ according the meager data we had. It may have been considerably more. There were no labor regulations to speak of. No business regulations period, or at least any that were being enforced. Let's make an example to explain why this happens and why Republicans are stupid:

I own a factory and I have 50 workers. I pay them each $20 a day. I have $2000 in sales a day. Let's assume for the sake of round numbers that my only cost is labor. I have a $1000 profit. I'm doing swell. Then, HOLY CRAP, my sales collapse. Suddenly I have only $1000 in sales. I'm not interested in breaking even. I want my hold profit margin back. I want my 50% so I have to reduce labor costs to $500. It makes no sense for me to cut everyone's wages to $10 a day and keep the same capacity for production I used to have. I would simply have idle labor that wouldn't do anything. Sure, I wouldn't incur any extra costs, but all workers might be less motivated with their wages cut. So, what I do instead is I fire 25 workers and I might even cut the current wages slightly on those I do keep since the market is unregulated(in this example).

Even after observing many depressions that occurred in unregulated economies, the right-wingers never understood that unemployment does indeed happen in unregulated economies where wages can sink.

[AirAmFan]

18. The best economists who've studied minimum wages agree with your

conclusion. See http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691043906/002-4011537-7202418?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance for an excerpt from their book.

[badger1080]

19. So what's the point?

"Generally, the minimum wage is well below the equilibrium price for unskilled labor and thus does not have an effect on the job market or at least not a noticable one."

So why even have a minimum wage if its well below equilibrium wage to begin with?

[AirAmFan]

22. I said Card and Krueger agree with Zynx's CONCLUSION--

I did NOT say that they agreed with all his logic.

But their explanation of their findings (minimum wage increases in three states in the early 90s appeared to INCREASE employment) does emphasize the low proportion (then 5 percent) of American and Canadian workers who earh the minimum. Raising the minimum wage for the poorest fraction of workers reduces employers' costly worker turnover, and has a beneficial ripple effect on wages of workers above the minimum.

The naive neoclassical economists' THEORETICAL interpretation of minimum wages assumes atomistic competition and costless worker turnover, ignoring the realities of ACTUAL low-wage labor markets, where turnover is very costly to employers, workers are NOT paid their individual marginal products, and monopsony or oligopsony power may be present

[badger1080]

28. Card and Krueger

I did NOT say that they agreed with all his logic.
I was responding to his post. I never saw yours.

Anyway, I'd be skeptical of Card and Krueger's conclusion. I haven't read their book, but I've read their well known journal article. It got a lot of good press, but really wasn't a good paper. They looked at fast food restaurants in Penn and NJ and used a dif in dif estimator. Not likely to yield consistent results in such a situation.

[Zynx]

26. It's possible that some employers may take advantage of no minimum wage

and pay less than the current minimum wage for their least skilled labor. That's why we need to protect against that.

[badger1080]

29. Do we?

I'm not a big fan of minimum wage.
If someones only worth $5 an hour then we shouldn't force businesses to pay them more. 1) It's a tax on the business. It's not the businesses fault that the person is uneducated or whatever. 2)It reduces the number of low paying jobs and young folk jobs. This is a problem because teenagers get good experience from their first jobs. Their pay is in experience as much as dollars. Especially for those not looking towards college it's the start of an employment history that can help to acquire better job in the future.

That's not to say I don't think that the poorest need help. They do, but there are much better ways to do this than with a minimum wage.

[StopRoy]

30. That whole posted sounded familiar... (n/t)

[IntravenousDemilo]

21. Ah, not all Republicans....

Ex-president Calvin Coolidge once said, "When a great many people are unable to find work, unemployment results."

So that's the reason for unemployment -- people not having jobs. Jeez, Republicans were clueless fucking airheads even back then.

[Zynx]

27. Republicans are idiots for the most part.

Coolidge is a perfect example since he is basically the grandfather of current Republican economic "thought".

[depakid]

15. It is in Oregon

The rate is annually adjusted for inflation by using the U.S. City Average Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers for All Items. The wage amount established is then rounded to the nearest five cents.

Wanna see how your state stacks up?

http://www.dol.gov/esa/minwage/america.htm

[porphyrian]

20. Simple answer - only labor cares about labor.

The time of being hired in the mailroom and working your way up to president of the company no longer exists. If a business has created a minimum wage position, it is because it's slightly more convenient for them than outsourcing it to Eastern Europe and slightly less expensive than buying a machine to automate the process. They don't care about people, they care about profit, and that's the problem with business today. Corporations are sociopathic - they don't even care if they're killing people to make a profit. Firestone didn't accidentally make a bunch of exploding SUV tires, they were cutting corners to save money. They just underestimated the amount of damages they would have to pay out in court. A certain amount of customer deaths were EXPECTED. They're all like that. And now we have a government where you can buy political influence. So, corporations have bought themselves personhood and the rights and protections of individual citizenship, but without any accountability or responsibility. Corporations can effectively murder thousands of us, and at worst be forced into bankruptcy, at which time they funnel all the assets of that company through loopholes to the executives' personal accounts and call it a day. Now, they're buying wars and no-bid contracts to clean up after them.

If we want a fair living wage, we've got to get corporate influence out of our government.

[Ouabache]

25. I think the minimum wage should be tied to CEO salaries

Lowest employee gets a set percentage of the CEO salary. AUTOMATICALLY.
That would cahnge a lot of things.