And I don't know where you come up with the notion of passive, I'm just stating an observation.
I guess so, if you assume that the total salary envelope is fixed. In which case, minimum wages protect lower-paid workers at the expense of higher-paid workers. Which is fine in of itself.
But on top of that I think we have to assume that the salary envelope has some elasticity. Maybe minimum wage increases the total salary cost, and decreases returns on capital - so helping lower-paid workers at the expense of investors. Again, why not
Um, no, actually the complete opposite. Minimum wage protects the workers who are able to get the job at the minimum wage, at the expense of those even lower-paid -- the ones who would've been employed if the wage had been less (and now are not employed).
But maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe we don't send work offshore to lower cost countries to take advantage of wages lower than ours.
But maybe I'm mistaken.
Couldn't tell you. Never heard of that study. It sounds like one study among so many that all indicate the same.
Maybe we don't send work offshore to lower cost countries to take advantage of wages lower than ours.
People DO send work offshore for that reason, and you know it. Why so childish? Why such pointless passive aggression? Why come out with that kind of nonsense bullshit? Grow up and have an adult conversation.
So the notion that raising minimum wages doesn't affect employment just doesn't hold water unless you study it in a very isolated environment, where the effects of it get washed out by the larger absorptive capacity of the broader labor market.
Overall unemployment isn't worse historically. Not sure why you cherry-pick youth as if it invalidates the overall stat somehow. But even that stat isn't worse historically.
You're going to have to work a lot harder to prove that those two facts are related than just saying them.
Perhaps you mean that the very lowest paid jobs are those that are outsourced? Are you talking about very low-wage factory jobs, such that people in China may be paid a few dollars an hour where the same in the US would be many dollars an hour? Or are you talking about IT outsourcing, which happens at values much higher than minimum wage?
If I have to guess your arguments and make them for you, then I don't really need you in this conversation at all, I suppose.
it's not like lowering the minimum wage would change this much - if the cost of living is an order of magnitude lower in a third-world country, the labour costs are going to be an order of magnitude lower too
> Maybe we don't send work offshore to lower cost countries to take advantage of wages lower than ours.
Labor costs in the US are higher than in China, so this should and has happened anyway. You think it would happen to a larger degree and it could be correct. But it is a restricted perspective aside from the fact that not every work can just be outsourced to low wage countries.
A first start would be to stop subsidizing the transportation costs through the US Navy and oil subsidies/tax breaks
One way is to try to orient your economy around more high-value jobs, with a generous safety net for those who can't reach it. It's a very difficult question
Instead, profits take a hammering and some businesses get replaced by others with no overall reduction in employment.
If you analyze who lobbies for minimum wage hikes (labor groups) and who protests them (business) it ought to be plain as day who really gets hurt and who benefits from the narrative of "wed only hurt workers by paying them more".
What's the point in working if you're going to be paid in breadcrumbs?
Do we really want to race towards another Dickensian society?
Being able to eat. "Breadcrumbs" for you or me might not be worth it, but for someone else it could be the difference between buying food that the supermarket or stealing ketchup packets from a fast food store.
I recommend rereading “The Grapes of Wrath”, to get a taste of what poverty in this country had actually looked like, and what it actually was like to not be able to afford food. Then compare that with what currently passes as “poverty”: you get much more than that already on SNAP benefits.
I am very sympathetic to people in poverty, having grown up in it. However, let’s not pretend that poverty in today’s America is about “affording food”: everyone, no matter how poor, is able to afford food, and poverty today is less about the hunger, and more about the lifestyle you can or are forced to carry out.
The hidden assumption is that lower-paid positions are less important. They aren't. There are many minimum wage positions that are more important than higher wage positions.
They're not lower paid because they're less important, they're lower paid because they're more replaceable.
So, when you force the employer to choose between not having a janitor, or paying 3.5$ more per hour, they will certainly decide to pay 3.5$ more per hour.
Assuming that there is profit, which is a good assumption as the average surplus value rate is of around 5-7%, then what will happen is that profit will decrease, and employment will stay more or less the same.
It's very important to realize that the market values replaceability, not importance.
Maybe they end up with 60-80% of the janitorial coverage that they had before.
I suspect but cannot prove; a lot of elasticity. Those graphs showing productivity and wages decoupling; all that wealth is going somewhere. It's going to rich people. As you suggest, we could "just" (ha!) change where it goes; instead of to rich people, to workers.
Imagine someone today capable of creating $1 of variable gross profit for their employer every 5 minutes before they were paid. Under a free labor market or a $10/hour minimum wage, that employee has stable and good employment prospects. Make the minimum wage $15/hour and change nothing else and that employee is on shakier ground. Either they must hope that their employer doesn’t know their individual productivity (likely somewhat true), that there is so much money being generated elsewhere that the company doesn’t care if they lose some here, that their job is practically required structurally (no one will close their shop from 10-12 and 2-4 just because the foot traffic drops off and those hours lose some money), or that their employer feels charitable but wants to dress that charity up in work clothes.
Total wages have some elasticity. I have to believe it’s not generally beyond what is advantageous to the employer and their customers (who are paying all the wages ultimately).
I’m not saying companies will invest right up to break even, but that they will attempt to avoid going beyond that point.
No, because empirical studies demonstrate that u employment doesn't go up when the minimum wage is raised, profits instead get lowered.
There is an enormous lobbying industry dedicated to telling us what is bad for them is bad for us though.
If you assume that the market clearing price for non-minimum wage labor is set, as all market prices are set, by the interaction of a supply and demand curve, then it becomes clearer that there’s no mechanism by which the redistribution from one worker to another would happen.