In reply to GameboyRMH :
You may not see yourself as complaining, but you are not offering solutions.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
No, that's not what minimum wage is supposed to be. It never was, and never should be a minimum living wage. As someone else pointed out, it's meant to be a starting job, for someone who has no skills and plans to leave that job asap.
SV reX said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
You may not see yourself as complaining, but you are not offering solutions.
I admit that I am doing some complaining and have mentioned some potential solutions to the income issue (a higher minimum wage first of all, bringing it on par with the highest inflation-adjusted historical values would be a decent start), for the housing issue the cause isn't well-defined so it's hard to come up with a complete solution. I've mentioned that zoning changes to allow more high-density and low-end housing would help, and I think that tailoring policies intended to help the poor obtain/retain housing so that they can't be exploited by middle-class house-flippers (or people with even less trouble affording homes and/or interest in long-term home ownership) to pump more money into the real estate market for profit would help as well.
docwyte said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
No, that's not what minimum wage is supposed to be. It never was, and never should be a minimum living wage. As someone else pointed out, it's meant to be a starting job, for someone who has no skills and plans to leave that job asap.
You can argue about what it should be, but that's not what it is:
Right now it's more like the starting wage for entry-level jobs that don't have much room for growth.
I'm not sure everybody should own a house but we should do something about homelessness. Not everybody is cut out to be a homeowner. It takes work. There is maintenance. Even some people who can afford it would rather pay a landlord that maintain a property instead of spending their weekends at Home Depot. There is a problem with affordable housing on the bottom end. We could go back to building SRO (single room occupancy) apartments instead of putting luxury apartments everywhere. But of course nobody wants those in their backyard and investors don't make enough money so some subsidy would be required to build those. Maybe the government. Maybe the companies that want low income workers to move to the area could start a co-op. But nobody really wants to go to war against the NIMBYs. They have all the money. We probably have to invest more in drug treatment programs and mental health programs because some people have to learn to go to work every day and pay their rent on time. And just maybe we have to bring back vagrancy laws because some people actually want to live in the street, do drugs and beg or steal to support their lifestyle. Go to rehab or go somewhere else. Good luck with that. Conservatives don't want to help them. Liberals don't want to make them change their destructive lifestyles. The ACLU will go to war against you. Fixing problems is much more difficult than it looks.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
The problem is that the jobs paying minimum wage or not much above it are becoming more common and require more skills, and more, older people are working in them. People still want out and try working to get out, but are realizing that trying to work their way out of the situation isn't taking them far. This is what's caused people to think the numbers should change instead:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2021/12/17/too-many-older-workers-are-stuck-in-low-wage-jobs/
As someone who until a few years ago made minimum-wage-ish amounts of money in a place with a stupidly high cost of living, I don't see myself as an outside observer complaining on behalf of others.
I know this sounds harsh, but- so what? 20% of people make poor choices early in life and don't correct their course in time? I'm suprised it isn't higher, but the bar is pretty low. If at 55- after at least 35 years of life and work experience, a person isn't any better off than they were at 20- is that a society problem or an individual problem? I sure hope they enjoyed their 20's, 30's and 40's since three decades weren't enough time for them to learn a marketable skill. How is this societies' problem? What do we owe these people? What should we do for them that they didn't do for themselves in over 30 years? It really doesn't matter who thinks that should change. What matters is that people on the road to becoming a 55 year old minimum wage worker want to change themselves. Anything less is a band aid on a bullet wound at best.
As a 16 year old kid in high school, I made minimum wage, $4.25 an hour if remember correctly, for a few weeks, before I received a raise to $4.50. That was in the early 1990s. I never made minimum wage again. That's a normal progression.
On the housing front, I left for college at 18 and was in dorms or rentals until after I graduated and worked for several years. I didn't buy my first house until I was 27. It took 11 years for me to go from minimum wage to home ownership, or rather a mortgage. I don't think that is too unusual based on younger folks I know.
Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) said:Not everybody is cut out to be a homeowner. It takes work. There is maintenance.
Agreed. I wish we would stop holding up homeownership as the standard for what everyone should be able to achieve. Owning a home when you can barely afford one can be a terrible financial and quality of life decision.
I also agree there there is a problem with affordable housing on the bottom end.** Both rentals and purchases. Reading these threads reinforces my invest in something along these lines in the near-term future.
The affordable housing/minimum wage/quality of life is obviously highly political as one of the main drivers here is the free market. In theory it will correct itself. There are those on one side that say "it will if things keep getting worse, lets just let it do its thing" and there are those on the other that say "it should have done so by now, lets step in and adjust". I don't think you will convince either side to budge from their position.
**I DO think both sides can find some common ground on this issue.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
A few pages back you pretty much said you have done all you feel like doing to improve your skills, but think you should make more money for some reason. Why? Just because?
One of the issues people are seeing with the "$15 minimum wage" movement is when they pay the $15, people decide they only want to work 30 hours a week, because they have better stuff to do with their time now. They didn't want a raise from $11 to $15 an hour so the could make $600 a week, they are ok with the $440 they're making, and figure they will only work 30 hours and make the same amount they were at $11.
You want the same thing, more money because you see profits, not because you've earned it. It doesn't work that way.
Steve_Jones said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
A few pages back you pretty much said you have done all you feel like doing to improve your skills, but think you should make more money for some reason. Why? Just because?
That's a pretty big leap from not necessarily being interested in learning the hot new skill of the week, but carrying on...
Steve_Jones said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
One of the issues people are seeing with the "$15 minimum wage" movement is when they pay the $15, people decide they only want to work 30 hours a week, because they have better stuff to do with their time now. They didn't want a raise from $11 to $15 an hour so the could make $600 a week, they are ok with the $440 they're making, and figure they will only work 30 hours and make the same amount they were at $11.
You want the same thing, more money because you see profits, not because you've earned it. It doesn't work that way.
The issue is that who "earned it" is decided artificially by the most powerful people at a company. Right now those people conveniently think they themselves, execs and upper management, did an absurd and ever-increasing proportion of the "earning" that produced the company's profits despite working ordinary hours, doing jobs that don't require much more training or talent than those in the middle of the company, and usually not touching the product or service with a 10-foot pole. Management has value, sure, but it doesn't increase by orders of magnitude at higher levels.
This is the core issue, it will always be possible for those with power over capital to misattribute productivity like this, and if left unchecked it will take us back to the worst excesses from history (again, see Victorian England, depression-era USA, or Mexico basically any time in living memory) and beyond. For those who dictate who "earned" what, it's all too easy to just label a worker's skills "unmarketable" and anoint yourself as an earning superstar. The only way to prevent this is to reduce the power these few have to dictate who "earned" what. A minimum wage says "nobody can 'earn' less than this, otherwise the job is a time-wasting drain on society and shouldn't exist, so start there" and that's the floor every low/mid-tier worker's pay right is built on top of right now. Artificial limits we've put on the system are all that separate us from those horrors of other times and places where they didn't exist and those with the most power had more freedom to unilaterally decide who earned what.
What you describe as "earning" isn't so much producing more value through your labor as it is gaining more power to attribute more productivity to yourself.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
working ordinary hours, doing jobs that don't require much more training or talent than those in the middle of the company,
if it's that easy, why don't you just get that job?
In reply to GameboyRMH :
The issue is that who "earned it" is decided artificially by the most powerful people at a company. Right now those people conveniently think they themselves, execs and upper management, did an absurd and ever-increasing proportion of the "earning" that produced the company's profits despite working ordinary hours, doing jobs that don't require much more training or talent than those in the middle of the company, and usually not touching the product or service with a 10-foot pole. Management has value, sure, but it doesn't increase by orders of magnitude at higher levels.
This is the core issue, it will always be possible for those with power over capital to misattribute productivity like this, and if left unchecked it will take us back to the worst excesses from history (again, see Victorian England, depression-era USA, or Mexico basically any time in living memory) and beyond. For those who dictate who "earned" what, it's all too easy to just label a worker's skills "unmarketable" and anoint yourself as an earning superstar. The only way to prevent this is to reduce the power these few have to dictate who "earned" what. A minimum wage says "nobody can 'earn' less than this, otherwise the job is a time-wasting drain on society and shouldn't exist, so start there" and that's the floor every low/mid-tier worker's pay right is built on top of right now. Artificial limits we've put on the system are all that separate us from those horrors of other times and places where they didn't exist and those with the most power had more freedom to unilaterally decide who earned what.
What you describe as "earning" isn't so much producing more value through your labor as it is gaining more power to attribute more productivity to yourself.
Have you ever been in management? As a worker, you are responsible solely for yourself. You have direct control over your performance. Management are responsible for and accountable for the performance of other human beings. That is orders of magnitude more challenging and stressful than just being responsible for your own performance. Sure they get credit when things go right. But they are also the first to fall on the sword when things don't. Whether it's their fault or not, it often doesn't matter. So yes, when things go well, they have earned it.
Boost_Crazy said:Have you ever been in management? As a worker, you are responsible solely for yourself. You have direct control over your performance. Management are responsible for and accountable for the performance of other human beings. That is orders of magnitude more challenging and stressful than just being responsible for your own performance. Sure they get credit when things go right. But they are also the first to fall on the sword when things don't. Whether it's their fault or not, it often doesn't matter. So yes, when things go well, they have earned it.
I haven't worked in management and would rather not mainly because I'm not a people person, but in my experience management gets credit when things go right, but lower-ranking workers take the damage when things don't - they're first in line for layoffs when the chips are down or become a sacrificial lamb when something goes wrong. The place I worked the longest went through many rounds of layoffs and only became more management-heavy over time. The number of managers who got ever got fired for performance reasons was greatly outweighed by the number of workers who got fired for bullE36 M3 reasons nobody could figure out. Plus when a predictable failure is coming, management tends to "move on to pursue other opportunities" somewhere else. Sometimes the replacement manager will see it coming too and do the same, and this cycle can repeat a few times until one of them loses the game of musical chairs.
At the executive level there is practically no accountability or responsibility. Executives make astronomical amounts even if they make plainly terrible decisions that predictably destroy a company - GE, Nokia, and WeWork being some of the prime examples. They're unlikely to get a worse punishment than a golden parachute to fund a luxuriant retirement, more than any worker could "earn" through a lifetime of diligent labor.
Also do you care to explain why management has "earned it" more and more over time since the introduction of computers?
In reply to GameboyRMH :
Workers get canned first because they are the easiest to replace. If you don't want to be included in the replaceable, learn a skill that is irreplaceable.
Steve_Jones said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
working ordinary hours, doing jobs that don't require much more training or talent than those in the middle of the company,
if it's that easy, why don't you just get that job?
First I'd prefer to avoid management work, and second there's a lot of palace intrigue, social climbing and backstabbing involved in those jobs which I want no part of. Getting those sorts of jobs is also a lot easier if you come from the right background, which I don't.
My dad once got a board-level job by being the manager of a factory when it was acquired by a larger group of companies and saw it all up close. He wasn't into that either, so he does accounting now.
Doing an honest day's work for an honest day's pay seemed like a better option for me, unfortunately those opportunities were drying up as well by the time I started working.
Toyman! said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
Workers get canned first because they are the easiest to replace. If you don't want to be included in the replaceable, learn a skill that is irreplaceable.
Well I did survive all those rounds of layoffs, but no skill is irreplaceable. The closest thing you can have to an irreplaceable skill is a secret or a connection.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
Being better, more dependable, or even nicer than anyone else is also a skill that helps a person keep a job. Everything about your person can be a help or a hindrance to maintaining employment.
The fact is widget stickers and bolt tighteners are easily replaced. They are a dime a dozen. The hardest part of hiring one is getting someone that will actually show up to work and pass a drug test. As long as that is the case, they will be paid less because their work is worth less and easily replaced.
Conversely, the guys that work for me take years to fully train to the point they have the confidence and the ability to tackle any problem and solve it. Figure 12-18 months before I can stick them in a truck and send them out on their own. For the 1st 6 months, they are basically dead weight sucking up money and generating little in return. They get paid much more than minimum wage. They get nice bonuses. They get pampered at times. I will cut my own pay before I lay one of them off because they take so long to train. I won't call them irreplaceable, but they are certainly more difficult to replace.
"Secrets" don't make people irreplaceable. They might get you fired.
A friend who is a dentist was looking for a file. He asked his admin where it was, and why he couldn't find it. She said, "Oh. That file. I'll have to get that for you. It's filed in my own way." Turns out, she thought she could make herself irreplaceable by reorganizing all the files in such a way that only she could find them.
He fired her that day.
Yep it's a big risk to keep a secret, I'm not a fan myself. Usually it's done at the company level rather than the employee level. I think that if your job or business relies on secret techniques or business relationships, it's extremely vulnerable. It's surprising how many businesses rely heavily on keeping the identity of their suppliers secret. One particularly egregious example was an aftermarket parts company selling store-brand "miracle" brake pads, turned out they were just de-branded Raybestos ST43s.
Corporate trade secrets are entirely different than employee secrets to try to be irreplaceable.
You said it about being irreplaceable.
I'm perfectly fine with corporate secrets.
Toyman! said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
Being better, more dependable, or even nicer than anyone else is also a skill that helps a person keep a job. Everything about your person can be a help or a hindrance to maintaining employment.
The fact is widget stickers and bolt tighteners are easily replaced. They are a dime a dozen. The hardest part of hiring one is getting someone that will actually show up to work and pass a drug test. As long as that is the case, they will be paid less because their work is worth less and easily replaced.
Conversely, the guys that work for me take years to fully train to the point they have the confidence and the ability to tackle any problem and solve it. Figure 12-18 months before I can stick them in a truck and send them out on their own. For the 1st 6 months, they are basically dead weight sucking up money and generating little in return. They get paid much more than minimum wage. They get nice bonuses. They get pampered at times. I will cut my own pay before I lay one of them off because they take so long to train. I won't call them irreplaceable, but they are certainly more difficult to replace.
Sales is sorta like that, except people either have the ability or not. Only 5 out of a Hundred hires. Carry their own weight ( revenue generation wise). Of those 5 only 5 out of 100 remain in sales for 5 years or longer. And of those 5 only 5 in a 1000 make really serious 6 figure+ income.
It takes tremendous self confidence, self discipline, and ability to make a career in sales. In my 35 years in sales I've only seen 1 retirement party for a salesman. But typical top producers earn more than the president of the company.
In reply to SV reX :
In reply to GameboyRMH :
I don't want to sound offensive here, but it sounds like you're on the whaaahambulance here. You're not getting exploited. It's not some sort of plot to keep you down. You have it in your power to increase your skills, climb the corporate ladder, go out and free lance, become a consultant, start a business, whatever it is you choose to increase your earnings.
What it boils down to is you don't want to. Which is totally fine, but to then proclaim that you deserve more money without actually doing anything different than you currently are is simply naive. You need to earn it, so go out and DO something. Take the risks involved, otherwise be happy with where you are and stop complaining about not getting pay that you simply don't deserve to get right now. There's a saying thrown around a lot in the military, "choose your rate, choose your fate". You've chosen yours, either except your fate or do something about changing your rate.
Only 1.5% of workers were at or below the Federal minimum wage in 2020 versus 6% in 2010. The wage data was on trend over that time so the decrease was not caused by the shutdowns. The hypothetical wage problem is well on the way to being eliminated. The emotional argument about workers being stuck at minimum wage is restricted to an exceptionally small group of people when we look at the numbers.
I do think we are seeing the elimination of entry level jobs like the one I had in high school. Honestly, that's terrifying for society and the economy.
Toyman! said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
Being better, more dependable, or even nicer than anyone else is also a skill that helps a person keep a job. Everything about your person can be a help or a hindrance to maintaining employment.
The fact is widget stickers and bolt tighteners are easily replaced. They are a dime a dozen. The hardest part of hiring one is getting someone that will actually show up to work and pass a drug test. As long as that is the case, they will be paid less because their work is worth less and easily replaced.
Conversely, the guys that work for me take years to fully train to the point they have the confidence and the ability to tackle any problem and solve it. Figure 12-18 months before I can stick them in a truck and send them out on their own. For the 1st 6 months, they are basically dead weight sucking up money and generating little in return. They get paid much more than minimum wage. They get nice bonuses. They get pampered at times. I will cut my own pay before I lay one of them off because they take so long to train. I won't call them irreplaceable, but they are certainly more difficult to replace.
To add to this. There is still a limit to what I can pay them because there is a maximum that the market will pay. While I'd love to pay every one of them $150k and pass that cost on to the customer, I can't. Just like I can't pay myself $5m. I have to bid against some huge companies that have more buying power, lower overhead, and bigger bank accounts than I do. I lose jobs to them on a regular basis. They are guaranteed to underprice me on any hotel or large project and frequently I don't bother to bid on those projects because I would be trading nickles for nickles to be competitive. The line between turning a profit and not is extremely fine at times.
The rose-colored world where everyone makes 6 figures just doesn't exist.
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