McDonalds: "What, my peon, you don't work two full time jobs?"

[dps]

"What do you mean I have to pay £2 more an hour to my workers! That's it! I'm closing my shop and going home! No shop for anybody! Who cares if I destroy my source of income with it..."

It wouldn't be dumb if you're being forced to pay your employees so much money that you're actually operating at a loss.

Nobody is suggesting doing that.

When you're talking about fast food restaurants, you very well might be.  It's a penny-profit business. 

Of course, in the real world, what the owner does is raise his prices to make up the difference--not necessarily on the day the new minimum wage goes into effect, but over time (and, since these things get passed into law before they actually go into effect, perhaps the prices actually go up before the minimum wage does).  So if you want to raise the minimum wage from $7.25/hr to $10/hr, get ready for your $6 value meal to become your $9 value meal.  The end result leaves the minimum-wage earners no better off than before.  Nobody really benefits, and the people currently making wages in the $9-$12/hr range get screwed, because they'll get raises, too, but whereas the increase in the minimum wage will roughly match the increase in prices, the folks currently making $9-12/hr won't get quite the same increase in their pay.

[Caliga]

Tyr, for most businesses the main cost is payroll, so yes, raising salaries even $1 an hour across the board would have a huge impact on operating costs, and as dps points out for something like fast food would have a direct impact on the cost of the food... which you'd probably bitch about too.

[derspiess]

We're not talking about people like you or me. We're talking about career minimum wage slaves.

Who ought to be learning a skill to get a higher paying job.  Or, in the absence of that, working their asses off.

[Eddie Teach]

When you're talking about fast food restaurants, you very well might be.  It's a penny-profit business. 

Of course, in the real world, what the owner does is raise his prices to make up the difference--not necessarily on the day the new minimum wage goes into effect, but over time (and, since these things get passed into law before they actually go into effect, perhaps the prices actually go up before the minimum wage does).  So if you want to raise the minimum wage from $7.25/hr to $10/hr, get ready for your $6 value meal to become your $9 value meal.  The end result leaves the minimum-wage earners no better off than before.  Nobody really benefits, and the people currently making wages in the $9-$12/hr range get screwed, because they'll get raises, too, but whereas the increase in the minimum wage will roughly match the increase in prices, the folks currently making $9-12/hr won't get quite the same increase in their pay.

They'll benefit from buying more groceries instead of fast food. 

[Berkut]

We're not talking about people like you or me. We're talking about career minimum wage slaves.

Who ought to be learning a skill to get a higher paying job.  Or, in the absence of that, working their asses off.

...and the better point is that of all the people working minimum wage jobs, the number who are "career minimum wage employees" is very, very small. In fact, as someone who employed minimum wage workers for several years, I would guess the numbers are less than 10% of the workforce, of even that. Nobody gets a job making pizza at the Hut thinking "Sweet! This is it! My job for the next 30 years....!"

But of course raising the minimum wage doesn't just raise it for those people, it raises it for everyone, and that include the vast majority of min wage earners who are NOT doing this for their career, but doing it as a secondary source of income, or, of course, are students, which is the majority of these workers.

[frunk]

I found these charts showing numbers of workers at or below the minimum wage (change 2012 to the appropriate year).  The charts I looked at bear out that it is generally young people just starting out at that level (~50% 16-24 in 2012, with the percentage slowly increasing).  Jumping to before the recession the number of people at or below minimum wage was much lower, and the percentage of young people was higher.  Year to year the numbers jump around quite a bit more than I was expecting.

[CountDeMoney]

We're not talking about people like you or me. We're talking about career minimum wage slaves.

Who ought to be learning a skill to get a higher paying job.

You should go on down to the 'hood and help them with that.

[Berkut]

We're not talking about people like you or me. We're talking about career minimum wage slaves.

Who ought to be learning a skill to get a higher paying job.

You should go on down to the 'hood and help them with that.

Oh look, Seedy playing the race card. How original.

[dps]

Oh, and on the issue of computers and other technology making jobs easier, it really doesn't work that way.  Technology often makes individual job tasks easier, but it also often makes it easier for an individual worker to be assign more tasks.  From the worker's POV, it's kind of a wash--productivity may have gone up, but the job hasn't really gotten easier because there's more to do.

[derspiess]

We're not talking about people like you or me. We're talking about career minimum wage slaves.

Who ought to be learning a skill to get a higher paying job.

You should go on down to the 'hood and help them with that.

How do you know I don't?

[garbon]

Oh, and on the issue of computers and other technology making jobs easier, it really doesn't work that way.  Technology often makes individual job tasks easier, but it also often makes it easier for an individual worker to be assign more tasks.  From the worker's POV, it's kind of a wash--productivity may have gone up, but the job hasn't really gotten easier because there's more to do.

I think we've lost sight of why this was initially brought up. We were discussing how workers (particularly those making minimum wage) were shafted while companies were producing more. I mentioned that if companies were investing to make work easier (/more efficient) so why would they then want to raise everyone's wages?

[Berkut]

Oh, and on the issue of computers and other technology making jobs easier, it really doesn't work that way.  Technology often makes individual job tasks easier, but it also often makes it easier for an individual worker to be assign more tasks.  From the worker's POV, it's kind of a wash--productivity may have gone up, but the job hasn't really gotten easier because there's more to do.

I guess.

But the basic idea that computers don't make things easier is, well, ridiculous.

Of course they do - that is the entire point. If it wasn't easier, they wouldn't have them. The point is to make it easier so you can do it faster, and hence get more done - make sure that drive through customer gets through the line in 60 seconds so you can get to the next customer.

Does that make the order takers job easier? Not really - because they will be expected to serve more customers with that decline in each individual customers "work". That is *always* the point of automation. It may make the individual task easier, but if so, that just means you will be expected to perform more of those tasks in the same amount of time.

Nothing gets much easier or harder overall - lets be honest, these are min wage jobs. They CANNOT get harder, because the bar for doing them is, by definition, about as low as possible. If you make some min wage job even nominally harder, then people will get a different min wage job that isn't.

And they aren't going to get easier, because why would they? The employer is trying to get as much productivity out of those workers as possible, not make their job easy. Which is why you see McDonalds with min wage workers running rather impressively automated and computerized shit like a french fry machine. Have you guys seen these things? All the worker does is dump bags of fries into the cage and press a button, then throw some salt on there, and even the fucking salt shaker is made to dispense the same amount of salt per shake!

[dps]

Oh, and on the issue of computers and other technology making jobs easier, it really doesn't work that way.  Technology often makes individual job tasks easier, but it also often makes it easier for an individual worker to be assign more tasks.  From the worker's POV, it's kind of a wash--productivity may have gone up, but the job hasn't really gotten easier because there's more to do.

I guess.

But the basic idea that computers don't make things easier is, well, ridiculous.

Of course they do - that is the entire point. If it wasn't easier, they wouldn't have them. The point is to make it easier so you can do it faster, and hence get more done - make sure that drive through customer gets through the line in 60 seconds so you can get to the next customer.

Does that make the order takers job easier? Not really - because they will be expected to serve more customers with that decline in each individual customers "work". That is *always* the point of automation. It may make the individual task easier, but if so, that just means you will be expected to perform more of those tasks in the same amount of time.

Nothing gets much easier or harder overall - lets be honest, these are min wage jobs. They CANNOT get harder, because the bar for doing them is, by definition, about as low as possible. If you make some min wage job even nominally harder, then people will get a different min wage job that isn't.

And they aren't going to get easier, because why would they? The employer is trying to get as much productivity out of those workers as possible, not make their job easy. Which is why you see McDonalds with min wage workers running rather impressively automated and computerized shit like a french fry machine. Have you guys seen these things? All the worker does is dump bags of fries into the cage and press a button, then throw some salt on there, and even the fucking salt shaker is made to dispense the same amount of salt per shake!

Yeah, that's true, but to a certain extent you're conflating "simple" with "easy".  Digging a ditch is a simple job, but it's also hard work--physically much more demanding in general than fast food work.  Though even there, in some aspects, ditch digging is easier.  For example, if a ditch digging crew is getting tired, the foreman can tell everyone to take 5.  You can't do that in fast food.  That's really the "hard" aspect of working fast food--it's constant extreme time pressure, with little to no let-up.

[Malthus]

I guess the issue appears to be that increasing productivity is benefiting everyone, with the notable exception of the workers.

I can accept that setting wage controls isn't the right way to spread the benefits more evenly through society. But it strikes me as unsustainable to not do it somehow. Otherwise, I suspect what you tend to get is an increasing tendency for more and more to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

[garbon]

I guess the issue appears to be that increasing productivity is benefiting everyone, with the notable exception of the workers.

I can accept that setting wage controls isn't the right way to spread the benefits more evenly through society. But it strikes me as unsustainable to not do it somehow. Otherwise, I suspect what you tend to get is an increasing tendency for more and more to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

Seems like that would be fair to say if a sizable chunk of workforce consists of permanent/long-term minimum wage earners. Do we know if that's true?