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

[CountDeMoney]

(even with retconning late boomers like Ed and Seedy).

Stop being ashamed of being Gen Y.

[Ideologue]

It is worse when it involves lies, but I am unsure that any lies are being used on the left.

Typical leftist--can't tell the truth from lies.

Name 'em, I'll listen.  I am an open-minded centrist.

Open minded I'll grant you, but centrist?  There's a lie right there.

I was joking.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

It has everything to do with what Berkut was talking about.

No it doesn't.  Berkut said the minimum wage was not intended to be a living wage.  That page simply talks about a different definition of living wage that is based on a nuclear family instead of an individual.  It does not address whatsoever what the minimum wage was and is supposed to be.

[Malthus]

A root cause analysis of the problem of minimum wage not equaling a living wage would be to determine why the minimum wage has been insufficiently increased.

That is some clever obfuscation there.

The root cause for why the min wage does to equal a living wage is because it was never intended to do so, hence it should not come as any great surprise that it does not now, nor has it ever.

I am not sure where this recent demand that the minimum wage be enough to raise a family on came from, but it is certainly VERY recent. Not even a decade ago was there any such claim that it was the case, and certainly 20 so odd years ago (when I was earning minimum wage) was there any even theoretical notion that it should pay me a living wage on 40 hours a week.

What has changed is the inability by a percentage of the population to get jobs other than of the burger-flipping, minimum-wage variety - leading to such people viewing those sorts of jobs, not as a temporary stop-gap or the sort of thing teens do in the summer, but as their actual employment. Hence, political pressure to do something about the situation - for example, by raising minumum wage.

Granted, the big corps who provide said jobs aren't the direct cause of this change. Also granted that raising minimum wage, while a simple and easy to understand response, may do nothing to solve the underlying problems (and may make things worse).

The difficulty exposed in this thread is that the corps are seemingly attempting to respond to this change in helpful ways, but can't get the "tone" right. The well-meaning attempt in the OP is to help employees with life-planning and budgeting - which, ironically, demonstrates that according to a reasonable set  of assumptions, a person *can't* adequately life-plan and budget at the wage they are likely to earn at McD's as a burger flipper. 

It isn't an adequate response to this irony to simply note that such wages were never intended as "living" wages, because the company, by making these materials available, is clearly assuming that the opposite is true - that its employees reading the materials *are* in fact planning to attempt to live on them. Which, sadly, probably has a certain amount of contemporary truth to it.

[crazy canuck]

It isn't an adequate response to this irony to simply note that such wages were never intended as "living" wages, because the company, by making these materials available, is clearly assuming that the opposite is true - that its employees reading the materials *are* in fact planning to attempt to live on them. Which, sadly, probably has a certain amount of contemporary truth to it.

Well said

[Berkut]

It isn't an adequate response to this irony to simply note that such wages were never intended as "living" wages, because the company, by making these materials available, is clearly assuming that the opposite is true - that its employees reading the materials *are* in fact planning to attempt to live on them. Which, sadly, probably has a certain amount of contemporary truth to it.

I don't think that is true - I don't think there is anyone at McDonald's who thinks that their minimum wage employees are (and should be) trying to raise a family on their minimum wage job. What McDonald's does not does not publish on their website is not evidence of any kind that should be influencing people's perception or opinions about what minimum wage ought to be for every single minimum wage job in America.

What is frustrating about this is just how silly the entire thing it - if you are working at McDonald's, and that is the best you can do, a full time job at McDonald's, then what is *really* frustrating is this implication in all this that you are doomed forever and all time, that there is NOTHING that you have control over that can improve your lot.

I mean really, that is just total and complete 100% bullshit. If nothing else, you can work your ass off AT MCDONALDS and move into management AT MCDONALDS (or Walmart or Tops or Mervyns...). Probably won't pay you some awesome salary, but it will certainly be better than minimum wage. You can work at McDonalds full time, work ANOTHER job part-time, and look for something better as well. Hold down a job for a while, be reliable, work your ass off, and people will in fact notice that, there are other, better paying jobs out there. Retail management, restaurant management, construction, whatever.

What I personally find objectionable about this entire debate is the implication that a minimum wage job is simply the very best that some significant portion of the population can do, and therefore society should make sure those jobs pay a "living wage". I reject that categorically. It is NOT the best *anyone* can do. And we should not legislate the salaries of the worst jobs to be equivalent to the salaries of the median jobs because we have so little faith in people that we cannot imagine them doing any better.

Lastly, I do think Malthus is basically correct that this really isn't about minimum wage at all - it is about unemployment for the low skilled. That is a problem, but it is not one that can possibly be solved by government fiat in regards to the minimum wage. In fact, econ 101 will tell you that it will certainly, without any doubt at all, result in exactly the opposite. If you raise the cost of labor, then it makes more sense to invest in automation instead, which will just mean less jobs for the low skilled, not the same number of jobs at twice the salary. This is not opinion.

Let me say that again: If you significantly raise minimum wage, it WILL DEFINITELY result in the long run in a decrease in the number of available jobs. It is certainly the case that there are some jobs (probably right in McDonald's in fact) that will be replaced by automation if the cost of the labor increases significantly - hell, even without increasing minimum wage that is going to happen.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

What has changed is the inability by a percentage of the population to get jobs other than of the burger-flipping, minimum-wage variety - leading to such people viewing those sorts of jobs, not as a temporary stop-gap or the sort of thing teens do in the summer, but as their actual employment. Hence, political pressure to do something about the situation - for example, by raising minumum wage.

This morning on the Diane Rehm Show one of the panelists claimed that only about 2% of American workers are actually at minimum wage (whatever that happens to be for their state).  He provided no reference for that during the brief period in which I was listening, though.  The actual distribution of wages seems to pre pretty important for this discussion.

[Berkut]

Plenty of stats out there:

http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2012.htm

Note that according to these stats, I am right, and Seedy is (surprise! surprise!) full of shit.

Most people making minimum wage are doing so because they are NOT typical full time primary bread winners with their minimum wage jobs as their primary source of income.

Highlights:

   
• Never-married workers, who tend to be young, were more likely than married workers to earn the federal minimum wage or less (about 8 percent versus about 2 percent).
• About 11 percent of part-time workers (persons who usually work less than 35 hours per week) were paid the federal minimum wage or less, compared with about 2 percent of full-time workers.

Most people making minimu wage (98%) are in fact part time workers. Just like I said.

This is interesting:

The proportion of hourly paid workers earning the prevailing federal minimum wage or less declined from 5.2 percent in 2011 to 4.7 percent in 2012. This remains well below the figure of 13.4 percent in 1979, when data were first collected on a regular basis.

Huh. The proportion of people earning min wage is actually going DOWN, not up.

[DGuller]

Lastly, I do think Malthus is basically correct that this really isn't about minimum wage at all - it is about unemployment for the low skilled. That is a problem, but it is not one that can possibly be solved by government fiat in regards to the minimum wage. In fact, econ 101 will tell you that it will certainly, without any doubt at all, result in exactly the opposite. If you raise the cost of labor, then it makes more sense to invest in automation instead, which will just mean less jobs for the low skilled, not the same number of jobs at twice the salary. This is not opinion.

I don't think anyone who actually studies this question in detail, and attempts to be objective at it, will be anywhere near as certain as you are.  There is more to economics than econ 101, surprisingly enough.

[Berkut]

Lastly, I do think Malthus is basically correct that this really isn't about minimum wage at all - it is about unemployment for the low skilled. That is a problem, but it is not one that can possibly be solved by government fiat in regards to the minimum wage. In fact, econ 101 will tell you that it will certainly, without any doubt at all, result in exactly the opposite. If you raise the cost of labor, then it makes more sense to invest in automation instead, which will just mean less jobs for the low skilled, not the same number of jobs at twice the salary. This is not opinion.

I don't think anyone who actually studies this question in detail, and attempts to be objective at it, will be anywhere near as certain as you are.  There is more to economics than econ 101, surprisingly enough.

I disagree. I think people who study the question in detail who actually understand economics understand that raising labor costs inevitably creates greater incentive to avoid those costs via automation.

There is much more to economics than econ 101, but the fundamentals don't change. You are arguing that since there is a lot more to math than simple arithmetic, then maybe 2+2 might not equal 4.

[DGuller]

Lastly, I do think Malthus is basically correct that this really isn't about minimum wage at all - it is about unemployment for the low skilled. That is a problem, but it is not one that can possibly be solved by government fiat in regards to the minimum wage. In fact, econ 101 will tell you that it will certainly, without any doubt at all, result in exactly the opposite. If you raise the cost of labor, then it makes more sense to invest in automation instead, which will just mean less jobs for the low skilled, not the same number of jobs at twice the salary. This is not opinion.

I don't think anyone who actually studies this question in detail, and attempts to be objective at it, will be anywhere near as certain as you are.  There is more to economics than econ 101, surprisingly enough.

I disagree. I think people who study the question in detail who actually understand economics understand that raising labor costs inevitably creates greater incentive to avoid those costs via automation.

There is much more to economics than econ 101, but the fundamentals don't change. You are arguing that since there is a lot more to math than simple arithmetic, then maybe 2+2 might not equal 4.

I'm arguing that there are a lot of complicated second-order macroeconomic effects in play.  Microeconomics is relatively simple, but macroeconomics are still a work in progress.

[The Brain]

I'm prepared to handwave that Socialism is bad mkay.

[Malthus]

It isn't an adequate response to this irony to simply note that such wages were never intended as "living" wages, because the company, by making these materials available, is clearly assuming that the opposite is true - that its employees reading the materials *are* in fact planning to attempt to live on them. Which, sadly, probably has a certain amount of contemporary truth to it.

I don't think that is true - I don't think there is anyone at McDonald's who thinks that their minimum wage employees are (and should be) trying to raise a family on their minimum wage job. What McDonald's does not does not publish on their website is not evidence of any kind that should be influencing people's perception or opinions about what minimum wage ought to be for every single minimum wage job in America.

No, but what McD's publishes on its website is pretty good evidence of what McD's thinks about its own jobs.

It is true that this may be a mistake on the part of the person publishing or approving it, but rightly or wrongly, corporations are held by the public to what they "say" in publications made by "them". Indeed, how else is the public supposed to know what a corporation collectively thinks about anything, other than in its published statements and materials?

As I said, it's a problem of tone. I see this as an example of good intentions gone awry, which exposes an underlying problem society has to deal with.

What is frustrating about this is just how silly the entire thing it - if you are working at McDonald's, and that is the best you can do, a full time job at McDonald's, then what is *really* frustrating is this implication in all this that you are doomed forever and all time, that there is NOTHING that you have control over that can improve your lot.

I mean really, that is just total and complete 100% bullshit. If nothing else, you can work your ass off AT MCDONALDS and move into management AT MCDONALDS (or Walmart or Tops or Mervyns...). Probably won't pay you some awesome salary, but it will certainly be better than minimum wage. You can work at McDonalds full time, work ANOTHER job part-time, and look for something better as well. Hold down a job for a while, be reliable, work your ass off, and people will in fact notice that, there are other, better paying jobs out there. Retail management, restaurant management, construction, whatever.

I agree this is how things ought to work. What I hear, is that for a lot of people, this is not how things work in reality. In theory, hard work at one job ought to translate into a better position. In reality, for a sizable number of people, what I hear is that obtaining a better position means applying through some byzantine applications process that leads nowhere, or requires an absurd level of pre-conceived criteria that a hard=working burger-slinger simply can never match.

That could be a mistake on my part, or wrong information, I admit. I have no direct experience of this.

What I personally find objectionable about this entire debate is the implication that a minimum wage job is simply the very best that some significant portion of the population can do, and therefore society should make sure those jobs pay a "living wage". I reject that categorically. It is NOT the best *anyone* can do.

I don't reject that categorically. It may or may not actually be true. It sounds like you are not open to even the possibility that, for some, it could be true.   

And we should not legislate the salaries of the worst jobs to be equivalent to the salaries of the median jobs because we have so little faith in people that we cannot imagine them doing any better.

Lastly, I do think Malthus is basically correct that this really isn't about minimum wage at all - it is about unemployment for the low skilled. That is a problem, but it is not one that can possibly be solved by government fiat in regards to the minimum wage. In fact, econ 101 will tell you that it will certainly, without any doubt at all, result in exactly the opposite. If you raise the cost of labor, then it makes more sense to invest in automation instead, which will just mean less jobs for the low skilled, not the same number of jobs at twice the salary. This is not opinion.

Let me say that again: If you significantly raise minimum wage, it WILL DEFINITELY result in the long run in a decrease in the number of available jobs. It is certainly the case that there are some jobs (probably right in McDonald's in fact) that will be replaced by automation if the cost of the labor increases significantly - hell, even without increasing minimum wage that is going to happen.

I don't disagree on any of that. I consider raising minimum wage to be a bad solution. The concern is, if the identified problem exists (i.e., that it is now harder to achieve social mobility through hard work for some sizable segment of the population), in a democracy you are bound to eventually get political pressure to do something. If good solutions are not suggested, eventually, bad solutions are likely to be adopted. Particularly if the difficulty of social mobility is seen as an increasing trend, and not cyclical over the relatively short term; and even moreso where, as in the US particlarly (but also elsewhere), the trend is matched by a massive increase in the total wealth held by the very wealthy.

In short, I view this situation to be a symptom of a problem. I do not claim to have any solutions.

[crazy canuck]

In short, I view this situation to be a symptom of a problem. I do not claim to have any solutions.

Agreed.  It used to be that answer to social mobility was education.  That was certainly my answer even if I did back into it by virtue of someone wanting me to play basketball for them.  But given the costs associated with that option I am no longer certain what the answer to social mobility might be.

[Berkut]

I don't disagree on any of that. I consider raising minimum wage to be a bad solution. The concern is, if the identified problem exists (i.e., that it is now harder to achieve social mobility through hard work for some sizable segment of the population), in a democracy you are bound to eventually get political pressure to do something. If good solutions are not suggested, eventually, bad solutions are likely to be adopted. Particularly if the difficulty of social mobility is seen as an increasing trend, and not cyclical over the relatively short term; and even moreso where, as in the US particlarly (but also elsewhere), the trend is matched by a massive increase in the total wealth held by the very wealthy.

In short, I view this situation to be a symptom of a problem. I do not claim to have any solutions.

No argument from me, and I like your point about the reality that if there aren't any good solutions offered, people will latch onto bad ones.

What bugs me is that I think you have people like Seedy and such who don't really want a solution, they want to use the problem as a means to advance their political agenda. That is what I see as really behind the entire "minimum wage ought to be a living wage" argument, especially when it is being put forth by those who I am quite certain have the basic grounding in economics to understand that the claim is obviously spurious to begin with.

Hell, I am right with them on the real issue, and am kind fo dumbfounded that we would let this distract us, for that matter. Doubling the minimum wage is not going to address in any real way at all the fundamental problem of wealth distribution overall.