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This summer, thousands of fast food workers around the nation walked off the job, demanding to be paid $15 per hour for work that traditionally pays about half that. As Wendy's striker Kaye Smith told NY1 recently, "I have to live with my mom ... because I wouldn't be able to support myself on $7.25, you know?" We can debate whether her living arrangements are Wendy's responsibility any more than they are that of New York's landlords or grocers. Either way, Smith's is a novel concept of unskilled jobs in America. Fast food wages have never been expected to support...

Jobs at Walmart don't pay a lot. Someone at The Nation recently noticed this, and decided to make up a new hourly wage for workers at the mega-uber-superstore chain—$12/hour—and declare their desire to see this wage implemented in an open letter to the CEO. The retail company has issued reams of press releases, funded and touted economic studies, taken to the airwaves, and made other serious efforts to address the criticisms about their compensation practices over the years. But it looks like someone in Bentonville finally snapped: Steven Restivo, a Walmart senior director of communications, sent out a email yesterday...

Are American workers paid enough? That is a topic that is endlessly debated all across this great land of ours. Unfortunately, what pretty much everyone can agree on is that American workers are not making as much as they used to after you account for inflation. Back in 1968, the minimum wage in the United States was $1.60 an hour. That sounds very small, but after you account for inflation a very different picture emerges. Using the inflation calculator that the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides, $1.60 in 1968 is equivalent to $10.74 today. And of course the official government...

Thousands of urban fast-food workers across America walked off the job last week to stage protests for higher wages. They want a minimum of $15, or about twice the current minimum wage, and a whopping $6 higher than President Obama’s suggested $9. Unions and their allies are marketing their efforts as a grassroots push to secure a living wage, but such ongoing one-day strikes are backed by Big Labor, which has an ulterior motive. With union membership dramatically on the decline nationwide, labor leaders are seeking new members wherever they can. Fast-food workers aren’t unionized, partially because the high turnover...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog In the real world, no liberal has ever bought a McDonald’s franchise and paid the workers $15 an hour Recently, Huffington Post published an article about how easy it would supposedly be for McDonald’s to pay its’ employees $15 an hour. Soon afterward, they took the original article down, and replaced it with this article, which admits that the original article had been wrong.But I knew they were wrong before they admitted it. Having read the original article, one thing I noticed was that it wrongly assumed that the demand for McDonald’s food would not go...

Several news reports indicate protests are taking place across the country over the minimum wage, with Lansing and Detroit intending to host their own, according to MLive.com. There are a number of problems with governments' wage floors. Minimum wage laws: Do more harm than good. The only true minimum wage is zero, which is what many workers may get after imposing this floor on pay. Price theory tells us that there is an inverse relationship between the price and quantity demanded of just about anything. Raise the price of workers and fewer will be demanded. Deprive people of invaluable work...

If Seattle fast workers demanding a big raise in the minimum wage get their way, they'll soon be replaced by robots says KIRO Radio's John Curley, who points to growing automation as a warning to those who want $15 an hour or more to flip burgers. A group of local fast food workers recently staged a one-day walkout and are calling on the Seattle City Council to increase the minimum wage from $9.19 per hour - the highest in the country - to $15 an hour. "We're asking for $15 because in order to support one person in a one...

More than 100 people were protesting outside a McDonald's in south St. Louis at lunchtime Monday, the first in a series of wildcat strikes and walkouts that are planned to ripple across the region over the next two days. The protests are part of a national campaign to push for higher wages for fast-food workers and are expected to hit dozens of stores between now and the end of the day Tuesday, culminating in a rally downtown in Kiener Plaza. Workers are advocating for wages of up to $15 per hour, a hike to Missouri's $7.35 per hour minimum wage...

In the recent fury over a proposed budget for low-wage workers circulated by McDonald’s, Forbes contributor Laura Shin asked “Will the McDonald’s Employee Budget help Get the Minimum Wage Raised?” I hope not, but not just for the sake of McDonald’s customers and shareholders. I hope not for the sake of McDonald’s workers and for the sake of low-wage workers everywhere.Who could possibly be so heartless? That’s the wrong question. I agree that we should be soft-hearted, but to borrow from Princeton economist Alan Blinder, our soft hearts have to be combined with hard heads. While Blinder was one of...

(Newser) – Fast-food workers want to make a "living wage" of $15 an hour. Chains say they'd have to jack up prices if that ever happened. But just how high? Turns out, not as high as you might think, at least according to a University of Kansas researcher. He found that if McDonald's immediately doubled the wages of all its workers (including the $9 million CEO), it would have to raise the price of a Big Mac 68 cents, from $3.99 to $4.67, reports the Huffington Post. Items on the Dollar Menu technically wouldn't qualify anymore, but that hike...

This column really is a bad idea. I should have counted to 100, had a drink, hit the treadmill for 45 minutes... something before I sat down and started writing after a segment yesterday on Neil Cavuto’s show. But I didn’t cool down. I headed straight for the computer and clicked twice on the “Word” icon – and here we go. Intemperate thoughts, sure to be considered offensive by some (like I care), are about to come your way. Our Republic has survived a great deal. We’ve managed to get through a war with states determined to secede from the...

President Obama is changing gears on the economy, highlighting income inequality as a growing problem in advance of pitched fall battles with congressional Republicans over funding the government and raising the debt ceiling. [WATCH VIDEO]The focus is intended to make it easier for Obama to argue that new taxes on the rich — and not cuts to social spending — should be imposed to lower the deficit.It also dovetails with Obama’s call for Congress to raise the federal $7.25 minimum wage and to end the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration.“This growing inequality is not just morally wrong, it’s bad...

Union-Backed Protesters Causing Disruption Outside Fast Food Chains Young communists for a $15 minimum wage rallied in cities across the country today. The workers want the corporations to “quit stealing” from workers and double the pay. Fast-food worker Shenita Simon, who brought a baby with her to the interview, told Neil Cavuto: Shenita Simon: “Those that think we’re making so much money and if we follow a particular type of budget, I can’t afford to pay rent. I can’t afford to feed my children. I can’t even afford the healthcare for my husband. Things that you guys see as everyday...

Nancy Pelosi recently spoke publicly on the need for a minimum wage increase. After that, at a recent rally, Obama called for an increase in the minimum wage. During this time, liberal pundits seemed to echo these sentiments. Trying to stoke the base? And then - behold - the rallies demanding an increase in the minimum wage at fast food restaurants are called for. Astroturf? Secondly, is this Union-backed and conducted to take attention off how disastrous Obamacare is to unions and how it has divided big unions in the U.S., many of whose leaders appear to have publicly expressed...

... Workers at the nation’s best known fast-food restaurants in seven cities across America are planning to walk off the job Monday to protest what they say are wages that are too low to live on. In a move orchestrated with the help of powerful labor unions and clergy groups, the workers plan to strike for a day to demand their wages be doubled. ... The workers are calling for wages of $15 per hour, more than double New York's current minimum wage of $7.25.

When Newton Murray — everyone calls him Mr. Newton — moved from his native Trinidad to Tampa, Florida, he went to Harry H. Bell & Sons cold storage facility and applied for a job as a janitor. He got the job, and began sweeping and cleaning 90,000 square feet of enclosed warehouse space, plus parking lots and loading docks, for minimum wage. That was 33 years ago. Since then, the now 99-year-old man has never arrived for work late, never left work early, never said no, and never asked for – or received – a raise. In 2000, the...

Whether or not you shop at Wal-Mart, you’ve already benefitted from the mega-retailer’s ceaseless efforts to cut prices. A 2005 study found that the nationwide expansion of the store had driven down everyone’s cost for food-at-home, commodities and overall consumer products. Competition among retailers drives down prices for all shoppers. Meanwhile, by one estimate, Wal-Mart saved consumers at its stores a quarter of a trillion dollars in 2006. And that was several dozen price cuts ago. But you need to live near one to benefit directly. And in our nation’s capital, many residents could be denied the opportunity to shop...

As the saying goes, everyone should have a budget. No matter how much or how little you make, a budget will help you reach your financial goals, right? Possibly with that idea in mind, McDonald's MCD +0.08% decided to teach its employees how to create one. But in doing so, the company may have inadvertently done something else: Shown that it’s nearly impossible to make a living off the minimum wage. Take a look at the sample budget, provided in a Web site that McDonald’s created in conjunction with Visa V +0.72%. Here are some of the main criticisms of...

German industry is largely in favor of a minimum wage, a new survey shows. Yet despite the opposition Social Democrats putting it high on their agenda, managers still do not trust the party with the economy. A survey of German managers conducted for the Handelsblatt business newspaper showed 57 percent wanted a mandatory minimum wage in the country. Those in service industries were the most in favor, with 61 percent saying they wanted a minimum wage. An hourly rate of €8.88 ($11.60) was considered suitable, the managers told pollsters from Forsa who carried out the survey. This is more than...

Do liberals hate Boston’s young black men? If you knew nothing about politics but everything about economics and jobs, that’s what you’d think. Under the leadership of Mayor Tom Menino, Gov. Deval Patrick and President Obama (the Mount Rushmore of Massachusetts-style liberalism), unemployment for black teenagers is around 40 percent — about 600 percent higher than overall joblessness. And what are Beacon Hill Democrats pushing? An increase in the minimum wage to $11 an hour — aka “The ‘Hire Fewer Entry-Level Minority Employees’ Act of 2013.” The Boston Globe-Democrat claimed economists are “divided” on the impact of raising the minimum...

About 80 fast food workers picketed restaurant chains earlier this month saying they wanted to double their pay going from minimum wage $7.40 an hour to $15 an hour. But business and economic experts say some of those workers would be out of a job if their demands were ever met. "If forced by government to increase wages to $15 per hour across the board, affected restaurants would almost certainly have to lay off employees and reduce overall hours to compensate for increased overhead," said Justin Winslow, vice president of government affairs for the Michigan Restaurant Association. Antony Davies, associate...

Laura Bailey makes $7.80 working at Wendy’s, but most of her income goes to transportation to and from work, making money tight for her and her teenage daughter, she said May 14 at a roundtable for minimum wage workers. An increase of the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 “would do wonders” for her budget, she said. Bailey was among 19 people who shared their stories with Seth D. Harris, acting U.S. secretary of labor, who hosted the roundtable at Our Daily Bread Employment Center, a Catholic Charities program in Baltimore. The event was the 23rd of its kind...

For folks too young or too unaware what has happened to our economy the past 30 years, here is an answer. Ronald Reagan, G.H.W. Bush and the Republican Party are responsible for what we know as "Reaganomics," an economy that continues today resulting in few "labor unions” and the resulting low wages and lack of worker benefits. Newly elected Reagan’s (1981) first attack on the middle class economy was his dismantling a labor union representing 11,000 striking air traffic controller employees, whom he “fired.” Their PATCO union was destroyed. Reagan and his rich, conservative friends (not one who needed job...

Last January, Walmart announced their upcoming initiative to offer a job to any honorably-discharged U.S. military veteran, set to begin on May 27. It was an idea that the White House applauded, with Michelle Obama saying that “Wal-Mart is setting a groundbreaking example for the private sector to follow.” As you might imagine, the AFL-CIO doesn’t like that at all. Behold, a statement from their president, Richard Trumka, on the “White House facilitating Walmart’s public relations move”: Walmart’s recent announcement of a plan to hire returning honorably discharged veterans is more about public relations than honoring our heroes. That this...

More Germans need state help to supplement their wages—because their jobs pay so badly they cannot pull themselves above the poverty line, figures from the Federal Employment Agency (BA) showed on Wednesday. This could fuel an ongoing debate over introducing a minimum wage. Lots of people in Germany have part-time “mini-jobs” for which they earn just enough to have to pay social contributions—around €800 ($1,052.80) per month—and according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, many of these people claim basic welfare support, Hartz IV, as they cannot live off their wage. There were also, the paper said, people with full-time jobs...

Hundreds of hourly employees of fast food restaurants and clothing shops, radicalized by the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago, walked off the job last week, to protest the fact that the minimum wage isn’t a “living wage,” to encourage further unionization, and especially, to do their day’s service to the Democratic Party that keeps them in bondage. This periodic saber-rattling of the American Left – about the alleged “need” to force other people to pay employees more than they think a job is worth – masquerades as a show of solidarity with the underpaid denizens of America’s lower class. But...

(Newser) – Many waiters are still waiting for their minimum wage to rise—which it hasn't in more than two decades. The federal minimum for servers is set at $2.13 an hour, though if they don't make at least the regular minimum of $7.25 when tips are added in, employers are supposed to make up the difference. That doesn't always happen, a waitress tells Bloomberg. She saw her wages plummet when she moved from California, which has a state minimum of $6.75, to New Mexico, which is one of 13 states to use the federal minimum. President Obama has called for...

A push to raise Michigan's minimum wage could be in store for the 2013-2014 election cycle. Sen. Bert Johnson, D-Highland Park, introduced Senate Bill 203 in February. It would increase the minimum wage from $7.40 per hour to $10 per hour over a two-year period. Under the bill, minimum wage increases would begin on Jan. 1, 2014 with an increase to $7.90. After that, the minimum wage would automatically increase every six months. It would jump to $8.40 an hour on July 1, 2014; then to $9 an hour on Jan. 1, 2015. It would then increase to $9.50 on...

Arts and crafts giant Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. announced on Monday that effective immediately, the minimum wage for its full-time hourly employees at its stores and affiliate Hemisphere was increased to $14. The hourly wage for part-time employees was also increased to $9.50. In a report on Thursday, founder and CEO of the company David Green said the decision was simply an acknowledgement of the hard work and dedication of his employees. "We are very fortunate to be able to increase hourly wages for our employees, because we know our company would not be successful without the great work they...

What happens when the U.S. Secretary of Labor visits a church in Charlotte? If an incident earlier this month is any indication, faulty political promises and destructive economic policies continue to spread. It took place on April 3rd. Acting U.S. Labor Secretary Seth Harris made an appearance at a Baptist Church in North Carolina’s largest city, along with Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx. He was visiting to promote President Obama’s proposal of elevating the federal minimum wage requirement from the current $7.25 to $9.00 an hour. Harris and Foxx gathered in a large room within a Baptist church building. They sat...

As low-wage food service workers demand a doubling of their pay, an uncurious journalist never wonders how people who earn $7.25 per hour were able to organize a “nationwide” strike replete with crisply-printed protest signs. For that matter, the dullard scribe doesn’t indicate whether “nationwide” connotes thousands of people in hundreds of locations or a dozen folks on two street corners. Bad journalism is defined most often by what it lacks, rather than what it states. Incompetence, or conscious manipulation, are found in the question unasked, the fact unmentioned, the absence of context. The passive reader will never notice. Reporting...

Walmart is starting to look like a Soviet-era retailer. The prices are still low, but shelves are going empty for months while products sit unwrapped in storage, lines are interminable, and no one is around to help. Bloomberg reports that in-store service problems for the world’s third-largest corporation are so bad that people are willing to pony up the extra cash to shop at stores like Target and Walgreens. Walmart’s problem, says MIT retail researcher Zeynep Ton, is a shortage of cheap labor:

Should the minimum wage be $22 an hour? That’s what Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) of Massachusetts suggested at a recent hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Here’s her logic: If you took the minimum wage from 1960 and indexed it for workers’ gains in productivity, it would be $22 an hour today. And why shouldn’t employees reap the benefits of their own improved labor practices?, she asked at the hearing, rhetorically. Today, the actual minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. “What happened to the other $14.75? It sure didn’t go to the worker,” Senator Warren...

New host, same loopy logic. Ed Schultz is gone from his weekday MSNBC slot, but the show's name lives on until Chris Hayes comes onboard next month. Sitting in for Schultz tonight was the never-at-a-loss-for-words Michael Eric Dyson. Discussing Elizabeth Warren's latest Senate hearing stunt, on the minimum wage, Dyson gushed "wouldn't that be great" if the minimum wage were raised to $22 per hour? Yeah, great . . . if you'd like unemployment to soar into the stratosphere, as lower-skilled workers were priced out of the market. African-Americans would be particularly hard hit. View the video here.

ALBANY — New York is poised to raise its minimum wage to $9 an hour — phased in between two and three years — as part of negotiations on a new state budget, sources said last night. Gov. Cuomo and legislative leaders have agreed to increase the current $7.25 rate to $8 next year, $8.75 in early 2015 and $9 before 2016, sources familiar with the budget talks said yesterday. “If we can get a minimum wage that ends in $9 in two years, I think we’ve done a tremendous service,” said Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan), who began pushing...

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Oh, minimum wage — the simple- and friendly-sounding yet actually regressive and economy-damaging populist throwback that just refuses to die. President Obama once again resurrected the timelessly terrible idea in his State of the Union speech in February, and it’s been percolating among the Democrats as a potential 2014-oriented rallying cry for how those obstructionist Republicans must really, really hate poor people because there’s no other possible explanation for their opposition (except that, you know, minimum wage hikes are actually counterproductive to an inclusive and prospering economy, but let’s just rid ourselves of any lingering school-girl notions that facts are...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democrat, suggested raising the minimum wage to $22 per hour is only logical if you look at the numbers. “If we started in 1960, and we said [that] as productivity goes up … then the minimum wage was going to go up the same … if that were the case, the minimum wage today would be about $22 an hour,” the senator said, at a recent Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on “Keeping up with a Changing Economy: Indexing the Minimum Wage.” The current minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. Ms. Warren wondered, in a...

The House on Friday rejected a Democratic push to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10, shooting down one of President Obama’s priorities from his State of the Union speech. The 233-184 defeat also exposed divisions within the Democratic Party. Where Mr. Obama called for a hike from the current $7.25 to $9 an hour, congressional Democrats pushed for a $10.10 rate. But they couldn’t muster unity even within their own ranks. Six Democrats from conservative-leaning districts voted against the wage increase, as did every single Republican who was present. “We need jobs out there. The best approach right now...

Firms are awash with cash, but they're not hiring. What's going on? One place to look for an explanation is the policies of the Obama administration. President Obama's proposal to increase the minimum wage and the health insurance employer mandate are combining to destroy job opportunities for young, unskilled workers in cities and towns across the country. The minimum wage, currently set at $7.25 an hour, will jump to $9 an hour and be indexed going forward if the president gets his way. The Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) is already the law of the land and its effects are being...

A new poll shows that a majority of Americans support raising the minimum wage. Doing so would almost surely help large businesses at the expense of smaller mom-and-pop stores and lower-skilled workers. A few years ago, the conservative chief executive at Wal-Mart went public advocating for an increase in the minimum wage. A short time later, the “maverick” left-wing Costco CEO Jim Sinegal followed suit. Was it out of the goodness of their hearts? Maybe, but the more likely reason is that this would help their bottom-line. While small businesses tend to be only marginally profitable and would have to...

Let's work through an example. Suppose 100 yards of fence could be built using one of two techniques. You could hire three low-skilled workers for $15 each, or you could hire one high-skilled worker for $40. Either way, you get the same 100 yards of fence built. If you sought maximum profits, which production technique would you employ? I'm guessing that you'd hire one high-skilled worker and pay him $40 rather than hire three low-skilled workers for $15 each. Your labor costs would be $40 rather than $45. Suppose the high-skilled worker came into your office and demanded $55 a...

Fred Deluca, the founder of privately-held Subway Restaurants, said government regulations are hurting small businesses and that this environment has prevented entrepreneurs from creating value in the market. "If I started Subway today, Subway would not exist," Deluca told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" Wednesday. (VIDEO AT LINK) Deluca said the environment for entrepreneurs in the U.S. has "continuously gotten worse because there are more and more regulations. It's tough for people to get into business, especially a small business." Effects of Obamacare The Subway founder pointed to a number of government regulations that are degrading the business environment for...

Folk heroes to some, villains to others, the owners of the Route 66 Malt Shop in Albuquerque have refused to abide by the city’s recently adopted minimum wage ordinance. The increase, they say, would bury their 18-year-old small business. “We had the choice to close the business and destroy 18 years of blood, sweat and tears and hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years … and fire 12 people or disobey the law,” Eric Szeman told New Mexico Watchdog after a busy lunch-time rush. “The law’s the law,” said Pat Davis, executive director of the liberal activist group Progress...

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama proposed raising the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9 an hour. That would be almost a 25 percent increase. Let's look at the president's proposal, but before doing so, let's ask some other economic questions. Are people responsive to changes in price? For example, if the price of cars rose by 25 percent, would people purchase as many cars? Supposing housing prices rose by 25 percent, what would happen to sales? Those are big-ticket items, but what about smaller-priced items? If a supermarket raised its prices by...

President Obama, in his State of the Union address this month, proposed raising the minimum wage to $9.00 an hour. As recently as 2006 that rate was $5.15, and has been at its current level of $7.25 only since July 2009. The next day, as if not to be outdone, two Minnesota state legislators proposed raising Minnesota’s minimum wage to $9.50 per hour from $6.15 presently. (Minnesota businesses currently follow the federal minimum.) After years of consensus among economists on the effects of the minimum wage, the last twenty years has seen renewed debate over whether minimum wage laws reduce...

President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress want to raise the minimum wage to improve the lot of the working poor. But they've got the wrong idea. The problem is not that these workers earn so little; it's that the things they buy cost so much. I propose instead to outlaw high prices. No one, after all, likes paying too much. So let's put a stop to it. Gas is too expensive? Make it $2 a gallon, max. Bread and meat take a big bite out of the family budget? Poor people could eat better if they had to pay...

For a moment there the other week, I was kind of thrown by President Obama’s SOTU suggestion that we hike the minimum wage, and I chalked it up to just another lame, old-and-tired faux-stimulus type of suggestion for growing the economy. As Allahpundit already pointed out yesterday, however, it’s really so much more than that. In the run-up to the 2006 midterms, a minimum wage increase was one of the specific issues Democrats used in their collective campaign to take over the House — and in their desperate upcoming bid to win back the House in 2014, they are ready...

I’d love to tell you that this strategy is nutty but after the last election I assume it’s already been vetted and deemed foolproof by an elite team of liberal Nobel-prize-winning behavioral scientists and supercomputer-enabled statistical models. Meanwhile, somewhere in Virginia, the GOP’s strategy squad is pushing colored thumbtacks into a paper map of the U.S. If you’ve been wondering where O’s out-of-left-field push for a minimum-wage hike in the SOTU came from, this is where. It polls well, and right now his only chance to get anything important done in his second term is by pushing dumb yet popular...