As a Matter of Fact, Minimum Wage Laws Hurt the Poor

Townhall.com ^ | January 10, 2018 | Jeff Jacoby

[bgill]

Every min. wage raise hurts everyone. It devalues the dollar.

[mylife]

They hurt retirees on a fixed income harder than anyone else.

[Red Badger]

....and the illiterate, and uneducated, and low or no marketable skills, dropouts and all around lazy types................

[loveliberty2]

Professor and Dr. Walter Williams has been writing and speaking on the "cruelty" and ineffectiveness of minimum wage laws as a way to fight poverty for decades.

The Progressive meme on "minimum wage" is both misleading and a deliberate political tool of people like the Clintons and the Schumer/Pelosi pair in order to get votes in order to gain power over the very people they claim as subjects.

[Navy Patriot]

Ping for $1000.00 hourly Minimum wage solving ALL problems.

[alloysteel]

Minimum wage = $0.00 per hour.

If a prospective employer wishes to pay a stipend for an inexperienced, untrained worker until some economically valuable work product starts to come from that new hire, then that is his prerogative, an incentive for the new employee to strive to learn with all possible alacrity the fundamentals of his or her designated position.

This is “zero-based” wage scale.

EVERYTHING should be set to “zero-base”.

[DungeonMaster]

Paying 93,000,000 not to work hurts even more.

[freedumb2003]

“Red Robin to offset minimum wage hikes by canning busboys”

https://nypost.com/2018/01/08/red-robin-will-offset-minimum-wage-hikes-by-canning-busboys/

They have 570 restaurants so that is what, around 6,000 or more out of work?

This isn’t even a case of unexpected consequences. These consequences were quite expected by people who understand business economics.

[Kaslin]

I used to work for minimum wage, and whenever the minimum wage was raised out hours were reduced.

[zeestephen]

Re: As a Matter of Fact, Minimum Wage Laws Hurt the Poor

No!

What hurts the poor is a deranged immigration policy that has flooded the USA economy with millions of low-skill foreign workers.

Supply and demand.

When there is a MASSIVE oversupply of low skill labor, wages get crushed.

[SkyDancer]

In Seattle they actually lost money; the employers just cut their hours.

[zeestephen]

Re: Red Robin to offset minimum wage hikes by canning busboys

Maybe the busboys should go back to Mexico?

Or does Mexico have a minimum wage, too?

[I want the USA back]

The government does not have the right to set a minimum or maximum hourly rate.

[arthurus]

Hikes in the Minimum Wage have the satisfying effect of putting more of those pesky industrious poor where they belong, on the dole where they are more likely to vote Democrat.

[freedumb2003]

>>Or does Mexico have a minimum wage, too?<<

They do: https://www.wsj.com/articles/mexico-to-raise-minimum-wage-above-inflation-1511298093

But what happens in Mexico except for the very large corporations (restaurant/supermarket chains, factories, etc.) companies do a LOT of business and employment under the table.

The corrupt unions are everywhere and they featherbed the hell out of the small businesses (outrageous time off, severance packages, health care) so small business go to the gray market or go out of business.

[ctdonath2]

“Minimum wage” is “debtor’s prison” redux: if you can’t earn enough, you’re not allowed to earn anything at all.

And a thing is worth only what another will give for it, including wages for work.

[NorthMountain]

Re: As a Matter of Fact, Minimum Wage Laws Hurt the Poor

No! What hurts the poor is a deranged immigration policy

Hah! Thank you for illustrating why rational debate is almost impossible today.

Yes! Minimum wage laws hurt the poor.

Yes! Insane immigration policies hurt the poor.

Those two harms are not exclusive of each other. You may rightly debate which of those two bad policies causes more harm. OTOH, to say that either one is NOT harmful, because the other one exists is consistent neither with logic nor with observed fact.

[Yosemitest]

Minimum-wage increase proposals are NOT about minimum wages.
It's about UNION wages (read government employees mostly) and UNION DUES.
Like "Artie" on another thread wrote.

"but my theory is that
this is one of the foundations of single payer.
Down the road, as single payer replaces ObamaCare,
all healthcare workers will become in essence government employees.
Think about how many thousands of new, dues paying union members will magically become part of the SEIU.

Barry had sealed this deal with Andy Stern years ago.
Barry promised Andy and the SEIU thousands of new members,
Andy says
great,
this is the wage structure we need
so we can pay the slush fund.
Gotta pay a living wage to all of the new union members
so dues can be extracted
and kickbacks to the dems can be made.
It’s convoluted
but what dem scheme isn’t,
especially when large sums of cash are involved?"

So read the following:

Union Support Of Minimum Wage Hike Is Self-Interested by RICHARD BERMAN on Aug 26, 2013

Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, ... was quick to emphasize that her organization's support of a more-than-twofold increase in the minimum wage was "not about growing unions."

This may be true — but it's also undeniable that such a move would have a profound impact on growing union paychecks, even if those unions don't count a single minimum-wage employee in their ranks.

The fine print can be found in union contracts. Each year, the Department of Labor's Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) releases a number of union collective bargaining agreements (CBAs).

Unsurprisingly, many CBAs available in the OLMS database LINK union salaries and wage rates to the federal minimum wage. There are a number of methods that unions use to accomplish this end. The two most popular appear to be setting baseline union wages as a percentage above the minimum wage, and mandating a flat wage at a set level above the minimum wage.

One example is a series of CBAs signed with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). Their contracts mandated that
"(w)henever the federal legal minimum wage is increased, minimum wage (in the agreement) shall be increased so that each will be at least fifteen (15%) percent higher than such legal minimum wage."

There's also an SEIU local's contract, which ordered that
"(t)he minimum hourly wage rates shall exceed any statutory applicable minimum wage rate by 50 cents."

Some unions have also arranged contracts where the employer MUST renegotiate their contracts in case of a minimum-wage hike, NO MATTER HOW LONG is left on the pact's life span.

The possibility for abuse here is staggering:
Unions with average wages WELL ABOVE the minimum wage CAN INSERT such clauses into their contracts, FORCING negotiations in industries not otherwise affected by a wage hike.

Given the limited number of CBAs available in the OLMS database, it's impossible to determine just how widespread this practice is.

But at least one union has trumpeted this arrangement as "one of the many advantages of being a union member."

Earlier this year on its blog, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union proudly boasted that "oftentimes, union contracts ARE TRIGGERED TO IMPLEMENT WAGE HIKES IN CASE OF MINIMUM WAGE INCREASES."

This is a stunning admission of SELF-INTERESTt for an organization that's actively PUSHING minimum-wage hikes at both the state and federal levels of government.

It also raises questions about unions' growing use of nonunion "worker centers" like the Restaurant Opportunities Center, OUR Walmart, Fast Food Forward and other organizations that have made headlines in recent months.

These groups advocate many policies that would affect those businesses that pay a minimum wage — restaurants, retailers, etc. — and a minimum-wage hike is often the FIRST demand that these union front groups make. This only casts further suspicion on the motives of the labor unions funding these groups.

No matter how you look at it, the benefits that these unions stand to reap from a minimum-wage hike should raise questions about their real motives — and whether they're only manipulating the debate over fast-food wages for their own benefit.



Berman is the executive director at the Center for Union Facts.

Young Student Gets Limbaugh Lesson on the Minimum Wage
Oct 27, 2017


RUSH: This is Caden in Reno.
Great to have you.

CALLER: Hi, Mr. Limbaugh. RUSH: Hi.

CALLER: This is just an honor.
I just want to say how much of an honor this is to be speaking with you on your show.
I am just… I’m doing a speech on Monday in my speech and debate class on why the minimum wage should NOT be increased.

RUSH: Mmm-hmm.

CALLER: And I would like to…
I was wondering if you could give me a couple of talking points on why
raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would affect the economy
or just business in general.

RUSH: Okay.
Caden, but first, before I answer this,
do you have a computer ?
Are you able Google things and search them ?

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Okay.
Because you’re gonna need to do this because you’re gonna find the evidence I’m gonna give you.

CALLER: Okay. RUSH: Seattle.
You need to search “Seattle and restaurants” and find out what happened to them after the minimum wage was raised to $15 an hour.
A bunch of restaurants closed, Caden.
Raising the minimum wage
— choosing an arbitrary number that has nothing to do with the market and demanding that the least qualified earn that money —
means that people get fired.
Businesses do not have a pile of money they’re not using
that they can go raise wages from.
They have to earn it via sales or whatever.

So what happens when the minimum wage is raised arbitrarily on the command of government
is that people lose their jobs.
More people end up out of work,
and the resulting increase in the minimum wage is not enough to counterbalance that at all.
But you Google “Seattle and restaurants,” and you’ll find out
the number of restaurants that have had to close since they raised the minimum wage to $15.
It will be your argument right there.
You can do your entire report on that story.



---



Related Links



• Washington Post: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news for liberals

[ctdonath2]

"Ping for $1000.00 hourly Minimum wage solving ALL problems."

While I appreciate the joke, it's worth looking at the limits of the idea:

Average US earnings ( GDP / (population * 2000 hrs) ) is about $29/hr.

That's with _everyone_ working.

As minimum wage approaches that number, and if we tacitly assume the unemployed are receiving benefits on par with min wage, that rapidly flattens out how much the actually productive among us get to keep. Rising $minwage first adjusts the values of low- vs high-end work (revisiting the accepted value of work), then starts trimming employment (cutting jobs that just aren't worth $minwage) and moving many/most of those onto welfare, then starts killing businesses that simply can't afford that cost vs revenue ... to wit: pay for high-end jobs drops, followed by gov't raising taxes to afford welfare approximating Universal Basic Income.

Thus, at a minimum wage of $29/hr (ignoring inflation), no worker nets earnings greater than that, no unemployed nets entitlements less than that, and nobody has an incentive to work for that (much less produce significantly more on-the-books). Society collapses.

Of course, in analyzing the joke, any minimum wage over $29/hr means straight-up inflation; all prices would simply scale accordingly. GDP is a number dividing the total value of all productivity; increasing $minwage just makes those slices smaller.

TL;DR - Maximum "minimum wage" is $29/hr. At that point, society dies.