The Minimum Wage: What's the Big Deal?

[volprof]

Wait until you pay for them to be off work to have a baby they can't afford. You're the scum of society sir... Haha

Poor, undereducated, low-wage earners are going to have children no matter what. That's just what poor, undereducated, low-wage earners do the world over.

What I'm hoping is that paid maternity leave could incentivize more middle-class, educated, medium- to higher-wage earners (those people who you keep claiming should be the ones having children but who, statistically, just don't reproduce) to have children.

To answer your question above, I don't have any idea about a specific amount, although, as I understand, many developed nations typically give 70-90 percent of typical earnings for a period ranging anywhere between two weeks to four months. I'd have to see more research done about costs and effects to determine a specific policy. And, while I'm at it, I say that optional unpaid paternity leave, ranging between a week to two weeks, should probably also be on the table federally, but, again, I'd have to see a little more research about the effects of optional unpaid paternity leave to say for certain what its effects are.

The effects of paid maternity leave, however, are pretty clear: it incentivizes reproduction among the middle-class, although even it can't completely compensate (as in the case of declining European domestic populations). But the situation would be even worse, and failed economies even closer, than if it weren't on the table.

Paid maternity leave is also good for business. After California instituted paid medical leave, a survey in 2011 by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that 91% of employers said the policy either boosted profits or had no effect. They also noted improved productivity, higher morale and reduced turnover.

That last point is one we’ve seen at Google. When we increased paid maternity leave to 18 from 12 weeks in 2007, the rate at which new moms left Google fell by 50%. (We also increased paternity leave to 12 weeks from seven, as we know that also has a positive effect on families and our business.) Mothers were able to take the time they needed to bond with their babies and return to their jobs feeling confident and ready. And it’s much better for Google’s bottom line—to avoid costly turnover, and to retain the valued expertise, skills and perspective of our employees who are mothers.

Susan Wojcicki: Paid Maternity Leave Is Good for Business - WSJ

 

[volprof]

And the last thing I'll say about the matters of family leave and paid maternity leave is that I have no clue exactly how these became Left v. Right issues of extreme polarization in this country. The only thing I can guess is that it's just one of those debates over pragmatic measures worldwide that somehow becomes polarized under the American political and media context and turned into an ideological battle here. It's not, in reality, a liberal v. conservative matter. Vladimir Putin, who is probably the world's foremost "conservative" among national leaders at the moment, presides over a country that gives 100 percent paid maternity leave to its mothers for up to two or three months. It's a common sense issue: in nations struggling to have citizens who can afford to have children to actually go and have children, it gives an extra boost. Studies show it's also likely to reduce healthcare costs associated with pregnancy.

Now, if you just don't care about your own country reproducing itself because you'll be long dead before the effects of that apathy would have hit you - in other words, the world ends and begins with your own solipsism - than of course none of this matters. So I admit it is also a matter of values and perspective.

 

[Biopsyman]

wut

Union jobs can't be close in pay to the minimum wage.. Therefore when thre miniium wage goes up.. They demand a raise as well.. It's that simple

 

[Orangedogsrule]

Union jobs can be close in play to minimum wage.. Therefore when thre miniium wage goes up.. They demand a raise as well.. It's that simple

I suppose some union jobs may be close to minimum wage. My experience is with constructon unions of all types when I worked project management a few years the Oak Ridge sites. They were not.

That said, I believe you are mostly correct in that when the minimjm wage goes up, most unions will try to include that in their collective bargaining when the existing contract expires and the opportunity arrises.

From the perspective of my 65 years, what tends to happen is all subsets of the labor force look around and become upset with their wage rate compared to others at some point in the general wage increase cycle. They get their increase, as also does everyone else, eventually.

Rinse, repeat, ad nauseum.
Add the inflation rate increases of pensioners and away we go.

Is it possible to fix, in a mostly permanent way, the value of one job with respect to all others? Would that slow inflationary spirals?

 

[Biopsyman]

I suppose some union jobs may be close to minimum wage. My experience is with constructon unions of all types when I worked project management a few years the Oak Ridge sites. They were not.

That said, I believe you are mostly correct in that when the minimjm wage goes up, most unions will try to include that in their collective bargaining when the existing contract expires and the opportunity arrises.

From the perspective of my 65 years, what tends to happen is all subsets of the labor force look around and become upset with their wage rate compared to others at some point in the general wage increase cycle. They get their increase, as also does everyone else, eventually.

Rinse, repeat, ad nauseum.
Add the inflation rate increases of pensioners and away we go.

Is it possible to fix, in a mostly permanent way, the value of one job with respect to all others? Would that slow inflationary spirals?

I never liked collective bargaining for a wage.. I think individual pay should be determined by skill and ability

 

[Orangedogsrule]

Now, if you just don't care about your own country reproducing itself because you'll be long dead before the effects of that apathy would have hit you - in other words, the world ends and begins with your own solipsism - than of course none of this matters. So I admit it is also a matter of values and perspective.

Very few humans could afford such cynical motives for such abject apathy, as we mostly all have close or extended family to care what happens to them after we're gone.

To have no care at all, IMO, places them squarely in the ranks of the approximate 4% of the population whose only motivators are themselves; the functioning conscienceless sociopath.

 

[volprof]

Very few humans could afford such cynical motives for such abject apathy, as we mostly all have close or extended family to care what happens to them after we're gone.

To have no care at all, IMO, places them squarely in the ranks of the approximate 4% of the population whose only motivators are themselves; the functioning conscienceless sociopath.

4% of the general population and 94% of our politicians.

 

[theutvolunteers]

Paid maternity leave seems like a no brainer. Allowing mothers to stay with their newborns longer is an excellent idea.

 

[allvol123]

Paid maternity leave seems like a no brainer. Allowing mothers to stay with their newborns longer is an excellent idea.

Says the person not paying out of their pocket to do this.

 

[volprof]

Okay, I lied. I do have more to say about this.

Think of paid maternity leave as infrastructure spending. You can avoid it now, feel good about yourself, but bitterly incur a greater cost to you later, or you can go ahead and buckle down now, feel ****ty about yourself, and be greatly pleased later when you learn you actually ended up saving some money in the end.

 

[volprof]

Paid maternity leave seems like a no brainer. Allowing mothers to stay with their newborns longer is an excellent idea.

Allowing mothers to spend more time with their children, without accruing great economic losses, in what proves to be the most formative time of their development, when they're gaining the communication and sympathetic skills that will set the foundation for the acquisition of those skills that will later make them valuable contributors, also seems like a great way to avoid having to pay for the costs of crime and social delinquency in the future.

This is just one of those debates where I think it's hard for many of us to visualize the future and see beyond our immediate concerns. All we see at the moment is that it's going to immediately costs us money; we don't see any of the returns. This is like infrastructure spending, as I analogized above.

It also reminds me a lot of the new anti-crime policy that some Western nations and some municipalities here in California have instituted, where they identify who the biggest troublemakers are in their community (often just a handful of people) and then actually pay them to stop committing crimes, with the stipulation that these individuals will take part in a program that will eventually wing them off of subsidies and crime should it prove successful. While it's too early to tell about long-term effects, the short- and mid-term effects are clear: paying these criminals to stop committing crimes is saving hundreds of thousands (even millions in some cases) of dollars. Of course, some don't like this, because it smells of "socialism" and asks them to forsake their moral and ideological principles, but the practical effects just don't lie. Plus, most people, even the most "ideological" among us, end up complaining a lot less once you start giving them their returns on their investments. Money talks and bull**** walks, as they say.

 

[theutvolunteers]

Says the person not paying out of their pocket to do this.

Relevance? Don't see how this matters.

However, my family did own a business for 50 years.

 

[SpaceCoastVol]

I never liked collective bargaining for a wage.. I think individual pay should be determined by skill and ability

That won't work in many cases.

 

[SpaceCoastVol]

Paid maternity leave seems like a no brainer. Allowing mothers to stay with their newborns longer is an excellent idea.

Not hiring breeding aged women is an even better one. Then you don't have to pay them to stay home and be unproductive, nor lose their services when they decide to get knocked up.

 

[allvol123]

Relevance? Don't see how this matters.

However, my family did own a business for 50 years.

It is everything that matters. Forcing a private business owner to pay for your beliefs is absurd.

Sounds like you were born into ownership though, so I can see where your warped views were shaped.

 

[82_VOL_83]

At roughly 30 cents/gallon in 1963, one hour of labor at minimum wage bought you just over 4 gallons of gasoline, at $1.25/hr. Today, $7.25 will buy a little over 2 gallons. If you paid the minimum wage worker with .9 troy oz of silver at todays price, they could by 4 gallons of gas.

Fiat money is robbing you.

Your math sucks.

 

[AM64]

How come in societies in the past you could work your 20 hours a week of hunting or gathering, a woman could have a child, and everyone could be provided for, and no one today considers them all lazy, reprobate, or overly demanding? And yet, today, we have people who could work 80 hours a week and still barely get by and women who want to be a part of the labor force but also want to still provide us with our future generations, and half of us complain about what a bunch of lazy, stupid, and demanding people they are.

I don't want to go back to the past, but if you don't think this gap between the two in terms of perspective sucks, then, man, that sucks. In some ways, while we've largely improved our quality of life, we've just made things more difficult on ourselves and have isolated ourselves from a sense of what is required of us to function appropriately as a well-adjusted society.

We can't have our cake and eat it at the same time. We're going to have to decide what is more important to us: providing women with a means to work, have children, and still contribute another income to a family that now requires at least two incomes, or returning to gendered economic models before post-Industrial society. Our problem at the moment is that we're attempting to do both at the same time. This won't work forever.

At the risk of having to deflect rocks and whatever... When you stop and look at it, don't you think that feminists had a lot to do with it? Rather than just support women who wanted to work, they had to go whole hog and convince women they should be in the workforce. When you flood the workforce, wages will drop - simple supply and demand.

The changes might not show up immediately, and the extra income in many cases led to new job demands - child care, more easily prepared meals (or eating out), transportation, clothing, and so on. But the endgame is that now two household incomes don't do much more than one did before, and kids and family life are societal casualties.

Don't count me in for one who thinks feminists and progressives have done anything to improve our way of life, but they've certainly trapped us in something worse than where we were.

 

[volprof]

Not hiring breeding aged women is an even better one. Then you don't have to pay them to stay home and be unproductive, nor lose their services when they decide to get knocked up.

You reek of nihilism, apathy, and decadence.

A society that hates itself as much as you hate ours will never reproduce itself.

And you're probably under the delusion that you're a patriot, simply because our tax dollars once provided you a means of later earning money in the private sector as a pilot.

 

[volprof]

At the risk of having to deflect rocks and whatever... When you stop and look at it, don't you think that feminists had a lot to do with it? Rather than just support women who wanted to work, they had to go whole hog and convince women they should be in the workforce. When you flood the workforce, wages will drop - simple supply and demand.

The changes might not show up immediately, and the extra income in many cases led to new job demands - child care, more easily prepared meals (or eating out), transportation, clothing, and so on. But the endgame is that now two household incomes don't do much more than one did before, and kids and family life are societal casualties.

Don't count me in for one who thinks feminists and progressives have done anything to improve our way of life, but they've certainly trapped us in something worse than where we were.

I know common sense doesn't often account for much, but it only stands to reason that double the labor equals double the wealth. The more laborers you have in the market, the more there is available to us as consumers. The 1950s weren't going to last forever.

Granted, that wealth isn't always distributed equally, but that's something that the unabashed supporters of unfettered capitalism will have to address for you, as I am not one of them.

I have to admit, VolNation never fails to throw me a loop. You never know what perspective you'll have to argue against. For example, I didn't know that being against social security was an actual position until I joined this forum. I also didn't know that being against government aid of any sort was another. Similarly, I never expected to argue with someone why women should or should not be cloistered in a kitchen. But, sure enough.

 

[AM64]

Your use of "despise" the minimum wage is not in any way the correct choice of word.

The economic philospher's Achilles heel may well be they ascribe ill will, self motivation and malfeasance to all systems other than the one they espouse. Adams' free market does not account for predatory capitalism, nor does Marx's 'social contract' allow for contract managers whose only goals become self enrichment and political aggrandizement. And the accumulation of functional sociopaths; those predatory sharks, without a conscience and who's goals only benefit themselves, are proven to accumulate in business and politics, with their numbers increasing the higher up the food chain we go.

The institution of minimum wage is intended to protect those who can not protect themselves from being swallowed by the sharks and inflation. But what industries should we place under minimum wage? Should "minimum wage" be considered a supplemental wage ... where one's primary living costs are covered by another source? Or, should it be a "minimum cost of living wage" where an individual could support a small family by turning burgers?

I think we need to split the concept. A manual laborer working for a sewer construction company down in a deep ditch shoveling mud has a different value than the burger turner who is different than the neighbor's high school kid who don't even mow his own lawn that now wants $30 for a little less the 1.33 hrs it takes to mow my lawn using my self propelled mower & string weeder. About $22.50 an hour. If the mower stalls, he has no mechanical apptitude. He wouldn't think, or know how to check the oil, or that a mower blade needs sharpening every so often. Compare his demand to Knoxville's starting wages for a 4yr BSRN (Bachelor of Science Registered Nurse). He's not mowing for me.

Cost of living minimum could even result in more folk out of work. Many businesses could never sell their product at a price to cover the wage demand. Much like most manufacturing jobs are outside US borders because the unions priced themselves out of the market.

I don't have an answer.
It's a complicated algorithm I'm not qualified to assess. But I do know, those who's job it is to dig through the issues and develop a workable solution really need to be very sure more folk aren't hurt than helped because they run with a popular rate.

I'm with you and wish I had an answer, too. I strongly believe in having as little government intrusion in our lives as possible, but some stuff going on is way out of control. Perhaps the basic concept of the stock and commodities markets are sound, but much of the rest is simply gambling. Maybe it's an offshoot of too much retirement money looking for an investment - more investment money than stocks. If governments don't regulate or ban it, it's hard to say who will - the pension funds have to go somewhere and most of us don't do it ourselves. We pump money in for the sake of investment, and a very few pump much of it out to enrich themselves, and it does nothing for our economy or our futures.

 

[82_VOL_83]

I know common sense doesn't often account for much, but it only stands to reason that double the labor equals double the wealth. The more laborers you have in the market, the more there is available to us as consumers. The 1950s weren't going to last forever.

Granted, that wealth isn't always distributed equally, but that's something that the unabashed supporters of unfettered capitalism will have to address for you, as I am not one of them.

I have to admit, VolNation never fails to throw me a loop. You never know what perspective you'll have to argue against. For example, I didn't know that being against social security was an actual position until I joined this forum. I also didn't know that being against government aid of any sort was another. Similarly, I never expected to argue with someone why women should or should not be cloistered in a kitchen. But, sure enough.

That's what you got from that post?

 

[AM64]

Minimum Wage should be state by state never should have been a federal issue.

Except they want safety in numbers. The rust belt is living proof that you can ruin an economy by forcing wage concessions. It is just basic economics; if somebody else can build the product more cheaply, then you won't be the one building it - they will. So with one solid sample right in front of us and China building what we did, it takes a raving idiot to propose more of what's already killing our economy.

If you have a higher cost of living and, therefore, higher cost of labor and no trade protection, someone else will eat your lunch. It's just that simple.

 

[AM64]

Union jobs can't be close in pay to the minimum wage.. Therefore when thre miniium wage goes up.. They demand a raise as well.. It's that simple

I had an economics prof who said when unions bump wages, that the government comes behind and ratifies it with an increase in the minimum wage. As an engineer, my instincts tell me that the whole process is a vicious unsustainable spiral into oblivion - dog chasing it's own tail or maybe vice versa.

 

[AM64]

I know common sense doesn't often account for much, but it only stands to reason that double the labor equals double the wealth. The more laborers you have in the market, the more there is available to us as consumers. The 1950s weren't going to last forever.

Granted, that wealth isn't always distributed equally, but that's something that the unabashed supporters of unfettered capitalism will have to address for you, as I am not one of them.

I have to admit, VolNation never fails to throw me a loop. You never know what perspective you'll have to argue against. For example, I didn't know that being against social security was an actual position until I joined this forum. I also didn't know that being against government aid of any sort was another. Similarly, I never expected to argue with someone why women should or should not be cloistered in a kitchen. But, sure enough.

Look at it as you will. I didn't argue that women should be chained to a stove. Women should have every right to be at home if they choose - and without feeling guilty for that choice. Feminists sold them on the idea that they were nothing at home.

Of course, it is nothing if you don't believe that there is value in what mothers for generations taught children. It is nothing if you believe that a household couldn't use a manager to keep it running competently.

I believe I read this in one of your posts. "Allowing mothers to spend more time with their children, without accruing great economic losses, in what proves to be the most formative time of their development, when they're gaining the communication and sympathetic skills that will set the foundation for the acquisition of those skills that will later make them valuable contributors, also seems like a great way to avoid having to pay for the costs of crime and social delinquency in the future." How long do you think that period lasts? Weeks, months, years? My best guess is that it lasts from birth until adulthood because a "good" kid can stray at any age, and part time parents are of little value in detecting and correcting it. If you are going to be parents, then act like it; take the responsibility and be a parent or forgo parenting for a career.

 

[tumscalcium]

I know common sense doesn't often account for much, but it only stands to reason that double the labor equals double the wealth. The more laborers you have in the market, the more there is available to us as consumers. The 1950s weren't going to last forever.

Granted, that wealth isn't always distributed equally, but that's something that the unabashed supporters of unfettered capitalism will have to address for you, as I am not one of them.

I have to admit, VolNation never fails to throw me a loop. You never know what perspective you'll have to argue against. For example, I didn't know that being against social security was an actual position until I joined this forum. I also didn't know that being against government aid of any sort was another. Similarly, I never expected to argue with someone why women should or should not be cloistered in a kitchen. But, sure enough.

I love it. This is the second time you've mentioned that if you don't support paying women to sit at home and be baby factories then you hate our society/country. Good stuff.