opebo was right about a $15/hour minimum wage

[memphis]

This thread is such a clueless Ivory Tower clusterInks. There is no unemployment, in the way the mmiddle class people think of unemployment, problem for minimum wage jobs. To the contrary, because the turnover at retail, food service, and child/eldercare facilities is so enormous, these places are always hiring. Always. And they will hire just about anybody. It's not that people cannot find jobs at all. It's that people decide, correctly or not, that minumum wage jobs are not worth the time and hassle. Raising the wage would almost certainly change that to say nthing of the increase in demand that higher wages inevitably bring. Get off your college campus and visit the Real World sometime, Atlas Forum.

[memphis]

This thread is such a clueless Ivory Tower clusterInks. There is no unemployment, in the way the mmiddle class people think of unemployment, problem for minimum wage jobs. To the contrary, because the turnover at retail, food service, and child/eldercare facilities is so enormous, these places are always hiring. Always. And they will hire just about anybody. It's not that people cannot find jobs at all. It's that people decide, correctly or not, that minumum wage jobs are not worth the time and hassle. Raising the wage would almost certainly change that to say nthing of the increase in demand that higher wages inevitably bring. Get off your college campus and visit the Real World sometime, Atlas Forum.

If there's a shortage of workers for these positions, why aren't employers voluntarily raising their wages?

There is no shortage, but the jobs require very little skill or training, so it's cheaper for the employer to deal with the churn than to pay people more and have less turnover. My point, however, is that the turnover is so profound that everybody can catch a fish fairly quickly and easily even if there are technically more fishermen than fish. It's not that hard to understand, is hugely important to the low wage job market, and gets completely overlooked by AD's oversimplistic Econ 101 graph. The world is a lot more complicated than college makes it seem.

[memphis]

This thread is such a clueless Ivory Tower clusterInks. There is no unemployment, in the way the mmiddle class people think of unemployment, problem for minimum wage jobs. To the contrary, because the turnover at retail, food service, and child/eldercare facilities is so enormous, these places are always hiring. Always. And they will hire just about anybody. It's not that people cannot find jobs at all. It's that people decide, correctly or not, that minumum wage jobs are not worth the time and hassle. Raising the wage would almost certainly change that to say nthing of the increase in demand that higher wages inevitably bring. Get off your college campus and visit the Real World sometime, Atlas Forum.

If there's a shortage of workers for these positions, why aren't employers voluntarily raising their wages?

There is no shortage, but the jobs require very little skill or training, so it's cheaper for the employer to deal with the churn than to pay people more and have less turnover. My point, however, is that the turnover is so profound that everybody can catch a fish fairly quickly and easily even if there are technically more fishermen than fish. It's not that hard to understand, is hugely important to the low wage job market, and gets completely overlooked by AD's oversimplistic Econ 101 graph. The world is a lot more complicated than college makes it seem.

I don't think I understand your metaphor. How would you expect an increase the minimum wage to affect low-wage employment?

What do you not understand? When one drone says Take This Job and Shove It, another drone can have it. When this happens one million times, anybody who sincerely wants a job can get one even if there is a nominal labor surplus. We also see the reverse of this situation with "good" jobs. Baby Boomers refuse to retire hecause they have inadequate savings. There is not enough churn, so the market for those jobs is awful for potential employees.

[memphis]

I was refuting AD's preposterous claim and accompanying graph that the current minimum wage has led to unemployment. Raising the wage to a reasonable extent would almost certainly decrease churn, but also stimulate demand to a sufficient degree that unemployment would remain negligible for the lowest paying jobs. It's important to remember that low wage earners are also customers at supermarkets and fast food shacks. McDonalds would see an enormous rise in demand if poors could afford to eat there more often.

[memphis]

I was refuting AD's preposterous claim and accompanying graph that the current minimum wage has led to unemployment. Raising the wage to a reasonable extent would almost certainly decrease churn, but also stimulate demand to a sufficient degree that unemployment would remain negligible for the lowest paying jobs. It's important to remember that low wage earners are also customers at supermarkets and fast food shacks. McDonalds would see an enormous rise in demand if poors could afford to eat there more often.

I partially agree with you - and, more importantly, so does the CEO of McDonald's, which arguably stands to gain more than almost anyone else as a result of the multiplier effect.

However, the multiplier effect won't help anyone who simply isn't productive enough to create more value for his or her employer than the minimum wage + employer payroll taxes + fringe costs. Unless you believe that every single worker in the country will produce at above the level of the new minimum wage, you must concede that raising the minimum wage makes some people unemployable, absent other incentives.

Also, even if the multiplier effect results in a net benefit for society, it doesn't follow that it produces a net benefit when you consider only the poor.  If you support the minimum wage based on the argument that it reduces poverty - a claim that Reich's video makes - this is problematic.

I don't have to concede anything. Short of yeoman farmer fantasies, individual workers don't create monetary value all by themselves in any measurable way. They work as part of a group. How much "value" does the fry cook at McDonald's add? There's no real way to answer that question precisely because the value of his efforts are mixed in with the value of every other worker to such a severe degree that it cannot be teased out.
Yes, owners want the best people possible, no matter what the prevailing wage is, but jobs don't just vanish into thin air if workers are mediocre because the jobs exist because of consumer demand. Hotels aren't going to eliminate half the housekeeping jobs because wages increase. The beds still must get made, and the hotel owner will just have to accept it. The Moderate Hero shenanigans you're pulling are completely at odds with reality.

[memphis]

How exactly would you outsource or automate maid service at a hotel? Do you think that one superstar maid who "deserves" a living wage can service every room at the local Hilton? Or do you propose that hotel patrons will simply accept soiled sheets? Are you going to fry potatoes remotely from India? Your ideas, straight university orthodoxy though they may be, bear no relationship to reality. And you see this constantly on the Atlas Forum, where most posters have a lot of classroom education but very little experience with the outside world. Any suggestion that runs counter to what they heard from the man behind the podium, whether it was in Wowyns Studies 101 or Econ 101 yields an endless waterfall of "this thread gives me cancer" and gifs of middle aged men smoking cigarettes. Get over your cognitive dissonance already.