When is minimum wage too much?

[the_tyrant]

My 19-year-old daughter, who is back home from the University of Victoria until September, has found a summer job as a hostess at a well known B.C. restaurant a couple of blocks from our house. She’ll be working four- to six-hour shifts, three or four days a week.
She’ll get minimum wage, which was $8 an hour until April 30, when it went up to $8.75 an hour. But she expects to move into waitressing, where she can make far more money from tips.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repor...2016037/page1/

The minimum wage where i live is even higher. Its $10.25 an hour ($9.60 for students) right now, and it will probably go up too!

my current part time job pays $13.50 an hour, so i unfortunately will not get a pay raise

[Tchocky]

Usually better to put in an earned income tax credit, but I can understand minumum wage systems. It's been cut at home recently, which is only logical.

I guess I see it as a compromise between what a perfectly competitive market would charge for an hours labour, and what the current system of monopolistic competition dictates through structure.

[UnderseaLcpl]

The minimum wage is always too much, regardless of the level it is set at. People tend to think of the minimum wage as being a safeguard against exploitation of workers by corporate interests, and it is not difficult to understand why this is so. Political interests that platform upon improving the lot of the common worker often claim to help people by raising the minimum wage, or intending to.

However, as with most things where there is any vested interest, the opposite is true. Raising the minimum wage does not improve the lot of the skill-less multitudes; It actually worsens it, which makes perfect sense in every way one might consider.

Some are die-hard fans of minimum-wage statues, often claiming that they improve the lot of the common worker. This is understandable, as they are told to believe this. Ironically, the same people who champion the minimum wage are blind to its obvious inefficacy. They think that they are standing against domineering corporate interests, but they are willfully being domineered by political interests. Evidence can be found in the fairly steady rate of minimum wage increase without a corresponding increase in middle-class wage-earners.

The truth is that minimum wage statutes, more often than not, reduce the income of the unskilled worker to zero. Businesses don't give a flying **** about social equality; they're too busy trying to make a profit in a very competitive environment. Raising the minimum wage simply causes them to hire fewer workers and be more picky about the ones they do hire, which obviously means that they hire fewer people. Where they can't do that, they simply move elsewhere, cut benefits, lobby for tax exemptions, and otherwise do everything they can to avoid the significant increase in overhead brought about by paying unskilled workers more, more-so when one's profit margin is as narrow as those typical of industries that employ unskilled workers.

[CCIP]

I think there still needs to be a reasonable minimum, though. Sure there is a big difference between zero and a very low wage, but let's consider the fact that if minimum wage is artificial and set by politics, then the poverty line and a bare survival minimum are set by the economy. If somewhere you have actual wage-earning, independent workers who put in the hours but can't meet that minimum, there's a problem - which is then naturally solved only by social welfare and tax relief programs, again a political move. Which at the end of the day I think are far less efficient ways to deal with the problem.

The author does make a few good points about minimum wage not being intended for workers feeding families, but you can't generalize that either.

I think the issue needs to be less about potential for abuse and mistreatment of workers, and more about the fact that if you can't ensure that all working people get more than a reasonable amount needed to survive, then your economy is well and truly broken.

[gimpy117]

minimum wage is about making sure that workers make a decent wage enough to live on. especially in a economy like this one that would allow employers to pay desperate workers comically low wages.

[Anthony W.]

Well when you're getting payed it - it's never too much, haha

I get 7.25 an hour

Not enough to finance my car obsession - which is why I'm starting my own business this summer.

[UnderseaLcpl]

Originally Posted by gimpy117

minimum wage is about making sure that workers make a decent wage enough to live on. especially in a economy like this one that would allow employers to pay desperate workers comically low wages.

No it isn't. It's never been about that, though we tell ourselves it is so we can feel good about it. Try living on minimum wage for a while - if you're single and don't have any kids, you can make it work, albeit somewhat uncomfortably. If you're married or have kids, you're screwed.

The minimum wage is nothing more than a political tool. Wages, prices, and living standards are all things governed by the economy, which answers to no-one. The reason minimum-wage workers don't make enough to live on is simple economic reality. Nobody is going to pay for unskilled services that cost extra due to the fact that workers must be paid a wage they can live on. You can try to make it so, but you'll ultimately end up with no industry at all, or a subsidized industry, which is even worse. Washington knows this, which is precisely why the minimum wage always seems too low, but remains popular.

Not that any of this is a problem. Minimum-wage jobs are minimum-wage because they aren't supposed to be jobs you can live on. They are intended to be entry-level jobs that give a new worker the chance to accumulate experience and earn good references for another job. The companies that provide such jobs are aware of this fact, and anticipate high turnover rates, as evidenced by the lack of benefits provided and high turnover rates.

Somehow, likely due to political machinations, people have turned this simple economic reality into a concept that minimum wage should be a wage people, and even families, can live on. As if that would ever f-ing work. It's as though people have somehow developed the attitude that because employers are "rich", they somehow owe unskilled people a living, notwithstanding narrow profit margins, quarterly performance reports, and a competitive business environment. I'd tell them to go to the Soviet Union, where such thinking was dominant, but it doesn't exist anymore.

Not that there's any need to worry. If the minimum wage were abolished, there would be more entry-level jobs for people who need entry-level jobs, not to mention reasonably-priced goods and excellent investment opportunities, all of which generate economic growth. Some of them probably would pay "comically" low wages, but then, people won't work for comically low wages unless they are comically stupid or unskilled, but there's no reason to worry about that. The market takes care of that all by itself, as evidenced by the abundance of cheap goods and services we already have, and the largely upwards trend in socio-economic mobility.

Whether you buy that or not in the logical sense (and you will actually buy it next time you obtain goods or services from a minimum-wage earner, whether you like it or not), there is also the inevitable economic truth that we are functioning in an increasingly globalized economy. This means that there is more competition to deal with, and therefore, less time and money to waste upon idiotic fantasy dreams of providing living wages to burger-flippers or shelf-stackers everywhere. This ain't the worker's paradise, it's the real world, and it demands efficient progress for any venture to be viable. Keep that in mind the next time somebody talks about minimum wage, no matter what their rationale is.

That said, you have my apologies for the tone of this post. This is a subject I feel strongly about. I'm not implying that you are an idiot or anything like that, nor would I know. It just pushes my buttons when someone even suggests that the idea of minimum wage is a good thing, and I think this message needs to be conveyed.