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Minimum Wage/How Much Should People Make For...
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I love this forum, lol. I think the positions that deserve to make the most money are positions that we as a society could not live without, farmers, teachers, doctors, et al.
Those that should make the least...sports stars/players, actors, models, etc. I can't believe people get paid millions of dollars to have their picture taken, to kick, throw, or run with balls, and play pretend. I did all those things for free when I was a child and I see no reason for someone to make millions for it as an adult. Should they receive compensation, sure, but they should not be paid as much as they are for basically remaining in adolescence.
I don't know if minimum wage should be higher, tough call.
Teachers teachers teachers need to make alot more money.
People who work full time should make enough to live on.
I understand, Ang.Two people making minimum wage with two point two children cannot afford a basic apartment or home in most areas of this country these days.
And yes, I realize that they have an obligation to work toward advancing themselves through education. But when you're bobbing around on the fringe as many are these days, that's a lot easier said than done.
And I realize that in many parts of the planet, families live in tarpaper or cardboard shacks and get their food from garbage piles.
But still ....
Mod
BC-US--Jobless Creatives, 1st Ld-Writethru,0985
Portland’s ’young creatives’ tough out tough times
Eds: ADDS photo links.
AP Photo ORRB102, ORRB102, ORRB101, ORDR101, ORDR103, ORDR104, ORDR105
By TIM FOUGHT
Associated Press Writer
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Ceramics artist Heidi Sowa had her eyes set on Portland for years. The city was not too big, had a cohesive arts community and plenty of easygoing and helpful people.
Within weeks of arriving, she landed a gig making costumes for 8-inch puppets in “Coraline,” a 3-D stop-motion animated movie. Her job ended last year, and the movie opened in theaters earlier this year.
Now, at 26, Sowa is living on unemployment, sleeping in a single room apartment and eating from a refrigerator in a studio she shares with other artists under a bridge ramp in Portland’s industrial east riverbank.
And she’s not planning to go anywhere.
Like thousands of well-educated young adults who have flocked to Portland, she is determined to weather a recession that is testing their affection for the city.
The newcomers, called the “young creatives” by local economists, have helped give Portland the reputation over the past two decades for being one of the hippest cities in the country. They have been lured by the city’s brew pubs, bicycle and mass transit culture, access to mountains and seacoast, and a tolerant, off-center way of life.
Now, they are trying to hang on while hanging out.
Sowa cites the city’s love affair with bicycles and mass transit, its scale and its mood for her decision to stay.
“It seems a small enough but a big enough place,” she said. “It’s easy to meet people, and the art community is cohesive. People tend to be pretty easygoing and helpful, too. I haven’t met many abrasive people.”
Sowa is keeping busy with a whirl of projects and prospects, ranging from film pitches with a “Coraline” colleague to fashion corsets — she helped a designer create them in exchange for learning the how-tos of a trendy garment.
A Portland economist who has studied the “young creatives” says Sowa is typical.
“It’s not as if it’s great somewhere else,” said Joseph Cortright, chairman of Gov. Ted Kulongoski’s council of economic advisers and author in 2005 of a study of young people and American cities, “The Young and Restless in a Knowledge Economy.”
Cortright said the United States soon will face a shortage of well-educated workers. Baby boomers are retiring, he said, and the rising percentages of women and college graduates in the work force are leveling off.
That, he said, will make winners of cities such as Portland that offer creative, entrepreneurial young people something distinctive, whether it is warm climate, cool culture, a combination of the two or something else entirely.
Charlotte, N.C., and Austin, Texas, are others that have Portland’s “stickiness,” he said, attracting outsize numbers of the 25- to 34-year-old cohort and keeping them.
High-tech entrepreneur Luke Sontag vows he’ll stay in Portland despite a hard first year in town.
In September, Sontag led a crew of 34 high-tech workers on a latter-day “Oregon Trail” road trip, moving from Tulsa, Okla., in a convoy of rental vans and RVs, circling them at night on the western plains and building campfires to illuminate performances by the in-house band.
Within weeks after Vidoop Inc. arrived, the financial companies Sontag hoped to snag as customers were out of the market for his Internet security services. The layoffs started in November. The company, he said, was reincorporating, planning for new financing and workers.
In the meantime, he’s plotting a company in mobile marketing with colleagues and living on savings. “If all went to hell with this, I would not be moving,” he said. “I wouldn’t give a flip if I had to pick up trash.”
Young creatives turn more often, though, to the coffee shops for work and their default job — barista.
Brodie Kelley, 29, is a comics artist and unpublished novelist who eventually landed a job behind a grocery store’s deli counter. He tells a story about the competition for jobs slinging espresso drinks.
Attracted by an ad, he went into a jammed coffee shop, which he figured meant a thriving business and good prospects. Then the manager looked over the throng and said he’d begin taking applications: “But, first, is anyone here a customer?”
Some young creatives are nurturing enterprises on the cheap through co-working — renting space that’s often loft-like with communal copiers and espresso machines. The environment is more businesslike than a home office.
CubeSpace, a prominent co-working spot, failed in June. Among the company’s workers is Reid Beels, 24, a free-lance Web designer and programmer. He said CubeSpace was ideal for Saturday “code sprints,” exercises in problem-solving that drew together otherwise independent high-tech workers.
These days, Beels said, he’s doing his free-lance business out of coffee shops.
“I’ve been living very cheaply lately,” he said. “I’ve still been doing enough work to pay the bills.”
Hanging on in Portland is a month-to-month decision for 26-year-old Julia Sexton, who is originally from Florida. She came to Portland a few years ago to help a family member get married, and she fell in love with the scenery and the scene. “I couldn’t believe this exists, the place I want to live,” she said.
Hoping to work in interior design and architecture, she moved here for good last year. But she got laid off from a job in the sales room of a furniture builder in January. She sold her car, cashed her tax refund and hung on with family help.
“My grandma is awesome,” she said.
By early July, she was working part-time and had a portfolio under consideration by an architectural firm. Her application, she said, is one of 41.
“I’m hanging in,” she said. “I know this month’s rent is paid for.”
Angabel wrote: "*ahem* Sorry for the rant."No problem. :)
Angabel, in which part of Ohio do you live? I ask in part because I drove through Youngstown by accident last Wednesday and my God, they should just level that place and start over. I've taught in some of the worst areas in the country, on the south and west sides of Chicago, but I've never seen a place so devoid of hope and light than Youngstown, Ohio.
But the people of Youngstown seem to have a fighting spirit - definitely a blue collar town.
I hope so. I hate to see those rusting midwestern towns in such distress. I also drive right by Elkhart, IN, one of the worst-hit towns in the country, from what I understand.
Randomanthony wrote: "I hope so. I hate to see those rusting midwestern towns in such distress. I also drive right by Elkhart, IN, one of the worst-hit towns in the country, from what I understand."I think the RV market has really cratered.
The big RV's are gas guzzling fools, so it is hard to drive one of those and feel comfortable that you will be able to afford it, or that there will be a resale market.
Okay, to the original questions:Which professions deserve to make the most money in your eyes?
Professions that create/maintain/protect things of actual value (ie., as opposed to those that generate profit without adding value). These would include planners and builders of infrastructure and technologies; teachers, firemen, police, military, corporate leaders whose decisions have enriched the economy over some established period of time, and...?
Which professions deserve to make the least?
Politicians, priests and other spiritual guides, motivational speakers, and others whose stated priority is "service to others." I don't suggest that this isn't a wonderful priority, merely that, according to many scriptural and philosophical writings, it is its own reward. When you give to others, your gifts are returned tenfold. Presumably that's more than enough. In my experience and observation, people who receive freely give back freely. Yay for all of us!
Should minimum wage be even higher, or would that cause problems for businesses trying to survive?
When I lived and worked in Canada, not only was minimum wage higher, but EVERY job included medical. In Western Europe, you don't tip waiters/waitresses, even at cheap cafes, because they already receive a livable wage AND medical benefits. They get FIVE WEEKS paid vacation a year. This is mostly because such "social services" are subsidized (and cost-capped) by their governments, which operate under the premise that citizens of a wealthy state have the right to share in that wealth.
Anything else on financial compensation?
There has long been a vague, largely unquestioned belief among Americans that we've got "the best thing going" in terms of quality of life -- that almost anyone would choose to to live here if they could. This belief comes from two realities. We Americans enjoy: 1) a GIGANTIC continent RICH in natural resources (compare China, also gigantic in land space but actually extremely poor in resources); and, of course, 2) an unmatched legacy of human freedom.
Speaking to the first point, when I returned to the US to attend college after 20+ years in Canada, I found that, rich or no, the US offered an astonishingly inhospitable landscape to those not hugely wealthy. This country is certainly rich, but its wealth didn't "trickle down" (a laughable term to most Canadians) to me as a student, and never has to me as a small business owner. My costs, be they medical coverage, operational, or taxes, have been far higher than those of rich Americans and corporations.
It could be argued that the second point is not relevant to this discussion, and yet I think it is. Human freedom is inextricably tied to a modicum of wealth -- no one is "free" who lives in abject poverty. Speaking to this, I would recommend books like Nickel and Dimed and Amazing Grace.
Did anyone welcome Doni? Welcome to TC, Doni:) I agree with much of what you said, but I want to think through my response first.
Thanks for the welcome, folks.Wow, Angabel. If she wrote from a position of privilege, then I must be privileged, too, an idea that makes me laugh like a little child! I mean, yes, I am privileged compared to many other people in this country because I was born into the White middle class. But I was aware of a number of the realities she described because, like many middle-class Americans, I worked some crap jobs in my youth. The truly rich in this country have no idea, and need a book like this. Meanwhile, a lot of specific info in that book was news to me, and it has affected my work in some concrete ways.
For example, I'm about to start an initiative for a client that needs to improve communication and teamwork organization-wide. Everyone there, from the top people (virtually all PhDs) to the security staff, has long enjoyed fantastic (for the US) benefits and job security. The problem is, there's an entrenched "tenured" attitude -- turf protection trumps cooperation, seniority trumps merit, yadda yadda. The organization, long funded by grants, is now experiencing the same financial crunch everyone else is, and is very sensibly looking for ways to become more efficient. Because of that book, I asked the COO exactly how much the lowest-paid people make. When she said it was around $8/hr, I shared some of the info from the book about the realities of living on that wage. My suggestion was that someone who works full time but can't amass enough for a deposit on an apartment isn't going to feel inclined to "go the extra mile" at work. Their daily life is just too stressful. She hastened to remind me about the benefits, and I agreed they're great but poverty is poverty and it's exhausting, and it's a factor we have to consider in analyzing problems at the workplace.
Believe me, I never hear anyone in the corporate world acknowledging this factor in efficiency assessments, even as they frantically seek solutions to their "productivity challenges"! I know the info in the book is obvious, but no one's acknowledging it. The book gave me vocabulary, citations, and something to point to while bringing the issue of wages into the conversation.
i wonder how much would be made if wages were based on how well one do their job instead of just showing up ....
Mod
I remember my first job, when I was working at a retail store, growing up down there in Laurel, Mississippi, I was making like $2.15 an hour. And I was being taught how to responsibly handle those customer interactions, and I appreciated the opportunity.
A blogger at Think Progress responds:
"[W]hat Blackburn didn’t realize is that she accidentally undermined her own argument, since the value of the dollar has changed immensely since her teenage years. Blackburn was born in 1952, so she likely took that retail job at some point between 1968 and 1970. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator, the $2.15 an hour Blackburn made then is worth somewhere between $12.72 and $14.18 an hour in today’s dollars, depending on which year she started."
(from the Dish)
Raising the minimum wage seems like a catch-22. I'm for people making a decent wage, but it's just that business owners will raise prices to compensate, and the rise in wages won't mean much in the end to workers on the low end of the scale. Or not? I'm probably wrong.
Mod
The question is, how do businesses react when the minimum wage is raised? How many workers are actually paid the minimum wage? It seems to me whenever we have this national discussion, it turns out that the number of people getting minimum wage is smaller than everyone thought, and that most low paid workers get more, and therefore it wouldn't hurt most businesses to have the minimum wage raised.
You don't think that businesses will raise prices to compensate for paying workers more? That's what I'd do.
As for which teachers deserve more money, I vote for a raise for Professor Kunerth. I've seen him a few times since journalism school. He remembers stories I wrote in 1980, he asks after my Dad, and he chats with me on Facebook. The connection is still there. I graduated in 1982, Bill was my advisor. He also taught my dad, who graduated from J-school in the late 1950s. Pretty amazing dedication.
Scout wrote: "You don't think that businesses will raise prices to compensate for paying workers more? That's what I'd do."Quote from Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, at 4:45 in video at http://www.upworthy.com/watch-a-diner...
The real philanthropists in our society are the people who work for less than they can actually live on because they are giving of their time and their energy and their talents all the time so that people like you can be dressed well and fed cheaply and so on.Some businesses probably would need to raise prices. Most corporations would probably also raise prices to keep paying CEOs more than they deserve. That still doesn't mean that all of us should agree to squeeze the poor the most.
Mod
That is very profound.
People work for less than they can live on because they're philanthropists?
Other way around.Philanthropy etymologically means "love of humanity" in the sense of caring for, nourishing, developing, and enhancing "what it is to be human" — on both the benefactors' (by identifying and exercising their values in giving and volunteering) and beneficiaries' (by benefiting) parts.
Mod
Low income people also give more of their wealth to charity, percentage-wise, than do the wealthy.
Mod
There are two hidden or mostly hidden costs associated with increasing the baseline wage. One is that you will have more people making minimum wage after you raise the baseline than before. Not sure how that works?It is simple. The increase in minimum wage doesn't mean that those above that level will automatically make more. It just means that those at or below a certain level will get an increase. Those workers already at the new minimum now are just minimum wage employees again. Doesn't do much for retention.
So do you solve that problem by raising the wages of the employees who effectively just took a pay cut? Or do you offer them something like more hours? Or do you give everyone an equivalent pay raise? That latter just means that compensation is about back to where it was prior to pay increases.You can create a sliding scale to balance the inequity in pay but that brings us to the second problem.
The second problem is that it cost a lot more for an employer to raise the wage of an employee $1/hr as example, than $1. The employer pays more tax as a part of their Social Security contribution, they pay more money to borrow the money to pay the employee as a percentage, and it changes their profitability which additionally alters their credit line for all phases of their business.
Now those employers who have as part of their corporate structure a compensation plan, that includes union contracts, will also have to amend their legal positions with several entities including more often than not the Federal Government on how much they pay monthly/quarterly in pre-tax and estimated tax amounts. Each of these costs a significant amount of money in what could be calculated as potential employee wages. It isn't optional for the employer to do any of these items.
Much of the problem is inequity in pay across the spectrum and cost of living. I know more people and families than I like think about who are making six figure household incomes and are running a deficit. Minimum wage increases are only going to make those problems worse.
You want more money? Move to Fargo North Dakota. McDonald's will pay you over $12/hr to just say "Fries with that sir?"
Mod
Are you also suggesting that the problems of people with six figure incomes running deficits are worse than the problems of people making very low wages?
I don't see how raising the baseline wage is a problem in the way you think it does - that it has to have a "hidden cost." Employers don't have to raise everyone's wages merely because they're raising their lowest wage.
All of the benefits of economic growth over the past 30 years have accrued to high wage workers, and to employers. None of them have accrued to low wage workers. None. Low wage workers have lost ground. This is why we are talking about raising the minimum wage. It's hard for me to shift my sympathies over to employers, when employers are the ones holding all the power and all the money in this power/money imbalance.
Mod
A closer look at women and the minimum wage.
Two-thirds of the country’s roughly 1.6 million minimum-wage workers are women.
http://prospect.org/article/life-bottom
Lobstergirl wrote: "Are you suggesting everyone who wants to make more than min. wage should move to Fargo? Because then Fargo will have a glut of low wage workers and suddenly they won't be paying $12/hr anymore.A..."
You are making my case for me! When a glut of workers enters any boom market, it crashes. It is in the disparity between regional wage levels where the opportunity exists, not in the actual wage level of a certain fixed rate. The high wages for the oil and gas field workers could also plummet if enough workers decided to go North.
No, of course you don't have to raise all of the wages across the board, even proportionally or progressively. But if you don't then you have more people making minimum wage than you did before you raised the minimum wage. The original problem is then magnified on a macro scale.
If everyone is paid in a too artificially a narrowed range then you get inflation followed by persistent recession. See Japan for the past 10+ years. Many of the largest corporations and their business groups adopted a 7:1 ratio. The highest paid employee of a company never made more than seven times the salary of the lowest paid employee. Of course there was some added bonus structures at different levels. But the salary levels were contained. It did enormous damage in corporation after corporation and to the economy at large. This was once one of the most prosperous economies in the world. Now they have stagnated.
I agree that there has been a problem with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Making the working poor less poor does only that. They are still ever close to poverty.
One problem is that there has been a shrinking in the overall economy and an increase in the working population in that 30 year time that has been mentioned. Less overall high paying jobs and jobs that haven't kept up with much more than cost-of-living. There have been 'rock star' jobs created where the salaries for a small few have skyrocketed and the rest have just inched upwards. Yet it looks like the economy has really improved based on the 'average' salary. It hasn't. The low paid workers are still around the same levels even with inflation adjusted increases in minimum wage as they were in the late 1950's. So how much do we increase that level? And most importantly what happens when we do?
Do we tax everyone then? Currently around 40% of the full time U.S. employees pay no net Federal Tax. They get all their with holdings refunded. So do we give them more bonus checks like we did in 2009 and '10? And did that really fix the economy? No.
The whole system is out of whack. It may even be totally broken. And one symptom of this is the that the 6 figure income problem is in many ways much worse than the low income/poverty wage earner. Why? They make too much money to be eligible for assistance or aid.
They can't qualify for low cost anything. Even if their remaining disposable income quotient is negative. They don't get supplements for telephones, transportation, day care, education, utilities, health and dental, nor basic food. Many times they have to choose between food and utilities or clothing or missing another payment on something that they have to have or are locked into such as a mortgage or insurance bill.
If the source of income they have had disappears the blow to the local economy is greater. They are not eating at restaurants, buying as much at Target, having dry cleaned done, etc. And there loss of spending power means that the waitstaff at Bob Evans doesn't get a tip. Or the restaurant doesn't get a sale. Or the dry cleaner doesn't make that $35 that week in cleaning and pressing charges. The bank loans they have may go into default and the bank can't loan as much money to the local dry cleaner to cover their payroll. There are less jobs for house cleaners, painters, carpenters, electricians, even utility companies will high less people in the long run. Don't believe it? Look at what has happened in Las Vegas, Nevada and Boise, Idaho. Big collapse, big problems. And they were top down.
Finally the benefits of the economy over the past thirty years have done exactly what every one thought they wanted. They wanted more service. And they got it. Whether fast or quick food so we could eat out more and cook less, we got it in spades. We wanted to go shopping. And we do! But it is shopping for junk mostly and because of all the people it takes to sell us that junk, we have less people making junk (higher paying jobs accordingly) than we did thirty years ago.
I don't pretend to have the answer to all the fixes that we obviously need. But knee jerk solutions have gotten us into much of this mess and though it may feel good to 'knee' a few more idiots where it counts (deck and wreck 'em as friend use to say) it has been demonstrated already that just handing one group an insignificant amount of money doesn't do what we thought.
More quality jobs, which pay more, is one part of the solution. But that's another discussion about the business-finance-economy three legged monster!
Lobstergirl wrote: ""Life at the Bottom"A closer look at women and the minimum wage.
Two-thirds of the country’s roughly 1.6 million minimum-wage workers are women.
http://prospect.org/article/life-bottom"
I read the headline and the gender disparity in pay is unacceptable in my book. The article goes on to make points that I made in but in further detail about the economic shifts.
But the article also has an agenda in that it make statements in the framework of truisms and even 'proofiness' such as carpenters being minimum wage jobs. There are few real carpenters that work at anywhere near minimum wage, other than over the course of a 2000 hour work year. If they work at twice minimum wage but for only 1000 hours, then we calculate they are being 'paid' minimum. But they aren't. It gets terribly complicated after that.
The other flaw in the article and this argument in general is, economically if we just raise the income level of the low wage earner, guess what? The Poverty level also goes up! These are factual issues that get ignored regularly because most of us don't look at the overall picture.
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Lobstergirl wrote: "Now I can't tell if you're writing satire or not. I disagree with nearly everything you say in #39, and in the Prospect article, they're specifically contrasting carpentry and similar type work do..."I did misread the part about carpentry wages and I apologize.
Other than that what do you think I am even coming close to being satirical about? Not that I am above a bit of Swiftian humor from time to time, but in #39 I am being sincere.
There is a necessary parsing in realizing that a 'living wage', i.e. above poverty, isn't achieved just by raising the minimum wage level. A fixed minimum at a national level is no solution. What is a living wage in San Francisco is tremendously higher than Springfield, Missouri. The American Prospect article referenced makes that very point in listing the disparity in regional incomes and cost of living.
There are several points in the article including the 'drill down' links that makes my case when looking at the facts they present as opposed to some of the commentary.
Several of the inaccurate assumptions promoted in the article, such as statements regarding food stamps, I need to think about a for a few hours to formulate a good response. Another that jumped out was the number of minimum wage earners. A quick look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that this may be full time workers, and not include sadly all of the 29ers or others saddled with minimum or near minimum wage compensation.
At this point though I stand generally by my statements in response #39. And I still wonder why you think I'm being satirical?
For the moment I'm going to go sleep for awhile! Sweet dreams to all, and to all a good night!
Lobstergirl wrote: "Yet one more reason we should stop demonizing them."One reason of many, LG.
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Terminalcoffee
Books mentioned in this topic
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (other topics)Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (other topics)
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (other topics)
Also, there seem to be some professions for which people make more money than they should. At least to me. But I'm not an economist. You know, the whole corporate CEO thing. So...question...and I know the world isn't fair...
Which professions deserve to make the most money in your eyes?
Which professions deserve to make the least?
Should minimum wage be even higher, or would that cause problems for businesses trying to survive?
Anything else on financial compensation?