Wrong. Money, power & control. If you limit what one can do if they don't have a vaccine, you create an artificial demand for the vaccine, thus driving profits through the roof.
Basic economics there.
I won't be getting my "ID" card if they ever make one.
What if it’s a non profit who use Western profits to subsidise third world efforts? This already happens in other areas of medicine, far more so in the for profit sector. Limit what one can do without a visa, up the artificial demand to useful levels of herd immunity, and use the profits to fund doing the same in Africa.
Except the fewer people who get (or can afford) the vaccine, the weaker herd immunity becomes, and the more likely a future outbreak might lead to another shutdown of the economy, to say nothing of the profits from a vaccine you might only need to take once per year likely not offsetting the losses from sick workers who can't be vaccinated throughout that year.
The ROI for that scheme seems terrible, but maybe I just don't understand basic economics well enough. It seems obvious to me that they could make more money charging less for the vaccine and more to companies and government for implementation and data infrastructure.
100% agree. In Ford's case, it was a voluntary decision to attract and keep the best workers. In the case of federally mandated minimum wage, it's a threat of force against business owners who are otherwise acting peacefully and quite literally, minding their own business.
Raising the minimum wage results in:
- A raise in the price of products (hurting the poor the most)
- Firing employees
- Reducing hours
- Going out of business
- Outsourcing
I'm a business owner, and I'm not going to sit here eating up the cost of a higher minimum wage. The central planners don't seem to understand this -- or they do, and they ultimately want more people dependent on them. If that's the case, raising the minimum wage is a great idea.
As you must know being a business owner, labor is only one component of expenses, so prices don't go up x% just because labor went up x%. In McDonald's case, a 100+% rise in wages would represent a 4% rise in price. Obviously most minimum wage increases don't double at once so it would be even less. You don't go on a firing spree and shut down the business when property taxes or materials go up so why would you need to do that if labor went up?
Increasing pay by close to 50%,one would expect that prices would have to increase by closer to 15%, not 4%. Though, given how price sensitive those customers are, it isn't clear how much you can raise the price.
In terms of margin, it looks like McDonalds is doing much better than other chains:
>...In 2012, for example, when McDonald's had a net profit margin of just under 20 percent; Burger King's net margin was less than a third of that and another big chain; Wendy's, had a scary thin 0.3 percent.
But even at McDonalds, I think it is safe to assume that in the longer term, fast food restaurants would look into replacing rising labor costs with machines - that might be replacing cashiers with kiosks or even machines that prepare and cook the food, etc. This would be expected to happen anyway, over time, but mandating huge increases in labor costs will mean it happens quicker and be more disruptive. (One might say "good riddance" as these aren't great jobs, but they are entry level jobs which are disappearing in all industries.)
The production cost of a McBurger may only go up 4%, but the consumer price of goods is also significantly dependant on how much money is in consumer's hands. If you just hand everyone in the country $500/mo, rent is going up everywhere.
Which is what happened when families started having 2 full time high wage earners.
Both rent and house prices shot up. Those who owned houses profited massively from the unearned wealth increase. Those renting suffered.
We're now in a situation where everyone needs 2 full time high wage earners to pay for the same housing and lifestyle that used to be done by 1 full time high wage and perhaps 1 part time low wage
Only <4% of people make the federal minimum wage. Couldn't find stats on state minimum wage earners but it's still probably not so much that rent would be hugely impacted.
Not to mention, rent control is a good idea in addition, or finding ways to make homeownership more in-reach for more people.
> I'm a business owner, and I'm not going to sit here eating up the cost of a higher minimum wage.
Yes you are.(1)
(1) "You" here means the collective cohort. You as an individual business owner might be principled enough to refuse to hire, but I believe the data from other places that have a low but non-zero minimum wage indicates your cohort will usually raise wages, rather than not hire. Bearing in mind minimum wages are still very low wages. If business is so tight that would catastrophically affect profits, you will usually raise prices, and the cost isn't so much eaten as the pressures in the business adjust around the new reality; this is made easier by the fact that your competitors are doing the same.
> or they do, and they ultimately want more people dependent on them.
At least in some countries, raising minimum wage makes people less dependent on the state, not more. Two reasons: People need less top up from the state to plug the gap between low wages and high costs of housing and health, and people are more motivated to take a job because it makes a material difference to their situation, indeed poverty-level wages (far below minimum) often cost more to earn than they provide.
This[1] discussion on the minimum wage (specifically centered on Seattle's recent laws) provides a more nuanced goal than just "helping workers" or "getting them dependent"; essentially he's saying there are two types of minimum wage workers - teenagers looking for summer money, and adults making a living -, and you can help the latter if you don't mind screwing the former.
I think the teenage bit is unnecessary; they’re talking more about anyone trying to find entry-level work. Which happens to often be teenagers, but would presumably also include low-level career transitions, homeless, etc.
The restaurant part is particularly notable: “'We're going to be fine. Our members of this [Washington Restaurant] Association--the minimum wage, it's not going to break them.' And the reason why, he said, is because, 'there are so many strategies that we have to basically reduce our labor.'”
And then it goes on to basically list alternatives to having any entry-level jobs in the first place; buying cut fruits from offsite, self-order machines, etc.
That is, its a bit more dangerous than the simple job-hour reduction; its a more permanent transition to the total removal of low-level full-service work
It'd be very interesting to see the history of who was working minimum wage jobs over time and what kind of jobs were paid minimum wage. Anecdotally it seems more and more people are working a lot of minimum wage jobs that formerly wouldn't be minimum wage like retail or food service (a la fast food places) and there's more people working full time minimum wage.
No matter what the goal of raising it I think the fact that it's now a fraction of what it was in real dollars demands we either raise it or completely rethink how it's applied and what kinds of jobs can be min wage. People working full time should be able to live on their wages, anything else is just subsidizing the labor costs for huge profitable companies.
> there are two types of minimum wage workers - teenagers looking for summer money, and adults making a living -, and you can help the latter if you don't mind screwing the former.
when you put it like this, it seems obvious to say that the right move is to screw over the teenagers who are much less likely to be supporting a family or themselves.
I'm not sure this is great in the long run though. imo, having some kind of part time job is very important in highschool. for a lot of teens, it might be the first time they are exposed to an environment that has no inherent reason to make things work for them. until we finally get luxury space communism, this is a really important experience to have early in life.
I don't know about other countries, but in the UK the approach is to set the minimum wage significantly lower for teenagers.
Which sucks if you're an adult making a living who happens to be young, but that's what we do.
There's also a dirty hack: We call some young people "apprentices"(1), which sometimes means the same job as before and not having to pay the minimum wage, with a veneer of marketing. See also "unpaid interns".
(1) I don't want to disparage proper apprenticeships, which from reports can be excellent, e.g. at engineering firms like Rolls-Royce.
the obvious problem here is that if you have a different minimum wage for teenagers, they will be preferred over adult candidates.
by the way, we do have special rules in the US for what kind of work you are allowed to give to interns. in general you are not allowed to give work to interns that would otherwise be performed by a full employee. this is intended to prevent adult employees being put out of a job by low pay interns. unfortunately, I don't think most minimum wage employers are interested in dealing with these complicated rules for interns.
And many countries are authoritarian shitholes who care more about revenue generation than protecting people. People don't need a speedometer to drive safely.
> People don't need a speedometer to drive safely.
Yes, they really do. Just ignoring the fact that people tend to drive faster when they don't have a speedometer, people already travel too fast for road conditions as a matter of course. Let alone the fact that at residential road speeds, the difference in life expectancy of someone hit by a vehicle drastically changes with even a slight increase in speed.
Safety checks exist because vehicles are roving machines of death driven by easily distracted people, who have a long track history of ignoring what they can't see.
Your life shouldn't be put in danger because some other arsehole decided that it's perfectly fine to drive a rust bucket with nothing more than a sheet of paper left by way of brakes, or with lights that are so badly adjusted anyone else gets blinded, or with windows in a state that someone sneezing will shatter them, or any other number of things.
But yeah, authoritarian government overreach. Sure.
No mention of NuxtJS in the article or in the comments here. I highly suggest checking out nuxtjs.org (built on Vue) with the `npm run generate` command to generate a static site.
"Bezos is no fool. He will reduce his headcount, and step up his automation effort to eliminate as many low-skilled jobs from Amazon. Then he will lobby Congress to increase the minimum wage for his competitors that still employ lower-skilled workers. As these competitors will lack the resources to automate, they will be driven out of business, and all their workers will lose their jobs. Less competition will make it easier for Amazon to raise prices." - Peter Schiff
I'm all for voluntarily raising wages for your employees; that's a great thing. But if we see that Amazon is backing efforts to raise the minimum wage, we'll know Schiff was right.
The problem I have with this argument is that it sets up Amazon in a caricature that always makes them look evil and anti-labor:
1) Don't support lowering the minimum wage = Democrats + labor groups hate on you for not paying workers, even if you can hire more of them = anti-labor
2) Support the minimum wage nationally + across their international workforce = "This is an automation ploy + competitive advantage = anti-labor
There seems like no ideal approach for low-skilled labor here that won't seem anti-labor in the short-to-medium term
Amazon is anti-labor. Someone posted a leak of their union-suppression policies not long ago[0], and they're quite vocal about their anti-union stance being a part of their "ownership culture."
You're right that they're damned if they do, damned if they don't though, but let's not pretend they haven't earned that mistrust.
Bingo! This debate is almost entirely predicated on all sides claiming to know the unknowable, and predict the future outcomes of policy changes where not only is the evidence and data very mixed, but where we aren't really sure what outcome we want. This is terrifying to me, because we have smart people with zero skin in the game playing with the poorest, most vulnerable people's lives in an ideological shouting match.
On what outcome we want, I think people are confused about the actual affect minimum wage has. Some people will lose their jobs when minimum wages increase. That is just inevitable, and not something anyone really argues against. The most positive response is that job losses will be small, and/or those jobs are usually not very pleasant anyway.
If we assume someone on an unlivable wage can either have their wage increased to livable, stay the same - i.e. minimum goes up, hours go down, actual pay is ballpark the same - or lose their job and become unemployed, what population level outcome is acceptable?
In the most simplistic case, what split of people losing jobs and becoming unemployed is acceptable if everyone else gets a livable wage? 60 (made unemployed) vs 40 (employed)? 50-50? 40-60?
What if the the group that works for unlivable wages stays almost static, and it is 10% job loss, 70% no change, 20% increase? Is that the success or failure?
These examples ignore people outside this group, and it is possible that some people who currently make livable wages today could have their hours cut or accelerated automation catches them as well. Even with the most simplistic outcomes, I don't know what numbers society wants to optimise for. How can we judge if a policy works if we don't know what we want to achieve?
It also ignores the economic diversity of the USA. Prices will rise a LOT in some places if Seattle/SF minimum wages are applied to less economically strong states, and the results could be disastrous. AFAIK (data is a few years old) there are a few states with median wages less than $15 in the USA - see https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-lunches-like-th... A blanket $15 is troublesome, while maybe ineffective (if it works) in some other states.
So it seems to me we have no clear objectives, no outcomes we are excited by, but what we do have are people for whom minimum wage laws are an article of faith. Any attempts to actually measure the affects of any of this will be fought vociferously by all sides, usually with competing BS studies. You just have to see what happened in Seattle, where a long term, detailed but ultimately negative study was countered with a hastily written pro-report for ideological reasons.
Terrifying certainty in an uncertain domain combined with unclear goals and a determined effort to not measure? Nah, nothing could possibligh go bad here...
Do you have any data that isn't subjective? I have subjective data saying the opposite.
8/9 times when I shop Around Amazon has the best price. If it's close, like a buck or so difference, I still choose Amazon due to reliability, speed, and me having a history of good customer service interactions.
I buy everything I need every month on Subscribe & Save (from tooth, toilet paper, to batteries, air freshener, etc) and the even greater 15% discounts add up as well.
