Seattle city council approves $15/hour minimum wage

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monkeydelmagico

Diamond Member
Nov 16, 2011
3,961
145
106
So what is a fair wage for stupid lazy uneducated people who won't do any real labor, or show up on most Mondays, have family issues and a drug problem?

Is it the same for a hard working person that is always on time, never misses a day, carefully follows directions etc.?

How do you plan to get person A to act more like person B with no real incentive?

You don't get to be head lettuce washer at McDowells with that kinda work ethic.

Seriously folks, we gotta find a way for our society to keep folks participating in the labor force. Otherwise it's gonna be game over. More jobs, not less. Will a $15.- min wage create more jobs? Unless Seattle is booming I doubt it.
 

poofyhairguy

Lifer
Nov 20, 2005
14,612
318
126
So what is a fair wage for stupid lazy uneducated people who won't do any real labor, or show up on most Mondays, have family issues and a drug problem?

Whatever keeps them actually working and not robbing old ladies in the street.

Is it the same for a hard working person that is always on time, never misses a day, carefully follows directions etc.?

No, but hard work is overrated as a determiner of worth. It is the quality and rarity of the work you do that matters.

How do you plan to get person A to act more like person B with no real incentive?

That is not the question. The question is: how is a subsidized wage that gets people working worse than a welfare check that keeps them on the street?
 

CountZero

Golden Member
Jul 10, 2001
1,796
36
86
Tell me this. Even if this experiment is a horrific failure, what politician in his right mind is ever going to repeal it? Who is going to be the one to take responsibility to the unwashed masses for taking their pay raise away from them? They would have to be one hell of a political idealist to put their neck on the chopping block like that. These are the kinds of moves you just can't undo.

It is phased in over 7 years, what is the horrific failure mode that would require a politician to take drastic action?

Since our entire economy is more or less built on inflation no one has to repeal anything, at worst it just means you don't increase it again for a longer period of time than originally expected.

So yes you can't undo it because you really don't have to unless the basis of our economy goes away in which case minimum wage setting is the least of our concerns.

In reality this will have a dramatic impact on a number of people both good and bad but overall the impact will be largely an exercise for economists to argue since it won't be obvious what impact it has. If the impact of minimum wage hikes was obvious we wouldn't even be having this discussion it isn't as if the minimum wage is new.
 

Hugo Drax

Diamond Member
Nov 20, 2011
5,647
47
91
This will be an interesting experiment. At the rate of 15 dollars an hour, I wonder if that will encourage more companies to automate everything. I understand that in Japan, there are already fast food joints that automate everything. There is just one worker in the entire store to make sure nothing goes wrong. I understand that in Europe, automated convenience stores are more popular.

Perhaps we can finally get rid of all the menial jobs and move forward in our quest for the ultimate goal: no jobs for anyone since everything is automated and done for us by robots.

That's coming no matter what, regardless of salary.
 

Ns1

No Lifer
Jun 17, 2001
55,418
1,595
126
anyone know how I can invest in "SABRE Autonomous Solutions"? I bet they're going to make a killing in Seattle.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7d398f90-ec8e-11e3-8963-00144feabdc0.html#slide0


At the Automatica robot and automation fair in Munich this week the organisers devoted a whole section to so-called “service robots” for the first time.

Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for manufacturing, engineering and automation demonstrated a Care-O-Bot that sweeps office floors and empties waste paper bins. Pal Robotics showed Stockbot, which walks the aisles in a shop or warehouse to check inventory at night.
 

dmcowen674

No Lifer
Oct 13, 1999
54,889
47
91
www.alienbabeltech.com
wtf does this even mean? public ownership? I think she needs to go back to India. who in their right mind would even consider voting for her.

I think she means employee owned

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee-owned

Other forms of employee ownership

Stock options and similar plans (stock appreciation rights, phantom stock, and restricted stock, primarily) are common in most industrial and some developing countries. Only in the U.S., however, is there a widespread practice of sharing this kind of ownership broadly with employees, mostly (but not entirely) in the technology sector (Whole Foods and Starbucks also do this, for instance). The tax rules for employee ownership vary widely from country to country. Only a few, most notably the U.S., Ireland, and the UK, have significant tax laws to encourage broad-based employee ownership.[41] In India, employee stock option plans are called "ESOPs”.[20]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodman's_Food_Market

Woodman's Markets was started in 1919, as a produce stand in Janesville, WI. In 1979 & 1984 Woodman's opened two stores in Madison, WI; these were the first to use the warehouse model now used at all locations. Today, Woodman's operates fifteen stores throughout Wisconsin and northern Illinois. Woodman's converted into an entirely Employee Owned operation in 1998. In March 2008, Woodman's hit $1 billion in annual sales.
 

darkewaffle

Diamond Member
Oct 7, 2005
8,152
1
81
http://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocrats_the_pitchforks_are_coming

Interesting TED talk that just came out lately and speaks quite a bit regarding Seattle and the minimum wage. It's a compelling argument and I think in principal he's right that more money in the hands of the workers creates more customers that create demand and so on and so forth. The thing he doesn't really touch on is how those noble intentions can still be damaging when/if not applied equally or across the board and how they can incentivize business practices that affect the domestic economy negatively when companies are able to redistribute the workload to a different locale with better margins.

I can't help but wonder what would happen if the federal minimum wage suddenly, say, doubled. On one hand, there would of course be a backlash. On the other, I think the benefit of doing so would be real, but could the benefits be reaped before the companies are able to reallocate/reorganize in retaliation and hopefully convince them otherwise.