Seattle Enacts $15 Minimum Wage

The street corner I'm working pays pretty well.

My biggest problem with the "market" is experience matters more than education. (not in all jobs but in a lot)

So you are fresh out of college oh we can't hire you we need more experience.

How are you supposed to get experience for a job if you never had a professional job ?

Outside of unpaid internships. If you are lucky enough to get one.

Yeah, I phrased that badly to get my point across. Stores like this are barely clinging to life because they don't have the customer base. A change in any of their costs is waiting to kill them, but that's because they had been non-viable for a rather long time already.

Or do you seriously imagine that a store selling antique pens is making money hand-over-fist? There's exactly that store in my neighborhood and it exists at the largesse of its owner who really just uses it as storage space and dissuades actual customers from buying anything.

Only time I got min wage was CVS cause I was 16. Everything else was always over. Highly doubt that would happen @ $10.10 or w/e stupid ***they want to do.

I could be wrong, but meh, not applicable to me for now. I'm just enjoying the show so to speak.

Yeah that was my stumbling block. They want you to work for free full time or close to it. Funk that!

I'll start my own website with less hookers and more feminists. I'll call Huffless Post.

Or more hookers and less feminists that will do the trick.

Ok, I'll bite.

April 1st, 2010 to December 15th, 2010. It was a shitty hellhole, was supposed to get a raise after 6 months and never did, and watch people not show up for work and I had to stay later because of it (still got paid for overtime, they tried to pull that ***on me once and I slammed the UCC and IRC on the owner's face, although my hours were then reduced, which suit me just fine, I only wanted spending money anyway until my internship started).

They "say" that you get a raise and a promotion after 6 months, but you really don't. This was a franchise anyway, and mostly high school and college students worked there. I didn't give two shits about that job because I knew it wasn't a long term engagement.

Sucked for the owner that I knew more about his company than he did, and he made the mistake of letting me see his books. Well, I showed him that his bookkeeper was ***anyway, and gave her some AJEs to fix her books. He never even thanked me, oh well.

Thank you. That's not the experience I have heard from other people, but being we're talking about a franchised chain, that doesn't surprise me.

Experience is a liability, too. I know two medical professionals (a nurse and a physical therapist) with 20+ years of experience each who lost their jobs last year and cannot get hired because no one wants to pay what they're worth.

I repeat: there's something deeply *** with our job market.

Actually that reminds me of the Duke student doing porn to pay for Med school or to be a lawyer. Something like that. See if you do porn for college A ok. If you do porn because you enjoy it. ***.

Not that is matter but I watched her videos for "educational" reasons. She is a D list porn star no one really knows about.

After she catches Hep C she might need to get that job as a doctor though. Kinda funny.

How long has these Mom/Pop stores been around? There is a shoe store in my hometown that has been there for almost 100 years, and I know that they don't make hand over fist income, but they still survive. They rarely hire more than 1 person extra though, and if the minimum wage increased, I doubt they could even afford that.

Do you know everything about that antique pen store? Or are you assuming because the owner didn't treat you (an obvious non-customer) with the utmost respect when you walked in his store?

Believe it or not, most Mom/Pop stores barely stay afloat, and don't have that much income to play around with. So, why should the government force them to either not hire people (if they had anyone to hire in the first place) or close down their business because their expenses are too high due to increased supply costs?

Or are you going to say that minimum wage increases don't cause artificial inflation (or in other words, the price of products going up rapidly)?

/waits for the "economist" to say that isn't true, even though historically it is.

From personal experience, most McD's managers are total *** anyways.

Mcdonald's Canada is supposed to be the number 1 employer in Canada, but has the single greatest turnover rate in the country. I worked for a couple of locations, because i needed/wanted spending money.

When i was 16, they started requiring applicants to already have a high school diploma, or grades that would represent 80% or higher, in attaining said diploma. Smokers got a smoke break every 5 minutes, Management were as dumb as rocks, and employed people smarter than they were, couldn't ask Management to step in and help if 4/5 people were off the line because it was beneath them, then get berated for not doing the work of 5 people. (Which, in an assembly line production, isn't possible, when you also have to keep up sanitation standards)

That's why I will never say that McDonald's "managers" are ever really management material.

To be a true manager, you need to know who you are managing, what you are managing, and lead the people you are managing. McDonald's "managers" very very very very very very very very very...you get the picture....rarely fit even one of the 3 criteria.

Do you know that the help they hire is being paid minimum wage? I am feeling too lazy to check if TX has a higher-than-federal minimum, so I'll just assume they're at $7.25. For a single employee to be paid $2.85 more per hour, it comes to $114 extra per week at 40 hours and a grand total of $5,700 per year if we assume 50 working weeks. That's really not a lot and could easily be financed in a variety of ways.

Nah, this is actually how the guy operates. He borders on being a hoarder, albeit he seems to stick to a very specific collection, and is reluctant to part with anything outside of really common stuff like pen nibs and ink.

You say that as though a dozen other things don't cause that. I shop at the second-largest supermarket chain in the country (Kroger, for the record) and regularly watch the price of milk, beef, and chicken fluctuate on any of a number of factors thoroughly unrelated to the labor market. I watch those goods in particular, by the by, because supermarkets are lucky to make 3 cents per pound of meat or gallon of milk in profit, so they're subsequently the most volatile.

But, sure, wage increases can result in incremental changes in prices. You make it sound like my Kroger (a massive national chain) will suddenly go from charging $2.99 for a gallon of milk to charging $5.99, however, and that's simply not the case (also, it's a bad example since the government controls the cost of milk, as I recall, but just pretend). If I go to my local art store (which is also part of a corporate chain but whatever) to buy some gouache and I find that I'm paying 50 cents more per tube, do you think I'm going to have a fit? Even an extra dollar wouldn't meaningfully ruffle my feathers, especially not if I was already used to spending $20 on what I needed but, now that I'm making an extra $400 a month, have to pay $22.50 instead.

I really feel that there's far too much exaggeration. People are terrible with numbers as a rule, largely because we don't have much cause to bother with them unless it is our job (which could mean accountant but could also mean "mom on a budget," as I've noticed moms are amazing at predicting what their full grocery cart will cost).

Moreover, I get a strong feeling of how disingenuous some people are here. If I say that 500,000 will lose their jobs, it's a tragedy. When I point out that they're ***jobs at Wal-Mart and McDonald's where the laziest employees working the fewest hours are given the boot, suddenly it's the employees fault. So which is it? Are we causing "millions" to lose their jobs or are we culling the herd while boosting the remainder?

I don't see what the big deal is if somebody with a college degree is only making $16/hr after this. I mean, the job is obviously not worth any more than that. If they don't like it, they can just quit and find something else. Get a better degree if you want to make more. Don't feel so entitled just because you graduated college.

Isn't that the basic argument against current minimum wage jobs? Funny how viewpoints change when it suddenly affects you.

The largest.

Also, we've all benefited from globalization, we're all better off because of it. Would anyone here rather live today or back in the 50-60s with 50% more of their inflation adjusted income?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/06/03/we-can-predict-the-effects-of-seattles-15-an-hour-minimum-wage/

Finally, we’d also expect to see non-wage compensation decrease as a result of the rise. The wages you get paid are not the only things that make up the amount that your employer is paying out for your work. Sometimes they are trivial things, free parking at work perhaps (although in some cities that’s worth a great deal). Others are rather more important, like health care insurance. And we’ve already seen these things changing at SeaTac, where the minimum wage is already $15 an hour:

While attending an event at a SeaTac hotel last week, I met two women who receive the $15/hour minimum wage. SeaTac has implemented the new law on Jan. 1. I met the women while they were working. One was a waitress and the other was cleaning the hallway.
“Are you happy with the $15 wage?” I asked the full-time cleaning lady.
“It sounds good, but it’s not good,” the woman said.
“Why?” I asked.
“I lost my 401k, health insurance, paid holiday, and vacation,” she responded. “No more free food,” she added.
The hotel used to feed her. Now, she has to bring her own food. Also, no overtime, she said. She used to work extra hours and received overtime pay.
What else? I asked.
“I have to pay for parking,” she said.

Forbes doesn't count as a news source if you're poor, unemployed, or generally love to ***.

Praise be to Huff Post!

Forbes is as right-wing nutbag as you can get without demanding the government stay out of your medicare.

Still, a broken clock is right twice a day.

You rang !: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/03/seattle-minimum-wage_n_5437916.html?utm_hp_ref=business

Seattle just passed the highest minimum wage in the nation: $15 an hour, well above the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

Yet, as progressive and monumental as $15 an hour may seem, it's actually nowhere what the minimum wage would be if it kept pace with inflation and increases in worker output.

The federal minimum wage would be about $21.72 an hour today, if it had kept up with increases in worker productivity, a measure of the amount of goods and services that can be produced in a certain amount of time, according to a widely cited 2012 study from the Center for Economic Policy and Research, a progressive think-tank.

Thanks to advancements in technology, among other reasons, workplace productivity has steadily climbed over the past half century. The same can't be said for the minimum wage, which, at $7.25 an hour, has fallen significantly since 1968 once you take inflation and the rising cost of living into account.

This chart shows just how widely the minimum wage and increases in productivity have diverged:

$21.72 an hour,

By that logical Huff Post would be the complete opposite.

Yet still, a broken clock is right twice a day, as you said.

Yay extremism!

That chart is amazing though. I can't read so it works for me.

That's America. Where a half-dozen different opinions can create a polarizing scenario.

According to the chart, the highest minimum wage report was roughly $10.10 an hour in 1968-1969.

At the end of the chart, the minimum wage resulted in $7.25 per hour, where as, if the minimum wage kept steady with production, would be 3 times what it currently it, which would lead to US currency being near worthless internationally, so in order to protect it's national interests, kept the productivity high, and wage low.

Assuming this is true, the transference to the national debt would triple in effect to the US dollar losing value.

Then again, i might have formulated this wrong.

The problem with relying simply on supply and demand without a good dose of moderation are manifold.

For example, currently minimum wage isn't enough to earn a living and support a modest household. Labor is dirt cheap today because there are so many who can supply it. This creates a problem though because those who don't have the skills necessary to get higher paying jobs generally don't have the income to spend on acquiring said skills, so they're f*cked. That's not even touching on the topic of how bad "experience" requirements have become.

Letting the cost of acquiring said skills get so out of hand is another failing of America. If we really wanted people to get smarter and better educated, we'd be supporting them, not forcing them, in general, into crippling debt from the outset of their adult lives. The country should be supporting those who want to improve themselves, not letting others take advantage of them and piling on as well.

The problem with unrestrained capitalism, like any other unrestrained human concept, is that it will eventually run everything into the dirt. People who no longer need money are still obsessed with grabbing as much of it as they can at the expense of anyone else. This is why "trickle down" economics are the dumbest thing since a Rube Goldberg Kevorkian Device: At every level the main goal of everyone with the money is to stop the trickle as much as possible.

A more competitive minimum wage forces people with money to open up a bit more, makes employers have to take better care of the employees they maintain, and increases the money the lower classes have. Something has to be done before those absurdly armored and armed doomsday vehicles, meant to appeal to the the rich that are afraid of not having 6 inches of bulletproof glass and steel between them and the 99%, becomes a good idea and sound investment instead of fuel for Colbert's ratings.

Time to blow it all up and start from scratch!

No, it is using the inflation adjusted wages in 1968 as the control point (yeah, lets use the point where it makes the chart really look skewed...) for their analysis.

They are saying that the minimum wage of 1968 ($1.60 per hour) paid more in real (inflation adjusted) money than it did at any point before and after that year. At least when you compare it to 1968 production.

They are saying that if people were paid based on production alone, then the minimum wage should be $21.72 per hour. The only problem is, they remove technology/efficiency out of the production number because it is impossible to quantify it in dollars. So, instead of saying "Well, we can't quantify intangible production pressures into our number, so we will just make one up" they are pretending that all production was based by the worker alone, and no outside technological help was needed because the worker naturally worked harder, faster, and with less defects over the years because they are awesome like that.

And liberals eat this ***up. That just shows how stupid they really are.

I got a couple of places in mind, you want to start there?

Let's do it.

Yea but that chart is so convincing I mean it had numbers and lines.

If it were a pie chart I would believe it no matter what.