Any Canadian who follows politics is well aware that a few times each year the Canadian Centre for Policy Failure Alternatives comes out with some new “paper” insisting that minimum wages across the country need to be dramatically raised to a “livable wage”. This then causes politicians and business leaders to duck for cover for a few weeks until the PR campaign gets pushed out of the news cycle.
Such has been the case in America this past week. In a well coordinated campaign, organized by the militant SEIU, their more than willing comrades in the media, have done their best to paint a bleak picture for restaurant workers everywhere.
Bill O’Reilly shares some personal thoughts on the matter.
Update: Here’s a brief mathematical analysis of the situation. h/t Maureen
A Big Mac will cost $20.00. ‘Nuff said.
Perhaps it should. Don’t the educationalistacratologists tell us people have different learning styles? Maybe such a demonstration is needed.
The very premise of a “livable wage” is extremely flawed. They always assume single income earner per household. How many single income earner households work at minimum wage? Also is it such a crime to get an apartment and split the cost with someone? You know, what actually happens in reality.
Right up there with the wisdom,”You did not build that”.
Money comes from the government, food from the supermarket, water from a tap and man controls the climate via thermostat.
There will never be a minimum wage big enough, these conceited phonies have no concept of productive work, unintended consequences and bureaucratic idiocy.
Zimbabwe is a recent example of government wage and price control, worked out real good for the actual workers, eh?
Shades of Douglas Adams , Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, tree leaves as currency.
Back to the Klectocracy parasites who continue to feed, their motto, “Tell them whatever they want to hear, do whatever we want.”, when governed by opportunist fools expect opportunist rules.
Idiots. I worked for minimum wage as a dishwasher for 2 years in high school. I knew washing dishes wasn’t a ‘career’ so I became so good they promoted me to cook. I’ve never earned minimum wage since. All it takes is a little hard work and determination.
Cooking may not be the most glamorous job nor the highest paying but I knew that going into it. After 25 years I’m still in the business and from what I’ve seen people who make minimum wage deserve minimum wage. Like any industry, if you want to make more, get better or find a new job.
While it is always attractive to go to the easy solution and just increase wages that will not address the actual issue of poverty. All that will do is reduce the number of positions open and increase costs to an employer who in turn will increase prices of the goods/services they sell. Anyone up for at $15 or $18 burger meal? The following is an interesting analysis (but beware – math is involved) http://iowntheworld.com/blog/?p=200841#more-200841
Does anyone remember the articles a year or so ago about Tim Horton’s franchises in hospitals that were losing money they couldn’t figure out why – turns out the health district was operating them and paying them union wages which turned out to be $-16 to $20/hour – duh!!! Turns out that surprise, surprise, surprise – people don’t want to pay $5 for a doughnut!
If we want to attack poverty we need to send some clear messages about what leads to poverty, but we don’t because those messages contain the dreaded ‘moral’ message. But here they are (and in order):
1. Complete a real high school (not the GED kind) and hopefully complete some other post secondary education (not university – even a one year certificate in office education will make you more employable). But always, always get as much education training you can – if your employer is offering tuition for a two day course on Excel – take it!
2. Get involved in a long-term, committed relationship – marriage is better, but if you don’t want to get married, make sure your partner is in it for the long haul. And that may mean taking a serious look at the women/men you are hooking up with and stepping up your game and expecting more for the man/woman you are dating. And have those hard conversations about values – finances, children, goals etc.
3. Don’t have children until you have done 1 and 2.
Violate one of these rules and you will always be ‘at-risk’ for being poor – you might never tip into poverty but you will always be on the edge. Do all three and you will ALWAYS be poor even if you win the lottery (because you will not keep the money!)
Put very well on that video. Notice minimum wage is pushed by the poverty industry, run by top wage earners.
More programs run by the Elite, to stop any competition against them. Just like Public Unions do.
Give am person just enough money to survive so they can live at poverty level, thinking its a real job. Like we do with Indians or blacks in the States. Keeps them on the plantation , while they waste their lives.
Whatever happened to the laws of supply and demand?
Unskilled labour = minimum wage. A job virtually anybody can do if you can walk and chew gum (and yeah, there’s some moonbats that can’t even do that).
ARe these the same restaurant workers that have advanced degfrees in wymyns studies and literature?
As O’Reilly — or was it Laura Ingraham — pointed out, many of the protesters are not ever McDonald’s employees. They’re SEIU rent-a-mob.
and to add, the CCPA is just another organization that represents the NDP under another moniker.
When our glorious news media quotes “A report says……the CCPA report…..”, I know that the credibility factor dropped into negative territory. Just propaganda, unchallenged by our mediots.
Well said,Maureen.
The last link was loaded with comments about “dignity: and “self-respect” which can only be procured by raising the minimum wage,apparently.
And,of course,there was the usual story of the struggling ethnic single mom who can’t make it on minimum wage and has swallowed the socialist idea that society owes her. No mention of the husband.
Fast food jobs are start-out jobs,unless a person wants to get into management or own a franchise,then the money can get pretty good. I knew a fellow who owned two McDonald’s franchises,which he bought with money he EARNED in another industry,and was smart enough to invest in the right franchise. Needless to say,he was doing well financially,as he deserved.
I had a conversation with a communist professor years ago,who wanted to raise wages by about 30% for “the poor”. When I asked what he would do if a company simply said,”no more” and moved out of the Country, he segued immediately into a personal attack that “it’s people like you who keep the workers repressed”.
Communists/socialists will rarely admit the totalitarian outcome of all their social engineering.
Listened to OReily on Sirus the other day.His guests included a PHD and some other hack.
What struck me was the fact that the proponents for the wage increase could NOT get their heads around the difference between McDonalds the CORPORATION, and a McDonalds FRANCHISE.
The corporation does not have minimum wage employees. It DOES have accountants, promotion managers and all the rest. And it does make billions.
That billion dollar figure is waved around falsely, to support more wages.
BUT, the wages are paid by the franchisee. A very hard working small buisnessman/woman.
I guess they don’t make PHD’s like they used to.
There are many good things said here (ie- Maureen).
Quickly now: re-haul the education system, put proper value on work (flipping hamburgers and unionising that position does not warrant $20 an hour), stop subsidising things and adding useless taxes (ie- carbon taxes) which only add hardships to consumers, particularly consumers who are struggling, move manufacturing sectors back to North America and fix a broken culture.
don, you touch on what the underlying ideology of those advocating for this is. They would have a society such as in the Soviet Union were doctors, truck drivers, cleaning staff and teachers would all make about the same wage and have norms to produce. Those that were more equal in the party echelon had access to higher wages and dachas on the Black Sea, oh and access to the GUM department store.
A Macdonalds share trades for $94.36. The company has a market cap of about 94 billion. They have to make billions of dollars to have a somewhat decent return on equity. Their earnings per share is/are $5.46 of which $3.08 is returned to the share holder as a dividend. In other words, the owners of the company (shareholders) are getting a dividend of 3.2 percent. Decent, yes, but not spectacular. The billions of dollars they make really means that the owners are making 3.2 percent on their investment.
I’ve always called them the Canadian Centre for Reality Alternatives.
The fact that youth unemployment, that is, those under 25, is typically DOUBLE the overall unemployment rate, is a clear indication that the minimum wage should go DOWN, not up.
In Spain and Greece, the youth unemployment rate is an astounding 50%. The only solution in these countries is to eliminate the minimum wage, and let wages fall until supply meets demand.
Of course, that will never happen…
Why stop at a $1.00/hr rise in minimum wage? If the lefties really believe in the benefits of raising the minimum wage, why not raise it to $100.00/hr and be done with it. After all, what’s wrong with hyperinflation?
Fools!
Someone made a comment on zerohedge that bears repeating:
“If you’re doing a job that takes only one day to learn, you’re never going to get more than minimum wage. Learn something or shut up.”
It has never been easier to learn on your own with the internet (free at libraries), libraries, electric light, etc. Minimum wage = minimum work ethic.
The real purpose of the minimum wage hike proposal is to increase the numbers of unemployed, from whose ranks more people could be recruited into the politically correct notion of an alternative working class for the purpose of overthrowing capitalism.
In 2007, when the economy was rolling along fairly smoothly, prior to the travails of the following year and subsequently, Ontario’s leftists of the day even then called for a minimum wage hike — for the same reasons as stated above. The last thing the Marxist left wants is a well-functioning economy.
If wages have been stagnating in recent years or decades, the biggest reason is too much government spending, especially on unprofitable activities (business subsidies and activist group handouts), and far too much regulation and intervention in the economy that interferes with individual decision-making.
One of the more basic ideas in economics is that wages rise in proportion to an increase in capital investment per worker. To achieve this, you must have a free market economy in which individual decisions can be rewarded through profits, whether literal profits for businesses or for a higher standard of living for citizens.
It’s time to have an examination of the whole concept of a minimum wage. There are lots of people out there whose production isn’t even worth close to minimum wage. All of my life I’ve been used to getting paid for the work I do, not how many hours I spend at the job. The last minimum wage job I had was through a temporary employment center where you showed up at 07:00 and waited to be hired on by someone at minimum wage for the day. As it turned out, I ended up going to a warehouse that needed to be cleaned up. I busted my ass the first day and then told the owner that if he wanted the work that remained finished, I’d want 3x what I was paid the first day for the next. He had no hesitation in agreeing to the price I’d set for my labor as if he had gone through the temporary employment center again he would likely get someone who felt that just being present for the day was enough to get paid. That was the last job like this I had to get before I got hired on at UBC and it was a good thing as I completed a weeks work in 2 days.
The one time that I had to belong to a union as a condition of my employment, the IWA, I had major disagreements with the union people about the need to take compulsory breaks (once I got into the rhythm of my work it was nice to just keep going till the end of the day) and that I was “working too fast”. A friend and I had an ongoing competition about who could prepare the most trees for planting when we were in the greenhouse and who could plant the most trees in a day when we were planting. I let the union goon know where he could stuff his complaints as I had no intention of slowing down as I had to make my university tuition and beer money for the upcoming year in a 2 month period.
I never frequent McDonalds unless there’s no alternative for a meal. Have hardly been eating in restaurants since the BC government introduced the harmonized sales tax and my response was to limit my restaurant meals to maybe 3-4/year. Likely raising the wage for a job that involves close to zero skills would result in the disappearance of the fast food industry in the US. Alternatively, it might result in massive automation of fast food restaurants where every meal is prepared in a machine and dispensed in vending machine style. Likely only a few employees would be needed in each city where such automated food dispensers existed to fix defective machines. Likely such technology already exists but it’s not cost efficient when one has minimum wage workers — once the workers become too expensive then suddenly automation is the answer.
The biggest hit that fast food workers are going to experience is Obozocare where all of them will become part-time workers limited to 29 hours/week. That might be one of the reasons that they’re pushing for an insanely high wage for someone who has almost no skills. Presumably if the US fast food industry goes belly up as a result of overpaid workers, then the former fast food workers will be on welfare at about the same rate of pay and still vote for totalitarians.
One thing moonbats seem infatuated with is the notion of a “living wage”. Someone who runs a business is not in it to make sure that the pampered progeny without skills are able to earn enough money to live in the style they believe they should; it’s to make a profit. Anyone who thinks that flipping burgers is a permanent job needs to have their head examined; this is a starting job and it used to be that one got jobs at McDonalds in high school for spending money. I hated the idea of being inside all day so my high school summer jobs were in the bush. The only people for whom a McDonalds job should constitute lifetime employment are the mentally retarded who have to work hard to grasp the concepts of burger flipping.
The idea of a “living wage” comes from the same subgroup of people who believe that going $100 K into debt to get a degree in “women’s studies” or puppetry is a good investment. The vast majority of such individuals live in a delusional world where they assume that money comes from the government and that all it takes is appropriate legislation to ensure that “disadvantaged” groups get more money. They are largely innumerate and engage in magical thinking when it comes to economics. Also, their “self esteem” is at high levels as a result of being promoted from grade to grade during their schooling regardless of how they performed academically and they can’t understand why they should work for minimum wage. When the Chicoms come over to collect what they’re owed such individuals will get a very rude awakening in Chicom work camps.
There are days when I flirt with Captain Capitalism’s plan of starving the government by reducing my earnings to the minimum I need to live on. Were I to do this, I’d only have to work about 1-2 months/year, but I have a fondness for expensive toys and I also enjoy what I do immensely. So, as much as I hate the idea of doing so, I have to keep working hard until I find an area that I’m equally passionate about that will bring in more money.
Shockingly, the Tides Foundation has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to local and national living-wage groups.