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Afterthought ….
I wonder how much support The Fight for 15 would get if Libs were clear and honest about the details of the plan ….
”OK. You are going to draw lots. Everybody who draws a short straw gets fired. The remaining employees will divide the wages of their fired neighbors among themselves.”
It’s a good question and ought to be asked, but it’s important not to let the leftists answer spontaneously, as individuals. Instead, they should have a chance to discuss the question among themselves first so they will know the party line.
I will give the author the benefit of the doubt, but I’d like more. What is the “baseline” minimum wage in the two states? I couldn’t find that in the article. Shouldn’t there be more info to establish: 1) that the Minnesota economy didn’t drive workers out of minimum wage jobs; and/or 2) that the Wisconsin economy didn’t drive workers into these jobs. I hesitate to say that supply/demand for these jobs is at equilibrium.
Bring on the robots. They cook good burgers.
They won’t mind. The people who vote for minimum wage increases also despise the idea of fast food. They want their little artisan foodie communities with all of the blight associated with lower class fast food workers and consumers removed from their sight.
Quick peek … Both states recovering nicely from Great Recession. Both have current unemployment rates near 3%. MN just over. WI just under. 2014 minimum wage in WI was 7.25, MN was 6.95.
Fyi. For data on lots of things economic, the St Louis Fed runs a website – FRED – that is a data library for all kinds of stuff. They collect data from all over and have a very user friendly query format.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org
I love telling lefties I told you so. Because we did tell them, we pointed to all the evidence that we were right and that they would hurt the poorest and most vulnerable people with their stupid regulation. But for the ‘feels’ lefties went and screwed over people who really needed a job and/or extra hours.
Look. Some things are hard to understand and we can’t be sure what the best policy is. The minimum wage is not one of those things.
I too like artistan foods but why should I force what I like on other people?
Assuming they want people to have jobs, that is.
Working a job can really cut into your protesting hours.
I just figure people without jobs are dependent on the government for welfare, and the lack of job also makes it easier to stoke the fires of envy.
For the endorphins.
The McDondalds I occasion now has 4 kiosks and 1 person rather than 4 people. The kiosks for ordering never have a line and work rather well. I would assume that the kiosks save somewhere in the neighborhood of $45 an hour at 18 hours a day, 365 days a year . That’s big money.
The McD near where I work did the same. But the Libs will be trumpeting how much they have done to help.
The progressives always forget that the real minimum wage is zero.
One big failure from our vaunted mainstream media is not reporting that the drive for $15 per hour is not a grassroot uprising by the poor service workers, it is a cynical play by unions like the SEIU. Many of their employment contracts wages are tied to the minimum wage. They force the government to renegotiate their contracts for them by upping the minimum wage.
That is exactly it!!!!! That is the root motivation here. Crass payola. The Union-Money-Votes-Democrat-Money carousel. And if some (non-Union) hamburger-flippers get burned … oh well…it’s the cost of doing business. They are collateral damage. Perhaps they should unionize?
Very nicely stated. Of course, my experience with so many liberals is that they are young and living in the parents’ basement, or older and living on a pension. Others in that group are government agency employees and academics. (And those academics re the ones writing about the economy and the need for a $ 15 an hour minimum wage.) So neither group has ever had to make a payroll and all that it implies.
Some experts have stated that for every dollar of wages, the employer spends an additional dollar on that employee. Such things as the cost of rent for space the employee takes up, equipment the employee uses and a dozen other things a person doesn’t think of when they are the employee, but that immediately become obvious once the person is the employer.
It’s more like, “The remaining employees will divide half the wages of their fired neighbors among themselves” based on this datum:
Live report from the field. NJ. Walmart. One manned checkout lane. Four self-scan lanes.
It is probably not worth noting that ‘kiosk’ sounds like some weird Russian bird-call.
Hush your mouth!
We need games that model this so that we don’t have such a gullible underclass. Children reasonably assume that money comes out of thin air; they should be disabused of this notion before graduating high school.
We pretty much have de facto $15 hour fast food wages out here in the oil patch of West Texas. But that’s due to a shortage of workers — you have to pay them salaries in that area or you don’t have enough workers, and that’s without taking into account the ordering touch screens (or the c-store or Walmart automated check-out stations) that have been in place for a while now.
However, you can pay for those salaries if you have enough volume of sales — they had pizza delivery drivers making $40,000 a year in Midland during the last spike in oil prices 4-5 years ago, because they were selling enough pizzas to justify the cost of hiring someone at that rate to deliver. It’s where you don’t have the volume of sales to pay those salaries that you simply end up with either workers laid off and replaced by touch-screens, or even if their keep their jobs, you get government-created inflation and just greater cash flow without any greater net worth for the employees.
The workers may make more, but companies simply raise the prices of their goods to cover the cost. So you go from $10 to $15 an hour, but the cost of your burger (or other food) goes from $4 to $6, and the extra money you’re getting just goes in one pocket and out the other. And that ends up hurting the people in the middle class earning above minimum wage who aren’t getting a pay hike, but do see the cost of their goods and services at restaurants, c-stores and other starter job locations rise (while the high-income progressive advocates of the move make enough to neither notice nor care about the cost increases).
Or they applaud the increases; people have no business going into convenience stores in the first place. They might buy gas, or worse – soda.