the pay debate in one place to save time in the future.
Because liberals have a hive mind, and I am sick of having the same discussion, with the same points raised over and over, in the same order, using the same words, and would rather cut and paste the rebuttals from here, rather than typing them again and again.
"employers do set a pay scale... they don't have to pay minimum wage so they can line their own rich pockets with more money... there is nothing that says they have to pay minimum wage... thats the employers decision..."
No, anyone that pays even the slightest attention to economics knows that labor is a marketplace, and that that market sets the price of labor in whatever field is under discussion. However, most people *don't* understand that, and they don't understand that with reason. That reason is that the marketplace is hidden from them. Because there IS A person deciding how much to offer for a given job. For every job, there's a person that says "I think I can get a but in that chair for $8/hour rather than saying "Well, everyone deserves a living wage, I think I will offer $15/hour."
However, that neglects EVERYTHING about running a business, that there's competition, that customers want the lowest prices they can find, etcetera.
Many people will bring up particular examples, Gravity payments, for instance, the company that decided on a $75,000 minimum salary, and the CEO took a large pay cut. That's cool. Of course. However, no one seems to pay attention to the specifics. That Gravity payments is an innovative company, meaning that they DON'T HAVE competition, they are one of remarkably few small business credit card payment processors, and the ceo has created a new and innovative way to process them. They hire out facilities maintenance, and all the other "menial" tasks, so that Gravity payments is a 40 person company that processes several BILLION dollars a year in payments. 40 times 75000 is 3 million a year, or 0.1% of their monetary throughput. And, it actually may be a good business plan for a company like that to offer higher than the prevailing wage, because of the reduction in churn that will result. Henry Ford paid double what his competitors did so that he could get the best and brightest and keep them, and have them consistently show up (very important for an assembly line). However, that doesn't apply to the local mcdonalds.
Thinking about "employee retention". Let's take 2 business cases. A Mcdonalds that pays $8/hour (minimum wage for our purpose here), and has an average employee retention time of 1 year, and a Wendys that pays $10, and keeps employees for EVER. Both have stacks of applicants numbering in the hundreds, so when an employee leaves, it's the work of 2 phone calls to have a new employee there the following day. Is the Wendy's making a good decision? That depends on training costs. If an employee can be trained to do the work in a week at 80%, and "fully trained" in a month, then the "cost" for Mcdonalds to replace an employee is $512. If they stay 6 months, that means that the cost to replace employees is $512/employee/year on average. By contrast, Wendy's, at an extra $2/hour, is paying $3840/year to eliminate that $512. That's not a good economic decision.
This is why jobs that require a good deal of very specific training pay more than jobs that are more or less "plug and play". Because the cost to replace an employee is much higher in those fields.
"But, why should teachers get paid so little?"
First of all, that's an outright fabrication. Teachers get paid a lot.
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary
Second of all, yes, it's true that the payscale for teachers is low compared to other professions with similar education and training requirements. However, in order to analyze this, it's necessary to come back to the basic question: What does it cost to put a butt in that chair? The fact is, every public school has a stack of resumes thousands deep of applicants willing to do the work at that price. Why would that be? It's for several reasons. First, and most important, the job has a good deal of nonmonetary compensation. That is to say, there are a lot of "warm fuzzies", that go along with the job, including satisfaction, the fun of dealing with children, and the social approval that go along with the job. People *want* to be teachers. Does anyone *want* to be a septic system repairman?
But, goes the argument, it's SO important, it should pay more than investment banking!" No, it's objectively vastly LESS important than investment banking. A teacher has the opportunity to touch at most a few hundeed lives a year, some do it well, others do it poorly, most do a mediocre job. Teachers produce a lot of inspiring stories, they can improve lives, and make quite a big difference. That's all true. However, an investment banker touches thousands of lives EVERY DAY. A bad call by a teacher typically sends a child home unhappy, a bad call by an investment banker can destroy hundreds of lives, businesses, jobs, can determine whether hundreds of people go to college, whether pensions get paid, etcetera. That objectively matters more, and, since it has similar training requirements and stiffer competition at the top, it pays more.
"Every job should pay a living wage".
Define your terms. What is a "living wage". Does it include "medical care"? To what standard? "Lifesaving treatments"? Do you mean decades of statins, or bones set? Do you mean multiple million dollar surgeries, or basic immunizations? Does it include "housing"? Does that mean a single family house with no more than 1 person per room within 20 minutes drive of your work? Or might it mean living with roommates? Does a "living wage" include making enough, on 1 income to raise a family of 4 to an arbitrary standard? Most of the proponents I have encountered support exactly this, that a single person, working 40 hours per week should be able to have *everything*. This is literally their argument. How many times have you heard "No one should have to choose between X and Y"? That statement implies that there is literally nothing that should be dependent on the contribution that an individual makes to society, that society should provide literally everything, without ever requesting anything in return.
Furthermore, they should be able to have *everything* without the need of being *given* it. That is, the employer must provide it, rather than society providing it.
This is one of the most broken aspects of this entire conversation. If *you* think that a person should have access to a good or service, then it's *your* duty to give them that access. The attempt to move that burden over to the employer is poorly thought through at best, and highly immoral. If the voters choose to give goods and services to people, then it's the voters that must bear the costs. Asking the uninvolved third parties to do so is both nonfunctional and immoral.
Now, saying that it's immoral is an emotive argument. So, let's concentrate on the "nonfunctional" portion. First of all, the majority of those in poverty do not work. At all. At current, it's 62% that don't work that year.
http://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-are-poverty-rates-among-working-adults
How is a minimum wage going to help those that do not work? Of those in poverty, only 12% work full time, year round. Minimum wage, full time is above poverty level for one person. It's above poverty for 2 people. The only way a person working 40 hours per week is below poverty is if they have more than one non-working household member. Which happens distressingly often, but that's a separate conversation. So, the minimum wage IS a "living wage" for 1 person, or even 2. So, what we're arguing about is *exactly* "Should a single unskilled worker at minimum wage make enough money to raise a family of 3 without drawing on the social safety net?" I would argue that the answer is rightly "no", particularly since doing it by minimum wage increases will mostly put more money in the hands of middle and upper-class families, while pushing others into poverty due to the disemployment effects.
More on this later, I have to go now.
"employers do set a pay scale... they don't have to pay minimum wage so they can line their own rich pockets with more money... there is nothing that says they have to pay minimum wage... thats the employers decision..."
No, anyone that pays even the slightest attention to economics knows that labor is a marketplace, and that that market sets the price of labor in whatever field is under discussion. However, most people *don't* understand that, and they don't understand that with reason. That reason is that the marketplace is hidden from them. Because there IS A person deciding how much to offer for a given job. For every job, there's a person that says "I think I can get a but in that chair for $8/hour rather than saying "Well, everyone deserves a living wage, I think I will offer $15/hour."
However, that neglects EVERYTHING about running a business, that there's competition, that customers want the lowest prices they can find, etcetera.
Many people will bring up particular examples, Gravity payments, for instance, the company that decided on a $75,000 minimum salary, and the CEO took a large pay cut. That's cool. Of course. However, no one seems to pay attention to the specifics. That Gravity payments is an innovative company, meaning that they DON'T HAVE competition, they are one of remarkably few small business credit card payment processors, and the ceo has created a new and innovative way to process them. They hire out facilities maintenance, and all the other "menial" tasks, so that Gravity payments is a 40 person company that processes several BILLION dollars a year in payments. 40 times 75000 is 3 million a year, or 0.1% of their monetary throughput. And, it actually may be a good business plan for a company like that to offer higher than the prevailing wage, because of the reduction in churn that will result. Henry Ford paid double what his competitors did so that he could get the best and brightest and keep them, and have them consistently show up (very important for an assembly line). However, that doesn't apply to the local mcdonalds.
Thinking about "employee retention". Let's take 2 business cases. A Mcdonalds that pays $8/hour (minimum wage for our purpose here), and has an average employee retention time of 1 year, and a Wendys that pays $10, and keeps employees for EVER. Both have stacks of applicants numbering in the hundreds, so when an employee leaves, it's the work of 2 phone calls to have a new employee there the following day. Is the Wendy's making a good decision? That depends on training costs. If an employee can be trained to do the work in a week at 80%, and "fully trained" in a month, then the "cost" for Mcdonalds to replace an employee is $512. If they stay 6 months, that means that the cost to replace employees is $512/employee/year on average. By contrast, Wendy's, at an extra $2/hour, is paying $3840/year to eliminate that $512. That's not a good economic decision.
This is why jobs that require a good deal of very specific training pay more than jobs that are more or less "plug and play". Because the cost to replace an employee is much higher in those fields.
"But, why should teachers get paid so little?"
First of all, that's an outright fabrication. Teachers get paid a lot.
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary
Second of all, yes, it's true that the payscale for teachers is low compared to other professions with similar education and training requirements. However, in order to analyze this, it's necessary to come back to the basic question: What does it cost to put a butt in that chair? The fact is, every public school has a stack of resumes thousands deep of applicants willing to do the work at that price. Why would that be? It's for several reasons. First, and most important, the job has a good deal of nonmonetary compensation. That is to say, there are a lot of "warm fuzzies", that go along with the job, including satisfaction, the fun of dealing with children, and the social approval that go along with the job. People *want* to be teachers. Does anyone *want* to be a septic system repairman?
But, goes the argument, it's SO important, it should pay more than investment banking!" No, it's objectively vastly LESS important than investment banking. A teacher has the opportunity to touch at most a few hundeed lives a year, some do it well, others do it poorly, most do a mediocre job. Teachers produce a lot of inspiring stories, they can improve lives, and make quite a big difference. That's all true. However, an investment banker touches thousands of lives EVERY DAY. A bad call by a teacher typically sends a child home unhappy, a bad call by an investment banker can destroy hundreds of lives, businesses, jobs, can determine whether hundreds of people go to college, whether pensions get paid, etcetera. That objectively matters more, and, since it has similar training requirements and stiffer competition at the top, it pays more.
"Every job should pay a living wage".
Define your terms. What is a "living wage". Does it include "medical care"? To what standard? "Lifesaving treatments"? Do you mean decades of statins, or bones set? Do you mean multiple million dollar surgeries, or basic immunizations? Does it include "housing"? Does that mean a single family house with no more than 1 person per room within 20 minutes drive of your work? Or might it mean living with roommates? Does a "living wage" include making enough, on 1 income to raise a family of 4 to an arbitrary standard? Most of the proponents I have encountered support exactly this, that a single person, working 40 hours per week should be able to have *everything*. This is literally their argument. How many times have you heard "No one should have to choose between X and Y"? That statement implies that there is literally nothing that should be dependent on the contribution that an individual makes to society, that society should provide literally everything, without ever requesting anything in return.
Furthermore, they should be able to have *everything* without the need of being *given* it. That is, the employer must provide it, rather than society providing it.
This is one of the most broken aspects of this entire conversation. If *you* think that a person should have access to a good or service, then it's *your* duty to give them that access. The attempt to move that burden over to the employer is poorly thought through at best, and highly immoral. If the voters choose to give goods and services to people, then it's the voters that must bear the costs. Asking the uninvolved third parties to do so is both nonfunctional and immoral.
Now, saying that it's immoral is an emotive argument. So, let's concentrate on the "nonfunctional" portion. First of all, the majority of those in poverty do not work. At all. At current, it's 62% that don't work that year.
http://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-are-poverty-rates-among-working-adults
How is a minimum wage going to help those that do not work? Of those in poverty, only 12% work full time, year round. Minimum wage, full time is above poverty level for one person. It's above poverty for 2 people. The only way a person working 40 hours per week is below poverty is if they have more than one non-working household member. Which happens distressingly often, but that's a separate conversation. So, the minimum wage IS a "living wage" for 1 person, or even 2. So, what we're arguing about is *exactly* "Should a single unskilled worker at minimum wage make enough money to raise a family of 3 without drawing on the social safety net?" I would argue that the answer is rightly "no", particularly since doing it by minimum wage increases will mostly put more money in the hands of middle and upper-class families, while pushing others into poverty due to the disemployment effects.
More on this later, I have to go now.