Sparkybob
King Koopa
I have a status?
Posts: 10,992
|
Post by Sparkybob on Oct 14, 2013 21:05:40 GMT -5
I read a study the other week that said if they raised wages for McDonalds employees the cost that would be passed on to the customer wasn't even a dollar. Yet I wonder how much the CEOs get every year. I'm not just talking about a salary but a bonus and wage increase. You know it's pretty nice. That's true: particularly in a place like the fast food industry, the rise in prices would be very minimal. As you say, most very large companies can pretty easily cover the extra costs with some restructuring at the corporate level, If the minimum wage goes up by a dollar, that means each worker goes home with about 40 dollars extra a week. Now multiply that by all the minimum wage workers that McDonald employs. That is a huge internal cost that the company takes and they aren't getting any addition value in return. Then take into account all the suppliers a company like McDonald needs for their final product and you can imagine how much new cost they have without any additional value gained back. Eventually if they don't want to lose most of their profit margins and stock holders, they need to up their prices a noticeable amount to offset the cost. Now take this example for 99% of companies in the economy and you get this cycle of inflation.
|
|
|
Post by Red Impact on Oct 14, 2013 21:22:49 GMT -5
I put the photo in spoiler tags due to size but I think it's part of the problem. A job as a receptionist who will answer phone calls, greet visitors, and schedule appointments that you need to have a 4 year degree for. Of course not all jobs are like this but it's becoming more and more frequent. People are being pushed into college to get starter jobs and we'll never be able to pay it off AND the cost of college is always getting bigger. There is nothing more frustrating than being in an interview and being told you won't get the entry level job because you don't have a degree, and the person interviewing you admitted they didn't have a degree either. {Spoiler} That is a big part of the problem to me, the destruction of non-collegiate careers. We've gotten into this societal trend of pushing college at all costs, but don't have the job market to support it. It's watered college down into just this thing you do and hurt the market by forcing workers to pay for years of schooling for jobs that don't give any added benefits for having a degree. I think a big part of fixing the problems would be to limit the costs of college and relieve the societal pressure of going to a four-year university to be able to get any job (or to get rid of any stigma of going Vo Tech). If you're only going to be trained on the job for whatever it is, then a college degree really shouldn't be required.
|
|
SOR
Unicron
Posts: 2,611
|
Post by SOR on Oct 14, 2013 21:26:37 GMT -5
Here is the real question. Why have children if you feel you're not making enough money to properly support them? That would assume that every childbirth in the world is carefully planned, which is being incredibly generous to humanity. Not to start a debate but if you're working at McDonalds and fall pregnant you look at your finances and see how much a baby would cost and you either: 1. Fix the issue by attending a short course and working your ass off to get a job in that field that pays more then your McDonalds one did 2. You make a very hard but mature decision and either abort the child or put the child up for adoption because you recognize you can't have the means to look after it. Here is the real question. Why have children if you feel you're not making enough money to properly support them? How do you know that at one time, she was able to afford children and something happened? Do you know her personal life and what happened? Because the article says she was working there for 10 years. Nobody can afford a child on 8.25 an hour. I'm sure anyone here with children can tell you how expensive they are (I've read 150,000 for the basics)
|
|
Mac
Bill S. Preston, Esq.
Sigs/Avatars cannot exceed 1MB
Posts: 16,502
|
Post by Mac on Oct 14, 2013 21:28:34 GMT -5
That's true: particularly in a place like the fast food industry, the rise in prices would be very minimal. As you say, most very large companies can pretty easily cover the extra costs with some restructuring at the corporate level, If the minimum wage goes up by a dollar, that means each worker goes home with about 40 dollars extra a week. Now multiply that by all the minimum wage workers that McDonald employs. That is a huge internal cost that the company takes and they aren't getting any addition value in return. Then take into account all the suppliers a company like McDonald needs for their final product and you can imagine how much new cost they have without any additional value gained back. Eventually if they don't want to lose most of their profit margins and stock holders, they need to up their prices a noticeable amount to offset the cost. Now take this example for 99% of companies in the economy and you get this cycle of inflation. Youre 100% correct. Cost of business does get passed on to the consumer. Theres a reason a soda isnt 5 cents anymore. And it's not because companies got greedy. People will eventually reach a breaking point on what theyre willing to pay for a product or service. And labor is a service to a company. If raising the quality of living was as simple as increasing the minimum wage then making the minimum wage $50/ hour would make more sense than just going to $10 - $15. It sucks to say, but some peoples labor and use to the workforce isn't really worth that much.
|
|
BigBadZ
Grimlock
The Rumors Are All True
Posts: 13,923
|
Post by BigBadZ on Oct 14, 2013 21:32:40 GMT -5
I put the photo in spoiler tags due to size but I think it's part of the problem. A job as a receptionist who will answer phone calls, greet visitors, and schedule appointments that you need to have a 4 year degree for. Of course not all jobs are like this but it's becoming more and more frequent. People are being pushed into college to get starter jobs and we'll never be able to pay it off AND the cost of college is always getting bigger. There is nothing more frustrating than being in an interview and being told you won't get the entry level job because you don't have a degree, and the person interviewing you admitted they didn't have a degree either. {Spoiler} That is a big part of the problem to me, the destruction of non-collegiate careers. We've gotten into this societal trend of pushing college at all costs, but don't have the job market to support it. It's watered college down into just this thing you do and hurt the market by forcing workers to pay for years of schooling for jobs that don't give any added benefits for having a degree. I think a big part of fixing the problems would be to limit the costs of college and relieve the societal pressure of going to a four-year university to be able to get any job (or to get rid of any stigma of going Vo Tech). If you're only going to be trained on the job for whatever it is, then a college degree really shouldn't be required. 100% agree. College really isn't for everyone, I just wish I knew that before I started. I would have definitely went to trade school or tried to get hired on as a bottom guy and work my way up (which is what I began to do, just had all the debt from college with it). Not to mention the college loan system is so screwed that they'll approve anybody for one. I've finally got mine down to under $5,000 and I get e-mails from my loaners about getting another loan or re-financing it (can't think of the right verbiage) to extend my interest they are collecting.
|
|
Mac
Bill S. Preston, Esq.
Sigs/Avatars cannot exceed 1MB
Posts: 16,502
|
Post by Mac on Oct 14, 2013 21:39:18 GMT -5
College is a nightmare for most. It's a life of debt with a poor market for most degrees. For most people it'd be worth saving that $100k+ and buying property or investing it. The "blue collar" fields are legit, learn to be a plumber, electrician, HVAC, carpenter. THey cant outsource your job and you'll never have to worry about what minimum wage is.
|
|
|
Post by Red Impact on Oct 14, 2013 21:41:10 GMT -5
That would assume that every childbirth in the world is carefully planned, which is being incredibly generous to humanity. Not to start a debate but if you're working at McDonalds and fall pregnant you look at your finances and see how much a baby would cost and you either: 1. Fix the issue by attending a short course and working your ass off to get a job in that field that pays more then your McDonalds one did 2. You make a very hard but mature decision and either abort the child or put the child up for adoption because you recognize you can't have the means to look after it. What short course are you going to take that's going to be able to be completed in 9 months, be completed while pregnant, and has a guaranteed ability to lead to a better paying job in the future? The notion of being able to even do anything like that in that time frame is iffy enough, and whatever you do is going to add more costs and not going to bring any sort of job guarantee in the future. Your best bet for a short course would be something like a paramedic, and that's half a year that you probably won't be doing while pregnant. McDonald's may suck, but at the very least you won't lose a fast food job as long as you're competent. Option 2 instantly pushes into some very dodgy (and against the rules for being highly political and religious) discussion so I won't even talk about it.
|
|
|
Post by Red Impact on Oct 14, 2013 21:44:25 GMT -5
College is a nightmare for most. It's a life of debt with a poor market for most degrees. For most people it'd be worth saving that $100k+ and buying property or investing it. The "blue collar" fields are legit, learn to be a plumber, electrician, HVAC, carpenter. THey cant outsource your job and you'll never have to worry about what minimum wage is. If you're smart with it, it's a fine investment (better than playing the stock market/entering the real estate market, which has bankrupted plenty of people). The problem is that colleges have done a terrible job being honest with students about the market and what their degrees are worth. It doesn't mean much if you're getting a degree in a bad field, and colleges don't like telling students not to major in something, because that might cut into the tuition they get.
|
|
Toxik916
Hank Scorpio
Sacramento Proud
Posts: 6,207
|
Post by Toxik916 on Oct 14, 2013 22:14:01 GMT -5
That's true: particularly in a place like the fast food industry, the rise in prices would be very minimal. As you say, most very large companies can pretty easily cover the extra costs with some restructuring at the corporate level, If the minimum wage goes up by a dollar, that means each worker goes home with about 40 dollars extra a week. Now multiply that by all the minimum wage workers that McDonald employs. That is a huge internal cost that the company takes and they aren't getting any addition value in return. Then take into account all the suppliers a company like McDonald needs for their final product and you can imagine how much new cost they have without any additional value gained back. Eventually if they don't want to lose most of their profit margins and stock holders, they need to up their prices a noticeable amount to offset the cost. Now take this example for 99% of companies in the economy and you get this cycle of inflation. I really get what you're saying, but when profits for companies are booming and the wages for employees stay relatively the same or decrease over the course of a few years that's where I have a problem. I worked of a national grocery chain that was reporting record profits, but they were doing everything they could to take away certain benefits from employees and also lower the wages they were paying. Fun fact, when I started bagging groceries I was paid 8.40 an hour, after heated negotiations the with the union(ufcw) the store lowered it's starting wage to 7.25 an hour(minimum wage at the time) and quadrupled the hours it took to top out. That's what corporate America has become and it's bullshit for the working class. I will never understand how people would rather defend the exorbitant profits company makes while they don't give a shit about the PEOPLE that are getting f***ed by the system.
|
|
|
Post by Piccolo on Oct 14, 2013 22:34:00 GMT -5
I worked of a national grocery chain that was reporting record profits, but they were doing everything they could to take away certain benefits from employees and also lower the wages they were paying. Fun fact, when I started bagging groceries I was paid 8.40 an hour, after heated negotiations the with the union(ufcw) the store lowered it's starting wage to 7.25 an hour(minimum wage at the time) and quadrupled the hours it took to top out. Did the union get you anything in the negotiations, or was it a wholesale defeat?
|
|
SOR
Unicron
Posts: 2,611
|
Post by SOR on Oct 14, 2013 22:39:48 GMT -5
Not to start a debate but if you're working at McDonalds and fall pregnant you look at your finances and see how much a baby would cost and you either: 1. Fix the issue by attending a short course and working your ass off to get a job in that field that pays more then your McDonalds one did 2. You make a very hard but mature decision and either abort the child or put the child up for adoption because you recognize you can't have the means to look after it. What short course are you going to take that's going to be able to be completed in 9 months, be completed while pregnant, and has a guaranteed ability to lead to a better paying job in the future? The notion of being able to even do anything like that in that time frame is iffy enough, and whatever you do is going to add more costs and not going to bring any sort of job guarantee in the future. Your best bet for a short course would be something like a paramedic, and that's half a year that you probably won't be doing while pregnant. McDonald's may suck, but at the very least you won't lose a fast food job as long as you're competent. You can do some short courses in 3-6 months. Things like aged care nursing (Which pays okay, in my country at least) can be completed in that time period. You can also work your ass off and do one of those "Finish when you can courses" and finish a 12 month course in half the time. It's a tough situation no doubt but this woman did have options.
|
|
Toxik916
Hank Scorpio
Sacramento Proud
Posts: 6,207
|
Post by Toxik916 on Oct 14, 2013 22:41:51 GMT -5
I worked of a national grocery chain that was reporting record profits, but they were doing everything they could to take away certain benefits from employees and also lower the wages they were paying. Fun fact, when I started bagging groceries I was paid 8.40 an hour, after heated negotiations the with the union(ufcw) the store lowered it's starting wage to 7.25 an hour(minimum wage at the time) and quadrupled the hours it took to top out. Did the union get you anything in the negotiations, or was it a wholesale defeat? Worse benefits, lower wages, harder to get raises, lost our additional sunday pay, vacations took longer to accrue, etc. Not one thing was gained. The union had to bend over backwards to appease the company. Our contract negotiation were going on after the southern California union grocery employees got shafted in a work stoppage that lasted like 9 months. Basically they conceded everything to the company to avoid a similar work stoppage.
|
|
|
Post by Red Impact on Oct 14, 2013 23:09:51 GMT -5
You can do some short courses in 3-6 months. Things like aged care nursing (Which pays okay, in my country at least) can be completed in that time period. You can also work your ass off and do one of those "Finish when you can courses" and finish a 12 month course in half the time. It's a tough situation no doubt but this woman did have options. We'll have to chalk it up to differences in schooling between countries then. To become any type of nurse is at minimum 2 years everywhere I've seen here, and many places won't take you unless you have a 4 year degree. For six months, you're looking at something like a paramedic, which isn't really a training regimen you can do while you're 6 months pregnant. A lot of medical programs have at least a one-year commitment to education, and that can vary state by state. Those that require less often don't even have very good job security to begin with, because they're menial jobs that other staffers could take of in a time when medical costs are constantly being cut, or highly specialized where there isn't a huge influx of jobs to begin with. And of course, jobs vary widely depending on where you live, what is available in one place is often not available elsewhere. And even if it was a complete as you go program, those often are still attached to semesters at schools here, you can't just take everything whenever. You have tests and other mandatory things that push out how long you have to take it. There's also a lot of other factors. Did she have access to a VO tech or community college that offered any of these faster programs? Transportation is often a huge burden for the poor, and in much of the country there's very little, if any, decent public transport. Did she have the money to go to school? Even if she got student loans, they take a while to come in and don't pay for everything, and for a program like that you're probably not going to have a bunch of scholarship options. Even if the jobs did pay better, if you're trading a $9 an hour job for a $13 an hour job and taking on a large burden of debt, it's not going to be any easier to raise a child. And there's also just straight lack of information. You have to know these programs exist and if they're not advertising 6 month programs to a new career, which I've not seen, then poor people aren't going to know to look for them.
|
|
|
Post by "Cane Dewey" Johnson on Oct 14, 2013 23:22:56 GMT -5
Problems caused by neoliberalism cannot be solved with more neoliberalism. But it's all but impossible to start a conversation with "hey, maybe we can socially and economically organize ourselves in such a way that isn't capitalistic." All subsequent points mentioned in this thread stem from this gap in the discussion.
|
|
SEAN CARLESS
Hank Scorpio
More of a B+ player, actually
I'm Necessary Evil.
Posts: 5,770
|
Post by SEAN CARLESS on Oct 14, 2013 23:25:27 GMT -5
I read a study the other week that said if they raised wages for McDonalds employees the cost that would be passed on to the customer wasn't even a dollar. Yet I wonder how much the CEOs get every year. I'm not just talking about a salary but a bonus and wage increase. You know it's pretty nice. I remember when I was a kid my uncle (who's quite wealthy) had cut-backs made at his investment firm. Except it wasn't any of the superfluous, unnecessary positions like the TEN vice-presidents they had -- but rather entry level jobs and mid-level positions. I remember asking my uncle why they didn't just amalgamate (I didn't use that word) some of those VP positions into one job, (something he had joked about before), so those other people, who actually did real jobs, could keep theirs. He said it didn't work that way. I asked why, and he said "Because they think we're more important". That always stuck in my craw. Even to this day.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Oct 14, 2013 23:48:11 GMT -5
College is a nightmare for most. It's a life of debt with a poor market for most degrees. For most people it'd be worth saving that $100k+ and buying property or investing it. The "blue collar" fields are legit, learn to be a plumber, electrician, HVAC, carpenter. THey cant outsource your job and you'll never have to worry about what minimum wage is. If you're smart with it, it's a fine investment (better than playing the stock market/entering the real estate market, which has bankrupted plenty of people). The problem is that colleges have done a terrible job being honest with students about the market and what their degrees are worth. It doesn't mean much if you're getting a degree in a bad field, and colleges don't like telling students not to major in something, because that might cut into the tuition they get. Oh, it will cut into their tuition. Nobody's going to go into all this debt to get a piece of paper really ain't worth shit and if you think about it, the degree that's even wanted is getting higher and higher. It used to be you'd be all right with a Bachelor's, but now you've got everybody running around with a Master's. Pretty soon it's just going to be Ph.Ds and shit. After going through the whole college thing and getting my degree (while being fortunate enough to not graduate in debt to anybody) I've gotta be honest... College is just another hustle. Now, getting that degree means more for someone like me, considering that nobody would even think to hire my black ass without it, regardless of experience. One thing that wasn't apparent to me until too late is that college is all about testing your ability to make (useful) friends. Friends can get your foot in the door. Friends can help you tailor that resume. Friends can walk your resume to HR. Friends can hire you with a minimum of fuss. If you're not good at networking then you better shoot for a STEM or Healthcare job, otherwise you'll likely be stuck competing for a job you could've gotten in your Sophomore year in high school. Sorry, I choose this tangent because I can't get drawn into an argument over whether or not the people on the bottom deserve to be paid enough to live their lives with a decent wage in their pockets. It'll just end with me censoring myself and yelling at the computer screen a lot.
|
|
Glitch
King Koopa
Not Going To Die; Childs, we're goin' out to give Blair the test. If he tries to make it back here and we're not with him... burn him.
Watching you.
Posts: 12,717
|
Post by Glitch on Oct 15, 2013 0:05:08 GMT -5
Walking on egg shells on this topic, but I will say that minimum wage was something you could live off of when it first began in America in the early 20th century all the way up to the early 80s. In most of Europe, Australia, Singapore and a few other countries, you can live off of it too. so I don't buy the "Raising the wage creates a cycle" argument.
|
|
h
Hank Scorpio
Posts: 5,734
|
Post by h on Oct 15, 2013 0:16:36 GMT -5
I disagree completely with the generalizations about college. I went, spent a bunch of years and a bunch of money, came out of it with a couple of pieces of paper, did no networking, and got a position in my (competitive) field. I worked hard and have turned it into a career with job security. The focus on where you go or who you know played absolutely no role for me.
|
|
|
Post by Jimichiro Likes Erick Rowan on Oct 15, 2013 0:46:19 GMT -5
So what makes a livable, decent wage? Is there a specific number ($__,000 a year)? And what exactly should minimum wage be?
I just ask because I'm seeing the terms thrown around a lot and we all could have different ideas of what those could be.
Speaking for myself, I might make a couple hairs more than 15k a year. Doesn't sound like much but I'm able to pay my bills, clothe & feed my family, put gas in my truck and go to the movies or a ball game once in awhile. It's not a flashy life. Some weeks are easier than others but I'm living decently, in my mind.
|
|
|
Post by Piccolo on Oct 15, 2013 1:07:36 GMT -5
As far as a living wage, I lived well on 20K as a PhD student, but I was in a hard science and was living far from any cities. My humanities PhD student friends made around 14K or so, and they lived very frugally, but were able to pay the bills.
Of course, that's being single, in an area where the cost of living is reasonable, and sternly insisting on religious condom use to avoid unintended creation of new dependents. The "living wage" is nebulous, because every person's cost of living is different. Some people have five children and no spouse. Some people have health issues. Some people (I have friends who are this way) absolutely NEED to live in a city... they'd die of boredom elsewhere. Many things can increase your expenses... it's not as simple as what you need for rent, food, and bills. The concept is a shifting target.
|
|