Because it isn't just happening in the construction industry. There are restaurants in my town offering a $3000 bonus if servers and cooks commit to 4 months of work. They literally cannot open entire sections of their restaurant because they cannot find enough people willing to work. Same thing with the trucking industry, there was a driver shortage before the pandemic, and it has only gotten worse. People are simply not willing to work so long as they are being paid to sit at home.
Firstly, thank you for preserving some of the natural ecosystem on your farm. That is a tricky choice to make but from what I see driving about you are in a minority.
You take a drive from Melbourne to Sydney and you get to see the effect of livestock farming, it's been completely denuded of natural vegetation everywhere where it's flat enough to smash down.
The destruction is right there in front of your eyes. Knocking down scrub for cattle farming wipes out the natural environment, there are some species where it does good for them or kangaroos and birds that like open grasslands but for everything else it's really bad.
Drive from Melbourne to Adelaide you get the same thing.
Australia knocked down more open forest in the last four years than they did in the Amazon - 90% for beef farming.
You can grow crops on a much smaller area, without even mentioning organic crop growing where you don't use chemicals to wipe everything out.
My thought is it's for people who are meat replacing rather than being vegetarian.
I agree with you about so many foods to choose from.
For me as a vegetarian it's an absurd thing wanting to eat something that tastes like animal but it's a taste thing so it's just a subjective view of mine.
I don't think anyone is saying that these sorts of companies have lots of money.
These business have a model that relies on poverty wages changing the minimum wage will disrupt these businesses greatly and I don't see a problem with that.
You can't keep a broken thing going because of the businesses that will have to change their model.
But sorry I also see your point there needs to be help to business to change their business.
Yeah but the job market is not a free market, because not getting a job is existential for those seeking the job, while the company can usually just survive when a position is not filled for a certain time.
This means to make this a free market many nations did the reasonable thing and introduced measures like minimum wages and unemployment benefits. This way when you loose your job the balance of power evens out a little and the job market works better for all involved (workers have a highee chance of finding a job they like, companies have a higher chance of getting people that like them, really shitty companies get an incentive to change).
In the US all shitty work places have no incentive at all to change, because everybody and their dog is struggling to make ends meet. That means no matter how slavishly they treat your people, there will always be another person desperate enough to throw themselves into the grinder. Result: No incentive to change for the company and people who feel like society ows them nothing.
I don't think that is recipe for a bright future, but who am I to judge.
So from a systemic perspective minimum wage is like a limit you can set for how desperate you allow people to get. And quite frankly. 15 USD is still less than if you had adjusted the original minimum wage for inflation, so come on.
> Yeah but the job market is not a free market, because not getting a job is existential for those seeking the job, while the company can usually just survive when a position is not filled for a certain time.
This is, to begin with, not true. It's common for small businesses to be operating at the margin. If you don't have someone making the sandwiches then you don't have revenue and you still have rent and utilities. That math puts you out of business in a hurry and then the owner (whose wages came out of the revenue they now don't have) is facing the same circumstances as the employee.
But on top of that, even if you existentially need a job, that doesn't mean you need that job. You can pick the one that pays the most.
Where this falls down is when all of your alternatives are terrible. But if all of your alternatives are terrible, prohibiting you from choosing the one that was the least terrible (e.g. because it's right across the street but pays $2/hour less instead of being a two hour commute for $2/hour more) is not actually helping you.
To do that you need something like lower housing costs (so the wage you can earn is enough to live), or some kind of free community college so you can learn a trade that pays better, or a UBI. Not a minimum wage that could take away the job you currently existentially need.
Oh sweet summer child. When you are in debt and struggle to survive on a day to day basis, time is your enemy You cannot afford not to take a job. And if you are lucky enough to be able afford it today, you might not tomorrow.
Another thing: many people need more than one job as it is now. Guess what: if you pay people a decent living wage more people can actually get jobs, because less people have to do two or more. If your business is so inefficient it can't support minimum wage labor, it was doomed to fail before. Again: even McDonalds manages to pay minimum wages in Europe and their prices are roughly comparable. You are being gaslighted by the people profiting from that modern form of slavery.
you are right in recognizing that living costs are an issue as well, and they are an issue in many big cities. The known solution for this issue is publically owned housing which you shouldn't put into their own districts (thus creating ghettos) but mix them in throughout the city (Vienna's "Gemeindebau" is a good example for this, Vienna repeatedly got the title "City most worth living in" over the past decades). Don't only put poor people into these houses, make them decent and make them something people want to live in. Make them cheaper to rent than other flats (this way the rents in the surrounding areas cannot go up so fast). But most importantly: this must be done from the public side — nobody else in control has the incentive to act in ways that lower rents.
Aside from all this, what the US really needs to do is to look at all the other countries that are comparable to the area you are living in and wonder why they are doing so well without all the doomsday scenarios your politicians make tou believe (both socially and economically). Whenever I talk to US citizens about this they are either completely delusioned ("I live in an oligarchy") or they pretend their problems are so unique the rest of the industrialized world never had to deal with comparable things. "Who knows, maybe it cannot be solved at all", they say, while it was solved literally one country over since half a century ago.
That's like wondering whether man will ever be able to move faster than a horse, while your neighbouring country has airplaines they use on a daily basis.
Housing is an issue in big cities largely due to government policies that both limit inventory (building and zoning regulations) and limit profitability (rent control) that make is extremely undesirable to create new housing.
The solution to this is NOT government housing but less government regulations about building new housing
Not who you replied to, but I believe the current popular answer is to refer to Japan. Numerous articles have been written regarding how they managed their housing crisis by deregulating zoning and building permits. You'll have to read up on it yourself, it's beyond me to summarize as it's a complex topic and the model is not perfectly exportable. Partially for "real" reasons, such as Japan has so many earthquakes that many houses are not intended to last for 100+ years which affects the home economy. Partially for social reasons, e.g. wealthier nations view homes as investments (more-so than as a place to live, like we view an apartment), and people push tons of local/state/federal rules to ensure their investment always grows in value. The easiest way to make the value grow is to ensure there are no more homes e.g. NIMBY
I live in Japan and can tell you that those conditions lead to ugly, low standard buildings that seem to me to be among the very top complaints foreigners living here have about the place. The incentives are completely skewed here and seem just as likely to be corrupt as any other place. There's plenty of discussion about it on these boards, this one comes to mind https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26399071
As to the earthquakes/natural disasters bit for why they build relatively disposable homes - does that happen on the west coast of the US, for instance? I'm genuinely interested, if anyone knows.
The low standard one is reasonable as that is what keeps costs low. The alternative is high standard and high cost. You can't really get high standards for low costs.
If the government dictates that all housing needs to be high standard, the collateral damage to that policy is that you can only build housing that prices people out of the market.
> You can't really get high standards for low costs.
I agree but here they're also expensive, which, in my view, is a symptom of the corruption and lack of a free market.
> ugly is subjective so I won't touch on that.
Again I agree, but if you're into industrial estates with lots of concrete and overhead wires galore, then Japan is the place for you. I'm sure someone likes it, maybe the brutalists who made the ugliest parts of my country (the UK) after the war.
Tokyo. Prices have largely remained flat for the same unit of housing for decades because there aren't nearly as many government restrictions on construction of new housing.
Please try to keep the snark out. If they were snarky to you then I say go for it but I didn't notice they were snarky to you and, regardless of whether you agree with them, their contribution to this discussion is worthwhile.
Needing only one job is a historical anomaly as a result of an industrial society. Historically, people would have to perform a variety of tasks to provide for oneself.
Furthermore, more than one job de-risks someone's situation just like a consultant with many clients can handle the loss of a single client and not see their income fall to zero.
It's the total hours of paid labor over N jobs that you should look at instead. If you do 60 hours a week at one job or three jobs for 20 hours each, you're doing the same amount of labor with less risk.
The only qualitative difference between one 60 hour job and three 20 hour jobs is the benefits received from working 40+ hours for a single employer, but this isn't an issue with how many jobs you work. It's an issue with an artificial asymptotic condition created by an act of legislation by government.
Every time legislation creates artificial asymptotic conditions, you're going to get actors that optimize around that artificial boundary condition. If you want to avoid the circumstance, you need legislative solutions that are continuous in nature instead of asymptotic.
I'll just point out: if you need 60 hours of income to survive you actually increase risk by having it split between several jobs. That is because having a portion of enough rent to not be evicted is equivalent to having not enough rent to not be evicted. You only need one of your jobs to collapse for you to only have a portion of your rent therefore the more jobs you have the more likely you are to have one fail and to be in that position.
In other words diversifying your income only decreases risk when you don't need all of it, you'd be hard pressed to argue that that group includes those earning minimum wage.
> I will never stop being amazed at how Americans argue that something decent is wrong, or untrue, or even impossible... when Europe exists.
In Europe there are zero businesses operating at the margin that would go under if unable to staff their operation? That was the thing you are responding to.
I will never stop being amazed that European's think Europe is a Utopia that the rest of the world should look to as a model.
I do not want the US to be Europe, that is nothing short of a dystopia for me a person that wants Individualism, and individual freedom. rejecting Authoritarianism and Collectivism
If people in the US like the EU model soo much then i encourage them to expatriate to that location. Stop trying to make the US into the EU
I've never known anyone here in the US (friend, coworker, family member, acquaintance etc - Internet forums don't count) who has moved to Europe permanently. I know that many do, obviously, I just don't one personally. At the same time, I personally know many Europeans living here and have seen many more coming over the years.
I can't find hard data, but probably we should not say that "those who have the means to, do". It's likely more of "a tiny percentage of those who have the means to, do".
> An American barely surviving on minimum wage is very unlikely to move to Europe.
And even if they did they would be far less likely to contribute meaningfully to the commons in Europe to support that social safety net. Therein lies the rub.
The only way to provide the productivity that funds the social safety net is when those providing the safety net far outnumber those consuming it. As this gets out of balance, those providing it start to resent those consuming it.
When it gets out of wack, you get situations like the DDR and North Korea, where the government needs to erect walls to prevent the productive people from escaping that shitty deal.
You can only achieve this balance in a high trust society where there is social pressure not to be on the consuming side for longer than is reasonable to get back on the producing side.
Guess what destroys that high trust condition? Bringing in outsiders faster than can be assimilated and/or eliminating the expectation of assimilation as the US is doing and Europe is now starting to do.
It's not that you can't bring in outsiders and maintain a high trust society. You can. But that takes work and it requires an acknowledgement that a high trust society is something that we should be trying to preserve while we do things that can hurt the current state of trust in a country.
From a trust perspective, the US is at a low probably not seen since either the Civil War or the Great Depression. We should solve the trust issue if we are to have any hope of building the social safety net features that rely on high social trust as a foundation.
Yes, the obviousness of the limited capacity of multicultural integration should have been easily deducible to anyone in a position of real power back in the 70s and 80s when the decison was made. Yet, for several decades major countries, having decided to go down the multicultural road, also decided against a sustainable rate of integration over centuries, such as a constant 0.2% annual immigration influx until 2200 CE. The key decision makers instead favoured a destructive course of short term profits within their lifespan, and immense long term costs, that has led to the current outcomes with all the eventual consequences.
Interestingly, America is one of the best places to be if you are wealthy (part of the motivation on this thread). So it's also unlikely for a wealthy American to move.
Believe it or not, a lot people, in poverty or otherwise, really like the unique things in this country and most would rather have it this way than to move to Europe (which has its own share of major problems despite being a cool place overall).
Also, poor people rarely know the reality of other countries. I have friends in the States who firmly believe that Europe is a hellhole even though they are literally a medical emergency away from a bankruptcy.
Maybe that is because they value something more than Free Healthcare. Maybe they are not willing to trade this liberty for the safety of government services.....
Hmm Actual Freedom of Speech (we are not putting people in jail for jokes on YouTube as an example), The right to Self Defense (aka 2nd Amendment), the relationship between government and the people (i.e we believe rights transcend government and are not granted by same), I could go on and on
Housing cost is directly link to wages, when wages increase then the rent goes up, sometimes more than wages. This is because housing is in very limited supply (some artificial due to zoning and regulations) and extra income will be sucked out as rent.
>>15 USD is still less than if you had adjusted the original minimum wage for inflation, so come on.
This is a myth that is often repeated, but I have yet to see it proven.
The Original Federal Min Wage was passed in 1938 and was $0.38 per hour, Adjusted to 2021 that would be $7.14
In 1981 it was raised to $3.35, in 2021 dollars that would be $9.76
In 2009 it was raise to where it is today, $7.25 ($0.66 lower than a pure inflation increase should have been) and is 9.26 in 2021 dollars
So if you want to do a pure inflation adjusted min wage it would be no more than $10 not $15
I can find at no point in the history of Federal minimum wage would have wage inflation adjusted be more than $15/hr today. I can debate the merits of minimum wage, the ethics, etc, but we have to be having a debate with actual facts not political talking points.
That is moving the goal posts, the comment I was responding to was "15 USD is still less than if you had adjusted the original minimum wage for inflation, so come on. "
Given the context this would be the standard model upon which dollars are adjusted for inflation over time, tools like usinflationcalculator.com make this easy to factor in what that would be
If you want to shift the debate to "what is inflation" that is fine, but that is not the debate I am having in this comment thread
> because not getting a job is existential for those seeking the job
Before jobs offered by others existed, not working in some form would have been existential for those people. This is the de facto state of existence. You'd have to at least do some form of hunter/gathering or subsistence farming.
This increasingly common idea that individuals no longer are obligated to provide for themselves is wild. The only way around it is to obligate others to provide for you instead of providing for yourself. The last time this was a common idea in the United States was in the in the antebellum South.
The government has much better options than mandating a living wage.
It can simply pay you the wage as an indirect subsidy to stimulate production.
It can employ you in the construction of infrastructure. The infrastructure of the US is dilapidated to the point of national disgrace.
It should still mandate living wages, the same way it should not allow employers to lash their employees or own them as chattel, or any number of other practices which are both immoral, and cannot find any temporary justification due to exigent circumstances (eg. literal struggle for national survival...)
I think something is missing from this equation, which is the balancing act. The value of labor is dynamic, it depends what people are willing to pay, and what is the price of other costs.
How I see it, labor cost have been cut, while rent has gone up and prices have gone down.
If you increased minimum wage, it would put pressure on prices to go up and rent to go down, both would increase the value of the labor itself.
I think this whole dynamic is way way harder to model and predict how it'll play out then everyone makes it out to be. None of people's simple projection account for it all. Even economists with fancy models backed by simulations, math, and all that can't figure out the real outcome and often disagree with one another on what would happen.
It's not as easy as saying, half the restaurants are going to shut down, and leave empty all those commercial space. What happens next? Maybe some customers start to be willing to pay even more to get back some of the great restaurants they lost, or their proximity to them. Maybe landlords have to lower their rent for something else to fill in the vacancy, etc. Maybe everyone is happy with only half of the restaurants remaining, and each of those restaurant is making twice as much now allowing them to hire more staff and pay even higher. There's a lot of balancing act that could happen.
I guess the question is what do you do when you find people who present with that situation: that they’re perfectly capable to hold down a job but only to create $10/hr of economic value by their labor.
If you set the minimum wage at $15/hr and do nothing else, you have made that person worse off than today. Everyone around them now has more money, so everything is becoming more expensive. They now can’t find or keep a job, because any employer who employs them is losing at least $200/week, $10K/year by employing them.
I don’t know what the optimal solution is, but it’s not clear to me that the above is it.
Generally the math works the other way. I worked in a Wendy's for a while; I made minimum wage and most of the people made a little bit more. We cleared $30,000 a month profit for the owner ($100K revenue, $70K for expenses including all of our wages). If a company is so inept they can't generate a bit of value from people, then to be frank, as a society we can afford to be without them. Look at the minimum wage as a filter to remove companies that are so unsuccessful, that they disappear before dragging down the citizens.
Pretty amazing! Way way better than any of my friends who have owned restaurants. Did that $30,000 profit include paying off the mortgage, various forms of insurance, legal fees, accounting fees, taxes, and so on?
30% profit for a fast food restaurant is not credible. It's too competitive. I worked for McDonalds (a long time ago, but...) the best store in the market made a little over 10% profit. Others made less, or even lost money at certain times of the year.
So if someone else is willing to work for those wages (they don’t really need the income or have minimal expenses) you’d tell them “tough, it’s illegal to work for that wage now”?
That question never happens in places with a minimum wage. What you can do is support your employer by showing up early and/or helping out a few extra hours after the shift. Nothing in writing or by force.
I've really had a lot of jobs. I would just do anything for a while just to see what it is like. In some places it is as if Hitler won the war, in others the boss or manager becomes a good friend. You don't demand back wages from a friend.
Since that is how the relatively uncontroversial minimum wage law (which has been around since 1938) works, yes, society has generally decided that we do want to tell people, "it is illegal to work for some very low wage." And, while not the parent poster, I agree that it is a useful policy.
That’s a very US centric point of view and appeal to authority. Just because it’s been the law for almost 100 years doesn’t mean it’s the ideal approach.
And several developed countries have no floor other that agreed by through collective bargaining.
The problem here is, most peoples' wages are defined by their leverage, not their value. For people in those situations, the benefit of minimum wage is that most people below that wage immediately get leverage in the form of legal requirement to pay them (or anyone else) min wage.
This isn't a matter of improving the situation for everyone, it's a matter of improving the situation for the majority of min-wage workers.
If someone genuinely can't provide $10/hr of value, then either 1) they need to upskill (and there are social services for that, although perhaps not in the US idk) or 2) they're like one of those literal retards who are becoming literally unemployable, and the solution is either to subsidize their employer (which is okay in this instance because you're not subsidizing a race to the bottom like you are with subsidizing normal e.g. McDonalds wages) or put them on a disability pension.
But realistically, most people are capable of upskillinng and that's what they should be doing if they're not valuable enough to an employer.
I think we as a society have put in place lots of social programs, to the tune of billions and billions of dollars a year to ensure "survival" is not at play here.
Further at the end of the day wages are not the problem, cost of living is, economic value of labor is. Waving a magic wand and proclaiming a new min wage does not resolve those root issue, it may in some limited circumstances help a few people for a limited amount of time, but you need to resolve the root issue which mandated minimum wages increases is not going to do and often harms the very people you are looking to "help"
Please, define what is a poverty wage, it is important. How much stuff one should afford to avoid being called poor.
What is the change of the model in case of the restaurant? I can see only one, automate the jobs away to reduce the costs, namely replace humans with robots.
But, if we consider these crappy jobs, what about people that are not qualified/able to do any more advanced jobs? People have vastly different cognitive abilities, it is not like we can teach everyone to code. It will not work.
> Please, define what is a poverty wage, it is important.
The ability to afford adequate housing, food, and clothing. I'm not saying we should mandate people can afford a 1500 sq. ft. home, ribeye steaks every evening, and Ralph Lauren Polo threads, but how about at least a one bedroom, one bathroom apartment; nutritious, nourishing food; Walmart clothing at a minimum.
> What is the change of the model in case of the restaurant?
Removing the "tipping" system. Increase prices such that an employee can afford the above mentioned necessities.
> I can see only one, automate the jobs away to reduce the costs, namely replace humans with robots.
I think the industry will go here no matter what changes we do or do not make to policy, business models, etc.
> But, if we consider these crappy jobs, what about people that are not qualified/able to do any more advanced jobs? People have vastly different cognitive abilities, it is not like we can teach everyone to code. It will not work.
We either decide these people are expendable, or that they are human beings worthy of a baseline of a dignified life. I define a dignified life as the ability to have at least the minimums I described above.
Do workers who receive tips want it to go away? The friends I've known who worked jobs with tips seemed to think they would be paid less if tips were replaced with wage increases on the employer end; my understanding is that they made a significant amount of money in tips. Obviously this varies by individual, job, and establishment, though.
There some restaurants that tried to go no-tipping, but I think it didn't work out for them because they had a hard time finding/retaining staff.
everyone i know who has worked tipped and untipped service models preferred the untipped model for stability and the reduced interference of sadistic/irate/careless customers. in fact these people have been pretty instrumental in wider implementation as they have moved on to other work environments and advocated for that change. this is in a state that doesn’t count tips toward minimum wage.
the largest harm of the tipping model is in states that do count tips towards minimum wage. the wage paid by employer may be under $3/h and the employee mostly survives off tips. this means that tips are only subsidizing the employer, because an increase in tips is matched by a deduction in the wage paid by the employer, to a limit.
there are some rare instances, mostly luxury dining, where tips can far outpace typical restaurant wages. in this context the employer can afford to massively increase wages. there have been arguments made that these tips pay for the quality of service, but there is no reason this incentive and expectation can’t come from the employer directly, and it would remove the uncertainty of irresponsible customers failing to tip.
in all contexts, switching from tips to a real wage has many benefits to the employee when wages are adjusted properly, no detriments to the customer, and only harms businesses that are currently exploitative and doing harm.
If that were the case, then why did restaurants that switched to no-tipping models see the departure of much of their staff? [0] I would have expected servers to flock to those, but by the sound of it, tipping is reliable enough that servers can leave and go to a restaurant with tips and earn more money.
> “Andrew was very disappointed,” says an employee of Tarlow’s restaurant group, Marlow Collective, who asked to remain anonymous. “But when we went to non-tipping, we pretty much lost our entire staff that had been there for ten years. He wanted to make it work, but it just became really difficult.”
> ...
> But, it turned out, many front-of-house staffers were more concerned with making money than with maintaining the moral high ground. This February, Meyer admitted that he had lost 30 to 40 percent of his “legacy” staffers since 2015. (One Meyer employee told Grub last year that her wages dropped from $60,000 per year to $50,000 under the new policy.)
> ...
> Without widespread buy-in from other restaurants, it’s just too easy for front-of-house workers to leave to make more money elsewhere. “About 40 percent of our servers were like, ‘Hey, this is awesome, but I’m going to go to State Bird Provisions, where I can make 10 percent more,’” Vogler says. “And who doesn’t want to make 10 percent more? They’re not freedom fighters.”
To be sure, maybe they didn't do a good job implementing it. But the cases I've read about restaurants switching to no-tipping usually seem to run into problems with servers being able to earn more money with tips than without them.
I think perhaps part of the problem is that a uniform increase in prices will make people who would have tipped poorly decide not to go, and people who would have tipped generously now pay less. So before with the tipping model, the well-tippers were in effect subsidising the poor-tippers, but now the poor-tippers are gone so there is overall less revenue for the business and servers. But another issue is that they took some of the income earned from the higher prices and gave it to the kitchen staff, which would have been money that would have been available for the waitstaff.
of course you'll see staff leave if you cut pay. that's a deliberate choice by management, and not a question about tipped or untipped work.
i doubt there is real effect on the orders that customers place, but nobody's publishing their books, so who can say. in a systemic change in which every restaurant transitions to an untipped system, there would be no concern about losing out to a restaurant that continues to lower prices by exploiting servers.
Is it a deliberate choice by management, or an economic reality? Perhaps they could have kept kitchen staff wages low and used the extra money to pay waitstaff more, but since it seems like other restaurants that adopted no-tipping eventually switched back to tips, it sounds like there just isn't the money to go around.
Sure, if every restaurant switched to no-tipping, then waitstaff couldn't simply switch to a restaurant that did tips. But I would suspect they would make less money overall.
Are restaurants without tipping losing out to a restaurant that is 'exploiting' servers if servers are choosing switch to that restaurant rather than stick with the restaurant with the 'non-exploitative' no-tipping model? I cannot see the logic in that. Are you saying servers who leave a no-tipping restaurant for a tipping restaurant are choosing to be exploited?
what? all that is required in the transition to fully-waged labor is to pay an equivalent wage to the former wage+tips. if management pays a lower wage, that is a choice, because management has full control over what they rate hourly and what they write on the check.
if the concern is that workers may be paid less, the solution is simply don't pay less.
If you can demonstrate that happens, to the exclusion of other reasons, publish it. I haven't seen that effect or known anyone to see that effect during such a transition. What I have seen is a lot of bosses cutting wages and blaming everyone but themselves for turnover, and a lot of business owners with an ideological agenda making bad-faith arguments.
The money is already there, and the current situation is that customers are literally giving most of it without obligation. It makes sense to formalize the relationship, and properly allocate responsibilities to the business owner.
The entire debate is a deflection of responsibility for employee compensation.
There don't appear to be any direct studies on revenue, but the GrubStreet article mentions a study by Lynn (2018)[0] which looks at the impact of eliminating tipping on online reviews, which have an impact on revenue (but of course it's difficult to judge, since perhaps not all declines in Yelp scores are equal; maybe in that study declines/improvements in score had more to do with the quality of the food):
> This study examines the effects of such moves away from tipping on restaurant’s online customer ratings. The results indicate that (i) restaurants receive lower online customer ratings when they eliminate tipping, (ii) online customer ratings decline more when tipping is replaced with service-charges than when it is replaced with service-inclusive-pricing, and (iii) less expensive restaurants experience greater declines in online customer ratings when replacing tipping with either alternative than do more expensive restaurants.
> ...
> Given the already ubiquitous and increasing popularity of online reviews, and the influence that such e-word of mouth has been shown to have on consumers’ purchasing/patronage behaviors (see Kim, Li, and Brymer, 2016; Ong, 2012; Zhang, Ye, Law, and Li, 2010), our results also have important implications for restaurants’ bottom-line that warrant being underscored. For instance, in a longitudinal analysis (2003- 2009) of Yelp online reviews and revenue data for every restaurant in the city of Seattle Luca (2016) recently estimated that restaurateurs can expect a 9% increase in revenue for every one-star Yelp rating improvement. Thus, if the results of our study are shown to be reliable and Luca’s (2016) estimate generalizable then it follows that low and moderately priced restaurants that decide to replace voluntary tipping with either automatic service charges or service inclusive pricing can expect to experience a nontrivial loss in profits as a function of lower online satisfaction ratings.
The paper notes that raising prices whether through services charges or what will be a price increase for a significant percentage of the clientele:
> Additionally, tipping is a form of voluntary pricing and price discrimination that results in approximately 25 percent of customers tipping less than 15 percent of bill size and 65 percent of customers tipping less than 20 percent of bill size (Lynn, 2017a), so replacing tipping with service charges or service inclusive pricing will raise dining costs for a quarter to half of restaurant customers and this is likely to reduce the overall satisfaction of those customers.
One restaurant that had switched to no-tipping before abandoning had tip averages of 21%.[1] I don't know anybody who tips that much, but apparently they exist. But if you increase prices by 21% on all clientele, then the restaurant becomes more pricey compared to restaurants that do tipping. Someone who would have tipped 15% might just go to another restaurant and tip that much, whereas a particularly generous tipper who would have paid 25% to make the average about 20% between these two is now just paying that 21% price hike - that's an overall decline in revenue. And the restaurateur said his mistake was not raising prices high enough to cover both the waitstaff wages that they had been getting from tipping ($25-40/hr) and raises for the back-of-house staff; he says he should have raised them 40%! Perhaps he could have done so, but it seems likely he would have been doing less business and had to downsize.
But OK, let's assume that somehow restaurants earn the same amount of income as before with hiked prices and no tipping, and that extra income is paid to the staff. If any money goes to the back-of-house staff, that means that the waitstaff would be making less than they did before. Do you think it's reasonable for waiters to be making $25-40/h while the kitchen staff is making $13-20?[1] I don't particularly think it is, and if tipping culture eventually ends (which, make no mistake, I am no fan of tipping), we would see waitstaff being paid less because now they can't switch to a restaurant where they can make more than tips, but we might see kitchen staff make more. However, this would necessarily mean that waitstaff are making less money.
You're still talking about administrative decisions to compensate certain workers more or less. Again, if there is concern about workers being paid less, the solution is to not lower their compensation.
I have no problem with raising back-of-house wages, they are typically undercompensated compared to front-of-house, even though the work is comparable and all of it counts towards the dining experience. Raising kitchen wages does not necessitate lowering server wages, and suggesting it does only encourages division and confuses the situation. It is worth noting that tip pooling with kitchen staff is standard practice in many restaurants despite being flat out illegal until recently, so the situation you fear already exists, and could be remedied by moving away from a tipping system to explicit wages.
Again, it is worth formalizing the relationship and clearly allocating responsibilities.
> Again, if there is concern about workers being paid less, the solution is to not lower their compensation.
Then kitchen staff will continue to be paid poorly. Just understand that's the tradeoff.
> Raising kitchen wages does not necessitate lowering server wages
How?
> It is worth noting that tip pooling with kitchen staff is standard practice in many restaurants despite being flat out illegal until recently
It's still illegal in many states. Meyer, one of the restaurateurs who switched to no-tipping and back, is in New York, where it's illegal both to add a service charge and to collect part of the tips to share with kitchen staff. Switching to no-tipping allowed him to compensate the kitchen staff more fairly, at the expense of the departure of his entire waitstaff.
>Then kitchen staff will continue to be paid poorly. Just understand that's the tradeoff.
If it’s a tradeoff it’s only a tradeoff that management chooses to make.
>How?
How what? It’s a business operating within a market. They will do something.
None of this is a binary mechanistic outcome determined by a boolean of tipped or untipped service. The restaurant has a budget and they will spend money and set prices as they think best, and succeed or fail based on that. There is no law that dictates zero-sum competition between kitchen and server wages, and all else static! Clearly in a market in which tipping is not practiced, a business will behave differently than the current market, and employees will expect appropriate wages.
>meyer etc etc
this is still another case of an employer making administrative choices about how much to pay different workers, and workers reacting to those decisions. if the waitstaff were given an equivalent or better wage to their previous wage+tip compensation, they would have had no reason to depart. this was explicitly not the case: the servers left because the transition gave them a pay cut.
it makes no sense to blame tipping or not tipping for bad budgeting and failed wage negotiations. the issue is in the allocation, not the concept.
again, this is a case of employers deflecting responsibility for compensating their employees.
the economic calculus of a restaurant does not massively change based on a switch from tipped service to untipped service. there is still money coming in and food going out.
i am advocating that employers be held responsible for paying their employees. the current tipped service regime fails to attribute that responsibility to employers, and leaves employees vulnerable.
i have seen no-tip service implemented in a way that satisfied employees. i have seen also it done in a way that drove staff to quit, and in those cases the fault lay entirely with management trying to reduce compensation.
stop asking questions about a fantasy budget. i do not care. if tipped service was abolished tomorrow, employers would figure it out.
> i have seen no-tip service implemented in a way that satisfied employees.
Have you seen no-tip service implemented with waitstaff earning as much as they did before?
> if tipped service was abolished tomorrow, employers would figure it out.
Of course they would figure it out if tipped service were abolished. But I am confident the outcome of whatever they figured out would result in lower take-home pay for waitstaff, as waitstaff would no longer be able to earn more money by switching to an establishment that allowed tips.
I don't doubt that equivalent compensation is necessary to get waitstaff to stay. I do doubt that it's possible for a restaurant to switch to no-tipping, offer equivalent compensation, and pay the kitchen staff more equitably.
> how about at least a one bedroom, one bathroom apartment
to me, this part sticks out like a sore thumb. a 1BR where? I make well above the median wage for my area and I can't afford a 1BR anywhere near the place I work. literally no one would consider me to be poor. a 1BR, coming with a private kitchen and bathroom, is a luxury for a single adult. it's not at all an efficient use of housing space.
a more reasonable threshold would be a private bedroom with space for a desk.
> how about at least a one bedroom, one bathroom apartment; nutritious, nourishing food; Walmart clothing at a minimum.
It's interesting to see how standards have shifted over time. Not too long ago, it was considered sufficient if people could afford their own room in a boarding house. Those frequently had shared bathroom and dining facilities, and provided nutritious and nourishing meals. That was considered a worthy, dignified life by a great many.
Boarding houses went away in no small part because they were zoned out of existence. Often on the grounds that they were an immoral existence and it was the duty of the best of us (read: richest) to mandate a correct social order for the lower classes.
I find this interesting because it implies that we're going to continue to have this problem - a lack of dignity - no matter what we do. You can already see the ratchet turning. There are people who earnestly believe that food isn't nutritious and nourishing unless it's Organic (by some definition) and thus that universal access to Organic food is a moral requirement.
> The ability to afford adequate housing, food, and clothing. I'm not saying we should mandate people can afford a 1500 sq. ft. home, ribeye steaks every evening, and Ralph Lauren Polo threads, but how about at least a one bedroom, one bathroom apartment; nutritious, nourishing food; Walmart clothing at a minimum.
Now, what does adequate mean? I guess a place to sleep, a place to clean oneself, food and clothing seems like a reasonable bar for a wage above poverty. Are there many full time jobs in the US that do not allow that?
> Removing the "tipping" system. Increase prices such that an employee can afford the above mentioned necessities.
Removing tipping and increasing prices beyond the tipping, it reduces to just increasing prices. I guess not very smart people create these enterprises, if only they hiked prices… And seriously, they definitely increases them, it is just a necessity. But I would not call this as a change in the model.
> I think the industry will go here no matter what changes we do or do not make to policy, business models, etc.
We do not have to necessary speed it up. People are already having difficult with keeping up with the changes.
> We either decide these people are expendable, or that they are human beings worthy of a baseline of a dignified life. I define a dignified life as the ability to have at least the minimums I described above.
Are there really only two options? Is not that a bit simplistic? And what does that even mean, do you think we should provide everyone with the job that ensures they have the mentioned stuff. What if they have different needs. And what if they do not qualify for any job, should we provide them with the exact stuff that people who work 40h a week get, or the equivalent in money? How is that fair for those who do these boring jobs.
> Now, what does adequate mean? I guess a place to sleep, a place to clean oneself, food and clothing seems like a reasonable bar for a wage above poverty. Are there many full time jobs in the US that do not allow that?
I would say, a place where you don't have to share quarters with strangers, be exposed to violence, drugs, have your sleep interrupted, where the housing is stable enough that you don't need to leave work in the middle of the day to attend an emergency court petition to prevent your immediate eviction due to landlords non-payment of mortgage and interception of mailed eviction notifications, where you don't have to leave under cover of darkness with colleagues who know how to handle themselves as your bodyguards so that you can spend a month or two sleeping on a friends sofa while you try and wait for a room to open up in something resembling a half-way house for recently released prisoners.
Cos I mean, those were about the best conditions I could afford while working for a profitable multinational tech company while I was developing a key piece of the Internet infrastructure that everyone on this site uses daily (in a wealthy area of the UK).
I won't name the company, but it rhymes with "Clit Tricks"
> Are there really only two options? Is not that a bit simplistic? ... should we provide them with the exact stuff that people who work 40h a week get ... ?
Is _that_ not a bit simplistic? Is it really so difficult to imagine a world where working 40 hours a week is either a) dignified enough not to be totally demeaning and exploitative _and_ meaningful enough to carry some intrinsic reward, or b) pays noticeably more than the bare minimum required for an existence at least befitting the dignity of animals in a zoo, never mind human beings?
A lot of the issues you reasonably want to avoid seem like they could be solved more directly by other means. The argument seems to be, "America is a hell hole, so everyone needs enough money to escape it." There are poor countries where people dont live in fear of eviction and the slums arent full of violence and drugs. Maybe it's too difficult to change culture though, and we should just throw money at the problem.
The fact that it can be done in a poor country is all the more reason that it's a scandal that it is not being done in a rich country.
These poor countries don't have any special techniques or mystical cultural powers. For example, the fact that south Korea has adequate flood defences and the UK does not is not because Korean culture lends them a racial character uniquely cognizant of water management passed down from their ancestors over generations of rice cultivation or whatever... There is absolutely no reason the UK is unable to "throw money" at constructing flood defences (altering planning policy, etc.) if they were to so chose.
The idea is not to "escape the hellhole" but to transform it in to "not a hellhole", through the direct, rational application of readily available, and completely straight-forward policy mechanisms.
But maybe it's too difficult to use political policy as a tool to achieve desired outcomes and we should blame the victims, turning it in to a nebulous cultural or moral failing and then wait around for the culture to just spontaneously change itself, eh :)
>Now, what does adequate mean? I guess a place to sleep, a place to clean oneself, food and clothing seems like a reasonable bar for a wage above poverty. Are there many full time jobs in the US that do not allow that?
And as an aside: This is for a two bedroom - and it is important to afford a two bedroom. Single parents often need to keep a two bedroom even if their child or children only visit every other weekend. A one bedroom often isn't significantly cheaper, and a studio isn't always cheaper than a one bedroom.
There are definitions and I believe another commenter in this thread has defined it very solidly about poverty.
There will always be service sector jobs, this is the argument luddites were having in 1815 (I don't want to get into this as it is distracting from my main point).
We should be ensuring that anyone putting in 40 hours a week should be able to support a family. The wealth is there to be able to create this society (not saying it's easy not saying there are not problems).
Support a family? How many kids should I be able to support on my unskilled 40 hours/week?
Look, I might be convinced that minimum wage is too low, though I'm much more inclined to leave that as a matter for the employee and employer to reach agreement on.
But if you have no marketable skills and the only work you can get is entry-level minimum wage, you have no business starting a family as the sole income-earner. None.
That’s a rather eugenic standpoint. I think the argument is actual children are part of those family’s, it’s up to society how to deal with it. Currently we subsidize business and families, but perhaps we could remove the business subsidy.
What does it mean to support a family? Is getting them sheltered, clothed and well fed good enough? I think it is way easier to achieve today than in almost any other time in a human history, even for the low earners.
Restaurants are a part of the service sector. A service job does not imply that it is attractive. And they differ in requirements. The well paid ones get more and more complicated and hence, proportionally to the whole population, less and less people will be able to qualify for them.
Finding shelter is exponential Harder now than any time in my memory.
We have a homelessness problem that it unpresidented. I would bet more people are now than anytime in history. (Pioneers could camp when they were tired. Cavemen weren't ticketed for sleeping under a ledge.)
Hell--30 years ago certain states were still offering homesteads. There's not an inch of land in the USA that live for free. (BLM land requires you to move every two weeks. Only some BLM land us open to camping.)
Try taking a nap in your closest park, or open field. You will get poked by a angry cop. You will understand loitering/trespass laws innately.
People, especially in service jobs, are living on top of each other. Why was the Corona virus so prevelant in the hispanic communities?
As to your previous statement, "We all can't be Coders." I have personally know three older Programmers. Two died because they aged out of the industry, and became homeless. The other is currently being harassed in Richardson Bay by Sausalito cops, and the coast guard, over a dispute of the seaworthiness of his sailboat.
One was Jim Fox. A huge contributor to Word Star. He ended up in San Rafael wearing a fuzzy Penguin outfit begging. He died a few years ago.
You might be one of those Service applicants in a decade?
(I'm not going to debate this guy. My biggest worry post Covid is the huge increase in homelessness we are going to see. The government needs to open up any excess federal, state, and local to to free camping. We need to put up tent cities. I feel it's going to get very ugly.)
At least in the US, that's just not true. Rent and healthcare costs (which together are the majority costs for low income people) have risen way faster than inflation since the 1970s.
> I can see only one, automate the jobs away to reduce the costs, namely replace humans with robots.
This is generally not possible at twice the cost. The robots generally suck and break down a lot. Now you've replaced a bunch of low-skilled, interchangeable staff who work like dogs with a fleet of mechanics and an engineering department.
Half of the McDonald's automated kiosks I see are broken - and it's usually the store's entire system down, for weeks or months on end. I went to Home Depot today to grab some WD-40, and when I went to do the self-checkout, each of the four stations had a clerk helping the customer "self" checkout. To circle back to McDonald's - it's always been a joke how difficult some fast food clerks find their POS systems - where does this fantasy come from that customers are going to be better at it?
When it is possible to automate a job away, it is desirable. It's good that raising labor costs drives technology development. The better technology we have, the more comfortable we can all be, and the less we have to work as a species.
> This is generally not possible at twice the cost.
We get better at automation constantly. Thinking that just because today our technology sucks it will stay this way, is not reasonable in my opinion.
> When it is possible to automate a job away, it is desirable.
Yes, it reduces the cost (of the workforce). However, this change comes with a nontrivial social cost and a problem, what to do with the people that are not able to do more advanced stuff.
If you work full time as an adult and are Medicaid eligible, you’re being paid poverty wages.
> What is the change of the model in case of the restaurant?
Raise the prices.
It’s already happened anyway, the market has plenty of elasticity. Restauranteurs always whine about how impossible it is to raise prices, yet they seem to manage to do so just fine.
That’s a really excellent idea. On the off chance that you may be wrong in a few cases, what happens if you go out of business after raising your prices enough to get wages high enough to be where you think they should be?
That’s why the government has minimum wages, which help the market deal with that.
Fast service restaurants have already adapted. Five Guys or Chipotle cost more for a better product. McDonalds has to remind you on the wrapper that their burger contains beef.
This is the system we are using. I don't have to like it. Scaling is done something like: If there is room for 4 shoe stores and there are 7 its going to be difficult for all of them until 2 close.
I don't see it. McDonalds pays minimum wages in most european nations, yet their menu isnt that much more expensive than in the US.
Maybe they have a slimmer margin over here, but they are still profitable. That implies that the model is (in principle) just alright, but there are financial flows that will have to change in the US. Of course you don't like to pay more for the labor you use to generate profit — ideally you wouldn't have to pay anyone at all!
If you can't run you business with minimum wage labor, maybe tou are not good at doing business and should change careers instead? Because many businesses in many nations have not the slightest issue doing just that.
Their menu may not appear much cheaper in the US, but McDonalds is much more aggressive with price discrimination here. You won't find the same promotions, value menu, and coupons in Europe.
There is generally not a big coupon culture in Europe. Most people don't bother wasting their time. People with a money problem usually collect bottles for recycling purposes.
McDonald's here pulled way back too though (last I checked before trying to eat healthier and deleting the app). Probably not the worst thing in the world to have fast food be a little more expensive.
Well, without knowing how the Corp is setup, that’s a bad example as this could easily exist: an international company can very easily be paying for high wages in one nation (ie loss leading) by low wages in another. Or staying profitable and with open doors. And so on.
Unless you’ve done an FSA class and you can explain me your thinking more, it’s worth appreciating there are a ton of levers that impact Corp finance. Same way you have performance trade offs for one algo vs the other.
The franchise part is interesting, although McD’s owning them or not doesn’t matter as the cash flow is what’s relevant. In this case I wonder what the terms are for franchise owners in EU vs USA and if they account for higher wage laws.
There are a number of reasons corporate entities operate certain or many stores at a loss. Very well known example is flagship locations that are locally at a loss, but earn for the brand on other ways. Example being Times Square NYC locations. This still makes sense at a franchise model, but less likely I bet.
EU isn’t a flag ship obviously, but I also didn’t say loss. Loss leading is similar, but not a perfect analogy (sure).
My earlier example still holds, even with franchisees per the term, but you should expand your bad event set to loss or low profits. On the net, being in Europe is worth it despite higher operating costs, but maybe USA operating costs need to be lower as a result.
I mean this all to say, there are so many factors involved such that it’s a false premise argument without controlling for intra-market differences.
Are you seriously arguing that yhe entire EU McDonald's market is operating at a loss? That makes zero sense.
Clearly it is possible to operate McDonald's in the EU and not burn money. Thus clearly there is a fast food business model that involves paying higher wages. Does this mean that every fast food store will remain profitable with the same hours? Probably not, but it does clearly mean that some fast food stores would be able to stay open and profitable.
Yes, and then OP said this which is why I responded:
“ That implies that the model is (in principle) just alright”
It implies any number of things, but not that if the model works in EU it can also coexist with the same model in the US. The scenario I said is an easy and fairly common example of why they could not coexist.
Without breaking out a form 10k and a fair bit of financial statement analysis, it’s somewhat like saying that “well I get 1GB internet in NYC, it implies the model for fast internet works so we could do it in Montana tomorrow.”
To the extent that it’s important to know and discuss the actual factors involved such that the MBAs doing these decisions at McD will take you seriously, that implication is seriously flawed. Hence, why this hasn’t changed since Milton Friedman and the 80s. Ever wonder why that is? It’s because arguments made without any Corp fin awareness don’t work with the audiences with the power to change it.
I am not arguing that McD should take a particular policy. I am arguing that there are clearly functional business models for fast food under a higher minimum wage so that is not a valid excuse to avoid raising the minimum wage.
That when talking about a company like McD: public, multi-National...
Those functional business models are quite possibly/likely able to exist, or figure out how they exist per corporate policy, by opportunity costs other areas of the business, namely - American wages and/or American franchise terms.
I’m not sure if you’ve looked up an SEC Form 10K before, but that’s a good place to start to examine how this can look.
When McD EU, or similar, can function basically as its own corporate entity, this is even more possible.
When spanning national boundaries and regulatory space, you’re comparing an orange to an Apple by saying it works in EU, QED it should work in USA. Especially when it all flows through a choke point of SEC reporting and investor expectations/public listing in the US.
Really need to look at the financial statements to make that sort of claim, not just “it works there it can work here.”
Asserting that high minimum wage makes the fast food model untenable is a strong claim. Given that it is made in tha face of the apparant profitability of fast food in high wage minimum wage countries, then burden of proof falls on you.
So as far as I can tell, you are just trying to spread doubt without doing any work to justify that doubt.
IMHO fast food is a durable industry and while prices/locations/hours may change, it seems absolutely ridiculous to argue that there isn't a business model that will be profitable.
Yeesh… feels like a deliberately misreading of what I’m saying yet also you’re inadvertently agreeing with my point.
I have pointed out a couple known and realistic examples why wages in one country doesn’t imply they’ll work in another, under the umbrella of a single corporation.
As you say, making that implication as OP and you did is spreading a claim Without doing any work to justify that claim.
That work needed is financial statement analysis, starting with breaking open a 10K. It’s
not my job to do that, as you’re the pair that made the implication in the first place.
I’m pointing out that by you not doing the work to justify the claim, there are numerous straight forward financial accounting reasons for why the claim could be wrong.
If you don’t know much FSA, that’s fine, but from that knowledge base you should know that you’re basically saying it could rain purple and it’s my job to use standard weather data to disprove why that’s not the likely answer.
If their entire European, Australian and New Zealand operations weren't profitable, why would they run them at all? They wouldn't use American profits to support them, they'd shut them down.
Mm does this make sense: Profitable is a spectrum, end of the day it all reports back through McD USA. ebtida in EU might be a bit lower than ideal because of laws changing over time. So, to make numbers, they can juice things in USA.
You are aware that you can either use soft language, or discuss in the terms that are actually used, right?
What’s more important: sensitivities or understanding how the decisions actually work so you’re in the mix to change things with the audience to change it?
They can wait out ethics based arguments for decades, and they do.
The moment a community activist actually starts calling corps out on their sh*t from the perspective that’s actually used to build these policies, then the corps lose their main advantage which is ignoring calls to ethics like this which don’t work as they’re not at all related to the MBA’s incentive structure who makes that decision.
A lot of people who support minimum wage increases don't think that way though. They _do_ think the local McDonald's is raking in cash and not sharing the profits.
Conceptually, I agree with what you're saying (I also feel very strongly about off shore manufacturing for the same reasons) but, practically, when you increase the minimum wage, the poverty jobs will disappear and _eventually_ be replaced. The problem is the transition period. The real minimum wage is always zero.
> but, practically, when you increase the minimum wage, the poverty jobs will disappear
If we're talking about raising the minimum wage arbitrarily high, then this is true.
But this argument also gets made a lot when we're talking about a specific proposal (such as $15). For a specific proposal this argument is not always true.
It was raised a ton in Seattle when Seattle was considering a $15 minimum wage. Endlessly. The main argument was that it would devastate employment for the jobs it was supposed to improve.
Then the minimum wage increase passed and it didn't do that. Employment in those jobs actually went up slightly (probably not a casual increase, probably more coincidental). But it certainly didn't devastate the employment in minimum wage jobs.
So, the argument is one that feels compelling since it is true in the extremes. But it needs to be evaluated with the facts of each proposal.
Do you have anything to back that assertion up, that the poverty jobs will disappear?
The only articles I've ever found that say that come from the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute, and neither of those is anywhere near an unbiased source.
All the research (excluding the pieces from those two think tanks) suggests that the job markets remain stable through minimum wage increases, and in some cases the labor markets actually gain jobs -- possibly because more money in the hands of poorer people is going to go right back out into the community, as a matter of need.
>These business have a model that relies on poverty wages changing the minimum wage will disrupt these businesses greatly and I don't see a problem with that.
Doesn't that just end with bankrupt businesses and unemployed workers?
Look at empirical studies of past minimum wage increases and you don't often see unemployment increase. The employment rate is often stable through a minimum wage increase.
A teenager making change on bagel purchases isn't working for "poverty wages". And a business that providing tennagers jobs isn't being exploitive.
I do think employers should be conscious about the kinds of lives they set their employees up for, though we can talk about that without overgeneralization.
1. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, about half of people making minimum wage or less are older than 25 years old.
2. A single person working a full-time job (32 hours) at minimum wage makes $12,064. The US federal definition of poverty for this individual would be anything below $12,880. So yes, minimum wage workers are literally, by definition, working for poverty wages.
For one, even with your statistics, half of folks employed are school-age. Also, poverty is measured by household. Confusing the math isn't a good way to make a quantitative argument.
But mostly your argument is a semantic trick around the word "poverty" to rationalize weighted terminology.
Again, I have strong feelings that employers should be conscious of the lives and prospects of their employees. For instance, having policies that lead to irregular patterns of night and day shifts that have to be unhealthy long-term. But we can have rational discussion about these issues.
> Also, poverty is measured by household. Confusing the math isn't a good way to make a quantitative argument.
The figure they used was for a household of size 1, so I don't think they confused the math and I think they made a perfectly strong quantitative argument.
Be careful with this argument, it's a talking point that over-represents the amount of these jobs held by teenagers earning pocket money. Quite a lot of minimum wage jobs are held by single parents or people just trying to stay afloat.
By the way, even if it is just teenagers, I don't think that should somehow disqualify them from earning fair wages. They aren't being "provided" jobs, they work to produce value for a company, and and should be compensated fairly regardless of their financial situation.
But you have said yourself it's 'bagel' money, it doesn't seem to be coherent to be defending both teenager after school jobs and teenagers in poverty.
You seem to have read too quickly, the poster was talking about someone working a cashier in a store that sells bagels, not about someone making money to buy bagels.
Teenagers getting whatever after school jobs they can contribute to incomes for households in poverty. If the McD's kiosk takes the cashier job, the family loses income. I don't want households in poverty. I'm just unconvinced by this mechanism. I'd rather see minimum incomes or policies to deflate housing costs.
You have a good point, and I appreciate the evenhanded approach. I'm still far from sold that "poverty wage" is a useful term if we want to have a healthy discussion. It leaves too much nuance out.
So wages should be linked to the number of people in the household? Workers with more kids should earn more by law?
We do this is Europe, we pay something called 'kid allowance'. In some places people make 10 kids for the allowance, ignore them or mistreat them and live on that money.
Name one state where someone making minimum wage can afford an apartment, food, healthcare, and utilities, and some form of transportation. I think it's fair to say that if you can't, that counts as poverty.
I was a teenager working a minimum wage job. I also had to pay for housing, meals, healthcare, etc. Don't assume a teenager has a life less complex than yours.
Sure. Point stands: I was literally a teenager making change on bagel purchases. (Yes, actual bagel shoppe.) I was absolutely making poverty wages. If I did not have free meals from work as a perk I would have starved.
And I worked minimum wage and it allowed my poor household to make ends meet. And another minimum wage job helped me stay solvent enough to survive university.
Apologies, but I'd rather not reveal too much personal info. But I did get need-based financial assistance in university. And I did attend a low cost school for financial reasons.
I didn't "pay my way through school washing dishes" or anything like that.
I wasn't supported by my family so the extra income through low pay jobs was critical.
> A teenager making change on bagel purchases isn't working for "poverty wages".
Aren't they though? You don't get a discount on rent because you're not 20 yet, and being under 20 doesn't mean you have rich parents that can subsidize your lifestyle.
I'm not arguing for low wages. But it's dishonest to conflate household income and individual salary.
More specifically, having a roommate or two or living with some family unit is fairly normal at that age. So other income needs to be accounted for to make that semantic argument stick.
Of course not everyone can have employed housemates. But even in those cases, it's not clear to me that banning 16 year olds from working those jobs helps all those 16 year olds. It seems likely that many of them end up worse off.
How is paying a teenager to sweep a floor making a subclass? Seems like we're on a trajectory to replace that teenager with a vacuum drone, and I don't see as many teenagers employed in that world.
The wealthy wouldn't notice. Their teenagers are entrepreneuring and racking up unpaid volunteer hours to pad resumes. The teenagers with jobs are the ones that could use the money.
The company I work at has hired a number of employees whose only previous work was very low wage, and that (low wage) experience definitely weighed in their favor.
Worst: some workplaces allow the negative workers on the team to get away with anything.