RE: About minimum wage
October 7, 2016 at 7:50 pm
(This post was last modified: October 7, 2016 at 8:03 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
(October 7, 2016 at 7:29 pm)johan Wrote: So great, the guy schlepping away at Subway is making $15/hour now instead of $8.25 or whatever it is. Right now the average Subway sale adds about $7 to the cash drawer. When everyone is making $15/hr and the average Subway sale is adding $12 or $14 to the cash drawer, what have we really solved?
The absurd concentration of the proceeds into the hands of the very few who own the brand, rather than those who actually -make- the product? My industry is notorious. In my industry, you can legally be employed...for free. Not kidding. I can, if I wanted to..pay a person zero dollars. OFC me and all my buddies will make plenty of dollars off their work.....there's no shortage of meat at the table, just no legal compulsion to give any of it to the people who slaughter that calf, as it were. Mostly, though, we pay people @2 dollars an hour and then pocket the rest. Raising their wages won't raise the price of the product, because even though the cost of the product is related to their wages, the price paid at point of sale is not related to the cost of production, in truth..it's just an issue of marketing....which I'm hella good at.
The industry standard is 2, I pay 10, and I -still- make more money than guys using the standard model. Thus cutting the lie that raising wages raises the price of the product as some general rule. Maybe we've just got a bunch of stupid assholes who don't know how to turn a profit running things? The "cost" of raising wages is nothing more than the cost of their ineptitude. When I prototype a system, if it can't pay the lowest paid employee at least ten an hour, I consider it a failure. It -is- a failure. Work cannot be sustainably done if work cannot sustain..you see? It's just a matter of time until it gets outsourced to some third world shithole, or stops being done altogether. If I can't pay a person a wage that keeps them...they'll leave, and that means I lose productivity. Sure, there may be another asshole to exploit, but eventually, we run out of people willing to be shit on locally. This is why factories move. This is why we can't keep doing this.
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