RE: In case anyone loses sight of what these republican cocksuckers want
February 8, 2012 at 6:45 pm
(February 8, 2012 at 6:18 pm)Tiberius Wrote: Take for instance, a McDonald's cashier as an example. I don't know how much they are paid per hour, but let's assume for this example that it is a minimum wage of $5 an hour. If the minimum wage is abolished, McDonalds could simply reduce all wages to $1 or even $0.01 an hour. It's highly likely they would do such a thing, since people tend to value even that kind of work at higher wages. Say that McDonalds is able to hire people at $1 an hour though; they could continue to serve people at the same rate perfectly well, but they could increase profit by hiring more workers who can do more work.
Like I said before, this doesn't always work, especially in non-minimum wage jobs where a certain degree of skill is required, usually because you end up with scenarios where there is simply too much interference (the old phrase "too many cooks spoils the broth" applies here). However, with low-skill jobs, efficiency is increased if you hire more workers at lower costs, simply because it is (a) easy to train them, and (b) the work is done faster since not much collaboration is required.
Again, we are talking about minimum wage jobs here. If you have a large amount of a certain resource, and all workers do the same thing, then the more workers, the more productivity. Using the McDonalds example again, if I had 5 servers, a queue of 10 customers, and operate under the assumption that each customer order takes 1 minute, then those 5 servers would have all the customers served in 2 minutes. Add more servers, and the same amount of customers are served in less time.
Yes, it is an assumption, but one that is perfectly reasonable to make when talking about minimum wage jobs.
I still fundamentally disagree with you. In your scenario, doubling the workers would not double the productivity. The bottle neck in your example is not the # of workers but the # of registers. Say that there were only 5 registers. Adding 5 more servers would not reduce time needed. Also, there is a finite amount of space...having servers falling over each other would not increase efficiency but rather decrease it. So once again, if i'm running the business you described, I would pay enough to get the most efficient server. Since this is a low skill job, the cost of training is not figured into a wage assessment.
Bottom line, whether its a low skilled position or highly skilled position, a profit seeking business will always seek to keep pay as low as possible. The main difference between low & high skill is that low skill workers have no bargaining power & the job pool is larger; therefore the job will go to the lowest bidder.
