Originally Posted By TomSawyer There's a movement here in Seattle to increase our minimum wage from the current $9.32 an hour to $15 an hour. There was a big event yesterday, which you can read a story about at <a target="blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Minimum-Wage-Debate-248691951.html">http://www.komonews.com/news/l...951.html</a> I can understand what they are saying, but my concern is that many if not most of them will find themselves unemployed because the cost of the labor will be higher than the cost of machinery that can perform the same work. We still have a huge manufacturing base in the US, but labor priced itself out of those markets. If a McDonalds in Seattle has 25 FTEs and have an average wage of $10 an hour, then they are spending $520K a year on labor (not including benefits.) An increase to $15 makes the labor cost increase to $780,000 per year. What kind of automation can a McDonalds franchise get for $260K a year? Touch screen cash registers where you place your own order? A burger or fry making machine? When you look at the costs of all 20 Seattle McDonald's restaurants the increase in labor is $4 million a year by increasing minimum wage to $15. I'd much rather see people working than machines, but I honestly think that if minumum wage increases that much more and more fast food places will move toward automation.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 Going up 50% all at once may indeed be a shock to the system. What ticks me off is that the proposal to go up to $10.10 nationally is really just keeping up with inflation, but the Democrats don't adequately point this out, and the Republicans act like it would destroy our economy.
Originally Posted By Castleowner77 Raising the min wage costs jobs, it never works, there are mountains of books written on the subject, only the economic fools on the left push for a jacked up min wage. There should be no minimum wage...the market will take care of who gets paid how much. I won't hire a young kid for $15 an hour but I will hire him for $7 an hour and let him prove himself. However, if he likes Obama and talks like the socialists on here... he will never get hired at my company.
Originally Posted By TomSawyer More, mawnck? Less? I've never worked in fast food so I don't know what's typical.
Originally Posted By mawnck I suspect it's more like 3. All managers. Everyone else would be part-time.
Originally Posted By ecdc My guess is McDonald's has about 2 employees per location that are full-time: a manager and assistant manager. If the assistant manager is lucky.
Originally Posted By TomSawyer Mawnck, FTE isn't a number of full time employees but full time employee equivalents. If you have 10 people working 4 hours a week, that is 1 FTE. 5 people working 20 hours a week is 2.5 FTEs.
Originally Posted By Kar2oonMan >>more fast food places will move toward automation<< At most McDonald's, there is no "buyer flipper" anymore -- a worker with a spatula. Instead, the burgers are cooked on a clamshell style grill (kind of like an enormous George Foreman grill) many at a time. McDonald's premium drinks are blended and poured by a machine that can crank 'em out faster than any barista. They've already automated a lot. Grocery stores have self check aisles, where you can wait for many minutes behind someone seemingly using a touch screen for the very first time. And yet, the quick service food outlets that seem to be doing better are Chipotle and Panera and Subway, where there is less (apparent) automation. I'm not sure Robot McDonald would be a very good selling point for McDonald's, whose image has taken a beating over the past decade. It would be interesting to know the effect an increase in the minimum wage has on workers and the overall economy. It *feels* like when the minimum wage goes up, the prices rise a bit to offset that, so do the workers actually gain any ground at all? >>More, mawnck? Less? I've never worked in fast food so I don't know what's typical.<< Far less, outside of management, I'd say practically zero.
Originally Posted By Castleowner77 << It *feels* like when the minimum wage goes up, the prices rise a bit to offset that, so do the workers actually gain any ground at all? >> There is no doubt about it..prices go up and the " gains " in income from the min wage worker are eaten up by higher prices across the board where businesses are trying to recoup the costs for higher labor. The end result is less hours for employees, or the loss of their job. Prices get so high that the business owner loses customers and the end result is a closed business when you add in taxes and regulations that Democrats love to push.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 <a target="blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/min-wage-2013-02.pdf">http://www.cepr.net/documents/...3-02.pdf</a>
Originally Posted By Castleowner77 Dabob, I think we listen to actual business owners who have felt the effect of min wage laws and the wisdom of economists from past centuries as opposed to your little paper written by a liberal fools that have no clue about the business world. Quick..lets make the min wage $150 an hour cause after all..it helps the economy!!!!!
Originally Posted By Castleowner77 The real problem with jobs... Obamacare. Yes libs YOU PEOPLE are the reason for this. I was on Capital hill at a rally trying to stop this abortion of a law. Now even the unions are getting bit in the as$ Liberals NEVER understand basic economics and the market. When their polices cause a collapse they blame..well, they blame everyone except themselves. Please see Dabobs little paper... Nearly 10,000 Las Vegas Casino Workers Might Go On Strike Because Of Obamacare The biggest hurdle to reaching settlements in Vegas is the new costs imposed on our health plan by Obamacare,” Unite Here President Donald “D” Taylor said.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 Tom, and anyone else seriously interested in looking (as opposed to coming back 3 minutes later when he couldn't possibly have even read the thing) - the link is a good primer to why modest minimum wage increases have never increased unemployment. That's our history. Many decades of such increases, inevitable cries each time that it will add to unemployment, and then... it doesn't. Time after time after time. Now, it doesn't address a major hike, like the 50% Tom talked about. But it only stands to reason that simply raising the MW to keep up with inflation will not seriously disrupt the economy, and will in fact put more money back into it as MW workers will have more in their pockets. And the link explains the mechanisms. That's for anyone seriously interested in a discussion of the minimum wage, as opposed to throwing bombs. If indeed someone was doing that. I didn't see anyone, did you?
Originally Posted By ecdc >>Many decades of such increases, inevitable cries each time that it will add to unemployment, and then... it doesn't. Time after time after time.<< In some ways, this is our nation's history. I'd rather worry about the problems in the here and now than fretting over doomsday predictions that almost never come true. We keep hearing about how the erosion of conservative values and the shifting of the status quo will ruin everything...but then it doesn't happen. We heard it about Civil Rights. We heard it about gay marriage. We heard it about social security. We heard it about Medicare. We heard it about welfare. We get these dire predictions of disaster that just never seem to happen. And in its stead, we get true stories about real people whose lives were markedly improved. Compare and contrast the experience of seniors during the Great Recession to seniors during the Great Depression. Seniors weathered the disaster brought by deregulation relatively well, thanks to social security and medicare. Granted, no social program or government regulation is perfect. LBJ's war on poverty is definitely a mixed bag, with some failures. But those failures are to the poor themselves, not to the rest of us. Conservatives aren't wrong about everything. Social security will inevitably need tweaks. The day will come when we will have to raise the retirement age. But time and time again, conservatives are dead wrong about their predictions of doom if we dare to change the status quo even a teensy bit.
Originally Posted By mawnck >>That's for anyone seriously interested in a discussion of the minimum wage, as opposed to throwing bombs. If indeed someone was doing that. << You're doing a VERY bad job of out-Mawncking Mawnck.
Originally Posted By Castleowner77 Again, there should be no min wage. To say that raising labor costs has no effect on employment is naive. Of course it does. I take it you have never run a business Dabob? This is pure common sense and has been addressed by the great economic minds of the last 100 years. Milton Friedman talked about this many times and of course he was right. The liberal has no clue how a business runs or the fact that companies are not in business to create jobs or pay high salaries. This is why when they take power it all goes into the tank with boarded up shops and high unemployment.
Originally Posted By hopemax In order for capitalism to work properly, it needs to work from both ends. It is supposed to be a "push and pull." The "selfish" needs of both laborer and profit maker need to be in balance, and this push and pull will eventually drive toward progress and innovation. But what we have is some weird version where the profit maker can say and do whatever the heck it wants and it's accepted as "capitalism," while decrying the needs of the laborer as entitlements. The profit makers have figured out that they can short circuit the system by not having to respond to local market conditions that would create price increases on the labor side by "importing" labor like Disney does by switching a lot of it's workforce to College and International Program people, or the hiring of undocumented workers. The natural correcting mechanism has been severely weakened. If the labor force does not have the financial means to support their basic needs, which we've expanded to include things like health care, education costs, retirement and end of life care, etc. the local markets will seize. The profit makers are circumventing this by seeking out other places to sell their goods, leaving the damage to fall at the feet of the local government. The only reason we don't see the full effects are because of the existing safety net structure, and credit (people don't know how bad off they are because they can still buy stuff with their plastic). Our resident you know what, wants to pay minimum $7, but adjusting for inflation the minimum wage in 1971, was about $9.25 an hour. Are today's workers not worth as much as our parents were? As for the effects. When Henry Ford doubled the wage of his workers and cut the work week to 40 hours, there were many economists that proclaimed it would be the death of the US economy. We're still here.
Originally Posted By Castleowner77 ECDC- your last post is so sophomoric that its not even worth creaking down. When we want to talk the " confused liberal " .you are the perfect example. I guess Detroit and a 17 Trillion national debt that is about to implode means nothing to the Embers crowd....
