DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum House passes minimum wage increase

That's all great, but my post wasn't directed to you and you didn't answer the question either. <img src="/images/graemlins/rolleyes1.gif" alt="" /> That seems to be a theme around this place.

The job market isn't the same everywhere. And yes,it gets tiring and rather redundant asking the same question over and over without an answer sometimes..............

<img src="/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

I'm not sold on raising minimum wage myself -- for the record. I just hate it when people play avoidance games. <img src="/images/graemlins/plthumbsdown.gif" alt="" />

Like you should talk. If I had dollar for every question you avoid answering...

My answer to the question is yes. If every starter job paid minmum wage I would think otherwise, but that is not the case.

I thought I did answer it by saying that they don't have to take a job at that scale, the wording used in the question implies that the there is no other rate for them to start out at... but yes, it is fine IMO for someone to start out at that rate. That's what starting jobs are...starting out in life, or first job in high school or whatever.... it's money in the pocket.


If you're living on your own, then perhaps you're working extra shifts and taking on a few roommates or you're just not able to live in the part of town you want to or drive the car you want.... and maybe you don't get to go buy a shiny new TV and beer is too expensive, but hopefully that helps motivate you to step up to something better. None of those things are Rights or Entitlements, and neither is earning a good wage.

If you want more, join the trades or get some schooling, or just take a 2nd job or something... but go get it. IMO, if you're well beyond your high school years and still at that rate with no change in sight, you need to be looking at yourself, not the legislators.

Come on Purple...don't you know that not everyone can work 2 jobs...get a lift from one worksite to the other..afford decent/clean clothes to make a decent appearance at a job interview...find a suitable partner to faithfully help in raising their babies?? All true but not the point!

The fact is that regardless what the minimum goes to we will still have too many folks earning that for years. The markets sort out the productive workers from the less productive one, the market drives the prevailing wages paid for particular work as opposed to other types and the market allows for cheap bastards to attempt to run their businesses on the cheap using illegal/off the books workers to avoid the prevailing wages.
We will always have cheaters and we'll always have underperformers/overperformers due to human nature....a free society with a free economy untethered by excess gov't restrictions will IN MOST ALL CASES level it's wage and playing level over a reasonable time period all by itself.

Increasing the minimum wage is OK with all of use I believe as long as we don't fool ourselves in thinking social change can be dictated by a Minimum Wage increase. Water seeks it's own level and so will the general marketplace throughout the nation.

My sons education was also 100 percent student loans. But the kicker is he can't take a full time job for six, or seven bucks an hour. Why??? if he does he has to start repaying those student loans. The kid would have been better of if he wouldn't have gone to college.

Poor people can afford college before middle class people can since they get a free ride.

Again....I think you dwell on the wrong point...use yourself.....if there wasn't a bottom, your $20/hr would probably be way less.

If the starting point was $1 per hour, what would you be making??

The sad fact is there is always going to be a group of people working for minimum....and all jobs that are somwhow tied to a hourly wage are pegged from that point.

Say a person makes $10.70 per hour....and LOT's of people make that....twice minimum, and I doubt you are as eager to think of them as losers as you might be towards a person stuck in a minimum wage job.

If minimum goes to $7.25, the value of the job the person making $10.70 now becomes less.....maybe only 65% higher than minimum.....in time...it scoots up as well because employers know that in order to keep qualified people, they have to maintain a fair degree of seperation between the most minimal job on their shop floor and jobs that require people with some skills, ambition, smarts, responsibility or any combination of the above combination.

Sooner or later people are going to balk at making maybe $110 more a week than a guy fresh off the street who sweeps floors when they once were making $200 a week more.

I guess one could argue that all it does is weaken better paying jobs, but so far it hasn't...so far the middle has maintained a gap, and I suspect it will continue to do so.

40 years ago the aveage CEO of a Fortune company made about 30x the pay of the average salary it paid it's work force. Today that figure is something in the range of 600x.

Monopoly really is a good lesson . When you play the game, what always happens when you play long enough??....One or two people end up with all the money and the rest go broke. To keep the game going, you have to start over or give the losers money to stay in the game...and you have to do it because it sucks to play with just two people. Really, you can't play with just two people. It just gets to a point where you are trading money across the board. One turn you pay out...the next, you get money.

I think we are at a point in this countries game that too many people are broke. Just drive up and down Main street...count the number of check-cashing joints.

Why do you think they are there and doing so well??

It's where the losers in Monopoly go so they can stay in the game for another round.

So, minimum wage should stay at the $5.15 rate forever and that would be okay with you? If 10 years from now, when the value of a dollar will probably be far than it is today, and someone is making that wage, that's how you think it should be. Got it.

well, I didn't put a timeframe on things anywhere that I recall, but sure, why the heck not... if we're gonna cast about generalities...fine, $5.whatever an hour is a fine entry level wage, forever. We should actually roll it back to $3.35 an hour. Let these kids try living on what I had to.

Peen, I totally follow what your saying in how the middle doesn't sit there isolated, it's buoyed by the lower.... just one thing though. The "so many are broke", I would bet quite a major percentage of that is how poorly people handle credit and budgeting. People just don't want to live within their means.... or they themselves get suckered by "24 months same as cash"... trading the future for the present.

They wouldn't be.
<img src="/images/graemlins/rofl.gif" alt="" />

How long has it been since you lived on $3.35 an hour? What did that buy then and what does that buy now?

LMFAO

You are right Ralphie. I wasnt thinking of that type of Union work(trade type work) I was thinking of my experiences with manufacturing work. We have a buch of individual union painters who are a part of our amalgameted local next time we have a meeting I will ask some of them how this will effect them.But yeah maybe not immediatly but eventually this will effect prevailing wage. Not a entirely bad thing to me.

KING

On a smaller scale of influence IMO, it may also influence Union workers, that have COLA in their agreements. That would depend on any inflation triggered by the increase. They use a Consumer Price Index, too determine the amount, at predetermined periods, over the life off an agreement.

Not to be snide or too much of a smart ass but for those of us who believe that the union bosses simply want to help the downtrodden minimum wage worker rather than to justify an eventual bargaining point for increased contracts for union trades we need to rethink our positions.
All in all the MW increase is a positive thing when looked at over several years framework.

jc

web page

GOP hits Pelosi's 'hypocrisy' on wage bill

By Charles Hurt
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 12, 2007

House Republicans yesterday declared "something fishy" about the major tuna company in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco district being exempted from the minimum-wage increase that Democrats approved this week.

"I am shocked," said Rep. Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican and his party's chief deputy whip, noting that Mrs. Pelosi campaigned heavily on promises of honest government. "Now we find out that she is exempting hometown companies from minimum wage. This is exactly the hypocrisy and double talk that we have come to expect from the Democrats."

On Wednesday, the House voted to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour.

The bill also extends for the first time the federal minimum wage to the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands. However, it exempts American Samoa, another Pacific island territory that would become the only U.S. territory not subject to federal minimum-wage laws.

One of the biggest opponents of the federal minimum wage in Samoa is StarKist Tuna, which owns one of the two packing plants that together employ more than 5,000 Samoans, or nearly 75 percent of the island's work force. StarKist's parent company, Del Monte Corp., has headquarters in San Francisco, which is represented by Mrs. Pelosi. The other plant belongs to California-based Chicken of the Sea.

"There's something fishy going on here," said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry, North Carolina Republican.

During the House debate yesterday on stem-cell research, Mr. McHenry raised a parliamentary inquiry as to whether an amendment could be offered that would exempt American Samoa from stem-cell research, "just as it was for the minimum-wage bill."

A clearly perturbed Rep. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who was presiding, cut off Mr. McHenry and shouted, "No, it would not be."

"So, the chair is saying I may not offer an amendment exempting American Samoa?" Mr. McHenry pressed.

"The gentleman is making a speech and will sustain," Mr. Frank shouted as he slammed his large wooden gavel against the rostrum.

Some Republicans who voted in favor of the minimum-wage bill were particularly irritated to learn yesterday -- after their vote -- that the legislation did not include American Samoa.

"I was troubled to learn of this exemption," said Rep. Mark Steven Kirk, Illinois Republican. "My intention was to raise the minimum wage for everyone. We shouldn't permit any special favors or exemptions that are not widely discussed in Congress. This is the problem with rushing legislation through without full debate."

A spokeswoman for Mrs. Pelosi said Wednesday that the speaker has not been lobbied in any way by StarKist or Del Monte.

The Unions support the increase for the betterment of their membership. What is wrong with that. Why should the Unions hide from something, they helped get established, and help keep it in place. So, what is wrong with them supporting the increase for the betterment of their membership?

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Well, now I know that no one ever reads my posts. <img src="/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" />

I read it, and later seen it on the front page. I was thinking double post alert. I couldn't find yours, and started looking on another site, too see if I was going crazy. I knew I had seen it, and it was orange and brown. I feel better now. I still have a few cells left anyways.

Hard work is hard work. If you work hard you deserve a fighting chance to make ends meet. CEO'S making 250 million...give me a break. Every state that had a minimun wage increase on the ballet had it pass by large margins. America understands an honest days work deserves an honest days pay. They see the gap between the rich and the poor growing wider and the middle class disappearing altogether. We will take care of our own. We understand that prices will go up but we also understand that our level of humanity goes up as well. You can't put a price on that. <img src="/images/graemlins/thumbsup.gif" alt="" />

If you work hard you work hard you won't need an increase in minimum wage to make ends meet to begin with. All this does is let people know that laziness pays off.

The people voted for this simply because they think it's the governments job to take care of their problems. Personal accountability is a thing of the past. People will keep voting to give the government more power, in the end, we will lose every freedom we ever had. America is gone.

America is not gone yet, although corporate greed is trying to kill it. There are obscene profits going to the very few -not for those who actually work for it. The working poor are not "lazy" They helped build America! But some people will not face that truth, no one is self-made, we are all standing on the backs of the previous generation, who are standing on the backs of theirs. They were smart enough to let the goverment and their own tax dollars help them help themselves and in turn help America. Unions made many of them middle class. I suppose they were "lazy" too. Is that the America you are referring to ? Or are you pining about the good ole slave labor days?

Hmmmm so the poor guy who busts his ass, back, knuckles, knees, and hands, doing manual labor is lazy, but the fat cat who invests money and expects a huge return on his investments is not lazy. <img src="/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />

From Ralphie to Ralphie...

OK now I am talking to myself...good job old man!

It seems as if I have now reposted an article posted 30 minutes previous to my posting...good job old man!
Not only that but I managed to attempt to post it under a different thread and get it positioned back into an existing thread. This is one time I hope the refs stepped in to correct my error...if not...I just visited the "Twilight Zone"!
Good job old man!

In regards to Minimum Wage...it really doesn't hurt many folks at all. It may cause a few thousand kids to get hired at a different fast food joint. It has a short term positive effect on the lowest wage earners...a long term positive effect upon many union workers...and an additional positive effect upon all retail customers.
All businesses which offer MW or slightly above MW attempts to increase productivity and service to gain market share as a result of the trimming of some staff at these businesses.