At EconLog, Dave Henderson writes on the McDonald’s workers in New York City vying for a living wage of $15 per hour:
…The woman felt or thought that she deserved $15 an hour. But Kennedy’s point is: Why single out McDonald’s? Indeed, there’s a presumption that McDonald’s is paying her more than anyone else would. Why? Because if someone else would pay more, she would likely be working for someone else. Or, it’s possible that someone else would pay more, but she likes McDonald’s because the job is better, on a non-wage dimension, than that other higher-paying job. In short, she’s in the best place she can find.
McDonald’s is giving her a better deal than anyone else is offering. So her beef, so to speak, is with the very company that’s giving her the best deal!
Roosh makes a similar argument in a post that seems a departure from his regular content. He asks two questions:
1. Is there a scarcity of labor in the market that would make it hard to replace your job at $8.75 an hour?
2. Is there not another employer who would hire you at the wage you believe you deserve? If so, why don’t you work for them?
You see this response a lot from people across all social or political arrangements who choose a situation – a relationship of different types i.e. job or marriage, etc – and once they get their foot in the door they engage in a dialectical push for more stuff. Before being hired, unemployment was the individual’s new norm. They get hired and the new norm becomes the job which means that the all-important progress is higher pay or more bennies.
Since I’m the local prole blogger who works in the restaurant industry, a lot of people have asked me to weigh in on this particular labor dispute. From a Yahoo! article:
The protests also inspired another group of low-wage workers to stage their own. Last week, about 200 fast-food workers in New York City walked out of their workplaces—chains affected included Burger King, Wendy’s and McDonald’s—to demand a “living wage” of $15 an hour and an end to the practice of keeping workers on part-time hours to avoid giving them benefits or overtime. The employees also want to form a union for the city’s estimated 50,000 fast-food workers to negotiate pay and benefits.
The mention of overtime tells me a lot. Laws forcing employers to pay time-and-a-half for anything above the 40-hour threshold were put into place in order to prevent workers from being exploited by their employers. They were created to help workers maintain a better work-life balance. Disincentivizing employers was a good way to do that, and it probably also helps increase the overall level of employment. But workers today want to take advantage of that legal wrinkle and get their 50% raise. The law was created to prevent something from the capitalist side, but it seems to have created an incentive on the labor side. It isn’t the biggest fault line between labor and capital, but it is a good example of how twisted the argument has become and how the underdogs can play both sides of these debates depending on whatever coups from capital they hope to obtain.
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A living wage is $15 an hour? How on Earth am I alive?
My gross pay is about $12.50 an hour, and I’m doing okay even with student loans to pay off. I work as a research tech, which requires a bachelor’s degree and previous wetlab experience; I don’t see how any employer could pay people $15 an hour to make $1 hamburgers.
It depends on where you live Spoos. I knew a girl that lived in Wisconsin where her rent was $400/m and here you’d have to double that just to live in a ghetto. I can’t see how you could live here making $2000/month without some kind of off-kilter living arrangement to save money.
Seconding the notion of overtime becoming the new norm. At the union shops I’ve worked with, there’s usually a substantial fraction of the ‘crafts’ that rely on overtime hours to make ends meet (Normally because they either live large or have a history of poor financial decisions), and are more than willing to game the system to make them happen.
It has a tendency of hacking off the salaried folks, especially the lower-level engineers who frequently have to stay and follow the work the crafts do – In fact, I’d bet that this is where most of management’s anti-union attitudes come from.
Contra anti-racisss, it seems black males prefer to kill white women.
I think it’s a great idea to force employers to pay at least $15 per hour. Hell, $20/hour is even better.
I can see more automation coming in the fast-food industry … with Obamacare and wages going up etc …
I am very sympathetic to any adult who can only find a job at $8.75 per hour, but these people have simply got to face reality. They have an incredibly easy, un-demanding job. When I worked at Wendy’s during high school and college, we had several employees with Down’s Syndrome working the line during the lunch rush. Most of them were excellent workers.
The brutal fact is that even a retarded person with an IQ of 60 or 70 can perform the duties of a McDonald’s crew member. That job just isn’t worth very much. At some point you’ve got to take that into consideration when making your demands.
Well we used to have LOTS of decent paying jobs for marginally intelligent people. Now the Chinese have those jobs.
Remember how in the 80s Liberals were ranting about those “boring” and “dehumanizing” factory jobs? Well, we got rid of them! Now shut up and flip that burger.
@ joe schmoe
Why then should office workers who read blogs and gchat for 6 to 7 hours out of a typical day be entitled to 3, 4, 5 times higher wages? The “a monkey could do it” argument applies right on down (or, up, rather) the line.
A modestly higher minimum wage, coupled with enforcement of wage-hour laws is a perfect wedge issue against liberals, highlighting the inherent contradiction between their hatred of exploitation and their love of open borders.
This story below suggests that the clearing wage for illegal aliens in NYC is more like $3.12/hr.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104087809
Of course, most of these exploiters of illegals are immigrants themselves. How many of us nice white betas would have the sense of entitlement to order someone to bust ass for us all day for 25 measly bucks?
@Tom:
A salaried STEM worker is someone who burns his days of “vacation” so blue-collar guys can work at his house at their convenience, while himself working overtime/weekends “for free” so these same blue-collar guys experience NO inconvenience with the point ‘n’ click tools that keep them working semi-efficiently.
Why then should office workers who read blogs and gchat for 6 to 7 hours out of a typical day be entitled to 3, 4, 5 times higher wages?
Because the automation and process improvements that they come up with in their random, spastic bursts of effort pay for themselves many times over by botting away 10 proles here, 12 proles there, etc.
McDonald’s is giving her a better deal than anyone else is offering. So her beef, so to speak, is with the very company that’s giving her the best deal!
This assumes that the labour market as it exists cannot be organized in a way that would drive wages up. McDonald’s and the other fast food companies in that area are operating in a labor market that is atomized, which is to their advantage. It really doesn’t matter whether there are other jobs for which she is qualified that pay more, there are other ways to get a better deal, principally by unionizing. Last I checked McDonald’s is a profitable company, so there is blood yet to be squeezed from this turnip. Like any other negotiation between unionized workers (if they do unionize) and management, if it is feasible to make certain concessions and there are no better options, they will do so. That’s up to the parties involved. But to assume that the workers don’t deserve any better because no one else will offer better under the current circumstances is idiotic, the circumstances can be changed.
There is a larger problem though, which is that as automation and outsourcing eliminate the kinds of high wage manufacturing jobs that were the foundation of the American middle class in the past, something will have to be done to substitute for those incomes. There are just too many people that don’t have the capacity to transition into the “knowledge” economy and service jobs just don’t pay enough. Considering the massive efficiencies technology and outsourcing are creating, it shouldn’t be too hard to subsidize a living wage for the underclass, social stability will demand it.
@ workingman
Those jobs were never highly paid to begin with.
They only became so when labor-friendly government coupled with media pressure and conspired with the healthy profits most manufacturers were making in the post-war period. Suddenly, it became the norm to pay a lever-puller a middle-class wage with a full pension.
Historically, blue-collar work did not belong to the ‘middle class’ – the ‘middle class’ consisted of knowledge workers, highly skilled trades that required some level of formal instruction, and investors/merchants.
Shit that never happens. Can you even give a single example of ‘automation’ and ‘process improvements’ which was thought up by a cubicle jockey? Even if you can how can it possibly justify everyone in the office making more instead of just the one guy that actually improved shit?
These jobs are arbitrarily high paying. Anyone could do them. There are reasons that the pay is so high, but it has nothing to do with how difficult the job is, or the necessity in keeping high performing employees.
In regards to Joe Schmoe’s tale:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/developmentally-disabled-burger-king-employee-only,462/
Can you even give a single example of ‘automation’ and ‘process improvements’ which was thought up by a cubicle jockey?
Says the guy communicating instantly around the world via a system that is constantly improving thanks to cubicle jockeys. True, a lot of people react to nerds’ successes with irrational amounts of hostility and denial. Why, they belong to the loser caste; how on God’s green earth could they be successful at something? Does not compute!
These jobs are arbitrarily high paying. Anyone could do them. There are reasons that the pay is so high, but it has nothing to do with how difficult the job is, or the necessity in keeping high performing employees.
Nonsense. Granted like anywhere there are cube-snoozers and losers, especially at very large companies where you can hide in the cracks. But to suggest that “anyone” can do the job and that there is no difference between employees is lunacy. It’s the same thought process that leads someone to say something like “you could take anybody from the assembly line and give them Henry Ford’s job and they’d do just as well.” Uhhh, no. That’s Leftist insanity.
So tell me, are all salesmen the same? Do they all do as well? Are all writers equally good?
If Ayn Rand made one single indelible point in her writing it was that people aren’t fungible across a corporation and that there really ARE leaders among men and drastic differences in quality among employees.
A modestly higher minimum wage, coupled with enforcement of wage-hour laws is a perfect wedge issue against liberals, highlighting the inherent contradiction between their hatred of exploitation and their love of open borders.
A minimum wage of $20 sounds about right to me. It would encourage the tech-savvy out there to come up with automation to replace lots of people who earn minimum wage … and would have other interesting effects.
They only became so when labor-friendly government coupled with media pressure and conspired with the healthy profits most manufacturers were making in the post-war period. Suddenly, it became the norm to pay a lever-puller a middle-class wage with a full pension.
It doesn’t really matter, what you’re dreaming of is unsustainable. You can’t have a tiny class of mega rich, a small middle class of “knowledge” workers and a vast lower class barely surviving. Automation and outsourcing is displacing people from jobs that enable them to live relatively happy and peaceful lives. The basis for that is their material wealth. Many of these people are just not going to be able to move into the knowledge class, and letting them starve off is not realistic (although it seems to be a dream for libertarians). This is all just going to lead to more redistribution.
peterike, don’t bother referring to Ayn Rand; liberals’ (and it seems most conservatives’) brains just instantly turn off when you mention her name – the current culture has demonized and discredited Rand so badly that they automatically reject anything tainted with Objectivism.
workingman – so what happens when the rich decide they are tired of generating huge amounts of wealth every year just to watch it get “redistributed,” and ether flee the USA or just quit working and live off their savings?
Also, when you import millions of unskilled third world peasants, yeah…you’re going to get a “vast lower class.” Econ 101 – supply and demand. Increasing the supply of labor makes the price of labor (wages) go down.
…that was in no way created by people that are on Facebook 7h a day. I did and do work in IT. IT workers, computer programmers, engineers are not “cubicle jockeys” and you are rebutting statements that no one made, and conflating Shaniqua hunting and pecking keys to insert a new name on the template email she has to send out a few times a day with a tiny, tiny handful of geniuses, you disingenuous fuck.
No fucking farmville addicted secretary contributed to the creation or improvement of the Internet, and there is no justification to pay her $15/h, and yes just about any burger flipper could do her job.
…that make up the vast and overwhelming majority of office workers.
…is pretty much completely accurate as these jobs exist to employ the daughters of middle class men that are of marginal productivity, but which society can’t bear to have become ghetto dwelling losers.
And no one said that this.
Again something that no one said. So typing emails from a template, which requires no proficiency at either typing or original thought, and making and delivering copies on an automated copier with no time or resource sensitivity are equivalent to being Henry Ford right?
The reality is that anyone could do these specific “middle class” jobs, which isn’t the same thing as saying anyone could do any job. Anyone could probably do YOUR job and since you don’t see the problem you are probably a marginally productive worker being overpaid to do make-work.
You won’t find an office that doesn’t employ a slightly below average negro, which is the threshold to do the work. That threshold is slightly above mental retardation. You fucking libertarians are incapable of seeing reality for what it is. We employ people to do nothing in the private sector at ludicrous fucking wages because we wish to perpetuate a class.
We middle class people can’t support our unsuccessful children (ie women in the workforce) so we have invented an industry in which they can “labor” and get a living wage. It’s all make pretend that they are doing anything useful, worth more than (less than) minimum wage.
Companies leave money on the table to perpetuate a defunct business model. I’ve worked for/with similar sized companies, one that has a 5 person Accounts Payable department in an actual office, and another that has one perfectly average middle aged women with Quicken that works from home, and I’d say that this woman probably has more actual work as the company in question does a higher volume of smaller transactions.
Do salesmen play farmville 7h a day? Do salesmen earn an identical hourly wage regardless of performance? So now your typical office worker is the founder of a business empire and a salesman. Can you get any more full of shit?
…it’s that immigration is bad for America and Jews are a plague on mankind.
Uh Kyle, can you point out where Ayn Rand stated that Jews are a plague on mankind, because if she really did then I need to throw away my copy of Atlas Shrugged….
@ Workingman
Funny, ” a tiny class of mega rich, a small middle class of “knowledge” workers and a vast lower class barely surviving. ” describes 95% of recorded history.
Again, the notion that most of the population should belong to the ‘middle class’, and that you can join the middle class on the basis of performing low-skilled work for twelve or fewer hours per day is exclusive to the western world in the 20th and 21st centuries. That you could was largely a product of the rapidly advancing automation you so decry – rapidly falling manpower requirements to produce X unit of product meant that productivity exploded, and a competitive market ensured that the price of goods fell accordingly.
Now, does this mean that the newly displaced working class, temporarily members of the middle class, won’t complain? No. Does it mean that there will be no attempts at increasing redistribution? No.
Do I think those attempts are going to be successful? No.
Simply put, too many of the poor are too easily distracted to really care all that much about their position in society. Why should they, when bread and circuses are so damn cheap? Nowadays, they have almost infinite possibilities for distraction and amusement, and their survival needs can be comfortably met even without welfare. They complain now not because they’re hungry, but because they can. There’s no real fire behind it – they’ll vote for whoever promises the most free shit, but in the absence of free shit on offer, they won’t rebel – they simply won’t vote.
What working man 12:59pm said.
Can someone tell me the minimum wage in Germany and Australia?
Thanks:)
Simply put, too many of the poor are too easily distracted to really care all that much about their position in society. Why should they, when bread and circuses are so damn cheap? Nowadays, they have almost infinite possibilities for distraction and amusement, and their survival needs can be comfortably met even without welfare. They complain now not because they’re hungry, but because they can. There’s no real fire behind it – they’ll vote for whoever promises the most free shit, but in the absence of free shit on offer, they won’t rebel – they simply won’t vote.
I think this is glib, short sighted and all too self satisfying.
Again, the notion that most of the population should belong to the ‘middle class’, and that you can join the middle class on the basis of performing low-skilled work for twelve or fewer hours per day is exclusive to the western world in the 20th and 21st centuries. That you could was largely a product of the rapidly advancing automation you so decry – rapidly falling manpower requirements to produce X unit of product meant that productivity exploded, and a competitive market ensured that the price of goods fell accordingly.
First of all, just because most people in history were miserably poor doesn’t justify anything, least of all going back to that kind of system. As for advancing automation, I don’t decry it at all, quite the contrary, I think it offers great advantages. It has the potential to free us from toil. The question that needs to be asked is, what do we do with the productivity gains and how should they be distributed? And what do we do with the people that are displaced by it?
Again, the notion that most of the population should belong to the ‘middle class’, and that you can join the middle class on the basis of performing low-skilled work for twelve or fewer hours per day is exclusive to the western world in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The value that productivity increases have provided hasn’t been lost, it’s still there and it has increased. Some of it is passed on in the form of lower prices, higher quality or a combination of the two. Some of it is distributed as profits. But because these forms of automation act on the jobs of the former middle class, they aren’t passed on as wage increases. Instead they push those workers out and drive wages down as jobs are eliminated. Which leaves all the more to be passed on in profits.
It’s just a question of allocation, how do we choose to distribute the gains that advancing technology provides.