Don’t turn our fate over to depraved oligarchs for the price of a few dimes. Keep pushing these sociopathic bastards. Keep pushing them right off the stage.
The challenge for the future of work is not really about the quantity of jobs, but their quality, and whether they pay enough to provide a decent standard of living. In the US, ensuring that they do starts with raising the minimum wage and ensuring that other existing tools don't go unused.Pavlina needs to get in contact with Laura and set her straight.
Similarly, proposals in the United States for a federal jobs guarantee have been gaining momentum on the traditional left. But while such a program could employ millions of workers to deliver basic public services and rebuild and modernize the country’s dilapidated infrastructure, it is no more feasible than a UBI, given current federal budget constraints.BTW, government spending is now going full blast, deficit and debt be damned. What constraint?
The challenge for the future of work is not really about the quantity of jobs, but their quality, and whether they will pay enough to provide a decent standard of living.Workers don't want "bullshit jobs" (ht David Graeber). They want good jobs.
One of the abiding and recurring trends, accentuated in the neo-liberal era, is the apparent ‘concern’ for the low-paid by the captains of industry. They continually warn against allowing pay increases for this cohort because they are – so the story goes – deeply concerned about the damage it will do to the employment prospects. What they really mean is that they know pay rises at the bottom end of the pay structure don’t alter employment levels significantly but have some impact on profitability. That is, they reduce profits a little. And that is the concern they are really expressing. The British Chambers of Commerce have called for a freeze on real wages for the lowest paid workers in Britain despite profitability soaring and the share of business profits in national income rising. The expression ‘where do these characters get off’ comes to mind. Although it is hardly surprising. British entrepreneurs tend to be lazy and take the easy way out when they can to further their own ends.Bill Mitchell – billy blog
As the CEO of the corporation that operates Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, President-elect Donald Trump’s labor secretary pick Andy Puzder has frequently criticized efforts to raise the minimum wage, claiming that higher wages are inadequate for entry-level employees and overly burdensome to businesses like his fast food empire.
That aligns with Trump’s position.
But Puzder’s devotion to cheap labor extends to being an outspoken proponent of offering legal status to undocumented workers and pushing for immigration reform — something that is discordant with Trump’s obsession with blocking and deporting undocumented immigrants....Trump has already backed away from his goal deporting all illegals to only the the criminals, which he estimated to be about two to three million. That's a big climb down.
The Intercept reported earlier this week that Veronica Birkenstock, who runs a recruitment firm that secures visas for cheap temporary foreign workers, had been appointed to President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Labor transition team.
We knew this because Birkenstock’s name appeared on a list of individuals in an announcement on the Trump transition’s website on Tuesday.
But by Thursday, her name had disappeared from the team’s website.
Asked what had happened to Birkenstock, a spokesperson for the transition team responded: “This individual was never part of the team and has no role.”Trump Transition Team Announces a Hire, Then Denies It Ever Happened
Donald J. Trump on Wednesday morning repeated a statement he made the night before in the Republican presidential debate: that wages are “too high” in the United States, an argument he made to explain his opposition to raising the minimum wage....
In an interview Wednesday morning on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, the co-host Mika Brzezinski raised the topic again, which gave Mr. Trump the chance to clarify his remarks from the debate. She pointed out the current minimum wage, saying, “Donald, nobody can live on that.”
Mr. Trump responded: “Our taxes are too high. Our wages are too high. We have to compete with other countries.”Counter Current News
THE PUNDITS said it would never happen. But both California and New York on Monday implemented legislation that moves them toward a tiered minimum wage of $15 dollars an hour, covering 60 million Americans.The hikes come as a direct result of organizing by thousands of people in the union-backed “Fight for 15” movement that kicked off in 2012 — organizing that was quickly decried by pundits and opponents as unrealistic and unlikely to ever succeed....Power to the people!
"What welfare reform did in my view was to go after some of the weakest and most vulnerable people in this country," says Bernie Sanders…
To address this scourge, Sanders called for the federal minimum wage to be lifted from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour; proposed a youth jobs program to create 1 million jobs for young Americans; and urged support for a $1 trillion, five-year push to put 13 million Americans to work in good-paying jobs rebuilding roads, bridges and railways.…
On Wednesday, Sanders also advocated for a Medicare-for-all, single-payer healthcare system to help reduce poverty.Common Dreams
The International Monetary Fund in January published a report which calls on European countries to accept the majority of refugees and to temporarily employ and pay them with less than the guaranteed minimum wage.
The IMF in its report recommended the implementation of short-term differentiation between asylum seekers and EU citizens through “temporary” and limited deviations from the minimum wage for refugees.…South Front
It seems to me that there are two questions: 1. Should the the aggregate of the minimum wage and the earned income tax credit add up to a living wage? Answer: yes. 2. what is the right mix and balance between raising the minimum wage (which will, if it is raised high enough, diminish the total number of jobs) and increasing the earned income tax credit (which will, once we are away from the zero lower bound in interest rates, require raising taxes somewhere in the system)? The minimum wage should not be considered in isolation.…
There continues to be a great deal of debate over the economic impact of the federal minimum wage. Does it serve as a drag because it raises firms’ costs or do businesses experience higher sales as a result of the rise in their customers’ income? Obviously, if you consider only one side of that equation or the other–as most amateur analysts do–you reach a biased conclusion. The real question is, what is the net impact after all the relevant relationships are considered?
Fortunately, this has already been addressed in myriad professional, peer-reviewed studies using both mathematical modeling and statistical evidence. And there appears to be something of a consensus: changes in the minimum wage have little to no impact on employment (see for example: Why Does the Minimum Wage Have No Discernible Effect on Employment?). Apparently, the change in cost is largely offset by the change in demand and other factors. A little boring, perhaps, but it’s always a cause for celebration in my discipline when we get anything close to an agreement!
But if that is true, then what is the point of raising or lowering it?….Forbes — Pragmatic Economics
Back in 1992, New Jersey raised the minimum wage by 18 per cent while its neighbour state, Pennsylvania, left its minimum wage unchanged. Unemployment in New Jersey should — according to mainstream economic theory — have increased relative to Pennsylvania. However, when economists Alan Krueger and David Card gathered information on fast food restaurants in the two states, it turned out that unemployment had actually decreased in New Jersey relative to that in Pennsylvania. Counter to neoclassical demand theory we had an anomalous case of a backward-sloping supply curve.
Lo and behold!
But of course — when facts and theory don’t agree, it’s the facts that have to be wrong …Read the rest where James Buchanan makes a fool of himself without being savvy enough to realize that, "It's the ideology, stupid."
“I don’t have anything against raising the minimum wage but I don’t think you can do it in a significant enough way without creating a lot of distortions,” Buffett, 84, Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s chief executive officer, said Saturday at the company’s annual shareholders meeting in Omaha, Nebraska. Those distortions “would cost a whole lot of jobs,” Buffett said.It's funny. Buffett talks about distortions? Like massive, unprecedented income and wealth inequality is not a distortion? Come on.
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| Image source: New York Times |
“The market rate for me as a C.E.O. compared to a regular person is ridiculous, it’s absurd,” said Mr. Price, who said his main extravagances were snowboarding and picking up the bar bill. He drives a 12-year-old Audi, which he received in a barter for service from the local dealer.
“As much as I’m a capitalist, there is nothing in the market that is making me do it,” he said, referring to paying wages that make it possible for his employees to go after the American dream, buy a house and pay for their children’s education.
Is capitalism compatible with decent living standards for the worst off*? This old Marxian question is outside the Overton window, but it's the one raised by Ed Miliband's promise to raise the minimum wage to £8 by 2020.…Stumbling and Mumbling
