Cail wrote: Increase minimum wage and:
- Anyone making more than minimum wage also gets a pay increase.
Anecdotally I haven't seen this happen. I have worked for two very large corporations and perhaps its because neither was a 'small business'. The one I work for now pays a bit more than the min wage. The last few times min wages increased, we did not raise pay across the board accordingly. When I say across the board I mean, hourly workers or salary workers. Didn't happen. Everyone else in the industry did not see that happen or we would have had a flight of people out. Heck people will leave for .25 per hour. Again didn't happen.
Cail wrote:
- Unions who tie their pay rates to the local prevailing wage increase their wages.
no idea. I don't work in a area where you see many unions.
Cail wrote:
- As a result, fewer people are hired and....
- The cost of goods and serviced increases.
Again just my experience from where I work. We don't tie our cost of goods to anything but what the market is asking and the cost to manufacture/distribute and sell. Our cost to make and distribute goods has only continued to go down.
Example, For our Largest distribution facility. Seven years ago our CPU (cost per unit) for our facility was almost 40 cents. Its has gone down each year and is closer to 32 cents per unit now. We send out millions of units per year. So year over year that accounts for literally millions of dollars per year less in 'saved' cost to distribute goods out of our facility. The added cost 3 dollars per hour per person is almost insubstantial compared to just that fact alone.
Agreed that its not my money nor my decision, nor my risk, but its pretty obvious that the company is making money even in a down economy, we are doing more with less, and the company has continued to put that on our P&L and just separate the red and the black lines more and more.
Added to that, just this year the business has become less generous while making much more. Anyone hired prior to this year has a pension. One of the few left. Anyone hired after this will NOT get a pension. They instead will give you 2% more match in 401K if hired after that. I've already done the math on it and someone making 50K per year, even with 12% compound interest will have less than half of what they would have gotten with a pension.
These are the kinds of things that show me that things have changed a lot in the last 40 years. The bottom line has become more important than anything else.
I am not disgruntled and this doesn't affect me at all. I have a great job. My wife and I together make a crap load of money. We both have a pension, we both of good 401K's. But future hires will get less than we will. Even in a time when the company can afford to me more generous, it is getting less generous.
Cail wrote:
I've already posted the statistics of who it is working minimum wage jobs, and it isn't heads of households with kids.
I agree that this is feel good legislation. Those making min wages are less than 2% of all workers in the economy and thus little to no impact to poverty and spending.