Marie PhD
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The minimum wage

1/22/2014

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People I know constantly say they want to get rid of the minimum wage because it supposedly is keeping unemployed people out of a job.

Sure reintroduce legal slavery, if you want. And it will bring back slavery, because people will make promises to pay and then disappear or write you bad checks when its time to pay. At least when there was legal slavery, the owner was obliged to feed, clothe and lodge you.

When union's sprung up, it was agreed that 40 hours of work should be enough to support yourself on. These days you need 2 full time jobs to support yourself. If the minimum wage was increased you'd be able to support yourself with one job and then employment would increase because then an unemployed person would be able to take your job to support him/herself with.

Businesses still need to employ enough people to serve their customers and the ludicrous picture you see around of workers being replaced by machines is silly. People still prefer talking to a person rather than a machine.

So there is some propaganda on minimum wage. Lets take a look at their example.

For a start the profit on a burger is ludicrous at only 10c. Profit margins are usually at least 100% and labour costs would be included into overhead. Also included in the overhead are things like rent, the costs of the raw materials, like the bun, meat, lettuce, cheese, whatever, electricity etc.

This article better explains profit margins and how they are calculated. You'll see that the profit margins on a $4 burger is more likely to be 165%. And that 10c for the burger is really going to pay the worker. Imagine paying only 5c more for your burger so the worker could get 15c per burger - omg!

So now in the mythical example in our propaganda piece on burger prices,

Al flips 100 burgers an hour, Bob 120 and Carl 90. So when the minimum wage goes up Carl gets the chop because the owner because the owner sees Carl as making a loss for him.

But who the hell is serving the customers if Carl loses his job? Who is cleaning the toilets and taking orders? Carl may not be the fastest flipper but the customers liked his timely service and hate now that Bob dribbles drool out of the corner of his mouth. The lines are now much longer and people start to think they'll use the burger joint down the road where Carl now works.

The ridiculous rejoinder at the end is Carl gets offered more to flip burgers down the road. Why would they employ Carl for more when they can pay someone the minimum wage to flip burgers? The rejoinder is ridiculous.

What we are seeing more and more is how much contempt businesses have for their employees, which really tells me how irrelevant their customers are to them. Their employees are the people who interface to the world and their customers. The business the corporation does is just away of leveraging stock-market prices, nothing more.

We know raising minimum wage doesn't make burgers more expensive from the Australian model. There is no tipping in Australia and the tax the burger attracts is hidden in the price so in the end the burgers cost the same, the only difference is the owner makes less profit. When you consider corporations like Walmart, McDonalds and Peets are making huge profits, does it matter if they make a little less profit to pay their staff more? Is that such a bad thing when the owner doesn't care about either us or their staff and only really care about making major profit margins, not the ludicrous profit margins used in this ridiculous video.

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    I am interested in progressive politics, women's rights, science & art. I believe the only way we'll survive is if we help each other.

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