Sure, the owners set it up and took all the risk, and all power to them. But it did feel a little exploitative that I was making them all that money with my labour, and getting so little of it. I’m sure that it wouldn’t have hurt them that badly to pay a little bit more, particularly when they were indiscreet enough to let me know how much of that turnover was profit. If the minimum wage forced a pay rise for people like me (then), I wouldn’t be complaining. Perhaps they’d have been squeezed and I’d have lost my job, but I doubt it. It’s pretty hard to cut staff when there’s only one of me. And I knew they were milking it bigtime, as all the money went right through my hands. You really get a sense of it when you’re stuffing huge fat rolls of someone else’s cash into their safe 5 times a day.

Ultimately I did lose the job anyway. The boss’s son quit school and needed work. I hope he got more than the minimum wage.

Is NZ $12 a fair minimum wage or is it too much? Is it a LOT too much? What of other countries that have minimums? You have me curious.

These guys do the US pretty well. Never mind the opinions just the inflation adjusted wage law.

http://members.fortunecity.com/multi19/pay.htm#int

-and this is a listing by country along with a summary discussion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Worldwide_minimum_wages

So it looks as though it ($12) is comparatively generous but not more than about 25% above the typical and not the highest on the planet. Would you agree with that reading of the data?

With respect to the capitalist line, did you not recognize petermcks line being thrown back ? I should have directed it at him specifically perhaps…

OK.. so what happens if WE have a high minimum wage. Remembering our isolation.

Unskilled labour becomes more expensive.

People who might be tempted to drop out of school - do so in order to take an unskilled job at min wage…

People who might be tempted to drop out of school - cannot do so because there are fewer unskilled jobs available…

Products depending on unskilled labour are more expensive.

Automation is used as a substitute for unskilled labour more often.

People in poorer regions have more money (maybe, as there may be countervailing effects on benefits and taxes) reducing the effects of unequal wealth on the education of their children.

- feel free to add something I miss…

Preventing outsourcing is not like killing the other doctors to create a scarcity of doctors. The demand for unskilled labor isn’t that portable. People who do it aren’t able to travel to NZ from India to do it, and for example, picking fruit here from India simply isn’t possible. I think the outsourcing issue has to be argued separately from the min-wage issues.

As for introducing trade barriers, my first reaction is ??? What’s that got to do with the argument… but then there is not likely to be much reason to do more than let the cost of the distance take its toll. I assume that you reckon that these are required to separate our markets from those which are run without min wages?

We can’t save the rest of the world Nichlemn, it is already at 3x its carrying capacity IMHO, and allowing ourselves to be buried with them because we feel obligated to bind ourselves to the mast of their sinking ship, is not survival positive for the species as a whole.

I can’t continue this at present, have to scoot… and I am not really finished with the research

respectfully
BJ

Consider teenagers that are able to drop out of school. Some will always drop out of school, some will never drop out. But there will be a certain amount who are wavering, and an increase in the minimum wage will be sufficient to make them drop out, as opposed to staying in school. This can occur by other means but it is best not to push it.

Also, note New Zealand does not exist in a vacuum. When the minimum increases, businesses will have higher labour costs they must pass on in some way. If unskilled work is being far overpaid in a country, there is a large incentive to move elsewhere. You may call it “exploitation” but in reality, unskilled work has always been overpaid. They don’t deserve a reasonably quality of life by Western standards if they are simply not worth it. When there is a huge supply of people willing to work for a lot less, it may seem “unfair” to have to stoop to their level. But of course they’d feel that way. If I was getting paid $50 an hour in a McDonalds due to artificial controls, but some people were easily willing to do it for $10, I should accept that my standard of living has simply been inflated far beyond what it should have been. Of course, I’d probably just bitch about it. But consider the morality behind trying to protect my job.

Preventing work from being outsourced to try to save jobs would be similar to 10 doctors going off and killing the other 90 doctors to try to make more money by reducing the supply of them. Whenever we impose minimum wages significantly beyond the world equilibrium and introduce trade barriers, it’s “killing” the people who are willing to work for less to improve the outcomes of the fortunate people who are still working. Yes, this helps improve outcomes of the unskilled people in that country - but for what cost? The detriment of the rest of the world, for instead of working for low wages can’t work at all. It’s one of my biggest beefs with nationalism: appeasing your constituency at the cost of the rest of the world.

“It is astonishing how deluded and underinformed most capitalists are”

Now, now, that doesn’t get you any points at all. By attacking people, and not rationally debating ideas, you’re not doing yourself any favours. I could go and rant about how “You Greenies know nothing about economics, your arguments are incredibly flawed, it’s just a waste of time trying to convince you idiots.” I know that regardless of what I say, I’m not going to convince you - and you probably won’t convince me either. This is because politics are about core values that cannot be debated away.

“You don’t eat the American Dream… it… eats… you” - from “Odds Bodkins”, a political comic of the Seventies in San Francisco.

Nichlemn - Increasing the minimum wage does however, distribute the wealth a bit. It does NOT impose an artificial barrier to achieving wealth. NOR is a “high wage” economy the case anywhere anymore or a necessarily desireable goal. The USA used to be that, but real wages have been dropping for years. You can’t build a high wage economy at all when the global workforce is as large and accessible as it is. I think we should examine this “goal” a bit.

What do we mean by “High Wage”? This isn’t a real time medium so I will have to wait to hear your answer to go much further. My initial inclination is that it means that we ALL have a great deal more disposable income at our fingertips, much as the USA has had for the past few decades. We produce complex goods for export and get back wads of foreign money in payment? like the USA does?… except that isn’t what’s been going on in the USA, IS it? Does a debt of over 12 Trillion dollars ring a bell anywhere? Those aren’t “wages” those are debts. Won’t likely be repaid ever, but that’s a problem for our children…

Your point about skills is interesting too, as skilled labour is in high demand and is reasonably well compensated here. You mean that people would rather just work for minimum wage because it is so high - $12/hr - 40 hr week = $480. My family eats $300 of groceries in a week and there are child labour laws to keep my 2 year old out of the work force. So it really doesn’t work out for me not to be skilled, does it… and I am really lucky too, because I am VERY skilled, and paid as well as the company can afford to pay me. Yes it IS less than in the USA, even if the NZ$ were at parity with the US$ it is less, and the taxes are higher, but I’d rather be here.

I am aware too, that not everyone is capable of doing the things I do, no matter how hard they study. The average person is average smart and can upskill enough to get appreciably more than minimums. The bottom of the bell curve however, is not able to do anything whatsoever about their position. I know you would rather they just “went away” but actually paying them a bare living wage for their work and a lot of them work harder and more honestly than the smarter folks, is just good public policy. They WILL buy things too… not the same things that Bill Gates might buy but then, they won’t have been convicted of monopolistic practices on 3 continents either.

There’s more to it than that too, and you well know it. The lower decile schools have a hard time educating kids who come from those poor homes. There’s nutrition issues and resource issues in the homes and it just isn’t nice to have to grow up being that far behind the power curve. It is even WORSE to have to deal with the educational and social disadvantages that the school made up of poor people’s kids provides. Maybe we can fix those schools up enough to really level the playing field, and MAYBE it makes sense to simply equalize the available resources at home a little more.

You’d be happy to pay people less than subsistence, yes? and you are quite unhappy to make life liveable for them. However that sort of society breeds trouble along with poverty, and we don’t want it. Your “high wages” come with a high price tag.

BJ

BJ, thats a much more polite version of one of my sayings, namely that the alternative to the American Dream is jail…

The “ownership society” mantra that has been so popular in the USA has brought the US to a bimodal distribution of wealth. There are likely to be a million jobs lost over the next 12 months there, and the wage earners PAYE battlers will be the main casualties in the class war that the wealthy won back when Raygun was elected. There are two classes in the US now, owners and peons, and the “golden shower” that the latter have been experiencing of late, has not been in any sense metallic.

We’ve seen what unrestricted capitalism does and how it fails, and we aren’t having any of it. We know what uncontrolled communism does and how IT fails and we will have none of that either.

We don’t have any problem at ALL with paying people what they are worth in the main, but the minimum wage is not going to affect the rewarding of merit. That happens, and in the market as it stands there’s no shortage of jobs, there is a shortage of WORKERS.

Don’t you get the relationship? That’s the market speaking and it is saying that workers have to reap some of the rewards or they’ll just withold their labour. Capitalist principles at work, but you’re happy to deny them in order to improve on an already better profit margin… Taking advantage of inexperienced youth to get cheap labour is the basic game. The kids aren’t able to say “no, that’s not enough” because they want that first job, but I know what happened when I was working like that, and I wonder sometimes if that isn’t part of why I am here.

That’s what we know about Capitalists. They are never happy with enough.

BJ

In an ideal world, companies would pay their workers as much as they could afford to do so, and in a world that looked like that the concept of a minimum wage would be ludicrous, as would unions and loads of other bull. There have even been companies that started with that ideal, HP and McDonalds spring to mind. Unfortunately, in general reality, the question of employment comes down to how little an employer can (or is willing to) pay.

The vey concept of a competitive business (which is good) is competition. Unfortunately, competition usually comes down to “how little can I pay my staff” which looks good for the business owner. But what goes around comes around, and thats why his customers cant afford his products. Minimum wage breaks the downward spiral, albeit at a cost.

In my opinion, if a company can only afford to pay a substantive proportion of its workers on a long term basis at minimum wage then that company is not a a very viable company, its on the subsitance level waiting to fail. If the majority of the employees are on “low” wages and those in the upper echelons are collecting much money, then that failure is (again in my opinion) deserved.

Ratio of highest to lowest remuneration is an interesting meaure and should be required reporting.