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Strippers are generally self-employed private contractors and therefore not typically paid a wage and receive no benefits. My barbershop operates the same way. The barbers actually pay the shop to rent their space. I'm trying to think of other trades where this kind of arrangement might occur.
Are we just ignoring all if the workers that make above $7.25 but below say $10 an hour that would get a raise from a heightened minimum wage. It seems rather intuitive that not many people make exactly the minimum wage or less but that many people do make just above it and would receive a raise if the minimum wage was increased to $10-$15 an hour. I know you all aren't this ignorant so I have to assume you're being intentionally pedantic.
Not at all. This class of workers is specifically addressed in the paper I linked to earlier, along with those workers who earned more than minimum wage prior to forced increases but became minimum-wage workers afterwards.
In addition to having their hours cut.
Personal anecdote:
People who work on a base-plus-commission basis are not entirely dissimilar to people who work on a wage-plus-tips basis, insomuch as that it's impossible to predict your annual earnings, which makes form W2 a real goat-****.
That having been said, as of today I am officially unemployed, and when I rejoin the workforce in nine days, I will have done so taking more than a 50% pay-cut.
I am nervous as hell about the fact that I have no health insurance at the moment, given the state of my lumbar spine coupled with the fact that I'll be engaging in heavy physical labor over the next week.
And I did this voluntarily.
May the gods / flying spaghetti monster / etc have mercy on my soul...
I am nervous as hell about the fact that I have no health insurance at the moment, given the state of my lumbar spine coupled with the fact that I'll be engaging in heavy physical labor over the next week.
Wait, did you not have employee-provided coverage before? Aren't you eligible for COBRA?
Wait, did you not have employee-provided coverage before? Aren't you eligible for COBRA?
Yeah, HR mentioned something about that before I left. I probably should have paid attention.
Just gonna try not to paralyze myself between now and Monday, July 17.
EDIT: And, oh Irony of Ironies. With 5 seconds of my hitting "Submit", I heard the gmail *ping*. Flipped over, and saw that the private policy I'd forgotten that I'd applied for through IHC Group had just been approved.
$87 a month, $5k ded, 20% copay. I ask the following seriously: What the **** is everyone complaining about? I'm a 40 year old male with a borderline drinking problem and two surgeries in the past four years, who is staring major back surgery in the face, and I just got health insurance for $87 a month. I don't get what all the fuss is about...
Yeah, HR mentioned something about that before I left. I probably should have paid attention.
Just gonna try not to paralyze myself between now and Monday, July 17.
EDIT: And, oh Irony of Ironies. With 5 seconds of my hitting "Submit", I heard the gmail *ping*. Flipped over, and saw that the private policy I'd forgotten that I'd applied for through IHC Group had just been approved.
$87 a month. I ask the following seriously: What the **** is everyone complaining about? I'm a 40 year old male with a drinking problem who is staring major back surgery in the face, and I just got health insurance for $87 a month. I don't get what all the fuss is about...
You'd be fine with COBRA anyway. Basically, you have up to 90 days to accept it, and you can wait until you have a medical event that needs coverage to sign up. You just have to pay in arrears if you wait. I have a 3 week gap in coverage, so we'll go without coverage and then sign up for COBRA if we need it.
Did you receive a paycheck from your last employer this month, or will you sometime this month?
Everywhere I've worked since college (Dec '05), where there was an employer sponsored plan, that policy was in effect until the end of the month in which you left or were terminated. The policy from the TV station should still be in effect until July 31st.
The CDC and the NIH define binge drinking as achieving a BAC of .08. What's the point if you don't get to .08 (feel a little something)? That's two standard (wimpy) short drinks an hour for most people. Or one 16oz glass of 10%+ microbrew.
But seriously, my job affords me the opportunity to have a couple of drinks sometime around 1-4 o'clock with customers a couple of times a month. Then meet up with others between 4 and 6. And then have a few drinks at home sometime afterwards. It is a rare day but it does happen.
Roughly 3 days a week I will have drinks before going home, either with customers or friends, and then again at home. I seldom have just one.
I don't need to drink, but I do enjoy drinks. And I like variety.
It's fascinating to me how this same truth keeps keeps getting discovered and written about by what are traditionally very left-leaning media outlets:
‘Free lunches’ like the $15 minimum wage may hurt the people they’re meant to help
By Catherine Rampell August 7
Protesters rally in St. Louis. (Jeff Curry/Getty Images)
Progressives generally support better labor protections, including policies meant to provide higher wages, more predictable working hours, increased bargaining power, and greater access to paid family leave, sick leave and overtime. And given the raw deal that workers get so often, these are all policies that I generally support as well.
But lately, as Democratic leadership has increasingly embraced the far-left impulses of its base, I’ve become convinced that the left needs to think harder about the unintended consequences of such benevolent-seeming proposals.
In isolation, each of these policies has the potential to make workers more costly to hire. Cumulatively, they almost certainly do.
Which means that, unless carefully designed, a lefty “pro-labor” platform might actually encourage firms to hire less labor — or at least to shift toward contract labor that’s exempted from these cherished protections.
These are not mere hypotheticals. A two-tier labor market, in which some lucky workers are entitled to generous compensation and job security and the rest are hung out to dry, already plagues countries, such as France and Japan, with traditionally stronger labor protections than the United States.
But these are not outcomes that lefty politicians and policy wonks seem keen to grapple with. It’s easier, or perhaps more politically convenient, to assume that “pro-worker” policies never hurt the workers they’re intended to help.
Take the proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, a policy endorsed in the Democratic Party’s new “Better Deal” platform.
An increase in the federal minimum wage, stuck at $7.25 for eight years, is long overdue. But more than doubling it would likely result in massive job losses and cuts in work hours.
We’ve already seen preliminary evidence that raising wages in Seattle to $13 has produced sharp cuts in hours, leaving low-wage workers with smaller paychecks. And that’s in a high-cost city. Imagine what would happen if Congress raised the minimum wage to $15 nationwide.
In West Virginia, the median hourly wage is just $14.79; in Arkansas, it’s $14.48; and in Mississippi, it’s a depressingly low $14.22. A $15 minimum wage could be binding on more than half of jobs in these states. In fact, in every state (not including D.C.), it could cover at least a quarter of positions.
That might seem like good thing. Why wouldn’t you want to improve the living standards of as many people as possible?
The answer: You won’t actually be helping them if making their labor much more expensive, much too quickly, results in their getting fired.
Similarly, a year ago, the Obama administration issued a new overtime rule.
This rule massively expanded the universe of white-collar employees entitled to time-and-a-half pay for working beyond 40 hours per week. Before, white-collar workers earning salaries up to $23,660 were generally entitled to overtime. The new rule more than doubled the threshold, to $47,476.
The new threshold was to be implemented in one fell swoop, starting last December. There was fierce debate within the Obama administration about the wisdom of such an abrupt increase, but those who mentioned this to me declined to ever do so on the record. Meanwhile, left-leaning groups cheered the millions whose pay was about to go up.
Then, a court blocked the rule in November, and several weeks ago the Trump administration began the process of revising it. During his confirmation hearings, Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta cautiously suggested that a cutoff of about $33,000 might be appropriate, though he wanted to spend more time looking at the effects on workers and firms.
As strange as it feels to say something nice about policies being pursued by the Trump administration, this might be a better approach.
On this and other labor issues, says Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, “We need to be debating whether a cost-benefit test is passed, something on which reasonable people can disagree.” Instead, Strain says, a lot of thoughtful, well-meaning people on the left seem to be looking for a free lunch — that is, for policies with all winners, no losers and no costs. (Kinda like the right’s attitude toward tax cuts, I might add.)
Here I confess that I’ve been guilty of this. I’m often drawn to studies and stories about pro-labor policies that “pay for themselves.” And while there often is a pro-business or macroeconomic case to be made for policies that help workers, I pledge to be more mindful about potential unintended costs as well.
Readers, I hope you’ll hold me to this. And anyone else peddling free lunches, too.
I think another missing part of this discussion is education on how to make money... The US economy is built to benefit business owners and contractors. If students were educated (potentially at a high school level) on how to own and run a small business the number of people dependent on minimum wage jobs would decrease. The, theoretical, outcome would be less people in the low value labor market, stronger demand (due to lack of supply), and increased wages as a result or employer competition. e.g. Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations.
Edit: To be fair, this answer doesn't meet your standard for "dependency" as it fails to account for non-head-of-household earners being a part of this group. 24% of this group are teenagers (ages 16 to 19).
4.3% of hourly workers? So it's a lot lower number than that if you include the entire workforce because of the huge number of salaried workers.
correct.
min. wage is and always has been an easy way to get voters because people are idiots; simple because it sound like a nice worthy/moral cause to get behind.
Real-world data. This article is nearly a year old, but got missed the first time around. I'm actively looking to see if there's a follow-on.
Seattle's Painful Lesson on the Road to a $15 Minimum Wage
The experiment has hurt low-wage workers, cutting their earnings by $125 a month.
By Megan McArdle June 26, 2017, 3:21 PM CDT Corrected June 26, 2017, 5:17 PM CDT
Unintended consequences for workers. Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
In the summer of 2014, the Seattle City Council unanimously passed a bill increasing the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. “No city or state has gone this far. We go into uncharted territory,” said council member Sally Clark. The City of Seattle, to its credit, actually made some effort to chart the waters as they went, funding an ideologically diverse research team at the University of Washington whose members range from Jacob Vigdor, who is a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, to Hillary Wething, a graduate student who used to be a fellow at the left-wing Economic Policy Institute.
Since the law raised the wage in stages, they studied it in stages. The results of the first jump, from $9.47 to $11 an hour, were released last year, and seemed to show that the effects on earnings were pretty small -- an increase of about $72 every three months -- and that low-wage employment declined slightly. In the long-running battle over the effects of the minimum wage, this paper didn’t offer much ammunition for either side, and thus occasioned relatively little excitement in the wonkosphere.
Now the question has acquired a little sizzle. UW is not the only school studying Seattle’s experiment, and last week a report came out from UC Berkeley, focused specifically on food services. Last week, that study reported: “Our results show that wages in food services did increase -- indicating the policy achieved its goal. … Employment in food service, however, was not affected, even among the limited-service restaurants, many of them franchisees, for whom the policy was most binding.”
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray seemed ecstatic at the news; as Michael Saltsman noted at the time, he “conveniently had an infographic designed and ready to go for the study's release. His office excitedly tweeted that the policy had 'raised food workers' pay, without negative impact on employment,' linking to an uploaded study version on the Mayor's personal .gov website rather than a University domain.”
This morning's data gives ammunition to the mayor's opposition. The University of Washington released its second study, this one covering the increase from $11 an hour to $13. And this study found huge effects: For every 1 percent increase in their hourly wage, low-wage workers saw a 3 percent reduction in the number of hours worked. As a result, they lost about $125 in earnings a month, clawing back the entire gain from the earlier hike and more.
Mayor Murray did not have an infographic ready to go for this study. Instead, he simply retweeted the infographic from the old one.
This is hardly the first time we’ve had dueling studies on the minimum wage; indeed, by this point, the dueling is so common that the minimum wage practically has its own rules of engagement. But it’s pretty rare for a city to fund one study and then try to rebut it with another. Worse still for the citizens of Seattle, a read of the new paper suggests that this rebuttal won’t work.
To understand why not, you first need to understand a little bit of the history of minimum wage research. Such research has often focused on restaurants, because they employ a lot of low-wage workers, which would seem to make them a good proxy for a variety of low-wage industries. The most famous study in the field is probably David Card and Alan Krueger’s study of fast food restaurants from 1994. When you hear someone on the left claim that “research shows” minimum wage increases don’t hurt employment, then you can almost certainly trace that statement back to Card and Krueger.
Reality was always more complicated. We are not working with a model in a textbook where undifferentiated widget manufacturers hire indistinguishable workers from a giant pile of bodies marked “labor.” Different industries, different firms within those industries, and different workers within those firms may all have very different experiences under a minimum wage: some unaffected, some better off, some driven into insolvency. So while Card and Krueger was important, it was by no means the final word that some took it for.
The new paper, unlike Card and Krueger, has broad data covering all of Washington’s workers, not just those employed by fast food franchises that happened to be operating at the beginning of the study. This is no slur on Card and Krueger, mind you; Washington State just happens to have unusually rich data available compared to most other states.[1]
Leading labor economist David Autor told the Washington Post that “This strikes me as a study that is likely to influence people,” saying the study is "very credible" and "sufficiently compelling in its design and statistical power that it can change minds." In other words: if you thought it was settled science that raising the minimum wage is good for workers, be prepared to think again.
And particularly be prepared to rethink very high minimum wages, like those supported by the “Fight for $15” folks. For as the authors note, the first round of hikes had relatively small impacts, while the second round had huge ones, suggesting that the effects may be nonlinear. And that makes sense. Relatively few people in this country make the minimum wage, so a small increase doesn’t make that much difference to most workers, or most employers. But a large jump affects more people, and the wage increases are much bigger for the lowest-paid staffers. If you make $9 an hour, but generate $10.50 in revenue for your boss, a law that raises the wage to $10.45 may cause her to shrug and decide it’s easier to keep you on as long as she’s making something. But a wage that forces her to pay you far more than you bring in…. Continuing to employ you would just be bad business.
It’s worth noting that Card and Krueger’s famous study involved an increase in the minimum wage from $4.25 an hour to $5.05. That was a significant increase -- about 18 percent. But Seattle’s minimum wage has already increased by 37 percent, and it still has roughly another 20 percent to go.
At some level, we all intuitively understood that this was true. If the minimum wage increases by a penny an hour, probably even most rock-ribbed conservatives would not predict mass firings. On the other hand, if the wage was arbitrarily set to $100 an hour, even ardent labor activists would presumably expect widespread unemployment to follow. You can’t flat-out say “minimum wages don’t increase unemployment,” because the size of the increase, and the level of the resulting wage, obviously matter at some margin.
Seattle may have discovered that margin. And unfortunately, it may yet discover even further, uglier margins when the data is in on the full increase to $15. That’s the danger of striking out for uncharted territory; sometimes, you end up where there be dragons.
07-07-2017, 05:23 PM
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