Minimum Wage
I have read a lot on Steemit about how minimum wage is a job killer, and have gone through the many postulates people make to have us know that this is true. I will just write a post that I hope will make you think a little about the minimum wage.
My work experience is nearly limited to working for a multinational banana company, now to be fair this company pays a higher minimum wage than the official one, even though after president Zelaya hiked the minmum wage by 40% (this caused his ouster via a coup) the difference between the official and the banana and mining company minimums has declined sharply. 40 years ago the minimum wage of a banana or mining company in Honduras was about 140% more than the official minimum from Lps.3.00 official to 7.20 multinational, now the difference is just a few percentage points..
But this is just a preamble of what I want to talk about, banana companies operate in different countries in Latin America, for example Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia Ecuador and Peru. The minimum wages in each country are all different. I can state as fact that the Costa Rican minimum wage is much higher than that of all the other banana growing countries except maybe Panama, it also has more expensive transportation costs, higher cost for fertilizers and other products used in the farms, taxes are just as high if not higher than in all the other countries, port costs are higher and against Honduras and Guatemala they are at least 30 hours further away from the markets, this means thirty hours more of fuel spent by vessels carrying this fruit making it that much more expensive. And here is the clincher Costa Rican fruit does not sell for a higher price than the fruit from other countries so how can these companies manage the much higher costs?
And yet Costa Rica constantly is a profit center for these companies they always turn out a profit, one of the explanations given is that they don't spend that much on irrigation because it rains a lot in Costa Rica, but I really don't think that off sets costs that much.
I frankly think the real reason for this discrepancy is that all companies can actually pay much more than they do, but the interest of their stock holders are that much more important than the livelihoods of the people who actually produce their product and make it available to consumers.
So I really think all talk about minimum wage destroying jobs is crap, now artificial intelligence, that could destroy more jobs than anything else, but please before posting about how bad the minimum wage is think things through, if things were so bad all companies that have strong unions that demand and receive a lot of benefits for workers would have gone broke a long time ago.
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if things were so bad all companies that have strong unions that demand and receive a lot of benefits for workers would have gone broke a long time ago.
you mean like the steel mills?
I have no idea about the steel mills, but if you don't have unions, employers will take advantage of employees, like for example, fast food franchises they pay as little as they can, and I bet you their profits are huge, hell you don't even know what they are selling as food.
or the rail roads, or the automobile industry, or the teacher unions, or ....etc.
ever notice that progress is pretty much limited to non union industries?
taking advantage of the employees isn't going to be a problem much longer. Sit your mind at ease and say hi to the robot that takes your job.
Oddly enough some people seem to think that the purpose of a business is to provide jobs.
nope.
Ok, let's see I can only really speak for Honduras the US experience might be different I have only read about it so my opinion is practically worthless as you have to live something to have a practical say in it. Ok, here we had some strong unions, bananas, mining, utilities (all utilities were government owned) teachers etc. So after 1990 when the government which was of the more right wing party as all we had were two parties one center right the other extreme right, well the extreme right won in 1990 and started implementing Milton Friedman's ideas (most of the top government figures were egressed from the Chicago School of economics) anyway they started weakening the unions, the standard explanation was union workers who at that time were a large part of the middle class were actually extorting business and these poor businessmen had to work with losses. So the unions started losing power, workers started getting less benefits, some governemnt depndencies (airports, ports were privatized and others like telecommunications and energy were semi privatized) whta happened, the workers, including teachers stopped being middle class they became poor, and astoundingly all the businesses and government companies that were going broke, didn't become solvent all of them still say they are on the verge of bankruptcy. Because you see the unions weren't really the problem (I agree most unio leaders are crooks) the problem is corruption at all levels, government employees want to and do steal as much as they can, companies pretend they are going to close so they won't be taxed, so what we ended up with is 1.5 million immigrant workers the majority of whom are in the US most of them undocumented, and more millionaires than this coutry could possibly have, thanks to corruption and drug trafficking. Do you know, we have a lot of millionaires some of whom owe up to 100 million USD in utility bills abd they are not charged? But if I go a month without paying the I get the service cut off.
As to the robot who takes my job he's going to have a great time because I have no job.
In the US we work all of our adult lives in order to be able to survive with 'no job' when we retire.
and yet..
lookit you.
what's your secret?
No secret, I'm 56 I can still do an odd job every now and then, I am not lazy, I can speak English, even though that is not such a great advantage in Honduras a lot of people can speak English, but I do know a lot of people and sometimes I get the chance to do something in which I can earn some money. We do have social security it doesn't kick in for me until I'm 65 and it's a very small amount at the most a person can get about 200 dollars, so it doesn't cover that much but of course it is better than nothing. I would think you have social security, I don't know how good it is for you, but I have met a lot of North Americans who came down here to retire as their SS wasn't enough to live on in the US and they found they could live much better here. Of course this was before we got the crime wave we are in right now.
That is how capitalism works..
Which is why it is just another ism, people taking advantage of other people.
But unions have bankrupted companies and ruined pension plans. Not all but many. You sound like you know the follies of raising the minimum wage yet you refuse to believe it. Why?
Because I have seen unions ruined by government and businesses and the only thing that has happened is that now Honduras, the poorest country in Central America, has the highest percentage of millionaires including a couple of billionaires in the area. This subject should be thoroughly researched, not just go by instinct, just think in the 70' s there were only 2 billionaires in the world now there are probably thousands, now why do you think this is so? And the middle class has definitely declined.
I agree that the middle class is suffering. I guess my tendencies are to blame governments more than billionaires. I don't hate the rich but, everyone I see going into government ends up being rich and i don't like that.
You have no idea, you should live in a third world country then you would really know what it means to live off of other people's work, corruption is great here, and the worst part is that the free trade guys (better said millionaires and billionaires) are a main part of this corrupt system, better said the stalwarts of capitalism. Look I think you should know I don't believe in any system all of them are corrupt, here on Steemit the big onus is on anarchy and anarchy is just a variant of the same crap, you start out with ideals and end up with a few people getting rich off of the majority. It has, is and will always be that way.
So how does one discard capitalism without relying soley on a government to control all aspects of goods and means of production? Venezuela comes to mind. Milton Freidman and Thomas Sowell argue these things best. Alas, perhaps the future really is bitcoin?
Friedman's ideas have been proven wrong all over, I can vouch for that they have been in effect here since 1990 and the economy has actually gone backward, we survive because of money sent by immigrant workers and drug trafficking the only place you could say it worked is in Chile but it worked there because a dictatorship made it work, which contradicts Friedman's point of a small government being the basis for progress there is no larger government than a dictatorship, there is no real alternative, always the top layer will suck off of the bottom one, no matter what system you implement. Capitalism, for one (this can be said about every system) is responsible for the deaths of probably millions of people so that a select group of people can lead a great life, if not look at what happened in India, China, Latin America, native North Americans, coolies in the west, blacks all over Africa, etc. Communism, millions dead because the system didn't count on the weather screwing with farming, this apart from all murders committed by these regimes, monarchism, been killing people for centuries, feudalism ditto, so in reality apart from Jesus coming down and taking control of everything I don't see anything getting better, and somehow I don't count on him returning.