RE: Ontario Minimum Wage Hike Is Costing Us Money (Freedom Minute)
Yes things are going to "shit" but it has very little to do with minimum wage. Minimum wage jobs are not sufficient to propel a country. The problem in the US and Canada is that the majority of the industrial capacity has been shifted to China. My city which used to headquarter over 20 manufacturing companies before the nineties only has a couple of subsidiary plants left. Consider your own area. How many factories have closed. This has nothing to do with minimum wage.
As I reported in the post below this article contradicts the first report in Seattle. Yes minimum wage jobs were lost but they were replaced with better paying jobs.
The argument that higher wages drives companies to automation is very true. But historically there were new jobs and a better standard of living for the poor as a long term outcome. Even the poorest people in our society today have a better lifestyle than any class in the past.
Businesses simply hire less, and existing employees have to then work harder to make up the labor.
This article contradicts that statement.
http://lindsayadvocate.ca/st-daves-diner-finds-way-thrive-new-higher-minimum-wage/
It is poorly managed businesses fire employees. Here is the reaction that Tim Horton's ... a coffee chain in Canada did.
—a bagel sandwich breakfast meal — had gone up from $6.77 to $7 — an increase of 23 cents. That is just over a three percent increase in the price of the meal. Meanwhile the increase in wages was 20 percent ($11.60 to $14.00). All the fast food places in my town are advertising to hire more people. Why? Poor people shop at fast food places (rich people rarely do).
While Tim Horton's over all is having slower same store sales compared to last year
https://www.bnn.ca/restaurant-brands-profit-soars-in-fourth-quarter-1.995903
its parent company is making more profits. One thing that this report doesn't mention is that Tim Horton's is getting head to head competition from McDonalds which is giving free coffee away. Any size for a buck:
https://www.redflagdeals.com/deal/coffee-desserts/mcdonalds-get-any-size-mccafe-premium-roast-coffee-for-100-until-march-4/
McDonald's is much bigger than Tim Hortons—evidence that success in lieu of minimum wage instatement is more due to size and capital than it is about effective management. Also, I agree that automation is a good thing and raises the quality of life for everyone. But strangling markets with regulations is not the right way to move our society forward with automation. Also, where I live, minimum wage was instated in 2017, set to go up each year until 2020. I lost my job as we went out of business in December. I have empirical evidence.
What was the nature of your job? Did your company increase prices on its products? If it was unique and filled a certain niche it would represent an opportunity to replace the business. Unfortunately many markets are saturated so it is difficult to raise prices. I used to sell computers when computers were $2000. At that price, my employee wages were 10 percent of the cost (including accounting staff) and the profit was roughly 20 percent. Then the production of computers shifted overseas and could be bought for $1000. It meant that I had to sell twice as many computers (and so did all my competitors) in order to pay for my employees. So originally there was room to increase the wage component ... there is little difference between $2000 and $2100 but there is a big difference between $1000 and $1100 when buying a computer psychologically. If you buy a house for $1,000,000 or 1,000,100 dollars it is almost no difference.
What my point is that with many businesses a change in their wages can cause them to fail but they are very marginal and unsafe and probably would fail anyway. After all had you ever asked for a raise?
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Corporations profits have increased for decades while incomes have decreased. Increasing minimum wage addresses that imbalance.
I had asked for raises and gotten them—no minimum wage necessary. It was a restaurant and yes—it started with them raising prices and cutting hours. Also, when corporations profit, shareholders profit. But people like to pretend that income from wise investment is automatically evil and wrong.
Also, is that graph hourly wages, or yearly wages?
Wages (the red line) are as they are represented in the GDP. GDP is all the goods and services accounted for in an economy each year. So in 2000 49% of the GDP (value on the right side) declined to 44% in 2012. In contrast profits increased from 9% of the GDP to 12% in 2012.
During the period illustrated the GDP rose from roughly $10 Trillions dollars to $16 Trillion dollars.
I am sorry that you had to go through the distress of losing your job. I know that not only the employees but also the employers come under a lot of emotional pressure. That is a good thing about Steem that is represents an alternative stream of income which I hope will insulated you from that kind of event in the future.
I hope for your continued Steem success.
If that chart is yearly wages, then it is clearly faulty, as most wage workers don't keep a given job for longer than a year. Also, if cryptocurrency succeeds in it's philosophical goals, then things like minimum wage will be impossible because the state will be rendered powerless.
It has to do with all wages in an economy... but that isn't important as it shows how all personal incomes has been dropping for a long time while corporate profits have increased.
One of the directions that cryptocurrencies might take is that it establishes a commodity based coin. For instance there could be an egg_coin, milk_coin etc. This would allow commodities to establish their relative value automatically on exchanges. In this way there would not be an erosion of your personal equity because of inflation... one egg_coin would buy one egg in 1 year, 2 years etc. This cannot be said of fiat currency which constantly depreciates.
I wouldn't say that minimum wage would be "impossible" just moot. People could be paid a coin which is representative of the their job ... street_sweeper_coin vs teacher_coin representing 1 hour of their labour. Ironically some poorly paid jobs (septic cleaners, fireman) may attain a higher value due to the noxious or dangerous aspects. Negotiations would be eliminated as relative value could be determined by purely market forces on an exchange.
There will never be commodity coins because that defeats the whole purpose of a medium of exchange in the first place. We might as well go back to barter. And yes, without a powerful state to force employers to pay minimum wage—minimum wage will be impossible. I think you're missing the whole point of crypto... It's to castrate globally governments of their ability to regulate markets.
There are already commodity coins in play developed by Provenance which track for over 200 retailers and producers. These track commodities from the field/manufacturer to the retail shelf. When a person buys an item with BTC ... they receive a coin which represent the ownership of the specific commodity. It doesn't defeat the medium of exchange, it facilitates the trail of ownership.
Cryptocurrencies are just a tool which are meant to decentralize our societies. It changes the way that we can relate to banks. This pushes them back by decades to where they need to encourage people to loan money to them (so they can finance loans, mortgages etc.) instead of charging us to hold our money. They represent an opportunity to disrupt governments by giving us a mechanism to fund government budgets directly instead of having a couple hundred people deciding for us. The only thing preventing people from directly funding Education vs Healthcare vs Military vs Infrastructure spending instead of having governments voting on budgets is the necessary will of the people. Another thing is that if I elected to spend a government token on education and healthcare but not military, I could follow the transactions that token was used for on the blockchain. I could see if the token was used to fund areas that I did not agree with.