Company Raises It's Minimum Wage to $70,000 and All Hell Breaks Loose

wormie_sl said:

I do not think you understand how incentives work.

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^ does not employ millennials or understand that money is not the primary motivating factor for all employees.

So many millenials don't care at all about money or, at the least, have no concept of value. They like feeling happy, comfortable, safe. A flex schedule is worth 30K+ a year. That's not to say they won't ask for raised though, because they have come to work for a couple weeks now and learned other people make more money so it's only fair, they've proven reliance by only calling out once in the first two weeks on the job!

It's not a majority, but I'll definitely say it's a huge minority. I'm ashamed of my generation sometimes.

Eh. I think at the postgrad level you'll see less of the worthless stuff like calling out or quitting because they really needed a breakfast burrito and damn the consequences (guess how I have that example), but balanced against way more self importance, no patience and general feels data based decisions AND powerpoints with flippin' paragraphs. Good luck with that one.

Palum_sl said:

It's circular because you and Valnoomba will not admit that for any wage X there are people who are not employable because they are simply not worth that wage. Seems quite obvious the higher you raise X, the more people fall into that category.

It's a barrier to entry into the workforce. It is not a very high barrier at 7.25, but it starts getting up there as you go higher.

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No one fucking argued that, unless they're arguing that $7.25 IS that - which would be false. (and I personally think $15/hr is ludicrously high to jump to, BTW - I'd personally like to see it tiered with COL factored into regions so we've got cheap areas with a minimum of $8/hr (i.e. AZ), average places at $10/hr and expensive areas at $12/hr - frankly as per Mist's example - Wal-Mart is going to $10/hr by 2016 even the places that WANT TO PAY PEOPLE SHIT are realizing it's bad for the bottom line at this point)

Look at the breakdown of the businesses that this applies to in Khane's article, those are all industries with extremely high margins. In fact they're industries where you can find examples of people being expected to do similar work getting paid in excess of $20-25/hr to do the same jobs in many cases.

And to a degree it's also circular because you seem to think that FOR A GREAT AMOUNT (THIRTY FUCKING PERCENT) of Americans they have zero room to improve past that - that THEY'RE the entire reason behind their own plight, not that there's ANY possibility that businesses have been complicit in such - especially when you've got evidence from people like Papa John flat out saying he was abusing the contract employment laws to avoid having to worry about FICA and such. I'll more than willing to admit SOME helpless people exist - but they're in the minority - again, with my years of hiring people I've probably hired two thousand or more people and can count people that fell into that nonsense in the 1-2% range, and independent of whether they were paid minimum wage before or not - some people are just bad workers, period - not just minimum wage workers.

And "look at what happened in the recession" is a fucking terrible metric - when everyone has less buying power people buy less (which results in less employment) - SHOCKING. Why not look at the precedent of other minimum wage increases in history ALL OF WHICH HAVE HAD EFFECTS THAT WERE EITHER POSITIVE OR NOT FELT AFTER A YEAR OR TWO.

Fact: Every single time one has happened what you prognosticate does happen to a degree - for the first year or two - businesses tighten up their hours and belts to reacquaint to the new payroll - but after that adjustment period? Everything pretty much goes back to normal - a few businesses falter and a few businesses fill the void they leave because those businesses were already on the edge and got pushed over by the changes - but overall nothing substantial changes. Shit, I was around for a 0.75 hike during my working years, it wasn't even a discussion topic for anything we'd do about it - we gave all our employees 0.75/hr extra and started new people $1/hr higher and didn't even lose a beat. (Hell, we actually posted a gains in profit that year)

But please, keep beating your drum with "feels data" and stuff that isn't actually based on historical precedent (or completely tangential precedent in the case of the stupid recession "example")

OK, Mr. unemployment is communism.

Palum_sl said:

OK, Mr. unemployment is communism.

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Excuse me, when did I say that, fucktard? Don't put words in my mouth I didn't say, I don't do that to you.

Unemployment isn't - but saying "Hey, these people are worthless workers, so lets have them stuck on welfare forever" is. Literally as things stand right now, supporting NOT raising the minimum wage means that you DO support more people being on welfare (since every year it stays at the current rate inflation ticks up a little and makes a few new people qualify even with zero other factors) unless you get rid of welfare first. Which isn't going to happen with so many people on it - if it's ever going to happen you're going to have to wean them off - such as by increasing the minimum amount working people earn so that the amount of people that qualify shrinks drastically, so few people have welfare anymore except the true leeches then we can handle welfare as a program for leeches and tamp down on it appropriately.

No one working fulltime (our nominal target employment per person) should qualify for public support - period. If you agree with that but think the current minimum wage is appropriate, then I'd suggest taking on the other fight first - because otherwise you'll just be exacerbating the other issue in the meantime.

Looking at a problem in a vacuum as if it effects nothing else (i.e. that it wouldn't decrease welfare with the baseline income for a working person being higher....) is divorced from reality. Just like the "feels data" in place of precedent (because zero precedent supports your argument).

Mist_sl said:

Walmart already raised their own minimum wage to 9 dollars, going to $10 in Feb 2016. They do not actually hire the people that nobody wants. The people that nobody wants don't have jobs.

$15 is probably excessive in a lot of the shitty parts of the country, because COL there is so low. But then again, maybe those parts of the countryareso shitty because their wages are so much lower than everywhere else.

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Walmart in Williston, ND is starting people at 17.00 an hour. CoL there is absurdly high though.

My brother in law was a supervisor for a McDonalds franchise in south Louisiana and southwest MS until a few months ago. Not exactly a high cost of living area. Their starting pay is just over $11/hour. They had to pay that to get people who would actually show up. Of course for just manual labor there are a lot of other options that start off at around $15/hour but you have to pass a drug test which apparently is very difficult.

I'm going to assume that most people here who make a decent wage also made minimum wage at some point. I made $3.35 for a while which was was the minimum wage at the time. I worked at McDonalds and the only person there over 18 was the head manager and the hostess lady who was retired who only came in when someone had a kids birthday party there.

I'm curious how many are far a much higher minimum wage have ever had to sign checks? I have. I've never paid anywhere near minimum wage but I get the jest of it. Even at a starting pay of $15/hour it's hard to get people who can pass a drug test in my experience.

wormie_sl said:

I parked cars for 2 years. I made min wage + tips and tips were usually sparse. Now I sign checks and niether I nor any of my partners want to pay anywhere close to min wage because we know we will get garbage employees. If you want to hire worthwhile people, you pay more. Seems pretty basic but some people here dont seem to get that.

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Indeed - as is said in other applications applies in working too - "Garbage in, Garbage out". They seem to expect to pay for ground beef and get filet in this circumstance.

wormie_sl said:

I parked cars for 2 years. I made min wage + tips and tips were usually sparse. Now I sign checks and niether I nor any of my partners want to pay anywhere close to min wage because we know we will get garbage employees. If you want to hire worthwhile people, you pay more. Seems pretty basic but some people here dont seem to get that.

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And when the minimum wage goes up to fifteen , then you'll have to pay 20 an hour for a non retarded worker because like you saod, no one worth a shit will work for minimum wage.

fifey_sl said:

And when the minimum wage goes up to fifteen , then you'll have to pay 20 an hour for a non retarded worker because like you saod, no one worth a shit will work for minimum wage.

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a) Can we stop repeating that nonsensical $15 figure as if everyone approves of that specific one if they approve of a raise? I support $10/hr or $8-12 if we can make it locality adjusted. I wouldn't be shocked to see that most of the other "pro-side" folks would prefer something more median like myself.
b) Precedent demonstrates otherwise - plenty of people worked minimum wage jobs in factory labor and such during the 1960's if you look back at BLS statistics. At the end of the day, most people don't care how much they're making versus someone else - they only care about reaching their personal level of comfort. (And that there's room to grow their wage as time goes on - most people do get grumpy and phone it in if they know they've peaked for compensation/benefits)

Well they are pushing for 15/hour out here so it's the number in my head. I do think it should be around 10 nation wide though and still does nothing to address my concerns over the people who make bad life choices.

People care what others make, just hire a new guy who starts higher than someone who's been there before and grab the popcorn.

fifey_sl said:

People care what others make, just hire a new guy who starts higher than someone who's been there before and grab the popcorn.

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I've done exactly that at least a hundred times and never seen it cause an issue - most of the time it's never even brought up, and the few times it is - "They were better educated/had more experience" - "Oh, OK, I hope I can earn something like them after my next review". (Which I did keep in mind such when giving the new person raises, if they didn't perform as their history implied they'd stagnate with our minimum raise at review time ($0.10/hr) eternally)

Perhaps though, considering we had a potential of $1.00/hr of raise on the table as a NORMAL annual raise for hourly employees - they knew the gap wasn't really that wide if they performed. (Not to mention other forms of compensation actually scaled with seniority, so while the new guy might earn an extra $1.50/hr or whatever he'd be having 40% of his insurance premium covered rather than the 75% that the guy who had 3 years had covered by the company - more vacation time/etc.)