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Ask yourself why any
business should be forced to increase its labor costs on
arbitrary reasons that some of its workers cannot support their
personal choices by the wages paid to them?
How is it that
Government knows how to run things effectively when it
overspends every day by the tune of 40% - that it borrows at a
minimum 40 cents for each dollar it takes in to pay for goods
and services and does so with exactly one written annual
budget being passed in the last 6 years - that means in
five years it has not even fulfilled its own Constitutional
responsibilities. And for two of those six
years, Democrats controlled everything. And for the
other four years Democrats controlled the Senate.
Why is it the
role of Government to impose any wage rate upon workers who are
free to choose any job that they want to apply
for? Government does not require one
damned thing from workers to meet a minimum wage - no level of
competence, education, training, or intelligence - and not one
test of work ethic and imposes no guarantee on the workers that
they are going to be honest and trustworthy when hired by a
business?
How is it the
responsibility of any business to have one concern about the
personal situations of any worker? Most
certainly well managed businesses will attempt to understand,
but how is it that businesses have to provide healthcare
insurance or pay a wage rate that suits the worker without the
business having the input on how that impacts the ability of the
business to remain open?
Most ignorant
people who are discussing the minimum wage right now think that
raising the minimum wage is a nirvana for workers - that only
those who earn minimum wage will be impacted and that businesses
are greedy and are punishing workers with low wage rates.
Perhaps these
people have no clue that retaining GOOD workers is a very
difficult thing - and that GOOD workers will be compensated as
they should be or those workers will walk to green pastures and
will seek to get paid what they think they are worth.
The cost of labor
churn is ENORMOUS and businesses will seek to pay more to reduce
churn and as a result will lower their annual costs to hire
workers by reducing that churn rate. So it is in the
best interest of businesses to pay higher rates without being
told by Government to do so.
But somehow we
have this notion that minimum wages are like speed limits -
speed limits say the FASTEST speed you can travel, not the
lowest speed tolerated. There is a similar
misunderstanding about the purpose of the minimum wage and this
ignorance is manifold and shocking.
The minimum wage was never intended to be a "living wage" - it is an entry level wage floor and the worker either makes more of his job or he doesn't. If you want more money, work hard, get educated, or mooch on welfare. The business owes you nothing. Businesses have never existed to provide jobs - businesses exist to make money for the owners and as a product of their efforts, sell goods and services. That is what business is all about.
The minimum wage
exists primarily for first time workers or to jobs that require
essentially the IQ of a radish to perform. And
if you are a worker making minimum wage longer than six months,
you are nothing but a human radish - worthless and not worth
spit as a worker. If you were truly valuable, you
would make higher than minimum
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wage without any
government action. And if there is a flood of
workers competing for minimum wage jobs, what economic sense is
it to increase the wage rate solely based on socio-economic
bleeding heart whining? If there is more of
something, the price should decline, not increase.
I'm not surprised the White House is dismissing this CBO study
that says upwards of 500,000 jobs will be lost by increasing the
minimum wage to $10.10 - none of the workers in the White House have held a private sector job where they had to make a payroll, live within a budget, and had to turn a profit.
The minimum wage has an effect on all wages whether you care to admit that or not. The reason unions want the minimum wage increased is because most of their extorted labor contracts have pay provisions tied to the minimum wage - so if the minimum wage increases, labor unions get an unearned wage inflation.
Lost in most discussions on the minimum wage is the unintended consequence of marketplace wage inflation - across the board you have workers making above minimum wage - those who make more than the current rate but less than the new rate, will have to have their wage rate increased - and don't think these people will want to make a dime more than the new minimum if they make $2 more - so their new rate will likely be inflated to the new minimum rate plus the $2 differential that existed before.
And then there are the other workers who will be making just above the new minimum - they'll want their share - so their pay likely will be adjusted upwards at a commensurate differential. And if your workers are getting an increase, low level management will likely have to be compensated at a similar adjustment upwards and so forth.
Raising the minimum wage from $7 something to $10 something is easily a direct 25% increase in labor costs - escalating further up the pay scale as adjustments are made to inflate wages to keep workers noses in joint. Then you have the taxes paid by employers on the increased rate - total effect of the minimum rate being raised could approach a 30% labor cost increase to the business.
In restaurants where labor is often 25% or more of total costs, this would mean that you increase overall business costs by 10-12% - far exceeding profit margins of most businesses - so you have to factor that prices will have to increase 10-12% at a minimum as a result of the minimum wage increase from current to $10.10 - and it could be more depending on the industry - as all businesses will pass on wholesale costs upstream to other businesses for goods or services sold.
And the key point of how utterly stupid increasing the minimum wage rate is the fact that there is no productivity increase resulting from employers paying more at the base and pushing wage inflation up the chain - these are not wage increases earned through higher production - these are increases solely imposed on businesses on false premise of living wage and the hidden cause that this economy is pushing employees who had better paying jobs into low paying jobs directly due to this Administration's pathetic economic policies.
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