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Yes

81 (90%)

No

9 (10%)

Total Members Voted: 88

[Jimmy]

To play devil's advocate, first world societies have so many safety nets that it's virtually impossible for an adult to starve to death without serious effort. Whether it be through charities or government organisations, a person may find themselves without shelter or income, but rarely will there be a series of events that lead to starvation. If all else fails, dumpster diving is proven to be quite a lucrative and rewarding experience, and I have personal friends who do it as a hobby.

[Sonlirain]

Let's add 1 + 1.
No minimal wage.
+
American (rather shitty) social security.
=
People working for stupidly low wages that force them into shit like renting flats with roommates or ultra micro apartments.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Sounds perfectly reasonable!

As for the "average income" growing...
Who cares about it growing (it's growing mostly for people who already have loads of money anyway) when we talk about the minimal wage that sets the absolute rock bottom.
7.50 is that kind of wage that lets you get a tiny flat in the worst part of town and slowly die because you can't afford to even get drunk properly without visiting a loan shark.
If that was gone the then obviously the new minimum would be whatever people agree to work for.
If you have a wife you might actually tie things together if you both earn 5.50.
And if you are a temporary immigrant you would probably be happy about earning 4.50 and living one or two years in terrible conditions sharing a studio apartment with 4 amigos and leaving the nightmare behind once you have enough money to comfortably set yourself up in mexico or wherever you came from maybe even start a business there (where $1 is worth far more than in the US).
This of course drives the price of work down for the masses.

Of course you could say minimal wage eliminates jobs that would be profitable (for the employer) if he could only get his workers work for $4/h!
Of course whether that worker can even survive with that much money or not is his problem not the employers.
Maybe could work out and i mean MAYBE if the employer is not a scumbag and gives those workers fairly large monthly bonuses but hoping for that is like hoping for a fair trial in North Korea.

[DJ]

Minimum wages are good for business, because they spread the money around more evenly. If you're running let's say a sandwich shop and minimum wage gets abolished you'll lose your working class customers. Sure, your wealthier customers will have more money to spend, but they can eat only so many sandwiches.

[martinuzz]

That's why we have laws forbidding people to employ someone for less than the minimum wage, to prevent a race to the bottom that ends in pure slavery.

No, we don't.

We do. Maybe not in your country, but we do. Minimum wage is adjusted regularily though to correct for both inflation and purchasing power.

[pisskop]

zing

i bet that was on the burner simmering.

[Sheb]

I'm fairly certain he's american, so yeah, you do have a federal minimum wage.

[Frumple]

For those of you who were interested in the median stateside wage (i.e. the only thing most of the country gives two shits about) changes, this lays things out in a fairly straightforward manner.

The tl;dr version? For most people in the US, after the appropriate adjustments (for inflation and whatnot) their wage has increased by around 21% between 1967 and 2015. For reference, a similarly adjusted GDP has increased by around 137% over the same period (i.e. if we were making as much money as we had made for the country during that period, our wages would be somewhere in the realm of six times higher). For secondary reference, the average wage, going by the numbers posted earlier in the thread, has gone up by 38% between the 60s and 2004; checking elsewhere, the difference between the 60s and 2014 seems to be around a 110.8% increase* (i.e, around five times that of the median, only somewhat behind the overall GDP growth). Y'all can check for yourself how the cost of living's been doing.

... as always, yes, the average wage is kinda' shit for getting an idea of what's happening to most of the country. You use median for a reason.

And yeah, there's a federal minimum in the US. It's not pegged to inflation, last I checked. There may be some state minimum wages out there that manage that much, though.

*E: Actually, that may be based of non-adjusted numbers, now that I double check it. My ability to care relative to the amount of time I've been awake has been tapped out, though, so y'all should probably double check the numbers 'cause I ain't gonna'.

[smirk]

We do. Maybe not in your country, but we do. Minimum wage is adjusted regularily though to correct for both inflation and purchasing power.

Oh man, I wish the US's was adjusted more often. It's not pegged to inflation and hasn't been touched since 2009.

As to earnings - here are average earnings in the US in 2004 dollars:
1950 - $17,076
1960 - $22,051
1970 - $28,100
1980 - $27,206
1990 - $28,439
2000 - $31,089
2004 - $30,513

Alright, since no-one else is posting any numbers, I'll throw some in. Here are income levels divided by quintile, from 1967 to 2014:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The first chart there is the real (read: inflation-adjusted) mean, the second is the real mean cumulative. Notice how only those in the top quintile are seeing any meaningful growth (although the second quintile is also seeing just a bit, on the cumulative).

Here's a long, dry read on income levels, inequality and poverty. You can slog through it or just page down to look at the graphs. Take-away is that wages have been stagnant in the US for all us non-rich slobs since the 1970s or so.

E: Dammit, ninja'd by Frumple. Well done, that silhouette. Posting anyway.

[FallacyofUrist]

I'm going to make an argument against minimum wage.

Argument 1: Minimum wage laws reduce the number of jobs in existence.
Proof:
1. Deadweight loss. It's a microeconomics term for the loss in mutually beneficial transactions produced by a price floor or price ceiling, or some other laws.
2. Minimum wage is a price ceiling on the price of labor.
3. Hence: several mutually beneficial transactions go unexploited as a result of the minimum wage law.
4. In this case, a transaction is a worker working for a company/supplier/whatnot.

Which makes sense intuitively: there are going to be people willing to work below minimum wage and companies willing to hire them, but both would be prevented from doing so by the minimum wage laws.

But suppose that having fewer jobs in existence, but with better pay is a good thing... no.

Argument 2. Even some pay is better than none.
And I don't think that needs a formal proof.

With some pay, even below minimum wage, a worker can purchase some things, but without pay... none.

But I don't think that argument's sufficient.

Argument 3. Minimum wage is a condensation of money.
Eh, you say?
Perhaps concentration would work better.
So. What I'm saying is that some people have more money, but others have less(or really, none) as a result of minimum wage.
See Argument 1. So there's fewer jobs. But we know what a minimum wage is: companies must pay workers a certain amount of money in their salary.
So here's what happens: the companies fire the workers they don't need in order to use that money to pay the workers they do need.

There is no overall gain as a result of minimum wage: only a shifting of resources.

Argument 4. Minimum wage can often result in workers being paid above what they're worth(and soon laid off)
1. Create instance: janitorial job. Does a janitor deserve 15 dollars an hour(thankfully that high minimum wage law is going to take a few years to be implemented)?
2. The same applies to other cheap jobs that should be paid less than minimum wage.

So you have jobs that are necessary, but the companies paying the workers doing those jobs must pay them more than they're worth.

Thank goodness for robots.
And there go even more jobs.

Argument 5. Minimum wage hurts small companies, ma and pop grocery stores, family restaurants, barrel makers, more than bigger companies(MCDONALDS!).
Proof:
1. Small companies have less money to go around than big companies. You see that, right?
2. Hence, small companies can afford fewer expenses.
3. Labor is definitely an expense.
4. Minimum wage significantly increases the price of labor, to the point where smaller companies might not be able to bear it, but bigger ones can just tank the cost.
5. And on top of that, smaller companies can often not afford to fire their workers to save money because they're necessary to the functioning of the company. The larger ones most likely can.

I await a response.

[Sheb]

Argument 1, 2 and 4 are the same, basically "Minimum wage destroy jobs", which ignore the effect of extra consumption by workers being paid minimum wage.

Argument 5 is a fallacy: small companies have less money than big companies, but employ less workers too. You'd need to show that labour cost are a higher percentage of revenues for small companies. And even then, that assume that something that benefit big companies over small is bad, which is one more unproven assumption.

Argument 3 fails because it only consider two groups: minimum wage workers and the unemployed. If you look at everyone in the economy (workers paid more than minimum wage and capital owners) then minimum wage reduce inequality.

[Frumple]

Not going to cover it all, but this:

Argument 2. Even some pay is better than none.
And I don't think that needs a formal proof.

Is often very, very untrue. Some pay is better than none so long as the pay isn't less than what it costs the worker to obtain it. It's not exactly unknown for a job to actually be a net loss for someone, just based on travel costs, time investment involved, potential medical issues, etc. People still take those jobs, exactly because they've been fed the lie that any pay is better than no pay, without exception or other consideration.

Actual businesses know this really damn well, by the way -- there's usually an acute awareness that getting some profit in one area can mean losing out on a significant amount of profit in others, or that selling one product, despite it covering the production costs per unit or whathaveyou, will actually cost them money on the net. There was actually something like that in relation to a pharmacy chain here in the US recently-ish -- they cut selling tobacco products, despite the line itself comfortably making money, because it was costing them more sales in other areas of their business than it was producing profits in its own. No money in one area was better than some. For individual employees, the work et al is also just one area of their life, and can cost them more (either in an immediate sense, in terms of travel costs et al, or in a long term sense, in terms of medical damage or lost wages relative to better paying positions the work prevents them from seeking and suchlike) in other areas than it pays in its own.

Minimum wage is used, in part, to stop employers who would seek out those people desperate or shortsighted enough to lose money to work for them. Part of the intent behind it is to make sure that isn't bloody possible, for all that stateside it definitely doesn't actually manage it.

[Jopax]

Minimum wage is completely unneccessary, who needs people with livable standards when you can increase profits, and as we all know, profit is king!

IIRC, wasn't there that one rich guy in the US, from Michigan I think, who got together with some other folks and they pushed for a higher minimum wage in their state to prove how it actually helps everyone, unlike the trickle down bullshit the right wingers love to parrot. And lo and behold after pushing for it and having it implemented it saw a noticeable rise in both the quality of life and the general health of the local economy. Because suprisingly enough when people have more money, they usually spend more money too, which completely offsets the higher costs of paying said people to work for you.

I'll see if I can find the article itself.

[smirk]

Arg 1: I can see this being the case. Although I'm going to doubt that those losses are very significant; shaving another percent or so off the unemployment list wouldn't be enough to offset the shift towards poverty level that a lack of minimum wage would entail.

Arg 2: Nope. The question is, what level of pay is required to sustain a single worker? Below that level, there is no significant difference between "some pay" and "none": if your workers cannot live, they will soon not be your workers. This is the concept of a "living wage", and in many places in the States even the current minimum wage is not a living wage.

Arg 3: You're assuming a 1:1 redistribution here, where higher wages are paid for directly by other cut jobs, which is overwhelmingly unlikely to be the case. Businesses need a minimum number of workers to function, and due to market forces will hew to that number as closely as they can. Pay level would have some impact on this, but not nearly at that 1:1 factor. So yes, the increase in wages for the majority of workers is an economic good that far outstrips the relatively small loss of jobs that minimum wage entails.

Arg 4: Specious; personal value judgement. Have you ever worked as a janitor? It's quite a bit of physical labor and near-constant exposure to harsh chemicals. In a more general sense, tying back into Arg 2, any job that is valued at below a living wage is admitting its own irrelevance. If a business needs a job done, then it needs to be able to support the worker doing said job. Business can't do this, business fail.

Arg 5: What Sheb said. Also, to reiterate from just above: Businesses should be able to pay their workers living wages. Business can't do this, business fail.

[Jopax]

Ok, found it: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014?o=1
Important stuff starts at page 2. And it was Seattle, not Michigan, not sure how I misremembered that.

[sluissa]

Minimum wage is completely unneccessary, who needs people with livable standards when you can increase profits, and as we all know, profit is king!

IIRC, wasn't there that one rich guy in the US, from Michigan I think, who got together with some other folks and they pushed for a higher minimum wage in their state to prove how it actually helps everyone, unlike the trickle down bullshit the right wingers love to parrot. And lo and behold after pushing for it and having it implemented it saw a noticeable rise in both the quality of life and the general health of the local economy. Because suprisingly enough when people have more money, they usually spend more money too, which completely offsets the higher costs of paying said people to work for you.

I'll see if I can find the article itself.

Are you thinking of Henry Ford? or something more recent? Henry Ford was noted for pushing unprecedented wages for factory work on his car line in Detroit and it turned out pretty good for him and his workers.