Seattle Passes Ordinance For $15 Minimum Wage

$15 x 40 = $600 per full time week.
$600 x 52 = $31200 annual gross.

This means if two minimum wage earners get married after this goes into effect, the household is earning $62400 gross. That is well above the median income here in the US of high-40thousands.

I don't know how they expect this to work. The minimum wage is a price floor on labor. Given that businesses have finite dollars to spend on labor, if you raise the price, they'll be purchasing less of it. When you set it above the national median income, businesses will either decrease their labor force or get the fuck out of dodge all together.

Most likely effect? Minimum wage earners make twice as much, but there are half as many. End result? Higher unemployment and greater use of welfare benefits because of it.

Given the liberal proclivities of Seattle, I can't say I'm surprised. We're talking about people who somehow believe, after the Soviet Union, after North Korea, after Greece, that Welfare Economics works. Even though it's never happened once in history. Glad I moved to AZ and not the Pac-NW.

 

Side question, do you do thread grinding? As in thread gauges?

 

Nothing

 

Sure...same number of employees who now all get half as many hours.

No matter how you slice it, raising min wage above the median income of the nation is insanity. You might as well beg local businesses to relocate somewhere where labor is 50% cheaper.

This will not pan out how their feel-good fuzzies think it will.

 

How do you do the same amount of work with the same amount of employees in half the hours ?

 

Technology, efficient processes, and old fashioned slave-driving.

Since the late 80s the US has been setting the standard for the world when it comes to squeezing the maximum amount of productivity out of a given employee.

If minimum wage earners have their hours slashed, the workload will be transferred to salaried employees, or machines, or the services offered will be reduced, or the operating hours of the business will diminish.

It's not a single axis thing. There are a lot of variables that can cushion the blow in some way, and individual organizations will decide which strategy(ies) they prefer.

 

Something something 20% of the people do 80% of the work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

 

We're at $9 now (effective Jan 2014), and go to $10 in 2016.

 

Agreed.

Alternatively:

If I own a McDonald's and now the city is telling me I have to pay my burger flipper double, why on earth am I not just eliminating his position altogether and installing a fancy burger flipping machine?

At the previous minimum wage, the cost benefit of the machine vs. the human flipper was grey and uncertain. At double time for the human, it's a no brainer.

 

Crack the whip.
I've had plenty of bosses that have pulled that shit, and there's a reason I no longer work for them.

The average worker spends between 10% and 20% of their workday not actually working. Step up monitoring/observation, if they are field workers, frequent phone calls or surprise visits (which hurt productivity for good workers, but lets poor workers know they are being watched)

There are plenty of ways to get more productivity out of your employees... not all of them well-received, but when the employee's choice is no job, they do it.